Vim and Vitriol. Born into the Wrong Civilization

Attend with me a modern poetry reading. The audience is well-versed in literature, its current trends and attendant ills, but without the careworn weight of erudition that makes for a joyless or too-careful listener. Friends have come to hear friends, and life-long readers arrive in a steady flow for the pleasing frisson of hearing an ancient art touched and propounded by its living practitioners. This is no high-school event, where poetry erupts as naturally and plainly as a pimple. This is no mere excess of passion, or blind pursuit of an ideal more sensed than certain. This is a gathering of votaries, long-time acolytes, lovers who have shared years of glances and passion and have retained a complex togetherness in spite of all.

In the temperature-controlled building, a library, five thousand years of literature sit in taut attendance. All has been arranged with energy and ingenious diligence. A table by the door has a beige cash box, and hopeful pyramids of books written by the night's readers sit quietly stacked there. A local fellow from channel one-hundred and thirty documents the entire affair, archiving the very faintest waves of sound and sight for channel-changing generations yet unborn. Here, if anywhere, the artful origami of the heart might be attempted.

A scribble of hates, and a mashed trash of imprudent, and yet hidden, loves, are in evidence as the speakers proceed. One has serial contempt for her progenitors, snide, sly, and slimy all at once. All the personality of the pieces comes from them, their habits, their wretched, wrenching cowardice as seen through the adult eyes of their too-quiet child. Another speaker confesses an undue love of her vacation time in France. Photos of Matisse's famous chapel appear and we are whisked away to vestigial references to greatness; not allusions precisely,-- a formulaic, rather than formal, fortune-cookie Confucianism.

The recaller of childhood slights contends that the weight of details carries all her story, and not the coalescing consciousness that hones these details to home in the repeating breast. She's angry, impatient with her students, who make a brief appearance in her talk as examples of clueless youth. "They take flight with their ideas.... Oh, it's enough to make me and Marjorie boil sometimes...." Maggots are the Maginot line in her example. "Stop there," she implores her students in her didactic poem, "stop at the erupting, spoiled sack of yams. We do not need to know more." The audience hums a mobile appreciation--their minds full of the sacks she has, with hard art and suffering effort, placed there.

In such a case, it is as though one is watching the high art of poetry turned into a Seinfeld episode; all the wit and concision of fine comedy displayed with a peacock's pride, but centered on a vacuity. All the order and greatness of art churned into the claustric chaos of a hurricane. All is agitation without either cause or destination.

Such riled ranting seems to me to be starkly marred by a deeply frivolous approach to reality, a viciously superficial finesse that forgets the poised purpose finesse first flourished to display. The only way such an attitude can manage to excuse the dowdy hours laboriously burned in pursuit of such fine technique and then pissed away on such minor whims, sadly, is not to rear up and embrace some grand passion, some stirring triumph fought for by one drummed into the gutter.... No, that is not the way of such self-convinced trivializers. In such a case as this, where the wallpaper takes supremacy over the wall, the only cure for the imposed claustrophobia of the artist's perspective is to tear down the edifice itself--each slash of the bush must rip down a wall as well as display an erudite decoration. The harp of discord is sounded in all such efforts, and the horn of war herself is never very far behind this recourse to insult. For how can one sing even of one's own virtuosity, when pride himself has been assailed as impermissible, when praise is pidgeon-holed as a madman's gambit and not known as the due beautiful things demand?

So seemed the evening to me as I cried in my car. All the horror that the best of our efforts had hobbled themselves to here. That this was our articulate pinnacle, and not some wayward way-station on the trail to grace. Had our civilization only heaped itself thus high? A diminished soul aghast in perished light, marking time with sardonic jokes bolstered by biblical texts and a deconstructionist's exegesis equally? This was not the Dadaist's protest of a civilization viciously off-track. This was the exquisite dingus itself. This was the fullness of our self-story presented in all the timeless trimmings of an artist's hardest artifacts.

I grew convinced, as the night fell down on my humming Subaru, that I had been born into the wrong civilization.

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]
January, 2006

John Kochansky, an Appreciation

John Kochansky died last fall, suddenly and in his grown prime.

 

John and I were good friends, and daily spoke and sought solace for life’s twistings in our discussions and toyings with art and poetry for a time.  Eventually we fell out of touch, but not out of favor with one another.  When we met on a sudden moment, we’d share the green cheer of a Heinekin and go off on a tear about this or that moment in the omni-ball of perceptions that is the artist’s life.  Some years back, while we were apart, I wrote a remembrance of John, an old-fashioned chant to bring the man before my eyes and recall his qualities, an appreciation.  I’m re-printing it below from a chapbook of my “Autobiographies.”  Below that is a one-off poem, “The Artist Surprised in His Lair,”  a short monolog, which I wrote with John jokingly in mind, hoping for an indulgent chuckle when he read it.

 

When I first met John, long ago among dusty aisles of books, he drew, rather than wrote, his name and number for me to get in touch with him, saying something to the effect of “Why not play with the boundaries of the known?  With a letter you know what to expect.  When is a JK, unrecognizable?  When does it move from the known to the unknown?  What is that boundary?”

 

John and I collaborated on a cartoon too, Fido Diablo, Devildog.  The character’s tag line was “A dog cursed with the head of a man.”  Fido’s Joycean adventures combined a dream-text with a set of blazingly varied panels of illustration.  The day John stopped by my old home to crank the collaboration into fine-tuned reality, he left behind a totem item, a sunflower-headed Barbie, to connect our toils on a spirit plane and draw down from some hidden realm the good ju-ju into our winsome sport.  In all the years that have separated that day from this, she has not failed in her mission.

 

From Autobiographies:

A sliced strawberry or kiwi fruit halved could provide an hour's worth of conversation for that kind man without pause or fatigue. Unexhausted talk flowed from him as naturally as sleep follows prayer, as the saying has it.

He approached each canvas or projected scheme with a methodical incertitude, a patient abeyance of judgment that, in his case, came I think, from a deep dejection, developed by a too-long brooding over the pathological isolation all the arts in this nation must suffer under as long as it lack a sustaining tradition. His buoyant manner and whirlwind of activities withheld from view some central simplicity, some nexus, some weighted center acting as keel that served as a base for all his actions. He was all for the confusion of the mass and the packed canvas. No meaning could be extracted from the palimpsest. He talked of "paranoid flat spaces" and the obsess ional drawings of the mentally ill. Marginalia, echolalia, glossilalia. Pollack's revolutionary compression of space as an expression of "liberating density." But all of his own graphic work, no matter how fiendishly pressed into the frame, had always a simple clarity, a straight and generous enough character to endow the moodiest Cyclopes with a charmed eye that must laugh in the world's despite. His dogs with reversed heads and Pharaohnic glance, pastel fish suspended on a heavily worked surface of conflicting symbols, his proud women sporting flowered heads, his grave distortions of human form, and all of his linework carried that quality and energy of waking up refreshed after some long night-struggle with the faceless.

He told me once of a textile project of his to impose on a pattern of flowers the recurrent outline of a girl's face, as in Dali's illusionist works. To him it was the simple doubling of positive impulse and positive impulse,--- as he had once half-humorously described the troika of beer, yeast, and women, and told of how that supreme triad had stolen his fate from his own hands and consigned it to their fertile substances. But we can see in that faint flickering between slant petal and female smile on the pillow, as between ant and saint in Dali, a shift in our perceptual paradigm. First the lovely girl, then all is exuberant blossom swirled with shadow. Looking again, petal and face have again exchanged their places. The sovereignty of the imagination to designate its objects is coaxed by a trick of the light, a suavity of line. Caravaggio, in his canvas of the conversion, has the stunned man crawling away amazed from the glossy side of a rioting horse, having seen, in some moment that mixed ecstasy and grace, some portion of God's countenance in that great glistening square of skin rearing in triumph over his lapsed and piteous body. But what besides that fallen saint's imagination had put it there? A shift in his ideas of the universe's central theme allowed him to see some discrete omnipresence in that reality which was before fit for nothing save the carrot or the spur. It is for this reason that my friend, when too full of the world and the world's affairs, clambers at dawn onto a limber trampoline to shake some new mystery down; and it is why, however troubled the life, the consummate artist must, like the straight wake of the turbulent swan, leave no unperfected image after him.

But I must see him, even now, half in the air, and smiling still, squabbling with me over some point of medieval church decoration or peasant folktale, and tossing a squeaking ball back to the madly circling dog.

 

The Artist Surprised in His Lair

"In this drawing of an apostle's nirvana

I gave a charming native girl christ's

fivefold power hand, a santa rea item.

The bone dice of fate are chiseled on her skin,

her breasts are docile rounds to those twinned squares,

her pubic matt preadolescently slim. Note

the use of black, another power totem,

which oil slicks in India ink the right or damned

hand side of the visual field; out of its night soils

burst pumpkins, and watermelons halved

for the easy licks of the naked girl who lies

with crossed arms at their side. Calabeza bianco

says the stylized head joined to the anointed

torso which hovers clubfooted in this dream

which I fancy St. Jerome on an off day may have painted."

--Gregg Glory 

  [Gregg G. Brown]

 

 

 

 

The Poets Voice Box

Gregglory.com has been updated with MP3s of over a dozen poems.  Also included are sniggering outtakes from the studio session for the next CD Waxy Caskets.  The first CD, Platinum Lips, will be ripped into MP3s and placed on the site over the next month or so.

1/3/2006

Floaters Novel Ready to Submit to iUniverse

Brandi Scollins-Mantha's Novel, Floaters, is ready to start the submission process to iUniverse. As a micro-publisher, BLAST PRESS has neither the capacity nor the need to house several hundred copies of a massive manuscript. We specialize in small-run chapbooks of poetry, essays, and novellas.

By using iUniverse for all of our more ambitious projects, we get all of the advantages of a big print-on-demand publishing house, while still staying true to our authors. The entire cost is under-written by BLAST PRESS, so even though iUniverse advertises itself as a self-publishing option for authors, it becomes a useful printer's resource for BLAST PRESS. The manuscript is issued an ISBN, and is maintained as available-to-order on the web.

BLAST PRESS sets up an iUniverse account in the author's name, and manages the initial set-up, look and printer/publisher communications and edits for the author. Once the book is printed, BLAST PRESS turns the account over to the author so that all copyrights and future revenue go directly to the writer. Any profits from the book are first sent to the author, who then sends them back to BLAST PRESS until initial costs have been recouped. Any profit after that remains, like the iUniverse account itself, with the author.

This set-up allows BLAST PRESS to take on novels and other full-size book projects at minimal cost, while maximizing the benefits to the author.

1/3/2006