COVID GARDENS by Stark Hunter, reviewed by Hex'm J'ai

Welcome to… Covid Gardens!  Here, you can sleepwalk with Santo and Johnny!  You can grab a cheeseburger with Steve McQueen, hang with the Stones or The Who, enjoy Rice-A-Roni with Eddie and the Showmen meet the ubiquitous Jackie Robinson or have a healthy helping of Veronica Lake’s meatloaf!  You too can star in the newest Covid-19 inspired TV program produced by Allen Funt!!!

But there is one rule.  To fully engage these activities, to fully experience these events, upon entering the Gardens one must follow the Poet’s Instructions. It is also highly recommended that you are multi-lingual or have a translator readily available as these instructions come in various languages, scripts, and dialect.

Covid Gardens: The Anti-Poems of Stark Hunter, is a recent collection published by Mind Tavern Books. Anti-Poems are artistic endeavors that break away from traditional conventions expected from poetry. These are the eloquently crafted observations and interpretations of the NOW in all its absurdity.  In a time of pandemic quarantine, uncertainty, and social unrest many indulged in the outlets available to them to sustain the illusion of familiarity and “normalcy” (whatever that is) through the outlets of music, film, and television.  This created a cultural paradox that many may not have been aware of while it was occurring, but that Mr. Hunter clearly documents and exemplifies in his work.  The stark and threatening reality anesthetized by the culturally topical salve of binge-watching images and listening to music of the world that was, or more accurately, the mythical world we wish existed once upon time.  In Anti-Poem 8, “Veronica Lake’s Meat Loaf” we grab some comfort food with Steve McQueen to the backdrop of:

“Time for the marching of everything designed, to slaughter, annihilate and procreate; The full United States Army.”  

Yet, before engaging this, we must heed the poet’s instruction to only read this if we have both shots of one of the Covid-19 vaccines.

This collection is at once a love letter to the western cultural pantheon as well as the instrument of its undoing, the Anti-Poem exclamation that the emperor has no clothes!

And so, to Mr. Stark Hunter, I say bravo sir…. bravo!

Covid Gardens, The AntiPoems of Stark Hunter is currently available in Kindle format at Amazon.

Anti-Poem 44  “Mona Lisa”

“No Lisa. I am not afraid. 

Where on my sleeve do I shine yellow? 

You are the choicest of life’s pastries. 

The universe has a hard-on for you, 

As I do now here at the end of the world. 

But as you sit there as my eternal lover, 

Your stringent expectations surpassing, 

My abilities to even unfold my capacities, 

I wonder if this is even appropriate now

As millions drown in the hateful gurgling. 

Maybe we can sit here instead and pray. 

Maybe we should close our eyes and listen. 

The survivors now are creating their mad gods, 

With mindless verve and pleasing contours; 

These robot monster hybrids singing arias, 

Making false speeches to the groveling captives. 

Mona Lisa! Mona Lisa! Go home to your mother. 

She fell in the bathtub butt-first and is stuck. 

We sent for the pill salesman to get her out but 

Well, there you have it. 

No, Lisa. I am not afraid. 

I am looking into the green cemetery and now I can see God. 

He is digging up the dead with a bloody pickaxe.”

Born in Whittier, California in 1952, Stark Hunter was a high school English teacher for 34 years before retiring from the classroom in 2017. He has written and published 11 books, which are available on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

Mr. Hunter’s poetry works can be perused at poetrysoup.com. and allpoetry.com. Mr. Hunter is married with two daughters, a granddaughter, and resides in Chino Hills, California.

GAS Featured Artist Interview with Michael Jacobson by Sylvia Van Nooten

 Michael Jacobson is a driving force in the Asemic art and writing community. As the founder of Post Asemic Press (https://postasemicpress.wordpress.com), his vision for the future of asemics is as inclusive and inspiring as his art itself.  Each of his works feels like a small universe seeking to expand itself by allowing the viewer to experience rather than analyze.  ~ Sylvia Van Nooten 

Sylvia Van Nooten: What is behind your artistic vision? (Why do you do art?)

Michael Jacobson: As far as my personal vision goes I make art to get to the essence of the soul-seed of raw creation. I do art and writing because it is my reason for existence. I try to learn from the totality of experience and pluck out interesting details to run with, and then make up my own interpretation of the duality of hallucinations and reality. One thing I picked up on from other writers such as James Joyce, Xu Bing, Mirtha Dermisache, Basquiat, and Brion Gysin is to make art that pushes boundaries, but still has an entertaining quality, experimental but in a way that spiritually excites and is more interesting to read than accounting numbers. My long hieroglyphic asemic tale Action Figures tells my story from the pit of my mental collapse, and the Action Figures are what helped me climb out of the abyss of schizoaffective hell. For many years I self-medicated with alcohol, but I’m sober now (since June of 2020) with the exception being my meds, but I started to drink non-alcoholic beer to commune with the spirits on holidays.

SVN: How does being an artist help you communicate with the world?

MJ: Everything seems to communicate something, and nature, art, poetry, and music are the pinnacle as far as communication goes. I use my art to amuse myself and as a therapeutic process for coping with existence on this planet. There is so much pain and death in the world and in my personal history, and art helps me get through difficult times. I don’t know how to pray sincerely so I make art, writing, and music to cope and get through the bad days. So far I have published two books: one of asemic writing and one of senryu poetry: Works & Interviews and Hei Kuu. Two other books I am working on are Somnolent Game (2022) and id est (2023). Somnolent Game is a prose poetry novella written in a stream-of-conscious writing style. It’s about a bot maniac who has achieved sentience due to someone else's memories, and is trying to quit violence and start a new life as a clone in paradise. Id est: neo scribalist asemic expressionism is a book I just started working on; it’s a wordless pan-theistic illuminated manuscript (ok no gold is involved) painted using gouache paint on watercolor paper. I plan on working on it through 2022 and publish it through Post-Asemic Press in 2023. 

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

MJ: I founded the Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate Facebook group in 2008 as a FB platform for my blog The New Post-Literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing. Over the years it has been interesting to watch it grow from a small group of kindred spirits, until now where the scribal tribe of Asemica has expanded to the size of a small city. It is completely out of my control now in a good way, especially since I am not as involved with FB as much as I used to be; so thankfully there are others who help administrate it. The widespread community on the internet for asemic writing was first collected by Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich. I stumbled into the small and dispersed group of asemic writers back in 2005 when I first gained an Internet connection. But I had been inventing symbols for a long time before I learned the word asemic. When I found the online asemic community I realized that I had located my creative home.

I also hang out and drink tea with my fellow Minneapoets Terrence Folz and Jefferson Hansen. We talk about the writing life in Minneapolis and the vibrant local literary community. I am also involved with many authors through Post-Asemic Press which I founded in 2017. On average, I’m publishing 4 books per year of asemic writing and visual and experimental poetry. I’ve published 15 titles so far with another 10 in the works. I may stop when I get to 30 titles or keep on going if the press eventually takes off. So far it is almost self-sufficient as far as money goes, but it’s asemic art and poetry so I’m not expecting to get rich. Recent titles from PAP are Glyphs of Uncertain Meaning by Tim Gaze, Unwritings by Laura Ortiz, and due out in October 2021 is Intimate h&s by Karl Kempton.

 

I am taking a semester off from college to get caught up with my writing and publishing, and to take a Finnish language class (my mother has Finnish Ancestry). I plan on returning to college in January of 2022 to continue studying creative writing and painting. In the future I would like to travel more and see the world like Anthony Bourdain was able to do. 

Michael Jacobson is a writer, artist, publisher, and independent curator from Minneapolis, Minnesota USA. His books include The Giant’s Fence (Ubu Editions), Action Figures (Avance Publishing), Mynd Eraser, The Paranoia Machine,  his collected writings Works & Interviews (Post-Asemic Press), and his autobiographical collection of senryu poems Hei Kuu (Post-Asemic Press); he is also co-editor of An Anthology Of Asemic Handwriting (Punctum Books). Besides writing books, he curates a gallery for asemic writing called The New Post-Literate, and sits on the editorial board of SCRIPTjr.nl. Recently, he was published in The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics), and curated the Minnesota Center for Book Arts exhibit: Asemic Writing: Offline & In The Gallery. His online interviews are at Full of Crow,  SampleKanon, Asymptote Journal, Twenty Four Hours, David Alan Binder, and at Medium. In the past he created the cover art for Rain Taxi’s 2014 winter issue, and as of 2017 he has become a book publisher at Post-Asemic Press. In 2019 he was written up in the book Asemic: The Art of Writing (University of Minnesota Press) by Peter Schwenger; it has an entire chapter dedicated to Jacobson’s calligraphic work. He also founded and administers the asemic writing Facebook group. In his spare time, he is working on designing a cyberspace planet dubbed THAT. His Ello studio can be found here: @asemicwriter. 

Small Press History 8: Andrew Darlington/LUDD'S MILL (England-1970s)

 

BE:  When did you begin being the chief editor at Ludd’s Mill?  Did you distribute to several countries? I caught wind of it in Germany and it seems you had U.S connections with Rick Peabody and others.

AD: Indie publishing was the internet of its time, geography was seldom an issue. As a counterculture it always seemed to me to be a single nation of like-minded beings, and there was a driving kinship with activists wherever they happened to be, California, Australia, Germany or India. The way I was first drawn in, I was a socially dysfunctional messed-up kid with high but unfocused creative aspirations, when I discovered a copy of a magazine called Sad Traffic in what we quaintly referred to as a ‘Head Shop’ in the Leeds Hyde Park area, it turned my head around. I sent them a poem, my first and only poem, and they published it! From there I was able to link into the entire interconnected web of DIY publishing. As a result, my motivation was always to act as that same catalyst for some other socially dysfunctional messed-up kid, to shove Ludd’s Mill in unlikely news agents, gigs and festivals, places where it could be picked up by people outside the same self-referential arty bubble. And also to reach out to other similar projects wherever they happened to be. It was a great and wonderful time. As a result we had a regular influx of American and Australian poets calling off, crashing overnight with us, as well as British poets hitchhiking up and down Britain to gigs and readings.

BE: Was it mainly a poetry publication? What else did it publish?  What was the main goal for the publication?

AD: Ludd’s Mill started out as a local ‘collective’ venture in Huddersfield around the tail-end of 1970. Steve Sneyd had some previous experience of Indie-publishing with a magazine called Riding West, so he maybe had a more hands-on attitude than most. I was not involved with the first issue. By then Sad Traffic had evolved into a tabloid underground newspaper called Styng, and I’d go around there to help out, and take advantage of the opportunity to read my way through the vast mound of trade-exchange and review magazines that were sent in from around the world. It was there I discovered Ludd’s Mill, made contact, and joined the group, which also promoted a series of live poetry-cabaret events called ‘The Inner Circle’ in Huddersfield which is where I got to do my first readings. As is the way with such co-operative ventures, what begins with wild participatory enthusiasm, swiftly loses cohesion, people drop off. There’s an incredibly shrinking collective! For one editorial meeting in Steve’s kitchen it was down to three of us. Then it was Steve and me, and we shoved through to around issue no.12 (January 1977) together. I was doing a lot of artwork and lay-out, he sorted out the more tedious tasks of dealing with printers and balancing finances. He’d give me a poem to illustrate and I’d go crazy and splurge over the entire A4 page, which he then had to integrate into the magazine and also into the tight budgetary restrictions. It was odd the way it subsequently shifted. I swear this is my memory of it. 

Andy Robson (of Krax magazine) said to me ‘Steve tells me you’re taking over Ludd’s Mill. I said, ‘no, I’m not taking over Ludd’s Mill.’ Then George Cairncross (of Bogg) said to me ‘Steve tells me you’re taking over Ludd’s Mill.’ And I said, ‘no, I’m not taking over Ludd’s Mill.’ And this continued. Steve never asked, or even told me direct. But the truth of it just kind-of seeped in that yes, this was actually going to happen. I simply accepted the inevitability of it. Ludd’s Mill no.14 (January 1978) was my first solo issue. From the start I loved the trashy energy of Punk fanzines, the visual psychedelic opulence of the Hippie press, all the way back to the deliberate iconoclasm of Dada and surrealist publications, and I wanted that. I got stuff from Anarcho-Punk group Poison Girls. I got new work from Mike Butterworth and Barrington J Bayley of New Wave SF magazine New Worlds. I ran stuff about Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, MJ Harrison. I reasoned there was a certain recognition factor to putting Patti Smith or Allen Ginsberg there, as well as John Cooper Clarke. I adopted slogans ‘The Eloquent Argument For Dayglo Living’ or ‘The Danceable Solution To Teenage Revolution’ – ‘Buy Now: While Shops Last’ as playful taglines. I also expanded the review section to include the phenomena of Indie records, which in some ways was incidental in the magazine’s demise. An electronic trio from Sheffield not only sent me their self-produced records but took out a full-page ad. I met them, saw them play live, interviewed them… and shortly afterwards they were no.1 in the album chart as ABC with Lexicon Of Love. As a result, my music journalism and my fiction sales were taking off. I never intended Ludd’s Mill to end. The final issues had print-runs of 1,000. Everyone exaggerates. I sent out freebies for trade, I gave a bunch of issues away. But the print-run was 1,000. I was always planning the ‘next issue’. It just never happened.

BE:  Why was the name Ludd’s Mill chosen?  Was it a physical location or something metaphorical? 

AD: To declare an interest, I never much liked the name Ludd’s Mill. The way Steve told the story to me, they were sitting around the pub table brainstorming ideas for the proposed magazine’s title, while Steve, as note-taker was scribbling them down on a confused beermat. Someone suggested Thud, someone else said The Mill, which got misinterpreted and fused, when he was translating his notes into Ludd’s Mill. The area around Huddersfield had seen many incidents of Luddite insurrection and targeted outrage against industrialisation, and whereas I quite enjoy the idea of proletarian direct action against dehumanizing capitalism, I’m also quite open and accepting of new technology. So when I was later invited to explain the title, I suggested a barrage of playful alternatives such as Ludicrous Millinery.

BE: Who were some of the well-known poets you published in Great Britain and the U.S.?  What do you feel were your greatest accomplishments with Ludd’s Mill?

AD: If I saw a poem that excited me in another magazine, I wanted it, and used it – sending a copy of the issue to the writer concerned. I craved things that excited me, alongside a regular roster of my favourite poets that I wanted to promote and I felt deserved wider recognition, Dave Ward in Liverpool, the lovely Tina Fulker, Pete Faulkner, Dave Cunliffe. I got poems from Mike Scott before he was in the Waterboys. I solicited and got original work from Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs. I published the first piece by Simon Clark who went on to become a popular writer of Horror fiction. We did a special Kerouac issue. But I always felt that things worked most effectively not as individual titles, but as part of a ‘scene’. What I was doing was synchronized to what Dave Cunliffe was doing with Global Tapestry, to what you were doing with Gypsy or Richard Peabody was with Gargoyle, with Krax, Bogg, Smoke, Tears In The Fence and all the rest. It was a coordinated fightback against the grinding dullness and tedium of all those social conventions and repression. I was happy and grateful to be a part of that great churning amorphous creativity.

BE:  Seems like many of us who edited/published in the 80s are still committed to and doing the same thing now but via the internet. Tell us about 8 Miles higher, when you started it, why, and does it continue to this day?

AD: A musician has got to play music. An artist has got to paint artwork. If you’re some kind of writer, you write. It’s just what you do. So some pieces on Eight Miles Higher are new. But most of the stuff I put there is the final revision of old magazine pieces that got butchered for one reason or another in the first place. Editors have frustrating word-limits and tend to chop out text to create space for adverts. I like the immediacy and direct access of the internet. I used to work on the theory that some of those 1970s poetry/arts magazines only printed up 250-copies, many of them less than that. Half the people who got copies only read their own poems, or those by their friends. Only half of the others would eventually get around to reading your poem, and half of those that got to read it wouldn’t like it. So now, when I stick something on a Blog post and it hits 1,000 visits, I guess that’s a pretty strong ratio. We are still a continuity united by a diversity of the same aspirations, we simply use and abuse different technologies. These ideas persist.

Andrew Darlington and Steve Sneyd

GAS Featured Poet: Allen Itz

 

In Allen's words:

I grew up in La Feria, Texas, a very small town (2,000 people, one stop light) in the Rio Grande Valley in deep South Texas, about 10 miles from the Rio Grande River, and the border with Mexico, and about 40 miles from South Padre Island, in the days when it was barely developed.

 

My wife, to whom I’ve been married for 45 years, is from San Benito, a slightly larger town near La Feria. We met through our work. She was a job counselor when we met, and later completed a 30-year career as a Juvenile Parole Officer and later Regional Parole Supervisor.

Terminally bored with college after two years, I joined the Peace Corps in 1964 and completed a semester of training at University of New Mexico. I completed the training but never had an overseas assignment.

Barely a year later in 1965, I joined the Air Force after receiving my draft notice two weeks before Christmas. Most of my first year of service was spent at Indiana University studying Russian for my military job as Russian Linguist. Before my discharge in 1969, I served in West Germany (before German reunification) and on the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan. My job in both places was monitoring the activities of the Russian Air Force.

 

Upon completing military service, I returned to complete my university degree at what is now Texas State. It was during that time that I made my first efforts at writing poetry, publishing two of my first poems in a journal in Austin.

After earning my degree I returned to the little town I came from and where I knew I would at least get fed. (After two years living on the GI Bill, I graduated with a very old car and 35 cents in my pocket.) I began work for a state agency as a Veteran’s Employment Counselor. I retired from the agency in 1998 as Regional Director. That was my first retirement. I’ve retired twice more since.

I quit writing when I began my professional career in 1971, I didn’t begin to write again until my retirement in 1999, publishing my first poem in 2000. I continued to write and publish in small journals until 2007 when I started my own blog/journal, Also, in 2007 I began a regimen of writing a poem every day.  About a year ago I quit writing again, running out of ideas I hadn’t already covered during the previous 12 years of daily poems.

 

In 2007, I published my first book, Seven Beats a Second, my only print book,  featuring my poems with art on every page by my collaborator, Vincent Martinez. The book is available on Amazon, both in a new print on demand version as well as, usually, used copies.

 

Following publication of that book, I published seven eBooks, five poetry books – Pushing Clouds Against the Wind, Goes Around, Comes Around, Always to the Light, Places and Spaces, and New Days, New Ways, and two books of fiction – Sonyador, the Dreamer and Peace in our Time.

 

The eBooks are available everywhere eBooks are sold, in the U.S. and overseas, including Amazon.

I continue to use my old poems today in a new blog, I began a couple of months ago at allenpoetryart.com. At the same time I quit writing, I tried my hand at art, abstract, spray on wood, large pieces, 10 to 12 inches by 4 to 5 feet. I have had one informal showing of my work and am scheduled for a more formal gallery showing early next year. The work is large and very unique, not painted to match anyone’s curtains, and I don’t expect to ever sell much, if any.

 

Currently, I’m 77, going on 78 years old, and not in particularly good health. My day is centered around two things, my blog and my art.  Don’t have either the ability or interest for much else, so, like most old people, I make do with what I’ve got.

PURITY

From a fellow poet’s comment

On the idea of “immaculate Conception”

I am led to consideration

Of the eternal human desire

To have our cake and

Eat it too,

Our secret desire,

As a twelve-year-old

For mom to clean

Our room, how much better

It is when clean and neat,

How much pleasure there was

In the messing-up of it,

About all the decisions we make,

Proclaiming love of all there is,

While leaving a trail behind us

Like the snail’s sticky goo

Which is the essence of its life,

Like our own mess

Is the essence of our life

Like the purity

We say we yearn for

That we will never find,

That we never really want,

For it is the dark,

Not the light

That brightens our day

CONTINUING MY LIFE AS A NON-ECTOPLASMATIC

my quarterly brush

with mortality today

as I see my doctor for the regular

review of my quarterly labs

the schedule

is pretty well set so I rarely

have to wait long

before she comes in with

her quarterly

declaration

“IT LIVES”

and turns the rest of the session

over to her assistant, Igor,

who finds some reason or other

to give me a shot in the butt

and an appointment for the next

quarterly visit

the fact is, I have pills for everything

so I remain relatively healthy

for person in my

condition

and the primary purpose

of the regular visit being to confirm

that the meds aren’t killing me

by destroying my liver and good humor

and whatnot

the fact is (again, another

unfortunate fact) I have a lot of dead friends

and a lot of friends presumed dead

through long absence, so, a quarterly stopover

at the doc’s office and a quarterly blood draw

is a welcome confirmation

of my continuing non-ectoplasmatic place in the world

of the not-so-quick but living

I feel better just thinking about it

FLESHWARE

Blood and gristle

Forged from the trash

Of exploding stars,

Fragile, short-lived,

Prone to sag 

And corruption,

Helpless at birth,

Pitiful

In unremitting decay

 

Such poor use

Our body seems 

Of the external elements

Of creation

 

But lightning strikes within

 

Tiny electric jabs that jump

From receptor to receptor

Creating art,

Imagining love,

Finding courage, honor,

Theories of own origin,

Joy and laughter

To mock the truth

Of our condition

 

So much more

Than we appear to be

 

Star dust

 

Offspring of unimaginable light

Seeking an antidote to dark

LOTSA HOTS

I’ve worked in August

Under the noon-day sun

Digging post holes

In hard-packed caliche

On the Texas-Mexico border

 

That’s one kind of hot

 

I’ve won six months’ pay

Throwing dice in Reno

 

That’s another kind of hot

 

I’ve seen pretty little whores

In Piedras Negras

Hot enough to melt the silver tip

Of a cowboy’s dress-up boots

 

That’s pretty hot, too

 

But no hot is as hot

As thinking of you and me

In a big white bed

In a room with curtains whispering

To a low midnight breeze,

Soft lights, satin shadows

Shifting over pale skin

Your dark eyes shining,

Liquid in their knowing

  

Small Press History 7: John M. Bennett/ Lost and Found Times (1975-2005) and Luna Bisonte Prods (1974-Present)

BE: When did you begin Lost and Found Times and Luna Bisonte? What prompted you to start such a venture and how was it received? What kind of work did/do you publish?

 JMB: Luna Bisonte Prods began in 1974. LAFT in 1975, and ran until 2005. Both began as art/literary projects to publish great stuff that was “unpublishable”.  They both were avant-garde/surrealist/dada/flux-is/international/multilingual. Luna Bisonte Prods still is. Latest book is IS KNOT; other recent ones are HAVING BEEN NAMED, and OJIJETE.  See them at Luna Bisonte Prods  Future books are in the works, including several by other authors such as Jim Leftwich, Luc Fierens, David Baptiste Chirot, and Olchar E. Lindsann.

BE: How are Vispo and asemic works important to the world of art? Do you prefer them to other art forms? If so, why do you think that is? Which is more important to these art forms, humor or beauty, both or neither? 

JMB: Not sure what "world of art" might mean here, but I think they are important in that they show artistic/aesthetic creation has no real genre borders, in spite of what most people think.  Vispo (I think of asemics as a form of vispo) is between visual art and literature, claimed by neither, and so "falls between the cracks" in most critical and/or academic studies.  I like many kinds of art; music, photography, painting, conceptual, Fluxus or Dada, and of course literature.  I work in many different genres.  The best art has humor, horror, beauty, ugliness, love, hate, and much else, all simultaneously.  It attempts to be a mirror to the universe, or a talisman of it.

BE: How have you managed to keep publishing all these years? Have you been able to receive grants to help out? Did being a professor with a Ph.D. help gain critical acclaim for your publications and art form?

JMB: By having a professional career that paid for it. I did receive a few very small grants from the Ohio Arts Council in the early days of LAFT, and one larger one for my own writing in 1998. What critical acclaim? Not sure there is any, though a number of writers in my circle have written very well about my work, for which I am deeply grateful. But that, like my work itself, is invisible to the larger literary and art worlds. 

BE: Do you still perform?

JMB: I still perform, though perhaps less often than a few years ago.  With age I gotta slow down a bit, and travel, especially international travel, can be exhausting.  The pandemic hasn't helped either.  For several years I performed annually at Fluxfest (different city every year), and The Marginal Arts Festival in Roanoke, VA.  For several years, my wife C. Mehrl Bennet and I performed in places like Mexico City, Montevideo, Paris, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, etc. 

BE: Do you have any particular reflections on today’s Vispo scene? Any advice/suggestions for young Vispo artist/writers? 

JMB: Vispo has become very widely practiced today in USA, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. There is wonderful work being done everywhere, but also a lot of stuff that seems merely decorative (not so interesting). There have long been parallels between visual poetry and commercial design, and the two cultures often borrow from each other. My advice to young writers and artists is to only do what you feel you HAVE to do, and to ignore the impulse to please others. Also: do not expect to make any money off your work. If you expect that, go get a job in accounting.

John is the featured interview at the top GAS 8 video show.  

John M. Bennett's work, publications, and papers are collected in several major institutions, including Washington University (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, The Ohio State University, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major libraries. His PhD (UCLA 1970) is in Latin American Literature.  Visit John M. Bennett's website for more info.

Interview with Ernel Grant, Founder of POETZ REALM Performance Showcase

BE: I first saw you performing in a video on the Beat Poetry Festival site and it was great!  How long have you been performing your work?  Did you perform when you were young (acting, singing, etc.?)  Do you find performing more satisfying than words on the page or both important for different reasons?  

EG: I have been performing for about 21 years now and got into it because I wanted to express my feelings to a young lady and writing was the last means to get through to her. I acted in a couple of plays in high school and enjoyed that but didn’t get into doing poetry until later on in life. I was heavy into dancing and performed with my younger sister at various events. I believe the performing arts is very satisfying but I do enjoy reading a good book as well. Using the imagination can bring a person to unreal worlds.

BE:  You seem to have a very active performance group, Poetz Realm.  I’ve seen some of the performances there and many of them are knock-outs. There are also singers. Is it an open mic for all kinds of talent?  Did you begin it for a need for community?  Where can non-local residents find your broadcasts?

EG:  Poetz Realm is a place I created to bring different artists together in love and support. I started PR after I moved to Bridgeport, CT from Hartford, CT where I was very active in the artistic scene with a group called The Bulanians. We were a group of artists who came together to make a poetry CD but it evolved into much more. We traveled the country hitting different stages and ultimately started an open mic. WE wanted to provide a safe haven for artists who were searching for a home. The venue was inclusive of dancers, emcees, poets, singers, visual artists, comedians and musicians. There are videos available on Youtube on the PoetzREalm and ThePoetzRealm channels, Facebook under Ernel Grant, Poetz Realm & Poetz Realm Florida pages. I also have an Instagram and Twitter page called Poetz Realm.

BE:  What are some of the most exciting accomplishments/rewards you’ve had since beginning your writing/performances and Poetz Realm?

EG: One of my most rewarding accomplishment was starting Poetz Next-Gen Youth Writing Workshop. This program was very rewarding because it touched a lot of children’s lives. The program assisted with developing the confidence a lot of the kids needed for public speaking. We provided nourishment for the participants often times knowing that meal would be substantial for some of the attendees. I am also proud to hear how PR has helped to change and shape people’s lives. It’s always a pleasure to look back and see the growth of some of these individuals.

BE:  Are children invited to perform at Poetz Realm as well?

EG: Currently the Florida location is operating in a restaurant so there is no age limit but I do like to keep their attendance to a minimum due to some of the subject matter and adult language. The Connecticut location is for 18 and over but we won’t turn people away with children.

BE:  What are your hopes and dreams for yourself as a poet and for Poetz Realm?

My dream as an artist is to continue getting better as I hone my craft. I don’t perform as much as I used to mainly because I now love to sit on the side lines and listen to other talented artists. I would like to see and help them shine. I would like to see Poetz Realm franchised and a household name in the artistic community and beyond. I am looking forward to having my own building so I can do more for the talent in the area. I’m currently forming a corporation with other gifted individuals so that we can bring more to this area. Stay tuned.

Ernel Grant