GAS 10: Poetry, Art and Music

by Soheyl Dahi

 GAS 10 Features:

Gabor G. Gyukics: poet, jazz poet, literary translator born in Budapest. He is the author of 1 book of original prose, 9 books of original poetry, 6 in Hungarian, 2 in English, 1 in Arabic, 1 in Bulgarian, 1 in Czech, and 13 books of translations including A Transparent Lion, selected poetry of Attila József and Swimming in the Ground a Contemporary Hungarian Poetry (in English, both with co-translator Michael Castro) and an anthology of North American Indigenous poets in Hungarian titled Medvefelhő a város felett. He is Hungary Nation Beat Poet Laureate (Lifetime).

Michael Rothenberg is poet, artist, and co-founder of 100 Thousand Poets for Change (100tpc.org) and the “Read A Poem To A Child" initiative. His most recent books of poetry include Drawing The Shade (Dos Madres Press, 2016), The Pillars (Contagion Press, 2020), and I Murdered Elvis (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). He lives in Tallahassee, Florida where he is currently Florida State University Libraries Poet in Residence.

Joshua Michael Stewart is a poet and musician. His books, Break Every String, and The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums and albums, Three Meditations and Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy can all be found at Amazon and elsewhere.

Angelina Bong is a poet and visual artist. She represented Malaysia at the 3rd Delphic Games 2009, South Korea in Poetry. Since then, she has read in ten countries with poems translated into six languages. Her recent poem wins the Poetry-Adult category of Georgetown Literary Festival’s ‘Wake Me Up When This Is Over’ contest. She chirps on social media at @swakgel.

Emocat is the synthwave project started by Heidi Blakeslee in 2020.  It is music for cats and cat people made by a cat person.  

More music by Emocat can be found for free on www.Soundcloud.com under Emocat2380.

Soheyl Dahi has lived in San Francisco since 1979. He paints and writes every day when he is not reading or publishing poetry (Sore Dove Press).

Pankhuri Sinha is a bilingual poet and story writer from India. Two books of poems published in English, two collections of stories published in Hindi, and five collections of poem published in Hindi. She has won many prestigious, national-international awards, has been translated in over twenty one languages. After doing her BA from Delhi University, and PG diploma in Journalism, from Symbiosis Pune, Pankhuri did her Master’s in history from SUNY Buffalo, and has an unfinished Phd from the University of Calgary, Canada. 

Tali Cohen Shabtai is bilingual poet from Jerusalem, Israel. She has three poetry books: Purple Diluted in a Black’s Thick, (bilingual 2007), Protest (bilingual 2012) and Nine Years From You (2018). Her work has been translated into many languages.

Ken Clinger is a composer, musician and photographer living in Pennsylvania.  His music is in the intro and outdo of GAS shows. His music often accompanies slide shows and poetry on GAS.  You can download his music from many sites including https://kenclinger.bandcamp/music

Belinda Subraman, your host, has been writing and publishing a long time.  Over the years she has edited and published books and magazines, podcast internet radio shows, blogs and recorded with various musicians.  Her main current project is this GAS video arts show and its accompanying blog: GAS:  Poetry, Art and Music. 

Left Hand Dharma

Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights.

My Beloved Anti-Divas, Pt.2: Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich by Kevin M. Hibshman

No two women personified post-punk adventurism more than Nina Hagen and Lene Lovich. Not only did they look the part with outrageous make up and dress, they made music that was utterly unique and at times, challenging. It was only natural that they would align, waving their brightly-hued freak flags for the world to see. In addition to their own recordings, they teamed up to star in Dutch junk-rocker Herman Brood's iconoclastic film, Cha Cha in 1979. They often appeared as guests during each other's  live performances and they recorded a duet, “Don't Kill The Animals” for P.E.T.A. in 1986. Lene also duets on “Where's The Party” along side Lemmy from Motorhead on Hagen's self-titled album from 1989.  Nina recorded a cover of Lene's top 3 UK hit, “Lucky Number” for her second album, Unbehagen (“Ill at ease”) released in 1979. Nina was born in Germany, Lovich in Detroit, moving to England at age thirteen. 

        After singing with a few bands and dubbing screams for horror films, Lovich recorded a demo of Tommy James's hit from1967, “I Think We're Alone Now.” She was quickly signed to Stiff Records and her debut album, Stateless appeared in 1978. Her recording career was sporadic but she did put out the albums Flex and No Man's Land in 1979 and 1982 respectively. New Toy, a six-song stop-gap EP, with title tune written by Thomas Dolby, was issued in 1981. 

        Lovich's songs were often slightly bizarre, occasionally ethereal explorations of love, loss, and the supernatural. She did pen the lyrics to French disco star Cerrone's 1977 single, “Supernature” which she herself covers on the aforementioned P.E.T.A. Album. Her style was quirky new wave with plenty of charging rhythms and percolating synthesizers. The main attraction was her unique vocalizing. Her voice ranged from smooth, haunting lower registers to piercing soprano shrieks. If you have never heard her, I recommend you begin with Stateless. This album shows off her incredible versatility and is the strongest batch of songs she has presented. Lene has continued to record, releasing the excellent Shadows and Dust in 2005. 

        Nina Hagen studied ballet as a young child in East Germany and by the age of nine, was considered a promising opera singer. Her stepfather, an anti-establishment folk singer, was kicked out of East Germany and Nina reportedly was granted permission to leave the country in record response time after declaring she wished to follow in his footsteps. She first landed in Poland, age sixteen but later ended up in London at the height of the punk rock movements, befriending Johnny Rotten (Lydon) of The Sex Pistols and Ari Up of The Slits. After being signed to CBS records, she released her debut Nina Hagen Band in 1978. Her second German-language album, Unbehagen followed in 1979. it would be her first solo and first English-language record, NunSexMonkRock that would introduce her to the world. 

        The sound of her first two records was a blend of 70's hard rock, reggae, punk rock with operatic flourishes. Nothing could have prepared her audience for the masterwork that is NunSexMionkRock. Here all of her disparate influences meld together with her odd, amusing personality to create an aural assault unlike anything you will ever hear from a major-label artist. The album is a new wave post-punk opera with Hagen singing in what seems like an endless array of voices that range from demonic to operatic usually within the course of one song. It has to be experienced to be believed.

Be prepared for a mind-altering trip if you decide to dive into this stunning album. Nina's music is not for everyone. You either get her or you don't and NunSexMonkRock is certainly her most divisive record with subject matter that includes religion, addiction, motherhood and UFO's. Of course seeing her live was also quite a mind-bending experience. She often throws in unexpected cover tunes from artists like David Bowie, Sweet, The Monkees, Janis Joplin, Norman Greenbaum (She covers his one hit “Spirit In The Sky” on her 1985 album, In Ekstasy.) 

     
  There will never be performers like these two fascinating women again so if you are not yet aware of their singular talents, I urge you to make their unearthly acquaintance.

        

GAS Catfish McDaris, Featured Poet

Catfish McDaris is an aging New Mexican living near Milwaukee. He has four walls, a ceiling, heat, food, a woman, one cat, a daughter, a typing machine, and a mailbox. That’s enough for him. He writes for himself and sometimes he gets lucky and someone publishes his words. He remains his biggest fan. He’s been sliding in the shadows of the small press for 30 years. Catfish McDaris won the Thelonius Monk Award. His work is at the Special Archives Collection at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is listed in Wikipedia. His ancestors were related to Wilma Mankiller from the Cherokee Nation. He’s on vacation from selling wigs in a dangerous neighborhood in Milwaukee. Van Gogh and Catfish were both born in ’53 and Vincent died on his birthday July 29^th. Cat’s hometown is Clovis, New Mexico, Gauguin’s father and son were named Clovis.

The Man That Brought a Singing Fat Lady and a Violin to a Gunfight

Of all that is written I only love what is written in blood. Nietzsche

 

Surrounded by dead guardian angels

listening to: The Mephistopheles of

Los Angeles by Marilyn Manson

 

Warming hands and face above a hell

fire in a 55-gallon barrel dreaming of

dancing with a senorita in Guadalajara

 

Palm trees figs and dates in Damascus

driving Thunderbirds through a sequoia

and zebras and swallowtails in the Mojave

 

Shackled by my years, gravity sucking

my energy, the sky, and ceilings piss

on my head, the walls yawn in boredom,

Nobody laughs at the ugly mirror, guns

mean noise and chaos, death should be up

close and personal with a lovely serenade.

A Review of Tara Campbell’s " Political AF: A Rage Collection," by Heidi Blakeslee

If I could tie ex-president trump down one time and force him to listen to someone reading him a book, it would be this one.  This book addresses the grievances that have been building up for centuries in the US.  In fact, I would pay someone to sit there and read it to him over and over again until he can’t remember his latest Rush Limbaugh propaganda and mitigates some of his brain damage.

Even just the titles of the poetry and prose inside are astute and visceral.  Ones like “Vessel of the State,” and “Shut up and Dribble,” cut right through the conservative claptrap and get to the heart of what’s important about issues like reproductive rights and race.

“Political AF: A Rage Collection” is the book that you should give your relatives for the holidays.  Be bold and let the questions and discussions that flow from this book awaken the people who need it and comfort the ones who desperately need kinship in this time of social distancing.

Some of the poetry inside is set up to mirror the ridiculous bureaucracy that holds up the judicial system and the scams featured in fine print that no one ever reads.  “US Government Form BC-451: Form to Procure Permission to Purchase Birth Control,” absolutely skewers the double standard that exists for the 1% vs the 99%.  Campbell illustrates the terrifying truth of the real “deep state,” and its agenda for women’s bodies.  Make no mistake, if there is a deep state to be had, it is the white supremacist garbage-mongers who are at the source of current Republican ideology.  Like a criminal prosecutor, Campbell illustrates the sick illogic that permeates current evangelical radicalism. 

 Using her poem “In Contradiction to the Commander’s Standards and Wishes” as a compass, we see that she sets her sights for moving forward squarely where they should be, “on science/ in consideration with community standards and wishes/ based on faith/ in reason/ in empathy/ in data/ in compassion/ in knowledge/ in questioning/ in resistance.

Tara Campbell is a fierce, fierce voice that stands up to ultra-conservative fascist propaganda.  I know I will remember this book and refer back to it time and time again.

Published by Unlikely Books. Available on Amazon

www.taracampbell.com is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University in 2019. Previous publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Jellyfish Review, Booth, Strange Horizons, and CRAFT Literary. She's the author of a novel, TreeVolution, and three collections: Circe's Bicycle, Midnight at the Organporium, and Political AF: A Rage Collection.

Tara Campbell

Poetry Commentary by Beau Blue

Talk about poetry? Hmmmm. Today's poetry. On the streets,in bars and coffee houses? Slams? Private lists and forums, maybe some blogs as well? And I'll rail against the ink and paper monsters that won't wake up.

But first is an observation and a disappointment. I'm not crazy about this real short line craze. A line should be a breath of expression. Each line must invite the audience to the  next line or it fails to carry the weight of the poem. At least a foot is required. But a foot and a half is still pretty fast.

The more spoken, the more obvious the line. The line is treacherous if you ignore it. Each line must lead to the next and the next or the tongue tip trips. The journey stops.

Makes me wonder how the single word line smiths keep their audience past the exhaustion of racing toward the end of every phrase.

I can understand being bored with pentameter, nothing moves so 16th century as pentameter, but even jazz has riffs, poetry as pizzicato chops of stones? Will more messages get through? Only if the channel is set to cummings and only cummings does cummings well.

Meet Beau Blue, Poetry Columnist for GAS

 Beau Blue is an old man recluse living in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California. A systems engineer, he specialized in interfacing computers to machine tools and in networking computer systems. He came to the internet, known at the time as ARPAnet, when he worked with Ford Aerospace and Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in the eighties. 

In 1993 he helped start Cruzio Communications, one of the first commercial internet service providers in the USA. He became one of the first internet literary publishers that same year with the introduction of "The Hawk", an arts and literary ezine aimed at engineers and designers. 

He has been publishing Internet poetry since 1995 when he and Michael McNeilley co-edited 'ZeroCity', one of the first poetry Ezines in the country.

Along the way, during his systems design career, he became involved with San Francisco Bay Area musicians and started a band called the Captec Project, "Community of Artists Patronized by Technology". The band appeared in various clubs in the bay area, performing his poetry to fusion and hard rock blues music. The Captec group was well received and an album, "Human Tricks", was produced in 1980 to positive reviews. Blue moved on from the Captec Project's fusion sound to the Alibi Blues and the Back Alley Blues Bands during the mid-eighties.

Blue retired from systems design in 2002 and he began publishing poetry animations with the advent of his third excursion into Internet poetry publication with "Beau Blue Presents". In 2004 "Blue's Cruzio Cafe" came into being and the two publications became part of animatedpoets.com the following year. 

Nowadays, Blue hides in the forest and works at keeping animatedpoets.com a unique and viable addition to the internet poetry landscape. 

GAS Tali Cohen Shabtai, Featured Poet

 Tali Cohen Shabtai is from Jerusalem, Israel. She has three poetry books: "Purple Diluted in a Black’s Thick", (bilingual 2007), "Protest" (bilingual 2012) and "Nine Years From You" (2018).

Tali’s poems express spiritual and physical exile. She is studying her exile and freedom paradox. Her cosmopolitan vision is very obvious in her writings. She lived some years in Oslo, Norway and in the U.S.A.

Tali studied at the David Yellin College of Education for a bachelor's degree. She is a member of the Hebrew Writers Association and the Israeli Writers Association.

In 2014, Cohen Shabtai also participated in a Norwegian documentary about poets' lives called "The Last Bohemian"- "Den Siste Bohemien",and screened in the cinema in Scandinavia. 

By 2020, her fourth book of poetry will be published which will also be published in Norway. Her literary works have been translated into many languages as well.

I have to know the wage of text

For a poet, silence is an acceptable, even flattering response, 

claimed Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.

Another claimed 

that the calm that is the history of silence 

is the poet's revenge.

Look, I walk around with a quill 

between my teeth

Some people have their sensory hearing absorbed into in the most unexpected organs, and some will qualify in silence, accordingly I have to know the wage 

of 

text —

Surely, the initial reaction in humans 

in their early lives is the voice, after

which everything else is a charade.

Tali will be featured in GAS 10, due out December 5th.