GAS Featured Poet: Doug Jacquier

 

 Doug Jacquier has lived in many places across Australia, including regional and remote communities, and has travelled extensively overseas. His poems and stories have been published in Australia, the US, the UK and Canada. He blogs at Six Crooked Highways. For readers prepared to come along for the ride, he likes to make them laugh or cry or groan and, occasionally, shake their electronic fists at him. 

Carried on the wind

 

Sounds carry on the wind,

carry in the wind,

sometimes are the wind,

deafening the soul.

 

Sand carries on the wind,

in the wind

and sometimes is the wind,

stripping the paint.

 

Tears carry on the wind,

in the wind

and sometimes are the wind,

spreading desert rain.

 

Hope carries on the wind,

in the wind,

and sometimes is the wind

of whispered prayers.

 

Tomorrow carries on the wind,

in the wind

and sometimes is the wind

of soaring birds.

 

Writing carries on the wind,

in the wind

and sometimes is the wind

of Heaven.

Reflections

 

For you and for me,

all things seem possible when we look across blue water

from the solid shore.

Peering towards the horizon,

we conspire towards a thousand buoyant courses.

 

Imagining a receding shore and a rising tide,

we do not weigh our stamina against the undertow

nor the wind strength against our craft;

we have enough gods

to warrant speculation.

 

But there are those who stand upon the solid shore

who are already at the end of this world

(and the next)

and our imagined journeys

are their fated drownings.

 

For them,

as they squint anxiously across the water

imagining a receding shore and a rising tide,

sailing into the blue

seems a truly godless journey.

 

So they sit watching us,

like hermit crabs,

waiting for us to set out,

assuming we are unlikely to return,

and picturing life inside our empty shells.

Meg Tuite’s "White Van" reviewed by Su Zi

 

Content Warning: Meg Tuite’s White Van

Monsters are an ancient memory, a symbol, a staple of genre. Works thus of horror tend to time the reveal of their monsters, be it a frightening fog or a franchise of mutated outer space lizards. Not so in White Van, where the monster are monsters, unnamed, unseen. While a typical horror offering might involve the eternally invisible, it is precisely the prosaic settings Tuite depicts that make the work so horrifying.

Reviews and blurbs of the work, however, emphasize Tuite’s craftsmanship, with quotations that tend to view the lines through a poetic lens. Certainly, Tuite overtly has skills; however, the hybrid nature of the writing as collected has blurbs which describe the work as poems, as prose, as mash-up. The text contains just shy of 50 titles in the contents. A visual inspection of the text reveals occasional use of shortened lines, the use of alternating bold and italics font, and an interesting consistency in stanza breaks: used for paragraphing, even prose-appearing sections will be broken at 20 or fewer lines with a double space break. While a typical hybrid work can sometimes be tipped in balance visually, the structure here is almost demure—it's the sequential nature of the narratives that build the arc of this work.

A sensibility is strongly present here, and a lazy interpretation might escalate the genre of the work from horror to obscenity. Here, the hybrid nature of the writing might be seen as a gesture to influence; contemporary readers might remember Acker, or ought to. White Van exists in ordinary settings, as ordinary as the vehicle named. Each episode has a victim, and violence survivors are warned that gruesome becomes ordinary here. The daily nature of each episode, “Dad roams for hitchhikers” (69), is belied by the overt and repetitive taboos “ A magazine article kidnaps me while on the toilet”(39) or “Oxycontin shaves on to tinfoil like a shot and a prayer”(47), so that each episode builds upon the flash narratives for the work’s overarching point of the infinite of intimate violence.

The volume itself is a recent release from Unlikely Books, the title nears the dozen mark for the author, and the list of where these episodes were previously published is a half a page; therefore, we can conclude that the title was released both as an individual offering and as a thread of consideration in the publisher’s catalog. Certainly, the book itself appears as ordinary trade as that of some of the monsters’ forms of employment in Tuite’s episodes. Perhaps that is the resonant horror here: how unspoken the violence is in consideration of the work, how ordinary the settings, how police blotters are full of these episodes. Our repulsion might be immediate from the text, but the serial nature, the sheer numbers represented here, are the too often unspoken horror of our times now, the keystone of all other violence being our deaf eyes to each victim. For readers untouched by the daily horror of personal violence, this text gives you enough gore and anguish to catch, at least, the scent of blood. 

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Poet: Gregory Luce

 Gregory Luce, author of Signs of Small Grace, Drinking Weather, Memory and Desire, Tile, and Riffs & Improvisations, has published widely in print and online. He is the 2014 Larry Neal Award winner for adult poetry, given by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In addition to poetry, he writes a monthly column on the arts for Scene4 magazine. He is retired from National Geographic, works as a volunteer writing tutor/mentor for 826DC, and lives in Arlington, VA.

Warm Canto

for Emily

 

She reminded me of you,

sitting there in front of

the coffeeshop—a bit taller,

maybe a bit older—still,

composed, a small spark

in the deep blue eyes,

gazing straight ahead

at a point somewhere between

my left shoulder and one hundred

miles away.

 

I hadn’t thought of you

for months but your face appeared

now, looking down, half-smiling

and slightly sideways, your eyes shy

with just a glint of élan. Suddenly

the street noise diminished.

Dolphy’s clarinet notes floated

gently above Waldron’s light-

stepped fingerings in the air

behind my head.

 

You slipped away abruptly,

emailing goodbye. I had

no hold on you, neither

father nor lover, but you left

a little fissure in my chest

which throbs occasionally

when I see or hear something

that reminds me of you like

now as I tried not to stare,

still hearing Waldron now

in step with Ron Carter’s

fingers plucking their way

down the cello’s neck.

 

Always a War

(after Ilya Kaminsky)

There’s always a war

but it’s always somewhere else

where I don’t know anyone

anyway plus look how much

bread costs now and chicken

and milk, not to mention

the price of silence.

 

GAS Featured Artist: Phil Demise Smith

 I’m an MFA, published poet, and edited a magazine and chapbooks by (Gegenschein Press) and produced of 50 shows of poetry, art, and music at The Gegenschein Vaudeville Placenter.  I’ve been published in magazines and have had a chapbook published What I Don’t Know For Sure (Burning Deck) and Periods, selected writings 1972-1987 (Gegenschein). I have given numerous poetry readings in the U.S. and Europe.

 

I began playing music in 1975. I was a part of the New Wave/Punk Scene in NYC, fronting two bands (The N.DoDo Band and Didus and the Fabulous Mascarenes). My latest band is anDna.

 

In 1987 I began to paint. I’ve had numerous one person and group shows of my artwork in the U.S. and Europe. In April 2012 I had a one person show at the Museé Création Franche in Beglés, France.

 

I taught art/poetry to K-5 students in NYC public schools for 19 years.

 

The Piece "National Headache" is a series of overpaintings on pages of The National Enquirer and prose poem captions for each page.

GAS Featured Poet: Bruce McCrae

 Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy; (Cawing Crow Press) and Like As If (Pski’s Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

                                              Forewarning

He who fears he will suffer already suffers what he fears.  ~Montaigne

                                                          

                              

                                There isn't enough time.

Feast, fast and famine,

there aren't enough bullets or ballots,

minutes in an hour,

bread and circuses, wine, jellybeans,

shoelaces, pencils, kerosene . . .

Grab whatever you can hold, a storm

is coming, night is coming,

the Mongol hordes, a flood, a hurricane,

an edict of outlandish resolutions.

Count your fingers. Mind your head.

Are you prepared? We're not

prepared for the worst at best of times.

Because here comes the fire

mother warned us would burn

through us and all, across bourn

and county. A cleansing fire,

an insatiable yearning, a furious curiosity,

a blessed inferno, its millions mouths

a locust swarm, demon spawn, a plague of weevils.

Save the children and the gold. The cat.

The family bible, handed down

from son to son, from sun to sun,

the Earth shaking its molten pudding.

This is your captain speaking.

We're in for a rocky ride, downdrafts

and turbulence, wild-eyed kinetics,

a sub-molecular chain reaction.

Buttercup, it's best you buckle up,

we're in the arms of Jesus now, fate

is destiny, destiny fate, our blighted future

not so fortuitous as planned and Venn diagrammed.

Gather up your cargo, war is coming.

Sound the warning bells of wide renown.

Run, rabbit, run, the vulcanologists' decree

states quite openly and obviously

the end is nigh, the bulls are running, tides are high.

Swallow hard your raggedy-assed medicines,

we stridently disagree to disagree —

it's an asteroid the mass and gravity of Amsterdam.

The sun's gone out. The moon

has fallen down. We're doomed, I tell you, doomed.

As sure as shooting, darlings, as sure as sugar.

The psychic foretold all this to me, but would I listen?

I would not listen.

           

                                           Girlfriend

To hell with charms and spells

and the trappings of enchantment.

I'm in love with love

and beg for hearts and hollers.

Sweetmeat, you're a neon sign

and I'm the son of darkness.

We make music and strained musculatures.

I'll take you to the roller derby.

I'll bring you string tiaras and flowers,

the ones you purred over,

I forget their name, but remember

their smells and colours.

On our first date

we'll make a snowman named December.

I love you like mud and mush and muck.

I love you like an old car

up to its axles in farmyard slurry,

wolves howling your name,

every breath a symphonic crescendo.

Darling (may I call you 'darling'?),

your heartbeats are little bombs

in the hands of innocents.

Together we shall learn the art

of five pin bowling.

We'll cut out paper dolls

while the sky comes crashing down.

We'll walk in the rain

while practicing our algebra,

reciting limericks and riddles as we go

into the earth, like smoke,

like a golden spike

on the coldest day in memory.

We'll burn like sugar

and you will love me in our burning.

GAS Featured Poet: Vernon Frazer

Vernon Frazer has written more than thirty books of poetry, three novels and a short story collection. His poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Aught, Big Bridge, First Intensity, GAS, Jack Magazine, Lost and Found Times, Moria, Miami SunPost, Muse Apprentice Guild, Sidereality, Xstream and many other literary magazines. He introduced IMPROVISATIONS at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in Manhattan.  

 Working in multi-media, Frazer has performed his poetry with the late saxophonist Thomas Chapin, the Vernon Frazer Poetry Band and as a solo poet-bassist. His jazz poetry recordings and multimedia work are available on Youtube.

    Frazer resides in central Connecticut. He is widowed.

Fixing a Borrowed Habit

simulacrum addict

fixing with a borrowed paradigm

     amphitheater closing

     the latest string of artifacts 

                     hung

         

          a plaster closing

      attuned to past 

fortune no future

     in opposing 

     the brief that ripped the current

          from the pit          

                             of wet nostalgia 

repellent vector a slide

where fossils of the evening

gather postures

                          for similar dismay

    in veritas             a show of

      chaos                exposers

              dissembled 

                    for a lather gathering 

                    

                                foreclosed

              to join the programmed rhetoric

                                                  in its recovery

Insurrection Attacks

murder dart rebellion 

dungeon the reflective grandad 

     and 

           watchdog muzzle works 

letterhead calligraphy without rejoinder 

     the verity dollars arising 

     would slash vegetation substructures 

          each stroke sliding cold black

          contrapuntal reprint offenses

          strict emptiness attained skill 

          phrasing horseshoes playing 

         

                                sewer fossil leveraging

*

excursion culprit 

exalted enough bongo praxis

     from lotus tone 

     the intrinsic vegetations speak               lilacs 

gracefully             muster

                                                                 down-and-out

    muzzle dating stationer

                           fondles needle wrecker

                           chortle booms concerto

                          

               demonstrative morass

               attained lithe capability tactic 

               where appearing graffiti 

            upended novelty 

   spoken as the baton rises

Su Zi's Review of "Sometimes the Light" by Rick Campbell

 

                                 Available from Main Street Rag Bookstore

The authentic voice: too often overlooked these days, too often put into the shadows by the glitz of more acrobatic literary endeavors, the authentic voice has been subjected to an unjust partisan divide that results in robbing the passionate reader of resonant experiences. Yet such work exists, and ought to gain readership among those who do value that which truly, if quietly, seeks to speak to us in a deeper way. Perhaps the griot nature of experiential work is lost on certain urban-minded people, but even the most cosmopolitan among us will realize how joyous is a blooming tree after months of a concrete gray winter. Thus, Rick Campbell’s work, Sometimes the Light , a prose work of essays that is also memoir, is a pleasant reminder that yes, the authentic world is still here, an authentic voice still exists in published work.

The work opens with a train ride, an essay of seven sections that observes the other passengers with a full sense of being participatory, rather than as subjects of classicist derision. Campbell’s discussion of train passengers includes a section about luggage:

Train people have really bad luggage—mismatched suitcases, garish colors—

            and many have suitcases much larger than what one could take on a plane […]

            A lot of train people don’t, if we are precise here, have luggage. They carry their

            belongings in paper sacks, pillowcases, and large plastic bags from department     

            stores. (4)

The reader is introduced to a setting that is neither or place, or time—as Campbell discusses the lack of synchroneity of train time, of time in motion, with that of fixed positions, such as arrival at train stations. In case the reader is a classist trying to slum along with Campbell, two sections in this opening essay later, Campbell aligns himself with the other passengers:

             I am a train person. My duffel’s cheap and patched on the bottom with duct tape.

             My backpack used to be my daughter’s, and it’s got weird stains here and there.

             I have been wearing the same jeans for four days (9).

The reader will not find any separation between the writer and that which is witnessed on these pages, Campbell stands shoulder to shoulder with the lives that people his work.

Campbell himself is a Pushcart winner, author of multiple titles in multiple genres, and a long-term editorial team member of a respected press. His choice to be of the people does not escape the meditative memoir of this text. In a discussion about a celebrity baseball athlete, Campbell compares the ranks of celebrity, of legacy, between baseball and the literary world via a consideration of nicknames:

                […] was ‘the Georgia Peach” That just doesn’t work.

                It’s rural, regional, Southern. It’s like local color Southern writers

                battling the New York crowd for attention and only coming away with the

                title Regionalists […] it gets them in the Norton, but […] (72).

While the essay itself considers the retrospective moral life of the creator (as an athlete) versus the brilliance of their work, Campbell’s conclusion both includes and passes by the academic with “I tell my creative nonfiction students” (73), to a pure and intimate moment that, in one paragraph, makes prosaic mention of “gifts”, of “synchronicity”, of “forgiveness” and of “redemption”. The reader then too, as silent witness, must acknowledge a kind of posited hierarchy of priorities; that how one is seen as a writer is lesser than the “significance of experience” (73) that a writer might encounter, and that this too must come from us each in our most actualized humanity.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.