GAS Featured Poet: Carlene M. Gadapee

Carlene M. Gadapee teaches high school English and is the Associate Creative Director for The Frost Place Studio Sessions. Her poems have been published by Waterwheel Review, Smoky Quartz, Margate Bookie, English Journal, bloodroot, Wild Words, and elsewhere. Carlene resides with her husband in northern New Hampshire.

American Still Life with Milk

 

In my imagination, a milkman jingles to a stop,

tossing slack reins across an aging draw-horse’s

ample back. With practiced hands, he deftly

rattles the empties into faded wooden crates

to fill again. Cooled bottles glisten and wink,

and condensation beads at the rim. Tiny rivers

run and spot and dry on the dusty wagon bed.

 

“Git on Bessie,” echoes in my ears, recalling

times I never lived, and bottles I never held.

 

Coming Storms

 

Sheet lightning stretches

and winks. The metallic

smell of ozone is in the air.

No snug little house cradled

by beach roses, no fence

to stop sand from sifting

over the threshold. No old

woman lives here, only

horseshoe crabs. Tiny plovers

scuttle across broken steps,

etching letters into dust.

Greying and splintered

shutters creak on rusted

hinges, unable to block wind

and rain. No one visits,

not even to straighten

a broken chair or to sweep

one careful hand along

a silted sill. There’s no story.

Just shadows and ghosts.

GAS Featured Painter, Composer, Poet and Pianist: David Thomas Roberts

 

DavidThomasRoberts.com

Be:  Where were you raised and where do you live now?  I see a lot of “ragtime” videos and you post a lot of pictures of barns and country settings.  I was wondering how much your location might have colored your music and art?  How much do you feel your family has influenced your style of playing?

David:  I grew up in Jackson County, Mississippi, in the southeastern corner of the state, very near the Alabama state line. I count the village of Kreole as my hometown, though it was annexed by Moss Point in my teens, which I’ve always regretted. It was a world of savanna remnants and piney clusters, of our cousins’ little stores, of the Finn church and the forest just beyond, of the rude dreaminess of Bayou Cumbest, and the ongoing clamor of the paper mill, that destination of log trains clacking through the night. I was deeply affected by landscape and the nuances of place from very early in my memory. In addition to the pine thickets and buttercup savanna flourished much river swamp sporting the usual sensuous hardwoods, such as sweet bay magnolia, red bay and black gum. The Escatawpa River was nearby, and the mighty Pascagoula itself only a bit further. The mystery inherent in this heavy, ultra-green world became a central theme in my consciousness, and would remain a leering force in my work. I’ve carried the intrigue of structures pressed upon by the darkness of timber throughout my locale-obsessed life, reveling in its irreplaceable thrills from the Piney Woods of the Gulf South, to the Missouri Ozarks, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, just to mention the regions exerting the most intense hold upon me. 

I now live with my wife, Teresa, in Walnut Creek, California, in the east Bay Area, and have for some years.  We’ve known each other since our late teens, when we were attending the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. Having been in and out of California for much of my adult life, I’ve developed a poetic relationship with much of this territory, too, especially far northern California and the subtly magical California Delta just east of here.  To say that I continue to prioritize a highly reflective, intimate relationship with place barely suggests how deeply influential this factor in my thought continues to be. It drives my longings and the lyricism of my sanity, and I daily dwell upon it as I endeavor to decide where an archive/museum devoted to my work should be created. 

"The Window" by David Thomas Roberts

Be:  Even with your unlimited and eclectic compositions such as “The Window” I hear a ragtime influence.  Are your compositions played exactly the same every time or do you add bits as you play, according to your mood or what you have in mind to express?  

Can others buy sheet music of your compositions or are you completely unique each time you play? 

David: Ragtime came into my life in early childhood, thanks to the late years of the first ragtime revival, which roughly lasted from 1949 to the early ‘60s. I lost contact with it, in effect, for some years, especially as I focused upon painting more than composing from age 9 to 14, after writing my first piece at age 8 (a waltz which I still play in concert!). It reentered my life as I was returning to composition much more intently, thanks to my discovery of the extraordinary music of Charles Ives, who utilized ragtime in his uniquely prescient, visionary, collage-like works. This was also the time when Joshua Rifkin’s first recording of Scott Joplin’s rags appeared on Nonesuch, a project that yanked me onto the path of becoming a ragtime composer and, in the view of many, the most significant one of the second half of the 20^th century and beyond. Ragtime-based composing is but one face of my NeoRomantic language, though perhaps the most revealing, and thoroughly explored one. For me, the piano rag became an affectionate vehicle of lyrical, confessional utterance, a precious vessel for my most vulnerable and trusting expression.  One can’t miss my roots in Romantic piano music in general, or my love of hymns, much popular music and various ethnic expression when hearing such ragtime-based works as “Camille,” “Waterloo Girls,” “Pinelands Memoir,” “Through the Bottomlands,” “Roberto Clemente,” “Nahyr” and dozens of others. The sheer melodic appeal of these pieces as well as their unabridged, yearning expressivity, has much to do with my being disproportionately associated with ragtime to this day, despite the increasing availability of other branches of my musical output. It was as the composer of *Roberto Clemente* in particular that I found at least a cultish, niche recognition while still in my twenties. 

Like most other classical/art music/serious music composers, I greatly value the specificity and precision of scores, and my ragtime-based and other Americana/PanAmericana compositions are no exception. That said, I’m acceptant of very slight embellishments and hints of variation in many works in restrained keeping with the recorded legacies of 19^th and early 20^th century virtuosi such as Alfred Cortot, Ignaz Friedman and Vladimir de Pachmann, and what many of us like to think is the appropriate treatment of Midwestern rags as well, at least on the repeats of strains.

"Waterloo Girls" by David Thomas Roberts

A great many of my piano pieces are published, and are generally available via my website, DavidThomasRoberts.com

Be: Have you been to many countries on concert tours? I saw that you played in Japan.  Do you paint when you travel? Do you feel your music and painting are closely connected somehow, like different expressions of the same ideas?  They both strike me as energetic and “jazzy”.)

David: I’ve performed in Canada, Norway and Japan, but would love to concertize in many other countries, including England and Brazil. I’m friendly with a good many people in Brazil, and am an admirer and interpreter of Ernesto Nazareth. These days I would be gratified to appear far more often here in the States, too.

As for links between visual art and composition, yes, they are deeply intertwined in my psyche; indeed, I’ve often referred to them as facets of the same invention. I’ve been engaged in polymathic expression nearly my entire life, and have relished the interplay between poetry, music and visual art from early on. When asked in the fourth grade what I wanted “to be,” I answered in accordance with what I’d been becoming for a while---“A painter, poet and musician.” By my mid-teens, I was fashioning the essentials to be explored in all three media right up to the present. Even then, my sensibility was in keeping with Kandinsky’s maxim that the purpose of art is to present mystery in terms of mystery, as an encounter with my earlier poems and paintings is likely to suggest.

In the Little Belt Mountains

by David Thomas Roberts

In the Little Belt Mountains lacquered and steered like a lunar galleon

Where ice lore yanks its own banquet into trances

And timber guffaws its prissy way to dream-history

Roars a cosmic tide beyond reckoning

Booming autotelic tales unregistered everlasting

As if treatises and haughty manuals were nothing more than

Bruised brickbats powdered in Butte alleyways,

Sweeping the troposphere in sacred arrogance

Oblivious to sing-song patter and horsepussy foundations

Orating wintergreen fortresses into rocket-jangled archives

Oh!

In the montane bevy of ramrod visions

Lodgepole pine and polestar fed

This jack-o'lantern-hearted glacier-blaster primed for centaur nights

Spikes the prank of oceans in spirit-heat

Rearing to grin from vortex to beer joint like some ascendant pumping station

Thrashing in limitless green-eyed delirium

Tossing Neihart like a frosty infant Jupiter bound

And hugging it back to the spinning wheel of stoves and log spasms

Sure as upland paroxysms grind their stories

And clocks are hummed to testify to green glimmer of night

This the stocking yammer and winter-warmer ongoing

When a continent romances itself to planets

In the cartography of ultimates

In this the book of singing explosions

In the Little Belt Mountains.

Be:  I see a lot of sexual imagery in your poetry and a lot of your paintings.  Is that a conscious or intuitive thing?  (Sometimes it feels there’s something haunting there.)

David: You are so right! It’s surprising that this evident and provocative theme has never been mentioned in earlier interviews with me. It indeed speaks of a haunting that has been with me from earlier than my conscious memory can access, it seems. It was very upsetting to hear about the existence of sex when I was perhaps 9. When I told my mother about this, she uncomfortably confirmed the reality of the reproductive act, and said that she had tried to inform me when I was much younger but had desisted because I became nearly hysterical. Even into early adulthood, I never fully accepted it as a facet of this life that I was certain I could embrace. The tension between being galvanized by eroticism and burdened by disquiet, anguish and rage at its infusion in the world, remains a contorted presence in my consciousness and work.  

Be:  Are you still actively composing, painting and writing.  Have you ever had long periods where you didn’t feel creative? If so, how did you handle that?

David:  Oh, I’m always at work in one medium or another, and prefer to be in the thick of efforts in all media simultaneously. For me, writing, making visual art and composing are not optional actions, but obsessive drives, screamingly visceral needs and purposes.  My sense of rightness, fragile as it is anyway, would be crippled without fidelity to these drives that are the carriers of my very notion of selfhood.  

Be: I suspect you make your living through the arts.  Care to elaborate?

David: What income I’ve ever generated has resulted from my life as an artist. Composition commissions, sales of paintings and drawings, concerts, and sales of recordings and sheet music have provided my income. The only day job I ever had lasted about a week, but fulfilled its purpose---to fund my entering the state chess championship in Natchez in the summer of 1973. As it turned out, this was part of a crucial chain of events, as it led to my meeting a young man whom I would befriend at college three months later and who would soon introduce me to Teresa Jones, the indisputable love of my life. 

These days, the creation of my archive as the world grows increasingly insecure and, for me, inhospitable, is a relentless concern. I continue to hope for a decisive benefactor’s emergence, but accept that I might well be forced to disseminate and promote my work as never before to guarantee the creation of this citadel.  

David Thomas Roberts

GAS Featured Poet: Karlostheunhappy

Karlostheunhappy is a Welsh born resident of the dark Forest of Dean in England, just on the Welsh border. His work has been featured in it (International Times) and Beatdom as well as numerous anthologies. His first collection, OBLIVION: 200 Seasons of Pain & Magic is the summation of 30 years of writing and is available now through Amazon on both sides of the Atlantic and good

independent bookstores. He is the current International Beat Poet Laureate for England 2022-23 as awarded by the National & International Beat Poetry Foundation (US). Find out more at gloomyforpleasure.com

porch chimes
chime
the arrival of the wind

HYMN FOR ATHEISTS

Commit bodies unto the soil
or receive them as wisps and ash;
pour souls of the long universal night into the air,
absorb them into memory,
mean less than birdsong,
more than mortar.

autumn – she disturbs
leaves with a wave of her palm
of air; carefree, bored

NO HAIKU FOR BASHO

Snow gazing,
the son of a samurai
walking days to collect
flower gifts for city friends.

Finding haiku
with each floating colour
of Spring blossom,
each moonlit temple.

GAS Featured Poet: Karen Pierce Gonzalez

 

    Karen Pierce Gonzalez’s poetry credits include True North (Origami Poems Project microchap), and the forthcoming chapbooks: Coyote In the Basket of My Ribs (Alabaster Leaves), Down River with Li Po  (Black Cat Poetry Review). Her fiction, non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, and two of her plays have been staged.

    She is also an assemblage artist who follows the grain of tree bark, the threads in textiles, and endless streams of color. Her art has shown in several galleries and has also appeared in several literary journals.

The heartbreaking geometry of an origami heart   

                                                             

is there in the tri-fold red and white rice paper I stuff into the cracks of my four chambers to stop them from splitting apart. Asymmetrical sheets once square, now creased, slip into the seams, slide down beating walls; stick to the flesh of prayers.

 

Layered, diagonal and vertical lines swell; rectangular corners round out just enough for me to stand odd-angled, chest high in new dreams: grey grassland cranes, blue-tail butterflies, and wet, jumping frogs rise up from the crevices.

 

*after Restoration, Jenifer Yuriko Nogaki

 

 

 

 In a Bird Cage   (Haibun)

 

Strong coffee with cream, Ruby’s favorite. She slowly pours boiling liquid into her favorite cup, thick and hand-painted like her. Then stirs in condensed milk, easy to store in very small spaces. With broad strokes, she spoon-mixes the two until hot and cold meld. Hands rubbing the mug’s decorative buds, she whistles to her canary wake up. When it warbles back, Ruby sits on their shared plaid perch and sips as it sings.

 

winter blooms stay closed

morning sunlight too late

petals won’t blossom

 

Isotropic stardust: me 

Behind a star in Hercules’s shoulder,

I hide from astronomer probes

searching to dissect, colonize

 

leaked radio waves, barely heard,

whisper there are cracks

in this constellation’s armor

 

I tightly hold his upper arm.

 

If I let go, I could drift into a black hole valley

or sink to the bottom of a frozen planetary sea

partially thawed by the heat of my despair -

 

I would be lost. 

 

Beneath me, Earth— a pinball

in a game I no longer play—

pings against others in the Milky Way

 

my first home, once-believed-to-be my only home,

moves too closely to others, has boundary issues,

does not yield enough

 

As above, so below

the sages of that world explain

the constant push-pull;  at first too small to be seen

 

my body rippled

from collisions billions of years away,     

I space-swam to this kneeling giant—

 

nicked by asteroids, poked by scientific claims—

and now kiss his shifting seams -

love them, for their own fractured sake.

 

on track

sun and moon lights, wired together over a railroad junction, signal to flagmen

 

stop  go    stop  go    stop  go

 

in the train’s coach, we whir by a town: flat walls, blank windows, street lamps unlit  

 

stop  go    stop  go    stop  go

 

the conductor eyes the horizon rising above parched sidewalks, unpeopled streets and stokes steam-powered engine; smoke 

billows up –

stop  go    stop  go    stop  go

 

the end of that line is a tree branch climbing into the sky,

mouths open, we see our reflections

 

in the rail car’s leaf-streaked glass 

 

 

Among Phantoms

                             After Ghost Forest, Jack Bedell

I

 

If I do this

            lay down in the boat

 

so as not to fall out

             I will miss the silhouette

 

of nothing here

            a thinning horizon

 

a cypress graveyard 

            haunted grove of leafless limbs

           

stripped by oil-greed

a wasteland

 

crows no longer murder

            beavers no longer dam.

 

II

 

What trunked certainty I had

            about regrowth wavers

 

without windbreak

            lichen cannot cling 

 

fog skirts roll up

            sawgrass shores, naked.

 

III

 

Nature’s margins

are now muted

           

evolutionary prattle 

            rains from low-lying clouds

           

onto this skiff                                   

            spine absorbs water

 

hull heavy, I sink to the bottom

            of what little I know.

 

Silt cradles me —

            innocence rises to the surface

 

ebbs towards ghost forest

            fingers trace bark braille

 

silent

stories remember being told.                        

                                   

 

Still in the Sea 

   

GAS Members Interview Artist and Poet, Karla Van Vliet

GAS:  What medium/media do you work in and why did you choose those?

Karla: Over the last several years I have moved away from a painting technique I called scored painting; a process where I scored into a gessoed surface and then applied thin layers of acrylic paint to fill in the scoring and create an etching-type look. I started using ink on paper, scoring into wet paper with an inked tool. The ink created a strong line along the scoring but also held a softened color field on the paper where it had been wet. This intrigued me and I started to experiment more and more with inks. As I brought asemic writing into my work it made sense to me to work with ink, pen and ink, as inks relate to writing historically. 

This past summer I started making my own inks using flowers from my gardens. I really loved working with the natural elements, making color from petals. This led me to earth pigments. My newest paintings are made with these natural earth pigments. I mix them with an acrylic medium to create paint. I then paint on cut paper. I mount these pieces to a heavy watercolor paper or to a cradled board. 

I love the groundedness of these materials. As well, I was starting to work on a series of paintings inspired by water, the river, and the stones of the river. It felt right to use earth pigments for this series. In this series I am only using three pigments, indigo, earth green, and earth red.

GAS:  Can you speak on being a woman in the art world? 

Karla: I really don’t think about myself as a woman in the art world. I think of myself as an artist in the art world. What comes to mind when I read this question is an implication of a hardship, 

that there is an implied difficulty about being a woman in the art world, and I guess if you look at the percentages of women in museums and galleries there is some argument for that. 

However, what I’ve had to overcome in the art world, more than being a woman, is having grown up poor and the poverty mentality that resides in that experience. Another hardship is being an artist living in a rural area where there are fewer opportunities for showing work (unless there’s a cow in your painting) or of being exposed to the work of others. The internet has helped, somewhat with this, and I am grateful for all the many artists who share their work on fb and Instagram. 

On the other hand, I believe being a woman has been an incredible asset in the creation of my artwork. I feel there is a kind of inner strength that comes from negotiating the world as a female being. And a kind of permission, given more often to females, to follow one’s feelings, intuition, and to make art from those places within the self. 

This is a huge topic which can be seen from so many viewpoints. I feel I’ve just skimmed the surface in this response, but I will leave it here. 

GAS:  How did the pandemic impact the artist community you’re part of?

Karla: At the beginning of the pandemic I felt a lot of guilt; although I knew so many people where suffering terribly, I felt blessed in many ways. For one, Vermont was fairly insulated from the worst of the Covid consequences. Yes, I watched the news every day and was horrified by the stories of body bags piling up, yet here there were only rumors of someone from town or a nearby town being sick. No one I knew. It was over a year before someone I knew, a second cousin, got sick and died. 

Secondly, I am very much of a homebody, and an introvert, so having to stay at home relieved me of the stress of being out among the people. And I had time to paint, and paint, and paint. 

As I noted above, I live in a rural area, already my “in person” artist community was small. Most of us brought our studios back into our homes. Shows in the few nearby galleries were canceled and the strings that held us together frayed and many broke. 

But much of my artist community was already online, and that community grew as I immersed myself in the study of asemic writing. I reached out to my publisher with a book proposal on asemic writing which was given the go ahead, and soon after another publisher, one I had connected with through my online art community, reached out to me asking to publish a work of my poems and asemic writings. In 2021 I had two books published, astonishingly. I also decided to start my own online gallery to bring my own art and the artwork of those I admired into the world, a community much wider than my hometown. 

GAS:  How has your work changed in the last five years?

Karla: In some ways my artwork hasn’t changed in that it comes from the same place. Listening to and following the call, my intuition, my curiosity, my fear / uncertainty, no matter how uncomfortable that is, pushing the envelope. 

In materials I moved from acrylic paint to ink and have now circled back to pigment in acrylic medium. 

But it was about five years ago I had a dream of asemic writing over a moon. This image over and over. I am a dream analyst and I pay attention to my dreams and have since I was in my early twenties. This led me to delve into asemics to see what was there for me. Asemics is a kind of writing-like mark, the gesture of writing, that is defined simply as “open semantic”. There is a lot of discussion on the how to define asemics which I find very interesting, and the movement is in flux around this issue. I was drawn to asemics because I am also a poet. I found myself, due to the political situation in the US and my response to it, without words. Asemics allowed my hand to be in the practice of writing when I didn’t have words. I often think of it as what is rising from within to be expressed. I feel it adds a layered element to my works that deepens the work. 

GAS: Do you feel a kind of osmosis of water, fire, air, earth that you work with in your art?

Karla: Yes, my work is definitely inspired by nature, the elements of water, fire, air, and earth, the beautiful landscape of Vermont, the river, mountains, rocks, flowers, weather! All these elements inspire me by color, shape, sound, and sensation.

In my poetry I’ve often said that I use the descriptions of the exterior landscape to describe my internal landscape. As a seventh-generation Vermonter I feel this landscape is in my blood and so in my language, be that in word or image. 

GAS:  Are you formerly trained or self-taught?  

Karla: I did study art in college, briefly, but my formal training is in poetry. The philosophy of the school I went to was learning by doing. It resonated with me then and still does. I tend to jump into whatever I am doing... I rarely read directions all the way through, if at all. 

I’ve taken art classes, in college, in person, online, does this make me formally trained? I read books about art, I watch videos, I talk with other artists, does this make me formally trained? I also sit at my art table and work, try things out, follow what I’m called to experiment with, how to express myself, beyond what I’ve seen anyone else do, does that make me self-taught?

I live outside academia, I live in a rural area, I don’t belong to a formal group of artists, I do my own thing, does that mean I am a primitive, or outsider artist? I would love to see more exploration of these questions on a broad base. I am curious what others think about this subject. 

GAS: We haven’t seen any of your poetry on GAS but I’ve read you’re also an accomplished poet. Could you tell us something about your journey as a poet and present one or two of your favorite original poems?

Karla: I turned to poetry in a particularly difficult time in my early twenties. At the library I found books by Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. There I found both a language to speak in and permission to speak. I thought of poetry as a way I could say what needed to be said but “slant” like a code. This started a long journey towards self-realization and expression. I had given up art and poetry gave me a creative release. 

I finished my BA degree and then my MFA in Poetry. And poetry has been a large part of my life. Right now art occupies a larger space in my life than poetry but I strongly believe they are really two ways of expressing the same inner call. And that they both support and honor each other, like music together they make the song of my creative expression, and that song is the better for both melodies coexisting. 

GAS:  Please tell us about your recent books and awards.

Karla:  Global Excellence award, Poet & Artist of the Year, Bacopa Literary Review’s Visual Poetry Award, Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize finalist,

Nominated for a Forward Prize, three-times a Pushcart Prize (three times), and a Best of the Net Prize

She Speaks Tongues, poems, asemic writing, Anhinga Press, 2021

 

Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writing

Fragments: From the Lost Book of the Bird Spirit

The River From My Mouth

From the Book of Remembrance

first published in Orbis Quarterly Literary International Journal

Tell Me How 

The valley is a bowl of snow clouds
and the hawk is screeching in my own
chest’s hollow, the whole forest of me
taut with listening. Is the hawk not messenger
I ask you? And pray her words, caught on wind
in the wild storm, will hold some answer. 

Take a breath, I say to myself,
don’t go messing with this heartbeat
already erratic and outside your body
like the crows’ flapping wings pestering
the hawk to move along, tree to tree,
across state lines, and lines of conduct,
this hawk that wants to settle in the branches
and hunker down. 

You, there. The miles between us counted
in the thousands, like those wild pigeons now
extinct in their flocked migrations from coast
to mountain range. And yet here, I turn in my sleep
to your whispered voice calling my name.
   Tell me how this could be.