GAS Featured Poet: Joseph Howard Tyson III

Joseph Howard Tyson III graduated from LaSalle University with a B.A. in Philosophy, took graduate courses in English at Pennsylvania State University, then served in the U. S. Marine Corps.  He lives in a Philadelphia suburb, and works for the insurance industry.  Besides historical non-fiction articles published in Schuylkill Valley Journal, New England Genealogical & Historical Society, Southern Cross Review, and other publications, he has written eight books:  Penn’s Luminous City (2005,) Madame Blavatsky Revisited (2006,) Hitler’s Mentor:  Dietrich Eckart (2008,) The Surreal Reich (2010,) World War II Leaders (2011,) Fifty-Seven Years of Russian Madness (2015,) Notable Reprobates (2019,) and Astrology:  Its Worldview and Implications (2021.)  

Jug Wine Aficionado

I’m a votary of Bacchus:

Somewhere between a connoisseur and wino,

Vaguely familiar with wine snobs’ 

Panegyrics to rare vintages:

Glorious attacks on the tongue,

Followed by delicious middles and finishes,

Hints of currants, apples, kiwis, pears,

Licorice, coffee, tobacco,

Peppers, almonds, kumquats…

(Somehow never grapes!)

From newspaper columns 

I’ve half-learned rituals

Of swirling vino in proper glasses,

Sniffing, sipping, slurping, chewing, gargling,

Yet still have an uncultivated sensibility--

Favoring cheap varietals

Like Chablis, Zinfandel, Moscato,

And those extracted from wild Indian grapes—

Niagara, Concord, Catawba…

Does that make me a wine slob?

After forty years of random bibbing,

Eight buck bottles of Chianti

Still taste like nectar,

While dry French Cabernets

Costing thirty dollars per liter

Pucker my mouth,

Go down plebeian palate

Like balsamic vinegar

Mixed with mouthwash.

Could that mean flawed perceptions:

Savoring cheap plonk,

But spurning prized elixirs?

And does such faulty judgment

Leak into other spheres of life,

Signifying bad taste 

In clothing, music, women, art, and cars? 

GAS Featured Poet: Ari Whipple

Ari Whipple (pronoun they) is a 36 year old writer from Muskegon, Michigan that has traveled all over the country from Grand Canyon to Death Valley to Seattle and back. Mostly, they spend their time watching the waves and writing poetry. They have a book of poetry out, Full of Now, and a novel, David Lynch is After Me.

Extraordinary Town

“Don’t cry,” she said. “Come out with me.”

So I resigned myself because I had nothing better to do

and I trudged around a

store with a bunch of midwestern

people looking to buy

bulk coconut oil and cakes

and ground beef and big screen TVs

and all some such other nonsense

and I felt a little better

and we drove down

through the heights and

I listened to my mom talk about

factories long gone and

old Mexican night clubs failed and

family members that were dead and

old habits and traditions of time long gone and

I felt even better

And then by the time I remembered my bad mood

We were at the lake and

We started seeing deer coming out in

groups of four and six getting ready to mate, apparently, shy

of cars and looking shiny from summer

What a day, I thought, what a day

 

“The confessional vulnerability in Ari Whipple’s first full-length collection of poems, Full of Now, leads readers on a journey of self-realization in a mindscape where reality may not always be what it seems. Full of Now weaves a powerful narrative from the perspective of an individual accepting their bipolar disorder. The poems ebb and flow between states of mania and depressive lows, reflecting the shifting nature of self-acceptance, diagnosis, and treatment often associated with the condition. The persona, through poetic storytelling, paints mental health battles metaphorically as manifestations of enraged ghosts, cacophonies of jangling bones, and nostalgic tales of a “world beyond” told by Mercury. Whipple’s collection acts as a painter’s dynamic canvas as the persona discovers their role in reality, reveling in being alive despite “the demand to keep moving these tiny souls inside us.” – Donny Winter, author of Carbon Footprint

“Donny Winter and I do a podcast together every week called Restitching the Tapestry that aims to educate, inform, and heal the social and political bonds created in our society. We talk about everything from creativity and expressions of that to social justice issues in their various forms to current events. We have all of season two plotted out. And we're beginning to plot out the beginning of season three here in a bit. I have a lot of fun bantering with Donny. I wouldn't do it for sixty episodes if we didn't enjoy ourselves.” 

SMALL PRESS HISTORY 9: Cheryl A. Townsend/Impetus/Implosion Press 1984-2004

BE:  Best I can recall, circa 1984, I received a chapbook from Planet Detroit with a sexy pic of you on the cover.  (Not too long after Planet Detroit did one of me.)  That was was my introduction to you and your poetry.  Seems like Impetus mag started around the same time as Gypsy and we exchanged mags on a regular basis.  When did you start publishing  and what was the “impetus” to do it?  How long did the mag and Implosion Press operate?

 

CAT: I started September of 1984 with a desire to give voice to those of us not appreciated in the academic presses, ..those like myself, who had an ax to grind on inequities. I liked what I was reading in so many micro-publications that I wanted to add to that voice with my own soapbox. I invited those that I enjoyed/admired and asked the zines I was trading with to start sending poets over that would fit my mission. It came into play so fast and easy that I was soon adding issues, broadsides and chapbooks. I started publishing a chapbook or broadside to go with each issue. Then I had to do special issues (Erotic-ah, Female only, Male only, Shorts In The Winter, The Impugn) We had a nice 20 year run and threw in a Best of Impetus anthology of the first 10 years. I started to slow down on the publishing when I opened my bookstore, but I did have a newsletter with an exquisite corpse added in. I was still working 35 hours at my paying job and 40-50 hours at the bookstore. It was a lot, but loved damn near every minute of it. 

 

 

BE:  What were some of the highlights of your mag/press days?  Who were some of the people you published, names we might recognize?  Roughly about how many issues of Impetus and how many chapbooks did you publish?

 

CAT: Nothing beats being told "You were the first person to ever publish me!" One such instance was when I went to hear Sherman Alexie talk at nearby Oberlin college and after he was done, he allowed people to come up to the stage for book signings. I handed him a couple Impetus that he was in and he looked at me, smiled wide, then stood up and announced to the audience "This is the first person to ever publish me!" 

I published 41 issues of Impetus, 50 chapbooks, dozen or so broadsides and the anthology. I also published a full-length book of fiction by Terry Persun and let a local author use Implosion Press as the source of his full-length book of poetry.

 

 

BE:  Seems like you had some theme issues, at least for chapbooks.  What were some of those?  Were some of them to raise money or awareness for causes?  If so, what were they?

 

CAT: I did 4 erotica issues, 6 female only and 3 male only issues. I did one impugn and one short story. I also did an issue on violence against women while volunteering at the local Rape Crisis Center, with 100% going to a local battered womens shelter. One Christmas at the bookstore, I had the local members of W.A.R.M. (the Women's Art Recognition Movement I started with KSU's Dr. Molly Merryman, head of Women's Studies) give me recipes/directions for something they enjoyed, whether cookies or a craft, that I published and again, donated all the money to a local shelter, (BTW, W.A.R.M. held fundraiser art exhibits that also donated proceeds to local shelters.) 

 

BE:  How did publishing impact your life?  I’m sure you made a lot of great friends and I heard you had a bookstore for awhile.

CAT: I've made so many long-lasting friendships through Impetus that I continue to be blessed by it. It showed me that the word is still a very mighty weapon to yield. The readings I was part of or hosted added in. (For a span there, I was hosting a poetry reading every Friday of the month at various locations, starting with Borders Books and Music, where I was blessed to host Rita Dove and Jack Micheline, amongst the many other talents.) 

Cheryl in her bookstore

Yes, the bookstore was the icing on the literary cake for me. I wanted a space that showcased small press publications and that's what I strived for. I had it just under 5 years before the city decided it wanted to be less grass-roots and demolished my block to put in franchise shit. It was the best time of my life. People stopping in, talking books, hosting readings and art openings. Bliss! One special moment was when I just arrived to open after working my morning job and saw someone walking towards me.. I immediately recognized him as Ed Sanders. He told me "I heard about your bookstore and wanted to check it out for myself." WOW! I also had Diane di Prima in for a visit while she was in town. Jack Micheline read there. Book signings were fun, but the readings always brought in the most people. Some of the bands that played there also did good, but nothing beat the readings. I did one offsite at a coffeehouse that brought them in from around the country. The ones at my bookstore did well, too. Kind of an East meets West at cat's. I had a backroom area that had a frig, stocked with beer and such, a table with chairs, a typewriter with paper (usually) and roaming space where the poets would gather to talk and get high. I've had them sleeping on the floor when too drunk/stoned to go elsewhere. 

One funny art opening I have to mention... we had a series of art nights, where several models would pose nude for a group of artists and photographers, and then we held an art opening of their favorite pieces. On one of the openings, two of the models stripped naked and went the rest of the night as such. 

The bookstore was in an alleyway that was fronted with a barbershop, then seamstress, cat's Books, then a hand carwash. Above the barbershop was an apartment housing a couple artists that later was rented by a local band. It was always entertaining.

 

BE:  Any musings or advice on poetry publishing today?  Do you still write and submit?

CAT: I'm happy to see some of the ones from our era still putting the issues out (Abbey, Slipstream, for instance) and some starting back up again. I'm so tempted to start the gears grinding again myself, but too involved in gardening to go there again. But still, when I go to a reading a hear an exceptional poem, I always think...Damn, I want to publish that!

Advice? Don't do it for the money. Don't do it for the names. Don't do it for your own vanity.

Do I still write? Not often enough. Several long-term poetry pals keep at me to do so and maybe I will, soon. I have sent out a few of what I have written and it's always a rush to see one's name in print somewhere, but I've gone a different route than the one that started me off. I'm just as pissed at the inequities, but think there is a gentler way to address them. I hope that's maturity and not laissez faire. I've found peace in my own backyard and like staying there. Hermitage has infused my soul and I seldom venture far.

I miss going to readings and will start attending once I feel safe enough to be in a crowd again. This pandemic has really made it too easy for me to become reclusive, so I have to force myself to attend things. I don't like idle chitchat and the political division has made that a potential Pandora's Box. Still, I miss it. I do have a monthly bookclub of women who meet here at my house and we even get around to discussing the book, tho usually not for long. Life is volatile enough, it doesn't need my angst.

GAS Featured Poet: Peter Krok

                     

I was in Ohio during Kent State and my poem, "The Misfit Generation: In Memory of the Kent State Four" was a reflection and historical over-glaze of the tragedy, Sixties, an uncertain youth and questioning individual, I was always trying to find out who I am. My first book, Looking for an Eye,  should explain my searching. My moniker is “red brick poet.” The city is in my skin. . Someone was associating themselves with an animal; I did the same and decided on “a caring owl,“  My book, Wounded World deals with the hurt in the city and my place in it all. I have been editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal since 2001.

FACES WITHOUT NAMES

Getting off the el

they come here

to the darkness slipping

In and out of cars

 

No one knows them by their names

Names without faces

Faces without names

Strangers eyeing strangers

    looking to get a fix

 

They get what

they are looking for

Then they fade

to rooms and alleys

 

Many fall and can’t 

get up   The siren comes

Their heartbeat a flatline  

The fire and the ashes

The ashes and the dust

 

JANUARY 1   

The first day is a burden. I cannot celebrate this day. 

Three years, my son lay on the floor

lost to the world of breath.  Now he lives only in my mind. 

Some say if they had to do it all over again, 

they would have done nothing different. 

I am not one of those.  

If only …the cruelest words. I cannot explain 

The continuum that is our breath. 

Regret hangs on me like a leash. 

The New Year always has it own reckoning.

The loss and silence speak too loudly. 

I’ve brooded this and won’t stop brooding. 

The summer and heat. The sweat and bees and praying mantis

that keeps staring on the fence. I do not know why this thing 

is always there. The dust .

My son lies on the floor.

Both poems are from Wounded World.

Cover art by Rob Kaniuk

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.