GAS Featured Artist: Soheyl Dahi

 

Soheyl Dahi was born in Iran in a small town on the shores of Caspian Sea. After graduating from University of Leeds in England, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1979. He has published several books of poetry and a volume of short stories through Bottle of Smoke Press in New York. He now writes and paints full time. Soheyl has won awards and exhibited his paintings nationally. A new website featuring his paintings is under construction.

1) I've known you as a poet since the late 80s, when did you start painting and what inspired you to do so?

SD: Writing and painting came to me at the same time. At a young age, I realized very quickly that my escape route from my unhappy childhood in Iran was going to be paved through the arts. So a lot of my time was spent in my room drawing or writing. 

As a writer and painter I am largely self-taught -- other than 3-4 art classes at San Francisco Art Institute, I have no formal art training. But I have been studying art history and painting on my own quite seriously for the past 30 years or so. Every day that I paint, I'm confronted with the fact that there is so much more to learn.

2) What is your medium?  Do you only paint on paper you have made? 

SD: I started with oil paint but like many artists I switched to acrylic paint. My work is small in size, about 8x11 inches. I mostly use hand-made paper imported from Kathmandu, Nepal. The paper is uneven and somewhat fragile which to me mirrors real life -- now more than ever. 

3) Which artists are an influence on you?

SD: My interest in art is wide open. I appreciate artists as varied as Emil Nolde to Cy Twombly and everything in between. The work has to speak to me at some deep level. One of the early painters that fascinated me was Francis Bacon. His figures, always situated inside a small room, touched me a great deal. Years later, I finally saw his masterpiece, Painting, 1946 at NY MOMA. I think I stood in front of it like an hour and studied every brush stroke. Nolde has been a great source of inspiration especially nowadays since I am working a lot on land/seascapes. I am also influenced by the painters in the school that became known as the Bay Area Figurative. I think geography had something to do with it since I have lived in the Bay Area (mostly San Francisco) since 1979. Their use of bright colors which must have been shocking at the time (1950s) liberated my palette. Elmer Bischoff, David Park, James Weeks and others were all artists that I have been able to see and study their works often.

4) Do you ever write poems to go with your paintings?  If so, an example...

I don't. I see the two activities as totally separate. But someone like Lawrence Ferlinghetti can pull it off successfully (most of the time) and I'm fine with it when I see it done well by other artists. 

The Day After

California Burning

Evening

A slideshow of Soheyl's work is presented in GAS 10.  Also one of his paintings was used as the thumbnail for the show on YouTube. 

View it here:  Soheyl Dahi's slide show.  The accompanying music is by Emocat (Heidi Blakeslee who interviews poetry books on this blog).~Belinda Subraman

Ekphrasis Prose Poem Collaboration by M.A. Blickley and Zoe Anastassiou

Photos by Zoe Anastassiou

Mother’s Milk

by

M.A. Blickley

    My lips tremble as if I am about to cry.  Please let your mother’s milk steel me against the animal I become when my brain confuses intellectual arousal with physical pleasure.

    Why do I nurse wounds that flow from the expectations of others?  Sometimes it feels like I’m the suckling of a tin woman who warns me she has no heart, yet dopamine builds with each puckered kiss swallowed in humiliation or spit back in defiance. 

    You lactate a complex flow of contradictions that dribbles down my chin with the shame of a stain.  I want to forget the day I found that first red stain on my nine year old’s Wonder Woman panties.  Terrified, I run upstairs to tell Nana.  My gentle grandmother slaps me across my face. 

    I cry, “Why did you hit me?”  Nana says, “Ask your mother when she comes home from work.”  

    The moment I hear your key click in the keyhole I run to the door.  When I speak, you slap my face too.  You, who never laid on a hand on me.  Why?  You shrug. “I don’t know.  It’s what mothers do.  That’s what Nana did to me.” 

    Why doesn’t your mother’s milk offer me the nourishment and immunity from judging myself as being nothing more than my menstrual flow?  From fertility to maternity to menopause, must I believe that I am simply what I bleed?  

    Your milk sours in my mouth whenever you try to convince me your slap was done with love to awaken me from my childhood slumber.  I was nine years old. 

    If I’m ever blessed to one day suckle my own daughter, I will offer up a kiss, not a slap, when she comes to me with her first red stain.  I will celebrate her menstrual flow as sacred, not shameful, as it honors her passage from childhood, and will continue to do so right up to her old age.  

    And should someone ever claim her blood is a curse, I will ask why is it painful to be reminded of your youth each month?

Zoe Anastassiou is half Greek half Australian, born in London and educated in England and now lives in NYC as a working professional Actress. She works in Theatre, Film. TV, and Voiceover, is also a Host, as well as what she likes to call a "365 Blogger". Zoe has a knack for dialects so is often hired as a Dialect Coach in addition to performing as many nationalities. http://www.zoeanastassiou.com/

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center.  His videos, Speaking in Bootongue and Widow’s Peek: The Kiss of Death, currently represent the United States in the 2020 year-long international world tour of Time Is Love: Universal Feelings: Myths & Conjunctions, organized by esteemed African curator, Kisito Assangni. It opened last February in Madrid.

GAS Featured Poet: Krysia Jopek

 Krysia Jopek’s novel Maps and Shadows (Aquila Polonica, 2010) won a Silver Benjamin Franklin award in historical fiction. Her chapbook Hourglass Studies (Crisis Chronicles, 2017), a sequence poem in twelve sections, was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart in Poetry. She has published poems in BlazeVox, Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Redactions, and The Wallace Stevens Journal, among other literary journals. She is the Founding Editor of diaphanous micro, an e-journal of literary and visual art.

SHADOW PUPPETS

We were thin shadow puppets in another country broken by wind.

There were rumors of biological warfare, laboratories of losses.

We didn’t have the right connections to get home on time or publish manifestos.

The quarantine proved to be a drama of the absurd, a sandbox too small.

Unexpected kindnesses decorated small spaces.

The light through the stone walls found ways inside us.

We lacked the confidence of performers, the artist approaching the canvas or text.

A paper-thin ship stuck in an ornate bottle misses the sea.

Our inner horsepower went restless and lazy simultaneously, a paralysis of movement—yet rampant worry.

Icarus was not a fool to want to be near the sun; he just misjudged the distance.

We hungered for food prepared by our mothers who left us.

Our fathers would tell us to be brave until this strange state of affairs was over—

the shipwreck of the singular on the cliffs of shadows.

Until then, an ancient chorus praying in a language we didn’t know

Permeated our parched skin with haunting sounds, and syllables.

 

 

WATERLOGGED BIRDS

The abstract paintings and sculptures untangled lost music.

The maestro’s hands transformed waterlogged birds. He knew.

The book the poet had been writing became too intense to hold.

Pages could be ripped out and folded for paper ships. 

One match could take the whole fleet out.

Nothing is frozen externally, at least.

Too much is broken—the flowerpots, the left panel of the privacy wall, Buddha’s mossy chin, the rusted indoor table on the patio, the cat door, mantras for composure.

The scientist worked long hours researching a pill for heartache, for moving to the top of someone’s list.

The uninitiated will not understand.

One became very tired of being a pronoun.

GAS Featured Poet: Chris Bodor

Chris Bodor is a first generation American. He was born in 1967 in Connecticut to an English mother and a Hungarian father. After working for ten years in film production and audio-visual services in New York City, he moved to Florida in 2003. He was asked to start up a monthly poetry reading in August of 2009, on the last Sunday of every month in St. Augustine, Florida. During the past 25 years, his poems have appeared in many independent, small, and micro-press publications, such as the Lummox Journal, FM Quarterly, and Old City Life. Bodor is the Editor-In-Chief of the international literary journal A.C. PAPA (which stands of Ancient City Poets, Authors, Photographers, and Artists). 

File Cabinet Full of Sins

At the Good Friday service

members of the parish

wrote their sins on paper

and one after another

they nailed their confessions

to the wooden cross

set up near the altar.

After the mass

before I cleaned the carpet

and swept out the narthex

I removed each piece of paper from the cross

and placed them in a small plastic bag.

The anonymous sins of the congregation

are locked in my second floor office

in a file cabinet 

near the paint cans 

next to the dust mop

and the broken vacuum cleaner.

Attachments area

21st Century Poetry: Poetry and the Internet by Beau Blue #3

 

It was 1994 and the Netscape browser was born. Guys in commercial internet service providing were no longer faced with having to put up two servers, one for 'text-based' web and one for WAIS. Gopher was about to die, why bother with WAIS? [It was the text based computer server that fed documents to a user on searches. The app interface was called 'gopher' and the server was called WAIS. There was a competition between web servers and gopher servers when this was all text based. Netscape was the Graphical User Interface that allowed the World Wide Web blossom.] And presto the web became gigantic.The graphical user interface for the web was a gigantic starting gun.

Server providers started to provide seminars, live in real space, to tell everybody what was happening and how this THING, this internet, was going to let users be as creative as they could be.

Providers in a hurry started providing their own content. Some members of RAP  (Rec.Arts.Poems) started inviting other members of RAP to help. ZeroCity was born. All before '95.

More than 75 poets from all over the map, mostly found by McNeilley, showed up in ZeroCity.

Internet poetry moved into presentation websites and discussion forums, blogs, and even traditional print pubs making their first steps onto the web. The landscape was diverse and treacherous. And the poetry also moved onto MySpace and Yahoo and eventually to YouTube and Facebook and other social platforms. As creative as they could be became the norm.

We shuttered ZeroCity 18 months before Michael McNeilley died. I started "Beau Blue Presents" with broadsides by Robert Sward, Bill Minor, Ellen Bass, Beau Blue and Michael McNeilley. In 2000, I started making cartoons. By then I was head of web development for the Stanford Business School.

My colleagues and I started producing discussion forum software and other net based tools to facilitate education and make even Stanford professors more productive. Soon, poetry discussion forums were everywhere. So many template based bulletin board systems gave rise to as many template driven discussion forum software packages and hundreds of poetry forums sprung up over the nights of the next few years. Everybody became a 'contestant' and internet poetry turned slightly beige.

Oracles from a Strange Fire by Merritt Waldon and Ron Whitehead, reviewed by Belinda Subraman

This is a book of Merritt’s poems with Ron’s suggested modifications to the side.  Although there are a few word changes, most changes are in line breaks and spacing to make the poems breathe and jump off the page.  Merritt’s poems are well-written, philosophical and speak through a veil to current events and life in general.  The book shows that Merritt needed little help but it is also a book about a mentor and mentee, sharing and friendship and mutual respect. Below is an example.

Merritt’s poem:

Similar to fireflies swarming night fields

 Under the yellow moon light
My mind drifts like an echo toward
The inevitable rverb of birth 

Tremoring under the weight of our 

Selves suffocating, gasping reaching

 The bend in the river breaks all
Idea of safety and then there's 

Language or grenades stashed some 

Where deep in the secret reality of 

Our fears that go bang 

And we drown forever trying to swim 

Back against the current 

Ron’s suggestions:

Fireflies swarming summer night fields 

under the smiling yellow moon 

My mind, a drifting echo, 

the reverb of birth 

tremoring under the weight of our 

multi-colored gasping selves 

Reaching the bend in the river 

all notions of safety are lost 

Language grenades stashed 

deep in the secret of 

our fears explode 

and we drown 

trying to swim 

against the current 

    The added spacing does help in a cosmetic sense and for emphasizing the lines. Makes me want to re-think the spacing in my own poems.

    The book is published by Cajun Mutt Press and will be available soon on Amazon.

GAS Featured Artist: Nicola Winborn by Sylvia Van Nooten

Nicola’s artworks have been published internationally in Art in a Box, Circulaire 132, Rubber Postcard, South Florida Poetry Journal, Sonic Boom (cover artist also), Stampzine, Utsanga and X-Peri. In 2019 she founded Attic Zine: The International Book of Colour, a loose-leaf assembling zine, which she continues to edit. She is also the Founder/Curator of Marsh Flower Gallery, an online exhibition platform, hosting artists from around the world. Nicola posts regular news about all of her creative adventures on her Facebook page: https://m.facebook.com/nicola.winborn

 

Title: watching the river 1

Details: Mixed media and collage on paper, April 2020

Commentary: In this series, I have brought together my collage work, Asemic Writing and some rubber stamp art elements too. The six 'drawings' shown here form part of a wider body of 30 images, all generated during the first Covid-19 'lockdown' in April 2020. I created them in memory of my non-biological father William James Edward McClellan - each piece is dedicated to him. As a young man, he was a merchant seaman and he survived The Battle of the Atlantic: as an elder, he loved to watch the river and the comings and goings of its ships from the windows of his flat in Liverpool. 

Title: watching the river 2

Details: Mixed media and collage on paper, April 2020.

Commentary: This piece includes 'regular' writing as well as Asemic. The words around the blue circle read: "a great lover of ships" in continuous letters. 

Title: watching the river 3

Details: Mixed media and collage on paper, April 2020.

Commentary: I loved the phrase "sailing craft" underneath the image of the boat, so I decided to keep it rather than cut it off when I was selecting collage elements for this image. 

Title: watching the river 4

Details: Mixed media, collage and rubber stamping on paper, April 2020.

Commentary: The skyline 'silhouette' in this piece is an outline of some of the waterfront buildings near The Albert Dock in Liverpool city centre. I wanted to reference the beauty of my home city in an implicit fashion and so I opted for this veiled yet visible reference to architectural landmarks which I have always loved. 

Title:  watching the river 5

Details: Mixed media, collage and rubber stamping on paper, April 2020.

Commentary: This piece (along with No. 4 and No. 6) also includes rubber stamping: the radiating 'Ws' were made with a commercial letter 'W' rubber stamp and a black ink pad. 

Title: watching the river 6

Details: Mixed media, collage and rubber stamping on paper, April 2020.

Commentary: Here I wanted to render an unknown archetypal 'landscape' through rubber stamped collage papers: the boat travels through this beautiful dreamlike world. 

Nicola Winborn: Interview 

I met Nicola online on an Asemic Art Group about two years ago.  I was just starting to post my work there and she was the first in the group to encourage me.  She helped me so much with my confidence.  Building people up is one beautiful part of Nicola, another is her art.  Looking at the six pieces she submitted for this interview you can see the depth and range of her talent.  I’ll let her speak for herself and I encourage everyone to visit Marsh Gallery and experience the artists she showcases.  ~Sylvia Van Nooten

Q. 1: What is behind your artistic vision? Why do you do art? 

I have loved using art materials since childhood: in some of my earliest memories I am playing on the floor of our family living room with paper, brushes and watercolours. A tin of paints felt like a magic box to me back then and still does! I don't think the thrill of art will ever diminish for me, it will never become stale. The world of art, whether it's creating my own work or experiencing other people's, is unbelievably exciting for me, irresistible. It's also essential to me and far from a 'luxury', as some tend to see it in our overly utilitarian world: in short, too big a part of me dies if there is no art in my life. It is as necessary to me as breathing: I see art and creativity as life itself, not some optional add-on that is somehow 'self-indulgent' and can therefore be thrown away when personal and/or political agendas become brutal, blind. 

Q. 2: How does being an artist help you communicate with the world? 

I tend to work in mixed media painting/drawing, with emphases on Collage, Mail Art, Rubber Stamp Art, Asemic Writing and Slow Stitch. My methods are often eclectic and will fuse disciplines together: for instance, in 2022, I will be showing some textile pieces online on Marsh Flower Gallery, which join Asemic Writing, Textile Painting and Slow Stitch practices together. It's important for me to allow myself to experiment in this way, since my brain seems to be wired in a fashion which starts to see all kinds of ways artistic methods can be brought together, and so I have to create outlets for this. I often feel that visual art is predominantly an instinctive communication with our world and, since we live in cultures dominated by rationalism, this felt side of our lives is too often dismissed or ignored. However, our instincts are a very important part of our species. In my own creative experience, artistic communication is a place of flow, emotions, visions, the unconscious, and it has vital messages for us. I have discovered that visual art is a mode of communication with its own language and dynamics; it takes time and patience to get to know this terrain and to find one's own voice within this great and powerful river of creativity. 

Q. 3: Have you built or joined a community of artists around the world? How did you do this? 

I have helped build new communities of artists around the world and I have also joined existing international communities, in fact, often there's a bit of both going on. Take Attic Zine for instance. I founded this handmade, international assembling zine in September 2018 and it is a unique contribution to this genre in a number of ways, especially as that it is the first ever zine to make colour its primary focus and organising principle. However, it is also a publication very much indebted to and part of existing artistic traditions, especially the world of Mail Art. Mail Artists are part of what is known as the "Eternal Network" - a constantly growing and evolving international community of extremely talented artists, who use the world's postal services to communicate with each other, exchange art, collaborate and create group international projects. And so I feel that I have become part of this beautiful "Eternal Network" in recent years, and I have been made so welcome in this community, since it is made up of the most kind, rare and special people you could ever meet! I feel honoured to have had Attic Zine embraced so fully by artists from all around the world: fellow creatives genuinely love this publication, they find its concentration on colour to be exciting, joyous and novel. Recently, my friend the wonderful artist Kimm Kiriako, described Attic Zine as a "community". Her words made me so unbelievably happy, since I do indeed see Attic as a great coming together of many artists. It's a place where they can share their love of the colour spectrum and celebrate the great pigments of our world through their own unique creative contributions and each other's. 

Social media has been key in the setting up and running of Attic Zine. I would still be able to organise it without this platform, however, it would have taken much longer to get established and I wouldn't be able to get as many issues out per year as I do. Online life has turbo-charged the development of Attic Zine, for sure, and I am most grateful for this! I've also been able to make contact with other artists easily through social media. My idea for Attic Zine grew out of me becoming friends with Picasso Gaglione and Darlene Domel, editors and founders of Stampzine. Picasso saw my work online and invited me to make pages for Stampzine: this recognition and endorsement gave me a huge confidence boost at a time when I was just beginning to rediscover my creative self. After making my first set of Rubber Stamp Art pages for Picasso and Darlene, something clicked in my brain. Alongside making these zine pages, I'd also been making a set of books in boxes - I made a Book of Red, a Book of Yellow, a Book of Orange etc. In fact, I worked my way through the entire rainbow, and the seven books I created in this way sit next to me in my studio each day. One day, I was looking at my books in boxes alongside my copy of Stampzine and the eclectic, fusing side of my brain went into overdrive. I remember thinking to myself, "Imagine having books of colour made by the whole world, not just me". A light bulb illuminated and next thing I knew the seed of Attic Zine was born within me. I then began to communicate with and run my ideas past Picasso, who was so supportive and kind to me when I was getting Attic Zine off the ground. Both him and Darlene are angels in my life, they are such dear friends.