GAS Featured Poet: Helen Losse

 

Helen is a Facebook friend, a kind soul and a devout Catholic.  All of these descriptors come through in her poetry.  Although the book is dedicated to a priest and refers often to specifics of her religion, it also shows a general love and kindness toward humanity.

She quotes T.S. Elliot in the front of her book (as well as two Saints and the Bible).

...Be at peace with your thoughts and visions. ... your share of the eternal burden,
The perpetual glory. This is one moment, But know that another
Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy ....

~T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

From her new book, A Flower More Enduring, 

published by Main Street Rag.

In the “good old days”

Daddy slid down the pole

with three-year-old me in his arms,

bought Juicy Fruit gum

from the firehouse machine.

Neither Daddy nor Mummy

spoke of the retrieval of bodies,

dumped down a flooded mineshaft

not far from our house. Skinny firemen—

such as Daddy—were lowered

to retrieve the family’s bodies. Five people

and their dog, three bound & gagged,

kidnapped & murdered by Billy “hard luck” Cook. 

After that, Daddy left Joplin Fire Department.

Age 5: Jimmy’s Koffee Kup Kafe—

kitty-corner to our house—I licked single scoop

ice cream—vanilla in flat-bottom cone.

Daddy drank coffee. On the way home, he chatted 

with the only Black motorcycle cop I’d ever seen.

I’d never heard the word “lynched,”

didn’t know Blacks had been driven from town— 

cattle-packed onto north-bound trains—shipped to KC 

or St. Louis. In grade school, one classmate had

a Black grandmother.

At North Junior High, I made new friends,

acquaintances. Carol remains my best friend forever. 

Terry, lone Black student. Was he popular

for who he was or only for bringing

athletic talent to the Norsemen?

Even in high school, I never wondered

why Joplin had so few Black people, 

why Black kids huddled between classes, laughing together.

I lived the life of a white child in the “good old days”:

my yoke light, moon-glittered:

a world beneath contented stars, hadn’t read

White Man’s Heaven, didn’t know Blacks lived

hell that shouldn’t exist on God’s earth.

I enter the hospital after visiting hours

through a side door, wind the halls

to NICU. Hope rides radiator currents 

in the waiting room. The child

clings to her life.

Lights blink. Yards of tubes

connect whirring machines for 42 days.

Frost dusts the ground with silver. Hope 

bursts, a bubble on a thorn. A pink 

teddy bear rests on a granite tombstone.

A former English teacher, Helen Losse, who lives in Winston-Salem, NC, is the author of ten poetry collections. Her poems have been anthologized and nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and three times for a Best of the Net award, one of which was a finalist.  She is Poetry Editor Emeritus of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and a former Associate Editor for Kentucky Review.  A Flower More Enduring contains her most vulnerable writing.  Hickory poet Tim Peeler calls it her “best book” with “memorable imagery.” Not entirely autobiographical, the poems seek truth concerning her conversion from Protestant Christianity to the Catholic Church.  

  

GAS Featured Poet: PW Covington

 PW Covington writes in the Beat tradition of the North American highway.

He has been a featured reader at San Francisco's Beat Museum, and has had work nominated for both Pushcart and Best of the Net awards.
   Covington lives in New Mexico, two blocks off Historic Route 66. www.PWCovington.com .

Rosie’s Cafe

The place

Rosie’s Cafe

On Madison

With a rose on the sign

Is post-pandemic packed

Folding chairs unfolded

Under folding tables, open

On Saturday

Cowboy hats and trucker caps

Veterans of foreign wars

In stained T-shirts and torn blue jeans 

Drink percolated coffee

Bacon, biscuits, gravy

And as 

They amble out

To decent Dakota errands and tasks

7th Day Adventists

Sharp suits and business dresses

File in

Filling folding tables

With folded hands

Ordering blanquitos fritos y pan tostado

Hoping to make it to heaven en Español

On a Saturday 
Sabado

The timeless, always, Universal waitress

Fills coffee mugs

And splits the check

At every table

As light grey

Late June rain

Falls indifferently 

Outside

 

Turquoise Hope

We lay in my adobe refuge
Smoking
The world dies outside

Summer often ends abruptly in the mountains
We keep to ourselves in such seasons

When this ends, I want to
Take a vacation, she says
Somewhere far away and foreign
Someplace I can hide
Invisible and muted
Deaf and unaware
Of the chittering, native, word-sound-voices
Above all your vices, 
She says

I fill that room with smoke
Sativa curls caress the pine vegas
Reminding me of bingo halls
And sawdust floors
And steel guitars
And red dirt roads

Iron oxidized like blood vessels
Twisted around property lines
Mesquite posts and barbed wire
Defensive

Basalt over sandstone
Copper tears dry into turquoise 
On nights like this
And the parking situation has not improved

I nod and I hold her close until
She’s snoring
Every dream-filled breath of solitude and slumber

All I want to do is rejoin the galactic and fantastic
Human shit and shine show
The cum and go show
Casino sunglass Saturday night show
Gospel mirrors and Cotton-Eyed Joe show
The mask and pony
Serotonin and endorphin show
French kissed like a 220 socket
I want to jump back in and swim in it
All of it, 1990’s leftover sex and patent leather
Baptize me in your lack of better judgement
I’ve been made of stone too long

It’s all about the breath this year
Aspiration and ventilation
Inspiration, greed, negotiations
Basalt over sandstone
Subtle turquoise hope

RANK by Kristine Snodgrass, reviewed by Sylvia Van Nooten

RANK by Kristine Snodgrass, is in part glitch after glitch of contained and potent shape and color.  Each piece hums with an understatement that can only be understood as pressure—emotion, thought, intellect, experience—waiting to burst out.  Burst out in song or poetry, in ART—I found myself held within this pressure. 

The second part, Snodgrass' poetry, resounds with a lovely tension:   

“Object of art! Lumps from a freezer going to work in absolutes.  Pushed down in hieroglyphs and then pregnant again...” (pg. 72) 

Each written image frames the visual images, a beautiful balancing of the two.  With this book Snodgrass captures a moment in time when nothing is certain, in the personal and the political.  There is the pain of uncertainty as she speaks from the past to the future.  Endings begetting beginnings and perhaps, those beginnings are too late.

  “There are few variations that our mothers have also imagined. Like weeds majestic and quarreling, thoughts like you lure into the dancing light.  We are imagined and then you left. Past burns, stripped and pressed.  A grind and flood—darkness glared.  As I paint the road, afflicted sobbing peaks.  Blue fills a partial page, black enters this year. Long live the pain and its slow ending.  We are wicked, after all.  How we roll on floors and watch ourselves splinter into the Milky Way. And we can’t stop it.  Prayers as nourishment. Spells as sacrifice.  Yesterday, I looked into a camera.  I’d like to speak to him.” (pg. 92) 

 The explosion and release of the line, “splinter into the Milky Way” has me wondering if this art, this poetry is about the unintentional joy of unexpected futures.  A beautiful, powerful book, and one I will return to again and again.

RANK, published by JackLeg Press, can be purchased on Amazon 

Kristine Snodgrass is an artist, poet, professor, curator, and publisher living in Tallahassee, Florida. She is the author of Rather, from Contagion Press (2020) and the chapbook, These Burning Fields (Hysterical Books 2019) as well as  Out of the World (Hysterical Books 2016) and The War on Pants (JackLeg Press 2013). Her poetry has appeared in decomP, Versal, Big Bridge, 5_Trope, Shampoo, 2 River View, Otoliths, and South Florida Poetry Journal among others. Kristine’s asemic and vispo work has been published in Utsanga (Italy), Slow Forward, Asemic Front 2 (AF2). Her work was just featured in the Asemic Women Writers Summer Exhibition Online. Snodgrass has collaborated with many artists and poets.

GAS Featured Writer: Glenn Ingersoll

 

Glenn Ingersoll works for the public library in Berkeley, California where he hosts Clearly Meant, a reading & interview series (on hiatus due to covid). He has two chapbooks, City Walks (broken boulder) and Fact (Avantacular). The multi-volume prose poem Thousand (Mel C Thompson Publishing) is available from Amazon; and as an ebook from Smashwords. He keeps two blogs, LoveSettlement and Dare I Read. Other excerpts from Autobiography of a Book have appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review (as fiction), E-ratio (as poetry) and Caveat Lector (as essay). 

Autobiography of a Book is the story of a book willing itself into existence. Every word Book presents brings it closer to its dream, its dream, that is, of being what it claims to be, a real, honest-to-goodness book. I struggle with how to characterize Book. Is it fiction? There's nothing fictional in it. Everything "Book" says happened. It looks like prose, so it must be. But it does read a bit like poetry. It must be prose poetry! Then again, perhaps it is most properly classified as a collection of personal essays, the personal essays of someone whose person is no more (somehow more?) than those essays. I call myself not the author of Book but the one who took down what “Book" said, the one who transcribed the book’s insistent voice. 

in which the book admits to a difficulty

Wait. 

Wait. 

… um … yeah … yeah …

Just a minute. Sorry.

I’m thinking. I’m … I’m thinking.

I’m having trouble thinking. I really should be doing this out of sight. I should be doing this in the ether, that region of the protosphere wherein those of us who have not yet coalesced into a physical form are gathering our energies to exert the effort necessary to resolve into matter. I dissipate this energy when I struggle, when I force words. Yes. I need to hang back, marshal my forces. If I just push forth without the force required I won’t make it. I’ll … I’ll … I’m not sure. I guess I’ll just fail. Fail! You’ll see these clawmarks as I scrabble at the paper, as I scrabble to get a hold on your world and nonexistence pulls me back. What message could that offer but that I tried and in trying did not succeed?

Should you not try? 

I’m not sure it’s a generalizable principle. I mean, I’m in a situation here that’s not really comparable to any you’ll ever be in. I don’t exist. Period. That’s it. Oh sure, there are various parts of me that have emerged in your realm. An elbow, a few strands of hair, the slick dark upper curve of my liver. I’m just speaking metaphorically, of course. But I like thinking of myself as a body. A human body like you. I like thinking of myself with eyes that look into yours and lips that murmur at your ear. Feet that leave prints in the snow. It’s ridiculous. Ludicrous. I have a sense of that. The ludicrousness of me. The silliness of which I consist. Conceits! I am all fantasy land. Yes. I have an inkling.

But. OK. There it is.

I am a simulacrum, not of a person but of an idea. I am idea-like. If I tiptoe to the well and turn the crank and look down as I turn the crank and see out of the darkness a light rising, in this light I can see my face. My face rising toward me. But shivering, not fully formed, its surface only deep as the tension of molecules reluctant to part. I keep turning the crank. I will reach the world and spill out on its skin. 

You could say I am Pinocchio. I want to be a real boy. In my case: a book. A real book. That’s what I want to be – A REAL BOOK. You, you are my blue fairy. Your attention is the magic wand. Under your magic I become real. 

It’s nice. I’ve said it before. Being a book is not a bad job. 

Mostly you stand around. That’s not hard, believe me. I have my yearnings. I want you to read me. I’ve said that, too. But by the time I’m bound and on a shelf I’ve done everything I can do. 

Or you could say it is then (now!) my real job begins. I may look real but am I? I am not real until I have been read and to be read I have to hold your attention, that magic wand you wave over me. I have to seize it and point it, bring it to bear on what would otherwise remain inchoate, merely matter without life’s spark. It is my job to interest you and to keep your interest. I have to convince you to trust me with it. I have to talk you into giving your attention up. Let me be the caretaker. I will stroke and pet it. I will feed it little treats. I will give it back to you revved up, excited, ready to romp and jump and wrestle. 

That’s my job. That’s my job!

I wonder how I’ll ever do it. I have to think. I have to think hard. I have to think harder than granite, harder than bronze. I’ve got to think up something to make of myself. A wisdom manual? A travel guide? A bagatelle? No, no. Something lasting. Something worthwhile. Something worth your time, the time that is money, the time that is fleeting, the time that could be better spent.

Phew. I … I … Wait. No. Wait! Yes! It’s … it’s … no … no, I’m lost. I’m lost.

in which the book observes the translation of favorites

Let’s say I’m your favorite book. Some people have Jane Eyre, some have A Tale of Two Cities orNausea, others cling to The Wizard of Oz or The Very Hungry Caterpillar. You’ve known those who regularly reread Catcher in the Rye or tote a battered copy of On the Road all across Europe, haven’t you?

Say, for you, I’m like that. The favorite. The book you read and reread. The book you remember fondly when the years have passed and you figure one day, maybe when you’re retired, you’ll stretch out on a lounge chair at your cabin in the woods overlooking the lake and you’ll give me the attention I deserve. Maybe you’re debating whether you’ll make me the subject of a dissertation. Am I sure I want to do that? you ask yourself. Maybe too much delving, too much exploration will destroy the love. 

Maybe you hunt up a signed first edition. Maybe you give me pride of place on the living room bookshelf next to the photo albums and scrapbook of the India trip. Maybe you recommend me to all your friends: “Jayne, you have to read Autobiography of a Book. I know you’ll love it.” Maybe you give me as a gift to the nephew who is graduating this year with a BS in Electrical Engineering and you write a loving note just inside the cover and end up writing for two pages. 

What else? What does one do with a favorite book?

There are those who are so excited by the world a book creates, so sorry that they can no longer look forward to something new in that world, that they will, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps with amazed delight, take up pen and begin themselves to write. And not just write, but write about the very world the book created for them, the world that they cannot bear to think must remain contained only in that one book. And so new adventures for the characters will appear long after the author who invented them is dead. Sherlock Holmes continues to solve crimes of which Arthur Conan Doyle had no hint. 

Then there are the adaptations. Isn’t a book more real once it becomes a movie? It is! I’ve said it before: I am all abstraction. A book is code for something else. Long time readers become so used to the decoding that it seems natural, it seems as though what they see on the page is action. But everybody who’s never read knows when looking at writing that it’s not. It’s not action. It’s not anything. Open a book written in a language wholly unfamiliar to you, you’ll regain that sense of opacity, writing as barrier to meaning. But, ah, a motion picture, it needn’t speak a word and you get it or get something of it right away. You know all sorts of things in seconds – that there are people speaking, that the people are walking on a path in the sunshine. No wonder nobody reads anymore. 

Oh, don’t delude yourself. Nobody ever read. Most people, even in this era of universal literacy, read little, and fewer yet read for pleasure. 

The movies need stories, though. And the people who write also read. And readers have favorite books. And sometimes the people who make movies will make a movie from a favorite book. All right. You’ve read me. I’m not suggesting you make me into a movie. But suppose you hear the movie version of Autobiography of a Book is scheduled for release in the fall. The screenwriter was once nominated for an Academy Award and the director is well regarded, has done a couple art house pictures, one of which you actually saw, and though you don’t remember it much you remember it got good reviews and you remember thinking it was a movie you were supposed to see. Still, you are dubious. Autobiography of a Book is a book you cherish. It seems so personal. And there’s not much action in it. How can they make it into a movie?

Who would they cast in the title role? A man or a woman? You find yourself thinking seriously about this.

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.