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.

GAS Featured Poet: Larry O. Dean

Larry O. Dean was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. His numerous books include Frequently Asked Questions (forthcoming), Muse, Um (2022), Activities of Daily Living (2017), Brief Nudity (2013), Basic Cable Couplets (2012), abbrev (2011), About the Author (2011), and I Am Spam (2004). He is also an acclaimed singer-songwriter whose latest solo album is Good Grief (2015); Product Placement, the sophomore album from his band, The Injured Parties, was released August 2019. For more info, go to larryodean.com.

Muse, Um's Artistic Inspirations Muse, Um's poems were inspired by various visits to the Art Institute of Chicago in preparation for one of the Poetry Foundation's Pop Up Poetry events, a series of 30-minute lunchtime poetry readings marking the reopening of the museum's new Contemporary Collection. 

As defined by the Foundation, “An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the 'action' of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.” 

For this endeavor, Dean was given very little in the way of specific instructions; generally, he decided that the poems would be 'ekphrastic' in that they were written in response to the artworks, but he also strove to come up with poems that were different in design, voice, tone, form, etc.; thus, among others you have examples of abecedarian, found, list, oulipo, persona, and sonnet, though in the end he was limited by time to only four for presentation. 

Boy with a Carrot (1738), François Boucher (French, 1703-1770)  

Unwrapping the Mummy (1825), Harriet Cheney (British, 1771-1848)

 Monkeys Boxing, from Monkey-ana (1828), Thomas Landseer (English, 1795-1880) 

Young Peasant Having Her Coffee (1881), Camille Pissarro (French, 1830-1903) 

The Song of the Lark (1884), Jules Adolphe Breton (French, 1827-1906) 

Alphabet (1959), Jasper Johns (American, 1930-) 

Ohhh ... Alright ... (1964), Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997) 

Waiting Lady (1972), Christina Ramberg (American, 1946-1995) 

Slumber Party (1983), Eric Fischl (American, 1948-) 

Stamford after Brunch (2000), John Currin (American, 1962-) 

Woman with Dog (Frau mit Hund) (2004), Katharina Fritsch (German, 1956-)

Mr. Pointy (2011), Takashi Murakami 村上隆(Japanese, 1962-), 

Sampling of poems from Muse, Um

Alphabet 

Jasper Johns (1959)

As soon as Jasper affixed his final

brushstroke, he called John

Cage. “Cage” (that's what he called him),

“drop

everything. Get over here.” Taking the

F train, he was relieved to

get away for a while, clear his 

head, fingers arpeggiating 

indeterminate melodies on his lap,

jumping grasshopper-like as he transposed

keys and reworked ideas. “My intention is to

let things be themselves,” he reflected,

making a mental 

note of it.

Outside on the platform, afternoon

passengers jostled one another,

quickly filling the train while Cage

remained seated, his 

stop approaching, “let

things be themselves”

uppermost in his mind. So many

variables in mobile form. Jasper could wait—he

wanted to try something new: have his hands 

x-rayed while they played, metacarpals and phalanges 

yo-yoing in diaphanous black and white, 

zebras shivering in a violent burst of snow.

Waiting Lady
Christina Ramberg (1972)

A body supposes a question mark,

eyed from the side, somewhat de-sexed,

despite its state of undress,

underwear, necklace, and hair, all dark

against a muted gray background,

dark and darker. Her skin's the whitest

element amidst the murk, the brightest

palette here to be found,

arms confined by a cruel

partner in a consensual game,

or attired in lingerie, a diving dame

jackknifing into Victoria's secret pool

to butterfly after-hours laps.

Will her cohort lend a hand, at the lip,

or shove her back, watch her tip

and splash, perhaps

sink to the bottom and brood,

holding her breath as long

as possible? It's the same old song

and dance—the pursuer and the pursued,

a power dynamic built

on submission and release—

and who assumes which role a caprice

of circumstance or repressed guilt.

Slumber Party
Eric Fischl (1983)

Center of the room

a stoical face watches

like some omnipotent voyeur.

It's called pareidolia—

the phenomenon of seeing

patterns in randomness—that 

makes windows with drapes

and a heater into hair, a nose,

eyes, and a slitted mouth.

We stare back at ourselves

as the scene unfolds

in cold muted colors,

weird, exaggerated shadows

from a fetish doll atop

the 1980s TV set looking

like a gesticulating alien fetus

in a corner of the attic.

Is this abstinence agitprop

filtered through The X-Files?

A lean white boy stripped

down to his underwear toys

with the television's knob,

his back to a Black girl 

whose panties are either

coming off or being slipped

back on. Between them,

a single blue sleeping bag 

like a depressed tongue

lies zipped open, while

a bed with tousled sheets 

teases to the right, 

lumpy objects stacked 

on a bookcase in the back.

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