ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA by Christopher Ethan Burton, reviewed by Hex'm J'ai

Mr. Burton has been writing and creating for years.  As well, Christopher has recently been honing his craft on the spoken word stage giving definitive life, flavor and vibrance to his poetic works.  In the last year, with public readings cancelled due to covid-19, Mr. Burton took the opportunity to continue his live spoken word performances via Face Book and You Tube.  That said, Christopher Ethan Burton has finally taken his spoken word darlings and crystalized them, fixed them in his first published collection.  Though his first publication, Mr. Burton has painstakingly edited and re-edited his original manuscript to render the finished product as professional as a larger press, though this text is self-published and available to readers for essentially cost.  

Watch a performance by Christopher on YouTube.

Telling.  Autobiographical.  Honest and unashamed.  Witty, observant and nostalgic.  

Buzz words.  Buzzwords.  I could fill this page with buzzwords to describe the first published work of Christopher Ethan Burton.  They would be accurate, but they would be pale in meaning and be lost in the ocean of milk-toast descriptions.  This slim, self-published work deserves, in my humble opinion, a much closer inspection.

Between the covers of this unassuming volume is a microcosm(s).   Pulsing through these pages are what I call an alchemical blend that is matter-of-fact punk-rock simplicity combined with rich imagery.  Through this medium Mr. Burton creates a vehicle that can transport us to NYC in the 80’s through a child’s eye, dusty Hudson Valley libraries where the literary ‘greats’ reside or to bleak upstate Penitentiaries.  Through this blend, Mr. Burton offers us the opportunity to experience a myriad of emotions.  Righteous indignation, ennui, longing for the bitter-sweet past, the ego debasing and ultimate freedom of the quest for redemption, love, both young and innocent, tainted or that wise perfect love seldom described with accuracy.  All of these are possible destinations within the pages of Once Upon a Time in America.

That said, I encourage anyone who wants to take the trip, to pay the fare and hop aboard.

Gold Rush

Searching for Chinese food 

   in these odd times, 

like panning for gold in California

     after the rush was over

       and so many natives dead.

San Francisco transformed by that fever 

   into a robust city of vice.

      America, today flooded

with toxic politicians, 

      polluting our air waves. 

  It is mind numbing to think

   the populous falls time 

and time again for the old ruse 

  of smoke and mirror tricknology. 

The river alive with speed boats

   and families fishing for catch

hazardous to eat.

    Everywhere we look 

  rubber gloves on the ground, 

   like empty heroin bags

            and used syringes. 

Face masks finding their way 

         out into the ocean. 

   The gold was never in the mountains 

 or streams. 

  It was never in the oceans or rivers. 

The gold is the mountains and streams. 

    The oceans and rivers. 

   The gold is everywhere but our wallets.

   The gold is that piece of ourselves, 

like “Blue Birds trying to get out,

      we fight to keep down.

“Pouring whiskey on

   while inhaling cigarette smoke,

    and the whores and bartenders 

   and grocery store clerks, 

     never know that it is in there.”

Order Once Upon A Time in America on Amazon.

 

C.E. B.

Christopher Ethan Burton is a forty-year-old poet from New York. He began writing at fourteen, shortly after his father was murdered.  Fifteen years of his life were spent incarcerated, over ten of those years in New York’s worst maximum security prisons.  Today he lives a simple life with his girlfriend and her two children in Germantown N.Y.  He is the author of two chap books, “Once Upon a Time in America” and “A Dog’s Life.”

Poet/Artist Hex’m J’ai Joins GAS as Poetry Book Reviewer

 

In his own words: 

 

Writing, poetics, photography, visual arts etc. are all mediums I can channel energy into and receive energy from by the creative act.  I know that sounds ambiguous or pretentious, but that is because it is.  I love to live “mythically”, and these are vehicles for me to do so and vehicles that allow me to share said “myths” and creative “creatures”.  

It’s this energy and the myriad perspectives of the universe I can glean that draws me to the work of others.  It is also why I have always enjoyed and been willing to collaborate with others in creative endeavors, whether they were musicians, visual artists, fellow writers, etc.  There is seldom described sweet tension in the collaborative process where the sum is greater than those who contribute, and it becomes more than symbiotic as everyone leaves the project with more than they arrived with.  And that to me is love with a capital “L”.

Hex’m J’ai:

Currently resides on Earth with his significant other, offspring, various extraplanar entities (it is crowded up in here), two cats and a crustacean.  Hex’m J’ai has been writing and creating since circa 1990 EV. though this date is speculative at best as there is earlier evidence.  That said Hex’m has frequented the spoken word stage of NYS capital region since the mid 1990’s and continues to do so. The experiments of Hex’m J’ai have been published by:  The Rye Whiskey Review, Under the Bleachers, Unlikely Stories, Mark V, Alien Buddha Press, Rogue Wolf Press and several others.  Hex’m J’ai is currently the co-editor of Dead Man’s Press Ink.

Catalogue of Hex’m J’ai’s most recently published work:

Arm Chair Icarus

Lacklustre: The Meanderings of Mole-Man Jack

Elemental

Widdershins

Negative. Space.

The Secret Utopia of Mole-Man Jack

Death and war had become
The not so secret whores of
Celebrity
Even love (though not LOVE),
When scandalous,
Hiked up her skirt and let
Her spaghetti straps fall
Just off the shoulder

She new when the camera was watching
And straddled the bar between
'Raunchy' and 'tasteful'

Click

Far below the sewer grates
That catch broken glass, roses and tabloids;
Below the white monoliths and modern art
Tree houses;
Below the liquor stores, malls and crack houses;
Below the fallout shelters and syringes;
Below the streets
Of this city
Below it's
Egg

Lives Jack

Considering himself
A sovereign cosmic entity,
Jack concluded to secede from
The cultural union
Originally he wanted to move
In the other direction
But he found that battling
Rooftop samurai
Would be strategically
Unsound
Besides "they have satellites"
And lovely Luna had been claimed
By astronauts, witches and poets
Drunk
On potential....

He wanted her to have a world
A world of sun and sky;
A world of chalk drawings
And fingerpaint visions
A world of river parks and
First kisses
One of fairies and robots and
Mythic bliss

He forgot to speak of injustice
He neglected to inform her
Of the evil of restriction
Or that nature is a mechanism
He never told her where hot dogs
Really came from
Or that the lovely shapes of clouds
We're composed of poisons and
Evaporated blood

When her ghost was given
He forgot to cry
No, he didn't forget
He just couldn't....

Jack was a well educated nothing
A psychic sponge that could never
Be wrung
Though he had interest in current
Events
He found parties distasteful as
The agents and politicos
Would overwhelm him
Their onslaught of well
Crystallized rhetoric
And citations
Rendering him mentally
Frozen
Their sleek logic and
Eloquent passion leaving him
Befuddled and repeating phrases:

"The Emperor has NO clothes!"

In the kingdom of the one sock
Jack was the gracious co-ruler,
Along with his friends Bert and Raul

Here, below the radar and nonsense
He was no longer subject
To pocket fascism
For Jack surmised, being well read,
That it is far better to rule in
The basement
Than to serve in
The kitchen

Lighting fires would alert
The others
So Jack had acquired a taste
For his rat to be raw
Raul has seemed to have
Forgiven him for this
Indiscretion
Yet a ruler of Jack's prowess
Cannot be sustained on rat
Alone
Fortunately, the kingdom of the
One sock
Is abundant
With what he refers to as
The fields of the found

When it rains
High Spring
The Egg
As if by osmosis
Trickles a steady
Parthenogenesis
Raul is thrilled
Wormy tail swishing
In the liquid life that has
Been purified by layers
Of concrete and offices
Bert clings to the driest
Of supports
Until the Egg has abated

Some afternoons
Herald the arrival of the sage
The only outlander
Who does not suffer the vengeance
Of Jack's divine staff of reckoning
The sage brings offerings
Exotic treats of
Cheese, cigarettes and cheap liquor

Click

The village crier
And the shaman
Have been banished
There is a well tanned vampire
Invited into every home
Summoned by mothers
By children
By brothers and buttons
Sensory drugs compliment
The virus of language
Honing new creatures
Refining new golems
From superior
Calcinations

Click

Decomposition is ripe with Chi
Amidst his mushroom hell
Jack has erected temples
Portals to the out land
Thrift store televisions
Create an arching wall
Around his thrown
And he watches
He summons
He laughs

He still can not cry.

Click

At the bus station
Amidst the free philosophy
Of the restroom wall
Is the shaky signature
A scrawl of ownership
A window to the kingdom

"Jack lives"

Click 

Su Zi's review of THE GREEN ORCHID by Connie Helena

First books are definitive entities: the labor of the writer born into the world and flown to the reader; emblems of hope, sometimes. Some first books are as self-published as Whitman and sit as comfortably on the bookshelf as books from presses large and small. An enterprising reader might have once stumbled upon a debut collection in an independent bookshop, but nowadays a debut work can pop up on social media and be acquired with a fiddle of the fingers. Such is the case with the debut collection of both poetry and prose by Connie Helena, who posts art on Instagram as creativeflorida.

In a perfect bound, trade sized edition, with a 2020 copyright, Helena presents six short stories and a section of poetry. The poems are separated as individual poems by sometimes ending on the page, with the next page’s poem continuing often without title. Since the topic of these poems is a particular and romantic relationship, the poems lend themselves to being one long poem in episodes. During this excursion into intimacy, the poems’ lines alternate between a loose narrative structure and moments that hold much promise for further work from this writer: “ I am a bruise shaped like a butterfly” (79) is followed two and a half stanzas later with “ I’m your angel sugar pie/ I’m your sweetness super fly”(80). Helena is wise enough to filter the traditional trope of love through personal perceptions that include momentary references to the seasons to indicate the passing of time.

Helena’s short story offerings here are of another genre, uniting in various dystopian views that include ironic humor. Each story begins with a shocking premise: In “ The Cardinal”, the opening story, an infertile woman harasses patients at a health clinic; in “Cannibals” a teacher is undone by a false student; and in the book’ closing story, “The Last Violence”, a crew of astronauts seeks to introduce humans on a distant planet. It is in these stories that Helena shows a deftness in writing—each story’s premise is a bit nauseating, as if culled from distasteful news stories and re-envisioned. Of these, the premise of “ The Last Violence” might be the most appalling, as our beloved planet is destroyed in the story’s opening action. The reader is then introduced to the characters, who are mostly symbolic—the large male security soldier, the earnest communications officer. Also introduced is the division between these characters of those who engage in physical sex versus those who meet their neurochemical needs with a pharmaceutical cocktail.  “He could tell right away she did Natural—it was in her eyes and the way she walked. The long hair indicated it as well because most women cut theirs short once they began taking maintainers in the teen years (103)”. It is this absurdity in the story that clues the reader to the forthcoming twist. 

In the six stories presented here, told with varying tempos to their narrative arc, there is a hyperbolic moment that clues the crash of a climax. Each story ends with a bit of dark humor. Helena’s knack here is taking the most ordinary conceit in a story, prosaic and Hollywood enforced narrative cliches in character, and detailing their undoing.  If a debut collection is a promise of what else a writer might have to offer in time, then readers ought to keep lookout for this writer’s short stories; witty and slyly feminist, darkly amusing, Connie Helena debut’s work is a fine start indeed.

The Green Orchid is available on Amazon.

Connie Helena

GAS Featured Musician: Jerusalem Mules, presented by Kevin M. Hibshman

Jerusalem Mules is the one-man band from Erie, Pennsylvania comprised of Matt Borczon. He not only plays a variety of instruments, He builds them himself. His music combines original songs with cover renditions of timeless spirituals, country ballads and folk tunes. He is something like a troubadour for our troubled times, blending an antiquated sensibility with a post-punk edge. Let's find out more.

KH: Could you tell us some of your musical inspirations and/or favorite artists?

MB: I love most old music. Doc Boggs and The Carter Family come to mind. I also love Dave Alvin, Steve Earl and some of the alt-country guys. In the most modern underground sense, I am a huge fan of The Godamn Gallows, The Calamity Cubes, High Lonesome and the whole Hellbilly movement. As for who influenced me, there is a musician in York, PA. named Shane Speal who built the first big website examining the cigar box guitar. This changed my whole life! Building and then playing these simple instruments allowed me to get the simplicity I was looking for.

KH: How many instruments do you play?

MB: Let's see. Guitar, everything from one to six strings, tenor and five-string banjo, some violin and mandolin, Mostly anything with strings. I also play some penny-whistle and a little harmonica.

KH: What was your initial inspiration for building your own instruments?

MB: I pretty much only play what I build now. I learned  from a cigar box guitar website. You can now google plans for a cigar box guitar and find tons of great information on them. Also, YouTube videos.

KH: You are a published poet. Do you find it easier to write song lyrics or poetry? 

MB: Since starting to take poetry more seriously, I find it harder to write songs now. I tend to be better at whichever one I'm working hardest on.

KH: Has Jerusalem Mules played in public?

MB: I have played a bunch of open-mic shows and a few cigar box guitar festivals over the years. Not much since Covid hit.

KH: Do you have future plans for this project?

MB: I am always recording and I hope to get a three-piece band out in front of an audience once this all ends.

KH: What would you like listeners to take away from your music?

MB:I hope it gets them interested in old music and maybe building their own instruments. Also, I'm always hoping to show people that you don't need lots of money to make real music, just some simple instruments, time and energy. Sort of what made me love punk rock in the 70's.

Here is a link to the Jerusalem Mules on band camp. 

GAS Featured Poet: Thom Woodruff

 

"SPIRIT THOM"  has played and toured with Daevid Allen, Mother Gong, Kangaroo Moon, Invisible Opera Company of Tibet etc. Thom is a co-Founder of AUSTIN INTERNATIONAL POETRY FESTIVAL and can be found on YOUTUBE, ZOOM and SKYPE (Spoken and Heard ) Sunday nights. Thom improvises to the Muse and has  200 books of improvisations available from redking44@gmail.com.
Thom is the TEXAS BEAT POET LAUREATE 2020-2022.

VIBES LEFT BEHIND

BEING A JOHN LENNON DEVOTEE

I went to the Dakota Hotel. It was dark and chill.

No joy, so, around the corner to Strawberry Fields,

where the young were playing 

John Lennon songs continuously. 

Light and spark!

It was Yoko Ono who set up this Memorial Space,

with the single word IMAGINE central to this pocket park.

In Austin, we have a pocket park for Albert Huffstickler,

poet of the people, who from his park bench, 

wrote and gave away poetry in Hyde Park.

Memorials remind us of our shared pasts, 

which is why a statue of YORK,

an enslaved member of the Lewis and Clark expedition 

appeared in a Portland park.

And, in Bristol, a slave-trader statue of Edward Colston 

was dumped in Bristol Harbor,

replaced temporarily by one dedicated to BLM's Jen Reid.

In Texas, hundreds

of Confederate statues are now in Museums.

There are statues of whistleblowers in Berlin,

drawing our attention to their release from prison.

And statues of Saddam were destroyed,

like the statues of Stalin. 

Taliban destroyed Buddhist sculptures,

which were replaced by artists with holograms.

Statues of Hitler melted down.

Native American sculptures rising up.

What we honor, celebrate and respect has changed,

so statuary must adapt. 

I remember Beatles statues 

outside the New Cavern in Liverpool,

but there are no Beatles anymore.

I like what Dolly Parton said,

when they wanted to make a statue of her-

"I am grateful, but I am not dead yet.

Just enjoy the music while I am living!"

AND I AGREE...

See an interview and performance by Thom produced by the National Beat Poetry Foundation in 2020.

GAS Featured Poet and Artist: Michael Rothenberg

photo by Bob Howard

Michael Rothenberg is the co-founder of 100 Thousand Poets for Change (www.100tpc.org), and co-founder of Poets In Need, a non-profit 501(c), assisting poets in crisis.

His most recent books of poetry include Sapodilla (Editions du Cygne-Swan World, Paris, France, 2016), Drawing The Shade (Dos Madres Press, 2016) , Wake Up and Dream (MadHat Press, 2017),The Pillars (Quaranzine Press, 2020) and I Murdered Elvis (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). A bi-lingual edition of Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story was published by Varasek Ediciones, in Madrid, Spain in 2017.  In 2020, Arwiqa Publishers, Cairo, Egypt published an Arabic edition of Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story, trans. by El Habib Louai.

His editorial work includes several volumes in the Penguin Poets series: Overtime by Philip Whalen, As Ever by Joanne Kyger, David’s Copy by David Meltzer, and Way More West by Edward Dorn. Rothenberg is also editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen published by Wesleyan University Press (2007). 

Rothenberg currently lives on Lake Jackson in Tallahassee, Florida where he is Florida State University Libraries Poet in Residence. He frequently performs his poetry in the tradition of Jayne Cortez, Amiri Baraka, Michael McClure, and David Meltzer, with The Ecosound Ensemble, a group created by Rothenberg and composed of some of Tallahassee’s music legends. In 2020 Rothenberg and The Ecosound Ensemble released their first CD on TribalDisorder.com Records, featuring jazz and world music greats Longineu Parsons, Michael Bakan and Brian Hall.

City in Spain

PRO MUSLIM

 

She wants to know if I am pro Muslim

Why not pro Muslim?

Of course, I am pro Muslim!

Hugely pro Muslim

Pro Muslim like my life depends upon it

And while I am at it

I am pro Jew, pro Christian,

pro Buddhist, pro Fish, pro Swan,

pro Rose, pro Daffodil, pro Biotics,

pro Sun, pro Sky, pro Moon,

pro Trout, pro Limpkin

Pro Marmalade, pro Peanut Butter,

pro Volone, pro Cheddar

and pro Poetry!

Have you a got a problem with that?

Panic

OCTOBER BLUE

 

Airboats skim over lily pads

Zebra Longwing butterflies flutter 

in orange lantana

Pine cones bounce off the roof

Spanish moss just hangs there

 

                        Key Lime Pie,

               anecdote to the presidential election

            If you sprinkle toasted coconut on top of it

                        that's not bad either

 

Today, I will hold my nose and vote

One California friend says, 

         "Drink the Kool-Aid! Drink it!”

 

Another California friend tells me,

"Go make Florida blue!"

 

Blue skies

Blue oceans

Blue Herons

Blue Hydrangeas

Blue butterflies

Blue crabs

Blue runners

Blue Stripe Garter Snakes

Bluebells and blue plumbago

Blue!

 

Done!

Black and blue, I voted 

Who would not prefer nature over politics?

I prefer nature 

over politics 

any day.

 

Icicle Hill Totem

See an interview with Michael in GAS:  Poetry, Art and Music 10.

Watch an amazing video by Ian Edward Weir, using poetry by Michael.  Disneyland and The Cops was released as a video from his new CD, Dystopic Relapse from Tribaldisorder.com, the album features Longineu Parsons (trumpet, bass recorder, flugelhorn), Michael Bakan (drums and percussion) and Brian Hall (double bass).

Face and A Lizard

GAS Featured Artist: Karla Van Vliet by Sylvia Van Nooten

Karla Van Vliet’s newest book Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writings has just been released from Shanti Arts. She Speaks in Tongues, a collection of poems and asemic writings which is forthcoming from Anhinga Press, Fall 2021.

Karla is the author of From the Book of Remembrance and The River From My Mouth, collections of poetry and paintings, published by Shanti Arts, and a poem length chapbook, Fragments: From the Lost Book of the Bird Spirit, published by Folded Word. She is an Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize finalist, and a three-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Poet Lore, The Tishman Review, Green Mountains Review, Crannog Magazine and others.

Karla’s paintings have been featured in Women Asemic Writers, UTSANGA.IT, Still Point Art Quarterly, Stone Voices Magazine, Champlain’s Lake Rediscovered, and Gate Posts with No Gate: The Leg Paint Project. She is a member of WAAVe Global (Women Asemic Artists & Visual Poets) and Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate.

Karla is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal. She is an Integrative Dreamwork analyst, artist and administrator of the New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf, Middlebury College. Karla lives in Vermont, USA.  www.vanvlietarts.comwww.vanvlietgallery.com  Instagram: karlavanvliet

Karla Van Vliet’s work contains poetry within its movement and flow.  At first the pieces struck me as lovely and simple, but this is deceptive as they are deeply moving vignettes of emotion with the layers of words over clarifying color creating a conversation.  With Karla, asemic language becomes a truly unique expression of a self that expands to allow others to experience her voice. 

1)What is behind your artistic vision?  (Why do you do art?)

 

My first art was dance, I started to move in gesture before I could speak, before I had that skill. But I moved to what moved me, my father playing Mozart on the piano, or shady grove on the banjo. I came late to language. Yet I had so much in me to express. I thought I was a strange and awkward person due to trauma, and in a way that may be true, but I’ve come to believe that I was born an artist, someone who sees the world in a unique way. I’m just coming to terms with that now, although I have lived a full life of following my artistic path. First a dancer, then a painter, then a poet and now both writer and painter. I once lamented to my daughter that I was sorry I didn’t have the funds to buy her all the things she desired (we had been out school shopping), that perhaps I should have taken a job at the bank instead of being an artist. Then she spoke truth to me. “Mom”, she said, “but you have to paint, it’s who you are. If there was no more paper in all the world, I would give you my wall to paint on.” She was right, of course. 

 

I’m not sure all artists work to express some truth in themselves, to discover that truth. Perhaps they do. But I do. When I started writing poems, I wrote to express in code (poems are perfect for this) what I could not say straight. When I paint, I believe I’m tapping into what wants to be expressed before it has come into words, or what is there that wants expressing without words. I started asemic work when I had a dream of asemic script over the moon. I have had this dream image over and over, the dream insisting on the image. I hadn’t really been aware of asemic writing before that dream. I am a dreamwork analyst and have worked with my own dreams since 1991. I have built my life on the truth and the path that comes from dreams and I understood it was an imperative that I paint that image. All of my asemic work has followed from that dream.

 

I often define asemic work as the gesture of writing, that it kept my hand in the practice of writing when I had no words. I’m thinking now that I have been emphasizing the wrong word, writing, but it is gesture that is at the heart of it. Gesture, writing, painting, dancing, I was born to create gesture in expression of what moves me. 

2) How does being an artist help you communicate with the world? 

 

And does that gesture help me to communicate with the world? I’m not sure it does. I’m not sure I care if it does. Of course, I want people to like what I put out there.  I love it when people are touched by my images and words. But would I stop if they were not? I think I could not stop. First and foremost, my work is a communication with myself. Perhaps that is selfish. Perhaps it sounds like I only care for myself. But I care deeply for people in the world, I would give you the shirt off my back in an instant if you needed it. I listen to people’s feelings and experiences with compassion and non-judgement, and strangers often tell me their deepest secrets and traumas. But does my art help me to communicate with the world? Looked at in another way, perhaps it does. Perhaps it shares who I am, or an aspect of who I am, that otherwise would not be shared. I am a private person but I have never locked up my poems or paintings in the drawer of my desk. I have spread them far and wide. People have called me brave for doing so. I’ve never seen it that way. It seems the safest way to share myself with the world. A blessing for that.

3) Have you built or joined a community of artists around the world? How did you do this?

 

I live in a very rural area of the world. Given that, I know a lot of artists, Vermont is full of artists, musicians and writers. But it is also limited in many ways, no large cities, few galleries, or museums and none really that are cutting edge. The community of artists that I have connected with through the asemic groups and other artist and writing groups on fb have been a godsend. I am inspired by the work I see every day, encouraged by the response to my own work but also to the work of others. Encouraged that there are so many out there interested in art and writing, pouring themselves into their own work, sharing their work, connecting and supporting each other. It’s brilliant. Like an artistic diaspora come home.