Kevin M. Hibshman's review of DARLING (CD) by Jon Bennett

According to his bio, Bennett is “a longtime member of San Francisco's underground music scene who mixes narratives with a finger picking style sometimes referred to as Texas flat picking. He is also a novelist and poet and his writing can be found in on line zines such as Red Fez, The Indiana Voice Journal, Medusa's Kitchen, Mad Swirl Poetry and many others. His music can be found on Pandora, iTunes, Spotify, Deezer and other music streaming sites. Darling is his sixth CD release and is available on Amazon.

        His phrasing and slightly raspy voice bring Bob Dylan to mind immediately. The lyrics reflect the concerns of gifted waifs longing for love but spending most of their nights drunk, roaming inner city bars. Each of the ten songs paints a vivid and complete picture of wayfaring wounded souls under three minutes time. The music sucks you in and ends leaving the listener gratified but wanting more. 

        I detect a little of The Flaming Lips on the whimsical “Awesome Possum” and the ghost of Nick Drake drifts by on a couple tunes. These possible influences in no way prevent this from being a highly original work. Bennett clearly has developed a signature style, showing it off to great effect. A sampling of the lyrics from “Black and Blue:” 

" now there's a razor blade/in a pool of after shave/maybe I will/on second thought, well maybe not/it's always been the time/that I need to kill"

                                                                                                                          

To be honest, I've fallen in love with Darling and recommend it strongly to any music fan who simply admires true artistry when it decides to rear its lovely, rarely seen head. This ranks with the best indie folk available.

Jon Bennett

GAS Featured Artist: Kristine Snodgrass, presented by Sylvia Van Nooten

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.

I “met” Kristine Snodgrass on the Facebook page,  Asemic Writing: The New Post Literate several years ago.  At first I was intimidated by her credentials and hesitated to get to know her.  Once I got past my own neurosis I found her to be the most supportive, listening, creative and FABULOUS person.  She is not necessarily aware of how much she supports and encourages other writers and artists, but she does.  Her work, both the poetry and art, is enigmatic, deeply thoughtful and with an underlying playfulness that adds to the richness.  In her own words, here is Kristine.  ~ Sylvia Van Nooten

-What's behind your artistic vision? 

I think my answer may be similar to other artists: I do it because I have to. It is not just expression, or a politic, or an outlet, it is my life. A good friend once told me that I had an integrity to my art that was great. My life and my art are the same. There is such a small boundary between what I make and who I am. I think for many of us, we are caught in a gray area that seems liminal, and that is all consuming and becomes a place of ecstasy. I have said this before about ecstasy. Do you know that song, “Starry Starry Night”? Listen to it. Go ahead. There is a recognition there of Van Gogh and his love that cost his sanity. In the song there is a lyric, “With eyes that know the darkness in my soul” referring to VG and his ability to see the human consciousness and if that is the case, if he could see that forever in us, how torn up and diseased he must have been? How years later one observer could look at him, really look at him and understand this. And the loneliness, too. This is the artist. And I don’t want to liken myself to Van Gogh, not at all, but to lay light on this condition. Maybe I see that darkness, too. I think I am misunderstood, mostly.  I don’t know what ppl think about me. I think I make ppl angry. I think I have been angry, too. If I can show them what I see, then that is good.

-How does being an artist help you communicate with the world?

I think I am horrible at communication. People are always mad at me. I don’t know what that has to do with my art. Maybe I suffer and the art is supposed to take that over. The art is something I almost can’t control. So my body must be trying to tell me something, or tell the world something. I often have this fantasy of being in a big space, like a warehouse, and rolling around on the floor in many buckets worth of paint. Yellow, blue, orange, pink. I don’t even have to be naked! What communication! I miss being in public spaces, arting and reading poetry. I think that COVID has made me realize that there is a touching we need from others. I need to see and feel an audience, or watch another poet or artist. Don’t get me wrong, all of the work I am doing now long distance or distanced is so wonderful, I just miss that here, now thing. 

-Have you built or joined a community of artists around the world?

YES! My best friends are artists around the world. I have met so many people in Facebook groups! I also am on Twitter and there are some really cool folks there. I would say, without hyperbole, that being on Facebook in the asemic groups has changed my life. My work has grown so much in such a short period of time. I have been able to collaborate with so many wonderful artists, and to share work through mail and the Internet. I have met dear friends and also some really great mentors. It is so weird because we “hate” social media, you know?

 

GAS Featured Poet: Susan Darlington

 

Susan Darlington’s poetry regularly explores the female experience through nature-based symbolism and stories of transformation. It has appeared in Fragmented Voices, Dreams Walking, Re-Side and Anti-Heroin Chic among others. Her debut collection, ‘Under The Devil’s Moon’, was published by Penniless Press in 2015.  

THE CAGE

 

She painted birds on the walls:

a goldfinch perched on the dado rail

and seven magpies caught in flight,

secrets hidden in their pinhole eyes.

 

She talks to them every day.

Uses a rigger to touch up their colours

when they start to fade; keeps them

from falling ill or growing old.

 

One Sunday, when the window was open,

a magpie peeled itself off the wall

and flew out before she could catch it.

The next day her mother died.

 

Now she keeps the casements locked

and has bricked up the front door;

swallowed the silver key that clatters

against her hollow bones when she moves.

 

We see her looking across the street

from inside her cage of yesterdays

as one white feather flutters down,

lands on the swell of her shoulder blade.

TRANSLATE THE NOTES

(“Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands” - Francesca Woodman)

 

And then one day

I didn’t even need the piano.

 

I swept its ivory keys

into the concert of my skin

 

and laid them in the caesura

between my vertebrae.

 

I cut the hammer strings

from the unwritten frame

 

and stretched them along

the steel line of my nerves

 

until my whole being vibrated

with translated notes.

 

I tightened the tuning pins

in my fingertips

 

and my body became music

under my touch

GAS Featured Poet: Howie Good

 

Howie Good, Ph.D., a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of Gunmetal Sky, a poetry collection forthcoming from Thirty West Publishing.

Birds of New England

There’s scarcely a tree remaining in the area for a bird to sit quietly on and think. This is someone’s idea of progress. It’s just not mine.

&

I bought a book a couple of weeks ago at Costco called Birds of New England. It contains drawings of different kinds of birds – you know, wading birds, songbirds, migratory birds – and brief descriptions of their habits. What’s that screechy brown bird that wants to monopolize our feeder? I look from bird to book to bird to book to bird, only to finally realize just how hopeless this is, like trying to identify a 70-year-old from his first-grade class picture.

&

At a stoplight on Mass Ave., a panhandler in a New England Patriots jersey with a rip in the shoulder shuffled up to my car. He had eyes like peeling mirrors and a knobby nose that had obviously been broken more than once. I didn’t lower my window. I didn’t acknowledge him. I just stared straight ahead, willing the light to change. This is how the future creeps into the present. 

&

Almost a year ago now, I was sent home from the hospital just hours after surgery. The only instructions I can remember being given was to look for the tall weed whose milky white sap is said to relieve pain. And if I had to scream, to please scream silently. 

 

 

GAS Featured Artist: Amy Rodriguez, presented by Sylvia Van Nooten

Amy Rodriguez is another friend from the asemic world.  Her art is exquisitely rendered, layers of color and shapes that speak pure visual poetry.  I have several of her works and what strikes me is how powerful they are in person, as if I am hearing words I can’t quite comprehend but can feel deeply.  Below, Amy describes the processes that create these pieces of loveliness. 

-What's behind your artistic vision? 

Art is an active meditation.

I create with the intention of holding up a mirror to the unconscious, but when mirror faces mirror, what is seen? My paintings are maps to unseen worlds, foreign realms, pockets of consciousness inexpressible by other means. Painting is a way for me to move past space, time and understanding. To express essence with color. To inspire contemplation in myself and others. To usher in the birth of something new. The Sun is a source of great influence and inspiration in my life and it features prominently in many paintings.  

Most of my work is done with India ink, water and sometimes pencil. I adhere to a process of layering color, washing, drying and layering again. Washing the pages feels like a sacred ritual and I will often wash 3 times before the final period of drying.

I add the asemic elements of my work last, writing from the depths of dark, empty voids. Each stroke is an act of processing, moving through the trauma and grief I have experienced in this life, toward clarity, light, sweetness and peace. 

Some of my greatest influences are the marvelous immensity of the known Universe, our beautiful Mother Gaia, the philosophy of Zen, and the writings of Carl Jung. 

"I was being compelled to go through this process of the unconscious. I had to let myself be carried along by the current, without a notion of where it would lead me." -Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 196

-How does being an artist help you communicate with the world?

I have always had a strong desire to share 'beauty medicine' in
whatever form I am able. A lot of my drive to create comes from that inspiration. I often choose bold colors because I find them uplifting and hope that those who view my art feel uplifted as well. 

-Have you built or joined a community of artists around the world?

I first encountered other Asemic artists through the Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate group on Facebook. I was honored to be invited to become a member of Women Asemic Artists & Visual Poets // WAAVe Global after connecting with several wonderful women involved with the group such as Kristine Snodgrass, Sylvia Van Nooten and Nicola Winborn among many other creative and talented women. I am inspired daily by these outstanding Artists and feel grateful to be in their company, forging a new path together. 

In 2020 Amy was a featured Artist in The Attic Zine No. 7, Green and Purple 1 issue. Her work was also featured in Red Fez Issue No. 126. This year she was proud to be a part of the upcoming first edition of WAAVe Global Gallery, published by Hysterical books in the summer of 2021.

More of her artwork can be seen at: 

https://www.facebook.com/amyrodriguezarteclectic

https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/6-amy-rodriguez?fbclid=IwAR0ajUtsc5nI2qkFlQoG-pk71IsY1tV5NzWi_zjHDA-hg9XywxwiG8K3Heo

Su Zi's Review of CYBORG DETECTIVE by Jullian Weise

 

It’s vogue now to show diversity awareness, but as we step forward in our social discourse, we ought to consider the act of the step itself: we do not all walk the same, and some of us roll. Literally. When we go out. In Covid, we are your high risk: the woman on your daily stroll with the great garden, the woman in the chair you see sometimes in Walmart, the older guy at the pharmacy in today’s fashionista moment—do you see us?

Well, Jillian Weise makes sure she’s seen. If you think to hashtag #Disability in your scrolling. And therein, call yourself out. As we move forward into our own history, and we feature bipoc lgbtq intersectionality, has even a thought fluttered by for those of us whom even a venture for essentials is literally a life risk? For how can we ignore Covid? We are scrolling more, reading more and those who are not are causing death in their wake. Some long haulers will never again be as abled. It is in our own and in social interest to give voice to those for whom our presence was, a best, ghostly. We turn to our social media, and there she is suddenly very present on Twitter and Instagram, and always glamorous, with wry and interesting posts. We find out she has written things, and it’s poetry and we love poetry. Disabled poetry: imagine.

Cyborg Detective , Weise’s 2019 volume (BOA Editions) has some interesting reviews, and those with a more literary bent to their reading out to note Weise’s work for that sake alone. Diane R Wiener in a review on wordgathering.com , views the text as a reading challenge:

“[…]what is the degree of our engagement with ableist poetry and other writing’s norm,and what’s to be done about this pattern? No one is innocent.” And Wiener further states” Albeism, as infuriating as it is commonplace, is far too often taken for granted, or, if remembered at all, is last on a list of priorities” As further evidence of positing this text on disability written as poetry at that point of  literary intersectionality, is an essay by Anthony Madrid for Rhino posits Weise as a satirist of the highest caliber and mentions disability as “the writer is, page after page, sticking up for the humanity of disabled people, of which she is one (she has a robotic leg). She is everywhere fierce; she is not afraid to name names” except for those who would prefer to continue shadowy misdeeds, our public collections and our epicurean reading have evidence to posit Weisse’s work firmly within both academic and popular cultures.

But not every text that claims disability has disability credibility and we ought not to have to bring a note from the doctor: nonetheless, there are poseurs, there is glossy black vinyl and people who will throw scraps, our theoretical allies. For this, the work must speak. If we read the book backwards, because maybe we are that way,  the poem “ Anticipatory Action”  directly features a collective voice with terminology established in previous, and widely published poems as referencing disability: the cyborg. 

       […]sometimes you all  / come in and need us to assert/our powerlessness//.

       Of course, we trust you (75)”

In “ Biohack Manifesto”, Weise establishes herself firmly within disability culture,  “here I am at Walmart //Please, please can you make/ your children stop following me(70)”.  For while it might seem to be diversity inclusion to have pretty people of all genomes modeling trousers, the disabled are the unsightly, the don’t stare at stare, the high risk you hear about but might see as a peripheral blur.

    For anyone who looks, Weise can be seen. Her arguments are posed as poems, as posts, as a contributing voice to those of us who are maybe heard more so as our communities learn the forever effects of this horror that beleaguers us. As we reconsider who we are, we ought to move to include the voices of the disabled in our discourses, even down to the poetics of language, as Weise here proves. 

Jillian Weise was born in Houston, Texas, in 1981. A poet, performance artist, and disability rights activist, she studied at Florida State University, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the University of Cincinnati.

Weise is the author of three collections of poetry, including Cyborg Detective (BOA Editions, 2019) and The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions, 2013), winner of the 2013 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, which recognizes a superior second book of poetry by an American poet

GAS Featured Poet: Mike James

 Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee and has published widely. His many poetry collections include: Journeyman’s Suitcase (Luchador), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), and Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog.) He currently serves as an associate editor of Unbroken.

That Same Vincent of Alehouse Fame

 

If he found wrinkles he called them timelines, 

And read between. Firmly believed in survival 

Of the sleekest. So he put on makeup when 

He kissed up to anyone on stepstool or ladder. 

Despite a fear of his own height he played 

Through, was well played. 

Normally, kisses happened on clean shaven 

Days. That was not quite every day

Because of leap year extras. He was always 

Pocket-mint fresh, perfumed. So, of course, 

He loved daisies. There are over 

Twenty thousand daisy varieties. 

At night he counted them instead of sheep. 

He seldom dreamed of falling, but often of fields. 

Leigh 

 

She had a lot of secrets.

Some in the pockets of the summer dresses she wore year-round.

Some kept out back in an old shed beside oil cans and butt-busted cane chairs.

A couple were lonesome in the sugar jar, after she gave up pie.

Some were in the blonde first curl above her forehead.

One of the secrets was the type of music she kept in her glittery, flapper hat.

She kept that hat in the spare closet at the end of a hall she seldom went down.