GAS 10: Poetry, Art and Music

by Soheyl Dahi

 GAS 10 Features:

Gabor G. Gyukics: poet, jazz poet, literary translator born in Budapest. He is the author of 1 book of original prose, 9 books of original poetry, 6 in Hungarian, 2 in English, 1 in Arabic, 1 in Bulgarian, 1 in Czech, and 13 books of translations including A Transparent Lion, selected poetry of Attila József and Swimming in the Ground a Contemporary Hungarian Poetry (in English, both with co-translator Michael Castro) and an anthology of North American Indigenous poets in Hungarian titled Medvefelhő a város felett. He is Hungary Nation Beat Poet Laureate (Lifetime).

Michael Rothenberg is poet, artist, and co-founder of 100 Thousand Poets for Change (100tpc.org) and the “Read A Poem To A Child" initiative. His most recent books of poetry include Drawing The Shade (Dos Madres Press, 2016), The Pillars (Contagion Press, 2020), and I Murdered Elvis (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). He lives in Tallahassee, Florida where he is currently Florida State University Libraries Poet in Residence.

Joshua Michael Stewart is a poet and musician. His books, Break Every String, and The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums and albums, Three Meditations and Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy can all be found at Amazon and elsewhere.

Angelina Bong is a poet and visual artist. She represented Malaysia at the 3rd Delphic Games 2009, South Korea in Poetry. Since then, she has read in ten countries with poems translated into six languages. Her recent poem wins the Poetry-Adult category of Georgetown Literary Festival’s ‘Wake Me Up When This Is Over’ contest. She chirps on social media at @swakgel.

Emocat is the synthwave project started by Heidi Blakeslee in 2020.  It is music for cats and cat people made by a cat person.  

More music by Emocat can be found for free on www.Soundcloud.com under Emocat2380.

Soheyl Dahi has lived in San Francisco since 1979. He paints and writes every day when he is not reading or publishing poetry (Sore Dove Press).

Pankhuri Sinha is a bilingual poet and story writer from India. Two books of poems published in English, two collections of stories published in Hindi, and five collections of poem published in Hindi. She has won many prestigious, national-international awards, has been translated in over twenty one languages. After doing her BA from Delhi University, and PG diploma in Journalism, from Symbiosis Pune, Pankhuri did her Master’s in history from SUNY Buffalo, and has an unfinished Phd from the University of Calgary, Canada. 

Tali Cohen Shabtai is bilingual poet from Jerusalem, Israel. She has three poetry books: Purple Diluted in a Black’s Thick, (bilingual 2007), Protest (bilingual 2012) and Nine Years From You (2018). Her work has been translated into many languages.

Ken Clinger is a composer, musician and photographer living in Pennsylvania.  His music is in the intro and outdo of GAS shows. His music often accompanies slide shows and poetry on GAS.  You can download his music from many sites including https://kenclinger.bandcamp/music

Belinda Subraman, your host, has been writing and publishing a long time.  Over the years she has edited and published books and magazines, podcast internet radio shows, blogs and recorded with various musicians.  Her main current project is this GAS video arts show and its accompanying blog: GAS:  Poetry, Art and Music. 

Left Hand Dharma

Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights.

The Poetry of Su Zi

Su Zi is equal parts writer, artist, and badass eco-feminist.  She holds an MA in English and has published in such places as Driving Digest, Exquisite Corpse, and Blue Heron Review (where she was nominated for The Pushcart Prize).  She resides in Florida with her horses, dogs, cats, and turtles where she runs The Red Mare Chapbook Series.

Below is an interview with Su Zi in which she reads a long poem first read at a 100,000 Poets for Change event.

In the video below Su Zi reads a long poem she originally read at a 100,000 Poets for Change event.

Su Zi's newest book, Chicago Poems, will be available from Breaking Rules and on Amazon.

Su Zi also appears in GAS 9.

The Poetry of Kenneth Lumpkin

Kenneth reads from his work in GAS 9.

Kenneth Lumpkin is an educator, writer, poet, musician, Freemason and activist. He has published four collections of poetry to date: "Gather the Ashes", 1984, winner of the Louis Ginsberg Memorial Fellowship from the Chaucer Guild, "Song of Ramapough: A Poetics of Place", 2016, "Love Lake", 2017 and "God Has Many Names and other poems", 2018 and "Slip of the Tongue", 2019. He teaches anthropology online through three New Jersey state universities and resides in London, Ontario with his wife, Kim and cat, Molly.

Song of Ramapough is a work that has some years behind it...38 as of this writing. It is a poetics of place. In this sense, it gets a lot of its direction and inspiration from Charles Olson's Maximus Poems and William Carlos Williams' Paterson. It was my intent when I started this project to write something that bespoke of the land, in this case, the Ramapo Mountain area of upper Bergen County, New Jersey and parts of Rockland and Orange Counties, New York. The idea was that it would be an environmental learning tool as well as a collection of poems. It is, in fact, one long poem to a particular place, the Ramapo Mountains. The personal hope was that if I got to know one distinct place on this planet intimately, I would also come to know the larger place, and therefore, the very Earth, itself.

A sample from God Has Many Names

 From Song of Ramapough

Order his books Here.

Bengt O Björklund's "I Missed Woodstock" (Human Error Publishing) reviewed by Belinda Subraman

Buy Here

I have just finished this impressive poetic bio written in free verse. There are many memorable phrases and poetic turns in Bengt's life and his writings. I’ve always felt a kinship with him although we’ve lived vastly different lives. My greatest adventures and experimentations came later in life. As a young man, Bengt says,” I learned to run naked/across meadows and pastures/amongst surprised cows.”  Meanwhile I was merely walking in pastures, singing Joni Mitchell and stepping in poo.

By the time Bengt was in Turkish prison over a few grams of hash and discovering the joys of learning, creating art and writing poetry, I was living in a fantasy (but healing) world of reading philosophy, history, creation with words and art, expressing myself when I could not talk. I found a safe place of wonder and possibilities. It felt like a calling. In more drastic circumstances Bengt says, ”I had long conversations/with Rabindranath Tagore/and I often woke up in Russia/in the late nineteenth century.//The Japanese slowly moved/deep into my eyes/and tales are mixed/with reality/and Dylan Thomas.//I moved through the days/like a monk in his prayers.”

With or without drugs it is beautiful to see the world open up to unlimited possibilities of learning and perception.  People get to this point in many ways and travel is nearly always an important aspect of the never ending wonder of being human.  Alas, many or most seem to keep the same set of guidelines handed them from birth and when an opportunity to expand arises they reject it and choose to remain small and call the opportunity and/or those who offered it, unwanted, not of their kin so it must be “evil.”  How wonderful to finally arrive to a place as Bengt describes. “The world vibrated/in the smallest atom/and everything was just as important/except that which obscured.//An abandoned house/at the edge of the road/offered a ghostly shadow play./Trees spoke to me/of the speed of perception/and of everything/that lies within the possibilities/of angular occurrence. ~Belinda Subraman 

Bengt's voice and art appear in GAS 2, located below.