Laika Poetry Review

Comrades!

2007-02-28T14:22:00.006Z

Star City regrets to report Laika has temporarily lost contact and is floating in space (translation - we're going on hiatus).

In the meantime, please send all prospective writing to darrananderson1 (at) gmail.com, where it will be considered for those glorious heroes of the People's Republics 3:AM Magazine and Dogmatika.

Спасибо !

Laika Poetry Review Issue 3

2006-11-17T19:06:00.000Z

Laika Poetry Review Issue Three

Featuring writing from Michael Internicola, Maurice Oliver, Woodie Sinclair Stephenson, Richard Fein, Alison Ross, Julian Haladyn, Eamonn Stewart, Nicholas Grider, Ray Succre, Corey Mesler, Papa Osmubal, Sean Kilpatrick, Noelle Levy and MTC Cronin.

Laika Poetry Review Issue 2

2006-11-17T19:04:00.000Z

Laika Poetry Review Issue Two

Featuring writing from Etheridge Knight, Paul A. Toth, Chris Gilpin, Ryan Lees, H G von Paulis, Ace Boggess, Mark Young, Adam Jeffries Schwartz, Tom Hamilton, John Grey and Gary Lehmann as well as a study of the literary outlaw Ambrose Bierce.

Laika Poetry Review Issue 1

2006-11-17T19:03:00.000Z

Laika Poetry Review Issue 1

- Featuring work from Tom Leonard, Rennie Sparks, A.D.Winans, Alex Galper, Adam Jeffries Schwartz, Colin Dardis, Corey Mesler, Ryan Bird and Jakob Van Hoddis.

Laika Issue Three Contents

2006-11-17T18:11:00.000Z

Laika Issue Three

Contents

Editorial

Disinterment - Richard Fein

State of The Nation - Eamonn Stewart

More Plain Heathen Mischief - Maurice Oliver

Shit Jobs - Michael Internicola

Variation On Roman - Woodie Sinclair Stephenson

Monsters and Fossils - Julian Haladyn

We Two - Alison Ross

Clean Living - Nicholas Grider

Weather Result - Ray Succre

Sorry Bukowski - P.L.George

Its Own Circle Of Peace - Corey Mesler

Scotty Twilight - Michael Internicola

Lesson - Papa Osmubal

Lip Syncing A Vague Terrain - Maurice Oliver

Math Problem - Richard Fein

False Salute To The Dead - Sean Kilpatrick

40,000 Slaves - Adam Jeffries Smith

Million Dollar Whore - Noelle Levy

The Messi@h Code List - Maurice Oliver

Closed Mondays - Michael Internicola

Ticket To Trilce(excerpt) - MTC Cronin

Tribunal - Jeff Crouch

Laika Issue Three

2006-11-04T17:14:00.000Z

Laika Poetry Review Issue Three

A Ticket To Trilce (excerpt) - MTC Cronin

2006-11-04T16:40:00.000Z

A Ticket To Trilce (excerpt).

LV

Boyle had jotted down somewhere that the day always begins elsewhere.
Cronin writes rapidly of strangling justice because there is an everyday
that never passes beyond the sheeps' noses. Who's the fairest? The white
flocks remain unidentifiable, like blossoms that huddle to the tree for fear
of a wind that empties like distance into their open throats.

Three times it was Wednesday as Wednesday lingers in the faithful old week.
The name begins to spell itself backwards in search of a mate, the old
pallordromes no longer useful as guides in such a world,
a world of zombies with mollusclike mouths,
a world invented for the pure use of hope.

My unborn son bothers me again.
He is aging me and remaining stationary.
When I look deeply into the space he might occupy
I observe all the pages that have been turned upside-down.
There a citizen reads the impossible banning of reality.

Before us, suddenly, takes place the battle of the dimples.
A series of Buddhas comes bearing
the amberella chutney
while I crawl to the cupboard of flexible possession
and slip through
its jaw.

MTC Cronin has twice been runner-up in the James Joyce Foundation's Suspended Sentence Award, a runner-up in the Stand International PoetryCompetition, and won the Gwen Harwood Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poetry, short-stories and reviews have been published internationally. Her fourteen books include the highly-acclaimed 'My Lover's Back' and ' 1-100' and her response to Neruda's 'Book of Questions' - 'Talking to Neruda's Questions' - has been translated into Spanish, Italian and Swedish. She lives in Australia and you can contact her at margie_cronin@hotmail.com.

We Two - Alison Ross

2006-11-04T16:30:00.000Z

We Two

We two
move backwards in time
receding towards oceans
dripping magic curses from our tongues
and spilling flowers from our mouths

We two
rearrange the alphabet
dismantling vowels into hieroglyphics of sound
speaking multi-colored syllables
and bleeding language from our eyes

We two
scatter numbers to the wind
decorating the sky with an arithmetic of stars
smashing the clouds into silent symbols
and making shapes from the wind

We two
swim in reverse seas
speak strange syllables
and subtract the stars
from the geometries of wind

Alison Ross venerates verse. She has published poetry in Cerebral Catalyst, A Little Poetry, Muse Apprentice Guild, Mad Swirl, and Nova Express. She also praises political polemics, writing regular radical "rants" for Democracy Means You. She has published similar tirades in Exquisite Corpse, Democracy Underground, and Creative Loafing, among other publications. She can be reached by e-mail at Fleurdumal@earthlink.net.

40,000 Slaves - Adam Jeffries Smith

2006-11-04T16:28:00.000Z

40,000 Slaves

When my mother died I inherited: a piano no one had played in forty years (my grandfather—in the 60`s), half a house I couldn`t afford (don`t ask, I`d been rebellious) and some ugly dishes from the 70`s (we`re talking really ugly here--there are doves involved, there are rainbows).

Worst of all I inherited the 40,000 slaves. What to do with 40,000 slaves?
Where do you put them all?

I want to say right now—up front—I think slavery is wrong—very wrong. I`m against it --on principle. I`ve signed petitions and felt good about myself for several blocks. But, like so many things I put it all behind me.

My great-grandfather bought a few slaves when he came to the country, then he bought a few more; soon the multiplied. I`d grown up with thes slaves—they were family; they were just like family.

``You should get down on your knees and thank God you have so many slaves—not everyone is that lucky``. That`s my mother speaking from the great beyond.

`You got to pick a point on the horizon,and start walking`" That`s Lola-- my other mother—speaking. Unfortunately I didn`t listen to her either.

Now I`m 33 years old and broke-- except for the 40,000 slaves—who are family—they're just like family? How could I just sell them? Someone else would buy them—god knows who?
So I keep the slaves and promise (myself) to be good: kind, ethical. What else could I do?

Adam Jeffries Schwartz--a two time nominee for the 2005 Pushcart Prize-- is a writer and a traveller. He has stories, essays & poems in: Descant, Grimm, Szirine, Jacaranda & Bleach Magazines. Online he pops up at many sites, including: Mosaic Minds, Melange, Ghoti (Fish), Litbits, Kaliedowhirl, The Big Ugly Review & Caprice.

Disinterment - Richard Fein

2006-11-04T16:26:00.000Z

Disinterment.

Even a final resting place becomes an unmade bed
when a modern highway is planned.
Old bones must yield to fast lanes.
The newspapers reported in so many words,
that his now decayed butt once mooned heaven,
for he was interred head first.
A pocket watch worth a nineteenth century workman’s yearly wage
was helter-skelter amid his yellow skeleton.
Research was done, mouldy obituaries read,
and it was reported,
that this rear end up burial was his arrogant wish,
for on judgement day the world would turn upside down
and he’d ascend directly, with no chance of getting lost.
And so this man of affairs would firmly shake hands man-to-man
with the supreme creator of all affairs.
A year later the now defunct Brooklyn Eagle reported
that a warehouse misplaced his sorry bones.

Richard Fein has been published in numerous print and web journals including Southern Humanities Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Touchstone, Windsor Review, Mississippi Review, Kansas Quarterly, Oyez, Parnassus Literary, Touchstone, Morpo, Snakeskin, PIF, Afternoon, Small Pond, Blue Unicorn, Soundings East, Sunstone, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, and Oregon East.

Math Problem - Richard Fein

2006-11-04T16:24:00.000Z

Math Problem.

Suppose you walk up a hill at 3 mph, then return directly down to your starting point
at the brisk pace of 6 mph, what is the average rate for the round trip?
No, it’s not 4.5 mph; it’s 4.

From the runes of algebra understand how and why bodies move.
Ascent requires struggle, and struggle requires more time.
The longer the time, the smaller the quotient of distance over time
and so the slower the average rate
at which you leave and then return to your point of origin,
if you can ever return at all.
Climbing requires sweat; descent demands nothing but inertia.
To rise like an angel takes a lifetime, to fall like Lucifer takes an instant.

Richard Fein has been published in numerous print and web journals including Southern Humanities Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Touchstone, Windsor Review, Mississippi Review, Kansas Quarterly, Oyez, Parnassus Literary, Touchstone, Morpo, Snakeskin, PIF, Afternoon, Small Pond, Blue Unicorn, Soundings East, Sunstone, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, and Oregon East.

Weather Result - Ray Succre

2006-11-04T16:23:00.000Z

Weather Result

Time is made of inanimate particles shoved along by animated kinetic ones, though I am made of evil pitch, say the good. Land is digested by oxygen, and its movement in air or water, the cess result of which is a chronically refreshed, geological surface, though my rough is fine-cut by evil tongues, say the good.

This Earth has no heart but for magnets and blood, and this nature, no mind set aside for good or else.

Ray Succre has been writing for twelve years and has begun publishing his poetry while trying to broaden himself as a poet and parent. He is now beginning to send his work out at a more social level. He currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife, Maisy, and baby boy, Painter. He has been published in Aesthetica, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Poetry Nottingham, as well as in many others both in the U.S. and abroad.
For further inquiry, publication history, and information, visit http://raysuccre.blogspot.com. This site is updated often.

Tribunal - Jeff Crouch

2006-11-04T16:22:00.000Z

Tribunal.

I see you have on your Hugh Hefner, and I presume you’re Lucille Ball beneath that Groucho Marx; beneath that bathrobe, I don’t know. I can’t see your feet. Marilyn?
Now, you’re Marilyn?
The judge in the corner looks Irish.
I heard this story once from this Irish kid from New York. We used his dorm room for drinking binges. He didn’t like our abuse. But I usually cleaned up the mess. Except for the beer bottles on the sidewalk. Or the shower curtain I ripped loose. Hey, sorry.
No wonder my present wife hates me. I tried to hard to live without emotional baggage. For a while there, I kept down the number of children we were having by slipping her a pill. Before we had our first child, she had had four miscarriages. It was my fault. She was a good Catholic girl. Seven miscarriages total. Three children. At least my alimony’s limited.
The Irish kid always talked about the yard crew. So much for work study. Plato, Thomas Aquinas, and a bunch of criminals.
In my living room, there’s a chair I made myself, but no one can sit in it. It’s made from hair, coat hangers, and Elmer’s glue. I wanted to be an artist; the chair was to remind me what happens when you try to live as a rationalist.
No one understands you, and cleaning up a mess finally becomes a mess itself.
The hair gets piled high, and the garbage men refuse to take it. Of course, I couldn’t sell it.
The name of the piece is "Emotional Baggage, The Hair Bag Chair, Don’t Sit Here." My wife left with the kids and said she wasn’t coming back until I got rid of the chair.
Scars never look heavy, but they feel heavy when touched. There’s a scar beneath my elbow from when my arm went through a car windshield, almost on my funny bone. It’s a weird sensation. You’d think I was superstitious if I told you it helps me predict the weather. Like I said, its’ a weird sensation, almost heavy, when I touch it.
The Irish kid.
One dude on the yard crew always talked about this armed robbery he did to join a gang. The Irish kid said the yard crew liked getting stoned—stoned on marijuana—and watching TV. He went home with one of them, to the dude’s trailer. He never understood them, and the armed robbery story bothered him.
He must not have realized that while he was waiting in the car while the yard crew chief went into the store to buy beer, the yard crew chief was also was also pulling a job. Of course, the Irish kid gave the yard crew chief his five bucks (what it cost for half a case back then), but he never found the receipt.
I saw an armadillo dead in the road the other day, stopped my car, and used my brown paper bag to drag it out of the street next to a tree.
The Irish kid thought it odd that anybody would rather live stoned and watch TV. He hadn’t been in the Texas sun long enough. I don’t think he’d stepped in a red ant bed yet. But when he didn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving, I took him to my family’s Thanksgiving. He got to listen to complaints about Mormons.
I once mopped up the Irish kid’s vomit when he exploded after too many shots of vodka and wine. In the common room, in front of the TV. Dull grey vomit. It almost matched the floor.
The Irish kid became a monk. But his father was a judge who got busted for dismissing traffic tickets for friends. I guess that was my point.
A story about an Irish judge.
There goes the family fortune and prestige and power.
The last stupid drinking binge the Irish kid had been on was one his father had to rescue him from.
At the Fireman’s Ball, in front of all his friends.
Are you embarrassed?
Dull grey vomit. Not my favorite flavor, but ubiquitous.
This damn tribunal looks like a masked ball.
Is it true? Costume theft?
The Irish kid never came back to college. I tried to write him. I thought he might have committed suicide.
Having once said to somebody something like why don’t you blow your brains out, I had to wonder. After I said that, I found out that she had gotten drunk and slammed her car into a bridge column. Mary lived in a coma for twelve years before she died.
Reminds me of the lawsuit against Ozzy Osbourne.
So many misunderstandings because of the band’s name.
After Black Sabbath.
The Irish kid’s mother wrote me back to tell me the Irish kid was still alive.
I am trying to remember who might be on the tribunal.
Later, I found out that the Irish kid had signed up to be a missionary, but while he was working in a neighborhood in New York City, a gang captured him and beat him almost to death. He became a monk. He never said if the gang had raped him.
How could a hedonist ever conceive of himself as a rationalist?
Did you ask the Drama Department? And what’s with the Dr. Seuss?
Let’s get started.
I think my grandmother had that wig.
Maybe that is your grandmother. Maybe your enemies have dug her up and put her in a museum.
Let’s get this party started.
It’s a costume party.
No, it’s a tribunal.
Yes, you’re behind a mask, but I’m not wearing a mask. I’m at all not like an astronaut. I don’t have my own contained environment.
That’s the trouble with rationalism. Try to be emotionally detached, and life becomes a lonely fire drill. The sirens are always going off.
Where am I? I’m in this picture with you.
Does someone need to go to the bathroom?
Yes, I’m slightly uncomfortable.
Dear Astronauts:
How’s the moon?
Your truly, Me
All brides are beautiful.
My wife was beautiful.
We were deep-sea—yes, I don’t see any water. We were Deep-sea diving in bad lighting. I’m not certain, really—didn’t you like that tune? It was three in the afternoon or four in the morning. The music was too much like silence, yes. We were hoping there wouldn’t be violence. The camera corrected our spelling as we waited like guests for the film. The camera crew could only do stills. I asked for food, but the bride and groom weren’t finished with their photo shoot. Angry guests? Starving. The bar was open, and I got drunk—easily, because I had nothing in my stomach. It was Jim Beam and Coke for all I remember.
Sure, you’re right,
But here, no one’s even poured punch. It’s just napkins in glasses. What’s in the pitchers?
Doesn’t look like liquor.
I caused my wife to have a miscarriage.
I’m sorry you didn’t get to be a philosophy professor so you could talk Plato and midwifery.
Behind the wall, the monster roars and roars. Your stomach?
Dull grey vomit.
We sit trying not to fake it, but the party’s morose.
Beowulf? Why did you say that? Who’s hiding a monster? A murder? Your mother?
The monster behind the wall?
"I’ll eviscerate anyone who makes the mistake of offering to play ‘MacArthur Park.’"
Eviscerate? What wrong with ‘MacArthur Park’? At least, it’s music.
Shut up!
Calm!
You’re faking the terror; you’re putting me on? You’ve forgotten it? Do you no longer hear the music?
What music?
It’s deadly dull. No one is dancing?
Sitting at the table.
In judgment.
Who’s coming?
The Irish kid is here, but he’s really dead. His mother lied.
But I’m here, I’m here. Waiting with you. The truth was Tang.
Tang?
Tang in the pitchers.
What’s with the infinite lunch?
Waiter?
No Procol Harem.
What plan?
What’s the plan? The plan?
You didn’t make reservations did you?
No ice! I need ice. Ice for my stubbed toe. Ice to calm the monster.
The light is too bright. Hello?
Are you passing judgment?
Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be doing?
No, we’re not characters from some Love among the Cyber Ruins.
Hello? Are those strings?
You’re pulling the trap door?
Is that a trocar or a cake knife?
Eviscerate!
What’s the word from Stalin? Gulag or bullet in the brain?
"MacArthur Park"!
I told you I did not like karoke.
Yikes.
Now, I’m the monster.
Good grief. I’ve had enough excitement, and it all looked so tame.
A river of dull grey vomit.
The conclusion: it was never sane.

+++++++++++++++++++

Jeff Crouch is a writer in Grand Prairie, Texas. He plays at art as though it were a game of hide and go seek. His writing has recently appeared in Above Ground Testing, Canopic Jar, The Cerebral Catalyst, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Dream People, Lunatic Chameleon, My Favorite Bullet, saucy vox, semantikon, Subterranean Quarterly, Underground Window, Venue--A Southern Forum, and Wire Sandwich with more forthcoming in Laika Poetry Review, The Rose and Thorn, and Static Movement.

The Messi@h Code List - Maurice Oliver

2006-11-04T16:21:00.000Z

"The Messi@h Code" List

If I remember correctly, here is a list of those things missing:

-Rainwater pooled in the awning of a French bistro.

-Trees growing on only one side of the seven hills.

-A photograph of the Nile that's aged to sepia over the years.

-One intricately tended bonsais in a Koi-patterned planter.

-Charts & graphs illustrating the fault line under Jakarta.

-The massive overgrowth of a Brazilian rain-forest.

-Every bat that lays claim to Transylvania's caves.

-Nymphal snake skin of an Indian cobra after several molts.

-And that single lungful of breath that began this world.

Biography

After spending almost a decade working as a freelance photographer in Europe Maurice Oliver returned to America in 1990. Then in 1995 he made a lifelong dream reality by traveling around the world for eight months, recording his experiences in a journal instead of taking pictures. And so began his desire to be a poet. His poetry has appeared in The Potomac Journal, Circle Magazine, Bullfight Review, The MAG, Tryst3 Journal, Pebble Lake Review, Eye-Shot, The Surface, Wicked Alice, Word Riot, Taj Mahal Review(India), Stride Magazine(UK), Dandelion Magazine(Canada), Retort Magazine(Australia), & online at zafusy.com, megaera.org, unlikelystories.org, girlswithinsurance.com, subtletea.com, interpoetry.com(UK), kritya.in (India), & blueprintreview.de(Germany). He currently lives in Portland, Oregon where he is a private tutor. His poetry blogsite can be visited at: www.bloxster.net/mauriceoliver.

Sorry Bukowski - P.L.George

2006-11-04T16:20:00.001Z

Sorry, Bukowski.

So I started this experiment that has been bubbling in me for a long time. To submit a legends’ work and see who rejects it. Partly because I wanted to feel better about my own stories and to finally do what most writers have thought about doing but didn’t have the balls to.
So I’d had five big lit journals on my radar for pushing two years, five high cliffs, five on my shit list.
I’ve got all of Charles Bukowskis’ books except for some of his beginning works in small lit journals because I can’t afford them on E-bay. I first took one of his short story collections, “The Most Beautiful Woman in Town”, published by City Lights, circa 1967. As I skimmed through those drunk bard stories, I pick one that’s semi- obscure, something all Bukowski, but without the appearance of the age of when it was written. I picked “Trouble With a Battery”, a story that’s all Chuck, where he ends up fucking a girl in a bed above a bar with her brother alongside them. I submit from a friends’ computer under the name of Chuck Bukow so no one will recognize my email address. The others who don’t accept e-mail submissions I strictly adhere to those guidelines, all those hoops, SASE, title page, some aloof bio, the works. This is all pushing nine months ago.
The first, Paris Review took the longest, approximately eight months. I went to the mailbox and the envelope was thin and light. Inside was the card they always give out, a one-size-fits-all rejection slip. The second, Iowa Review I always liked because Vonnegut used to edit for them now and again. But I always had reservations about them, that workshop cult, that doesn’t let the outside in. I get a rejection letter, but also something in ink. “Too much vulgarity, you need to learn to say things without expletives”. You hear that Charles, you don’t know how to write without a fuck you thrown in now and again. The third, Glimmer Train, I submitted to their contest with my own money in tribute to this dead author whom I respect. They don’t comment, just say that they regret they can’t use it and list the winners. Women editors, they don’t get it. The fourth was Tin House. I don’t really know if they read much of anything. You know how it is, that aura that drips off that little slip they give out all impersonal and what not. Rejection number four. The fifth is Zoetropes’-All Story, extremely heavy competition. They give options for films for accepted stories. They also had given out written comments on the bottom of my rejection slips. I’m thinking film, maybe they’d remember “Barfly” with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, jar their movie archived heads. I’m sorry Chuck, I’ve never received a comment like this. “Too vulgar, don’t submit here, not right, if this is an example of your best,” and I quote all of this. Ouch.
So the poet laureate dies in these big modern lit mags. You five are all indicted. All you writers out there, scribbling in your caves take heart. Old Buck’s been put on the ash heap too.

-P.L. George

State Of The Nation - Eamonn Stewart

2006-11-04T16:20:00.000Z

State of The Nation.

Mark Twain swears that he once saw some men fuelling

The furnace of a riverboat with Egyptian mummies.

The furnace stoked with mummies

And the paddle-wheel turns.

The gamblers read the entrails of their cards:

The Achilles Paradox trumps venal concerns.

The tortoise *isn't *caught in Uncle Sam's backyard.

Air strike diplomats, keepers of the sacred flame:

Quench the brand of sedition, quench the brand of tradition.

A cord of mummies for the Ship of State –

And a surgical strike on Mark Twain !

Eamonn Stewart.

Born in Belfast 1964. Trained as an advertising photographer and worked as a focus-puller. Various poems published in magazines. Many influential enemies.

Shit Jobs - Michael Internicola

2006-11-04T16:18:00.000Z

Shit Jobs.

tito was a bad drunk. wore designer
clothes mostly and drugged his girlfriend,
now his wife and mother of his child,
to sleep just to get her off his back.
he worked for viacom selling something.
he was a salesman. he had side action and
wished he was an actor. i met him through
that asshole jerry i used to work with. that
fuckers old lady left a message that she was
moving out. he never got it. last sunday he
was sitting on a chair smoking a j watching
the game when she showed up with her
parents and a moving truck. poor son of a
bitch. he says he's a writer but he sells ad
space for some skin mag. neither one of them
are what i would call a friend.

Michael Internicola is the author of four novels, KISS ME BABY SUNFLOWERS!,CHAZ, ALL OUR SKIES ARE BLUE and AS RIGHT AS RAIN. His work has appeared inThieves Jargon, Zygote In My Coffee, Smokebox and many other magazines. He lives in Key West, Florida.

Scotty Twilight - Michael Internicola

2006-11-04T16:16:00.000Z

Scotty Twilight

scott is 27 and an alcoholic. he drinks
ten plus kettle rocks a night and is a
shitty tipper. he sits alone and makes
strange noises. gets so drunk he calls
me an asshole and laughs. sometimes
he falls off the chair and i pick him up,
"it eases the pain."-he tells me. last night
he fell asleep on the bar and i had to wake
him up. i got the money out of his wallet
and paid the bill. gave myself a twenty
dollar tip. i walked him to the door and
he fell again next to a dog taking a shit.
i picked him up and brushed him off best
i could. he stood against the window for
ten minutes. he said he was miserable. i told
him he was what he was and i locked the
door behind me. scott wound up at the wrong
apartment banging on the door. the guy who
lived there opened it up, punched him in the face
and called the cops. scotty twilight spent the
night at st. vincent's. i only serve him light
beer from now on.

Michael Internicola

More Plain Heathen Mischief - Maurice Oliver

2006-11-04T16:14:00.000Z

More Plain Heathen Mischief.

How it works is like this:

A fossilized thumb sprouts two sleepy hollows or the prized clay vase is
really an ayatollah disguised as an excavation site. Rocks grow-up to
be just another fairly common rash. Tissue is inadvertently exposed
around the umbilical cord of polluted metaphysics causing the whole
world to end up listening to Motown Music. Or in the alternative scenario, the color white learns how to bugaloo down Broadway wearing only a bunch of bananas for a skirt. A crowd gathers at the intersections. No
one is arrested. A misdemeanor is something you wash using rubber gloves. Or every branch in the family tree turns out to be kindling wood with the code-name "genealogy". No one even considers blackbirds
baked in a pie. Cherry is the flavor most soda-drinkers prefer and even you can develop spine enough to march into the boss's office without
knocking and demand a raise. In most cases, Seattle re-surfaces a
few months later as a hundred vacation-bound Germans destined for Havana. There's wood piled along the stream but no ribs served in the
cafeteria. Or the luft balloons are multi-colored and always willing to fly. So baby what you waiting for? Let your fingers do the walking through the yellow pages. And don't forget to bring along enough chump change
to tip the executioner.

After spending almost a decade working as a freelance photographer in Europe Maurice Oliver returned to America in 1990. Then in 1995 he made a lifelong dream reality by traveling around the world for eight months, recording his experiences in a journal instead of taking pictures. And so began his desire to be a poet. His poetry has appeared in The Potomac Journal, Circle Magazine, Bullfight Review, The MAG, Tryst3 Journal, Pebble Lake Review, Eye-Shot, The Surface, Wicked Alice, Word Riot, Taj Mahal Review(India), Stride Magazine(UK), Dandelion Magazine(Canada), Retort Magazine(Australia), & online at zafusy.com, megaera.org, unlikelystories.org, girlswithinsurance.com, subtletea.com, interpoetry.com(UK), kritya.in (India), & blueprintreview.de(Germany). He currently lives in Portland, Oregon where he is a private tutor. His poetry blogsite can be visited at: www.bloxster.net/mauriceoliver.

Monsters And Fossils - Julian Haladyn

2006-11-04T16:12:00.000Z

Monsters and Fossils.

Gravel driveways were our prime archaeological sites
categorizing the absence of small creatures
captured in the side of stones
embossed into the grey matter
presumably through some photo-mechanical process

Whole images were hard to come by
scary little buggers with weird looking outer membranes
monsters of sorts that could not harm children
casting shadows deep into their own forms

With the proliferation of paving in our neighbourhood
excavations were postponed or cancelled
these monsters allowed to live on in the void
folded between temporal logic and children
burning their summer feet

Julian Haladyn is an interdisciplinary writer and artist. His poems and short stories have appeared in elimae, ´a·pos·tro·phe, Jones Av., and a collection titled Grubstreet 2001-2002: Standing Room Only (Huron Literary Society, 2002). He has also published collaborative critical articles and reviews with Miriam Jordan in Parachute, C Magazine, On Site Review, and an essay in an upcoming collection titled Ready Made: Film Remakes in Postmodern Times (Costa and Nolan, 2005).

Million Dollar Whore - Noelle Levy

2006-11-04T16:11:00.000Z

Million Dollar Whore.

Many Russian brides
(who got out before the bubble burst)
go with the international
super ice cube caress
up to crusted minimums.

There’s also widow pieces
rumoured to have
coromandel clients
searching the globe for
customers who collect
Christian sums,
talking about how easy it would be.

One such hand delivery,
Kelly,
agrees variously
the world don’t want a woman’s breaking.

When you know that,
courtesans become
nightly weapons.

Then there’s
the model superstar collector,
consumer of Her,
myself,
and mine.

I’m not going to tell you
Hell adores
the most beautiful padlocks.

Some people think poverty
is the opposite of vulgarity,
but she just wants
the most glorious
tiddlywinks set.

Wealth is an ethos
women have taken from the ass.
These women, though discreet,
can easily, for a pair of customers,
buy survival
valued at $1.5 million
for her first shy clamoring -
staggeringly heavy
white and pink
for a month.

Lousy lousy jewelry
is not enough.

Noelle Levy is an online MFA student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Her work has appeared in Bombay Gin, Solid Quarter, and Catalyzer. As the singer/songwriter Lady Lazarus, she has just released her first cd, "She is Risen." http://www.cdbaby.com/ladylazarus

Lip-Syncing A Vague Terrain - Maurice Oliver

2006-11-04T16:10:00.001Z

Lip-Syncing A Vague Terrain.

By the time she returns from the restroom I've been ayatollah-ed twice.
Or any gravedigger for that matter, entwined with sawdust on the floor
and the faint smell of turpentine around the magician's wand or best
drank at room temperature. The stowaway hides between the turkey
stuffing or low-life is a voice-over using French sub-titles. The bar seats
are all occupied by ghosts. An ocean parks in the driveway of Italy at
a beach that was once merely stunted pebbles or could successfully
manage to evade capture. Either way, all the money that was originally
ear-marked for more exhaust fumes now resolves to live in a play or
becomes a scene already revised in the script. Or just to curse the sea
she captained, I later admit, once I'm safe on dry land...
deliberately allowing my speech to accept the award.

After spending almost a decade working as a freelance photographer
in Europe Maurice Oliver returned to America in 1990. Then in 1995
he made a lifelong dream reality by traveling around the world for eight
months, recording his experiences in a journal instead of taking pictures.
And so began his desire to be a poet. His poetry has appeared in The
Potomac Journal, Circle Magazine, Bullfight Review, The MAG, Tryst3
Journal, Pebble Lake Review, Eye-Shot, The Surface, Wicked Alice,
Word Riot, Taj Mahal Review(India), Stride Magazine(UK), Dandelion
Magazine(Canada), Retort Magazine(Australia), & online at zafusy.com,
megaera.org, unlikelystories.org, girlswithinsurance.com, subtletea.com,
interpoetry.com(UK), kritya.in (India), & blueprintreview.de(Germany). He currently lives in Portland, Oregon where he is a private tutor. His poetry
blogsite can be visited at: www.bloxster.net/mauriceoliver.

Lesson - Papa Osmubal

2006-11-04T16:10:00.000Z

Lesson.

“One dies of excessive salt intake;
one of deficiency of it;
and one of not having afforded to buy it.
Life is a tricky game
where even the fittest lose,” he said.

How can such a fool say that?
He turned to be a philosopher
after losing his job at a textile factory.
Whiskey is now his water,
started reading Kafka
and he does not sleep at night.

Papa Osmubal writes from Macao, South China. He is currently completing his MA in English Studies at the University of Macau. His works, both visual and literary, have found home in various places, hardcopy and online, more recently in Kookamonga Square, Modern Drunkard Magazine, Sentence, foam:e, Smokebox, LitChaos, Wire Sandwich, Alba, Admit Two, Word Riot, Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, Ygdrasil, Chick Flicks, The Seeker: A Glasgow Literary Review, MadPoetry, Out of Order, Pemmican, 63 Channels, Rattle, The Journal, The Green Silk Journal, Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), and others.

Its Own Circle Of Peace - Corey Mesler

2006-11-04T16:07:00.000Z

Its Own Circle of Peace

It’s raining words from
ancient books, bibles
that once inspired and now
are as extinct as the men
who dreamed them.
It’s raining and I’m inside
where the kettle is
chuckling and beginning a
song I heard once when
I was a younger man and
she was all I wanted.
It is best, when these things
happen, to stay still and
let the words puddle
on the old porch boards,
and let the song begin to
burn behind my breastbone,
and think about how she
was on days like this,
an impossibility wed to the
wettest sex and her eyes
saw it all happening
like a play she had written
herself out of. This is best,
and I pray, for now, it is
its own sweet circle of peace.

Corey Mesler has published prose and/or poetry in Turnrow, Adirondack Review, Paumanok Review, Yankee Pot Roast, Monday Night, Elimae, H_NGM_N, The American Drivel Review, Poet Lore, Forklift OH, Euphony, Rattle, Dicey Brown, Cordite, Cellar Door, others.
His novel-in-dialogue, Talk, was published by Livingston Press in 2002. Raves from Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Stern, Debra Spark, Suzanne Kingsbury, Frederick Barthelme and John Grisham. His new novel, We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, is also from Livingston Press. Kind words this time from George Singleton, Marshall Chapman, Marshall Boswell and others. He also has 6 chapbooks due out in 2006. His poem, “Sweet Annie Divine,” was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He has been nominated for the Pushcart numerous times.

He has been a book reviewer, fiction editor, university press sales rep, grant committee judge, father and son. With his wife he owns Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

False Salute To The Dead - Sean Kilpatrick

2006-11-04T16:04:00.000Z

False Salute To The Dead

The toilet will hold you
tighter than any wife.
So X-out your eyes
with drink." Her words swam though the smoke.

I took seven gulps,
laid my knuckles
on the bar and pointing
at my closed fist, replied, calmly,
"Crawl between them, or I sever your chin."

She got stuck halfway around
my pointer and ring knuckles
and lodged her molars
into my cartilage.

I demanded of the barkeep
some safe passage.
He was all frowns
for my disposition.

Then, out walked the cook,
a giant metro sexual.
He crowbarred her
off my hand with a spatula.

On the debris strewn floor
of the dusty roadhouse,
she made small guffaws
that forced everyone's
drinks back up.

After a good stomping,
she grew into the woodwork.
We left her there.

Years later, the paranormals
can be found sitting
in large groups, Indian style,
recorders and cameras sticking up
in false salute to the dead.

Sean Kilpatrick's poetry and short stories have or will soon appear in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including: Southern Gothic, Exquisite Corpse, Snow Monkey, elimae, Juked, 3 AM Magazine, Stirring, andwerve, Unlikely Stories 2.0, Kulture Vulture, Outside Voices 2008 Young Poets Anthology, etc. His first book is forthcoming from Six Gallery Press. His blog features interviews with poets: http://anorexicchlorinesextoymuseum.blogspot.com

Editorial - Laika Issue Three

2006-11-04T16:03:00.000Z

"Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things [Chartres Cathedral], this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life... we're going to die.'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing...Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."--Orson Welles, F For Fake

Why, in every primitive and modern culture, do poets and storytellers emerge?
What is it that compels us to write?

Certain reasons or excuses reoccur. Perhaps it’s a desire to make sense of life without the cold distance of faith or the bewilderment of science. It could be a tradition of denial, the reassuring telling of beautiful lies as Oscar termed it, to deceive ourselves with happy deceptions, to ward off the evil eye, ineffectual maybe but comforting.
It may be something as simple as the desire to avoid a proper job, a resistance to the world compressing your soul into coal, an attempt to dig ourselves out of the holes we find ourselves in, an urge to educate, entertain, inspire or incite, a fondness for drink and the telling of untruths. Ultimately there are as many reasons as stories themselves.

The one consistent motive that, consciously or subconsciously, moves a person to write or paint or pick up a guitar is the desire to defeat death, to prove that in the present death has no sovereignty over us. There is something in us, a life-instinct or a simple stubbornness, that refuses to accept the end. We thus document what is happening now, spend our nights in acts of revelry, to crystallise and make sacred the present even as time and work are laying waste to our days. A friend of mine came up with a profoundly depressing thought; just as every year you pass the day of your birth so too do you, inversely and without realising it, pass the date upon which you will die. It’s like a horrible antichrist birthday. Maybe some deep buried awareness of this spurs us on to create and to retain our creations, these things that will remain here when we are gone whether they be books or songs or children. Maybe it was the threat of extinction that took man from the savannahs north to the cold, that took man from the caves to the cities.

The island of Venice is sinking, Da Vinci’s frescos are crumbling, the wind is eating at statues as sure as the sea gnaws at the coasts. They moved the contents of London museums to the Welsh mines during the Blitz but ultimately they were delaying the inevitable. All will turn to dust; Mohammed, Jesus, Picasso, Shakespeare, a terrifying and strangely reassuring thought for if our dreams and achievements are dust then so are our worries and failures.

The point of this all, the point of art is simple; it is an attempt to defeat death, to shine light into the void even for just a moment. What is say the Easter Rising now that those who bore witness to it are in the soil? It’s celluloid, it’s Yeat’s poems and O’ Casey’s plays, a painting of Connolly’s Chair, the declaration poster. Art remains. At least for the time being.

As dear, dead Orson said, “Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing.” –

Darran Anderson.

Closed Mondays - Michael Internicola

2006-11-04T16:00:00.000Z

Closed Mondays.

the girl from india left a lot behind.
she was moving to queens because
her roommates were going back to
europe. i was moving in. the place
was good sized. they left all the dishes
and glasses. they left a couch and
medicine and food in the fridge. the
first day we moved in she was back
and forth three times. she still had shit
to clear out she told me. around midnight
i got home from work. ronnie and frank
took the girls to shea and they were there
and so was she, “i’m sorry.”-she said and
i told her not to worry about it, “want a beer?”
- i asked and she said sure. her name was stecha
or something. we played music and smoked
some pot. got a couple sandwiches across the
street. billy called and said he was taking piano
lessons after he saw a foo fighter concert
at the hammerstein. whatever i told him.
last month he was a writer. the year before
he was taking acting lessons. maybe you
should just stick with one thing i said. i think
this is it he told me. his wife was worse off
with the polish accent and her breath always
stunk. i took the indian girl in the bedroom
and she watched me write for a bit. we had short
sex after that. it was pitch dark. she rode me a good ten
minutes. i talked dirty in her right ear. i never came
with the rubber on and when morning called she got up,
got dressed and fell asleep next to me again. she woke
up twice to tell me she was leaving. half past the hour
stecha told me. frank was in the other room with what’s
her name. he thought he liked her.

Michael Internicola

Clean Living - Nicholas Grider

2006-11-04T15:59:00.000Z

Clean Living.

Is it possible to maintain a childhood drunken
in public? On wheels, a bridesmaid
to the radio’s night time relief. A 1987
way of believing. The years pressed
together under neon lights

That sad yelp in the distance has a name, and at home
a sad wife. Friday Night
hunting
for a new language, any language is necessarily
a hard angle. Turned. The way the world works

Tapped on the forehead, pushed
around in the park. Springtime of exigency, the
shelves
are empty, the leaves of the grooms turned.

Nicholas Grider holds an MA in Mass Communication fromthe University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is currentlyan interschool art/writing MFA student at theCalifornia Insitute of the Arts. His work has beenpublished in or is forthcoming from nthposition,
42opus, Ampersand, and Trepan.

Variation On Roman - Woodie Sinclair Stephenson

2006-11-04T15:55:00.000Z

VARIATION ON ROMAN.

after Rimbaud
I
We're way too serious when we're twenty-three
- one dark evening, to hell with dinner and picture shows,
Well-lit restaurants and crowded hipster bars.
We binge drink on the steps of cluttered Montrose apartments

The floors are sticky in the humid June afternoons!
At times the room is so smoky that our eyes water.
The walls rattle with sounds – the drag isn't far –
Having the stench of burnt tires and dumpster bilge.

II
There you can see sad old brick walls
Of dull shades, smeared with indecipherable streaks,
Tagged up by a graffiti artist, that melt
In heavy rusto drips, broad and semi-gloss black…

Night in June! Twenty-three years old! -we grow effete with it all.
The stench becomes 100 proof and goes to our head…
We listened aloof and feel a hand between our legs
Rolling on our backs like an old dog….

III
Our tired heart moves through ballads by Tom Waits,
When, under the awning of a metro bus-stop,
A street girl goes by forlorn and dolorous
Under the shadow of her pimp's terrible trench coat…

And she finds you dauntlessly impudent,
While clacking her soiled platform shoes,
She turns sluggishly and in a diffident manner…
- much later the cavatinas swell in your lips…

IV
You are in desolation. You are apoplectic until the month of April.
You are desolate - Your sonnets all fall flat.
You find unity in desolation, you are its progenitor.
- then one dawn the girl you despised deigned to call you.

That evening, … you return to the fancy cafés,
You ask for martinis or espresso…
We're way too serious when we're twenty-three
And when we have drinking spells in wretched places.

Woodie Sinclair Stephenson, a current Ruth Lilly Fellowship nominee, is a poet and musician native to Houston, TX. His poetry and prose have been published in Free Press Houston, Torrid Zone, Curbside Review, The Panhandler Quarterly, Blackball, Bayou Review, Asphyxia Digest, and Writer's Hood. His work has also been featured on KPFT's Living Art, and Earthwire Radio's Poetry In Reverse. As a passion, he has dedicated time, energy, and space to the art of poetry publishing Asphyxia Digest, editing Bayou Review, running a bi-weekly poetry column with Free Press, and hosting a variety cable show, TV Party Tonight.

Laika Issue 3 Update

2006-10-21T17:53:00.000+01:00

Having sailed across the sea and been tempted by the sirens of women, wine and song Issue Three of Laika Poetry Review has taken longer than expected. We are delighted to announce though that we are currently adding the finishing touches and it'll be online within the month. Watch the skies.

Laika Poetry Review Issue Two

2006-03-23T14:42:00.000Z

Laika Poetry Review Issue Two

Laika Poetry Review Issue One

2006-03-23T14:41:00.000Z

Laika Poetry Review Issue 1- Featuring work from Tom Leonard, Rennie Sparks, A.D.Winans, Alex Galper, Adam Jeffries Schwartz, Colin Dardis, Corey Mesler, Ryan Bird and Jakob Van Hoddis.

Seekless - HG von Paulis

2006-03-23T14:38:00.000Z

The spell-checker said "Seekless" wasn't a word;
whoopty-fucking-do;
I don't give a damn; I say
it is-and who's to contradict me; have they
forgotten how language was made? some
jerk made a grunt and then another picked it up; and
they all agreed that it meant "mastodon"; and they all
ate well that night, and so they
       started naming other things,
and it went on like that, until
now we have a such a proliferation of
bullshit that
  we're likely to
   drown in it.

Bio: I will resist here the urge to list all of my many accomplishments in literature and prose, and simply tell those who would care to know such things that I was born to the planet earth near LA, California and live there now and don't like using the word 'I' any more than you probably like reading it. My hobbies are women, eating and women; in that order. I am presently on a diet; and have married well, so that should handle that.

“Boxer Rebellion" image (1900) is from the National Archives and Records Administration.

2006-03-23T14:36:00.001Z

Laika Poetry Review Issue Two

Editorial

The Bad Man From Boolie

casual poem: send vodka - Chris Gilpin

Suicide Sushi - Ryan Lees

Please Contact Us If You Need Help Using This Equipment - Ace Boggess

London, 1975 - Mark Young

The Enablers - Paul A. Toth

Seekless - H G von Paulis

Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane - Etheridge Knight

casual poem: illness - Chris Gilpin

Two Stories - Adam Jeffries Schwartz

Where Her Heart Lives - Tom Hamilton

Phone God - John Grey

Obstreperous Meets Abstemious - Gary Lehmann

Ambrose Bierce and the Power of Negative Thinking

Acknowledgements/Copyright

Editorial

2006-03-23T14:35:00.000Z

"This world which is in the making fills me with dread… It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress - but a false progress, a progress, which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams, or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal." – Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

At some point everyone who puts pen to page or paint to canvas wrestles with the same question: is there a moral obligation for writers and artists to be political?
On the face of it art and politics seem opposed and irreconcilable. There’s a lingering old-fashioned feeling that politics is an ugly thing and art should be something of beauty. Politics springs from society with its tabloids, its curtain twitching and its gossip while art comes from culture that ethereal treasure trove. And while there are occasions when the two undoubtedly combine with immense power – Picasso’s Guernica, The Battle of Algiers, the films of Eisenstein, Shelley’s Oxymandias - these are seen as remarkable exceptions. In a way politics asks too much from the artist, it challenges them to take sides, to brace themselves for a lot of inevitable flak. Stick with what you know, fire out another meaningless abstract expressionist canvas and the critics will pin some meaning on it and praise it to high heaven. Everybody knows in the backs of their minds how difficult it is to be political without sounding like a daft prick.

The Internet is littered with the shipwrecks of many’s a piece that tried to be political and ended up a depressing, clichéd pile of steaming horseshit directed against Bush or globalisation or how boring working in an office is. It’s nigh on impossible to write a decent poem containing the word “capitalism” and if you could what would the point be? All the stockbrokers and oil merchants and management consultants are hardly quaking in their boots because you’ve written a sonnet, multinational capitalism is hardly teetering at the brink of collapse because you scribbled, “George W Bush is a rotter” on a toilet door. Leave politics to the taxi drivers and the old women a voice says in the back of your mind. Go on playing your fiddle while Rome burns.

We are proud to present in this new instalment of Laika Poetry Review a work by the late great black poet Etheridge Knight that proves that politics and art can come together and in managing to do so it lays down a challenge for us all. Knight believed the disassociation of poetry from politics, from the day-to-day realities, from life on the streets robbed it of its potency. Art that says nothing of the world, of what is or what should be, even indirectly, is like a toothless dog scratching it's fleas and howling at the moon. Through honest, passionate personal accounts Knight created a microcosm for something wider. There is more truth and fury about the world in “Hard Rock…” than in a thousand political diatribes and crucially by getting under your skin emotionally it stays with you. Writing like this may not change the world but it changes the way we see everything in it.

In his deadbeat masterpiece Tropic Of Cancer Henry Miller inadvertently demonstrated that you can be political without appearing to be so, without talking drivel and even without knowing it. In his lengthy brilliant essay Inside The Whale George Orwell defended Miller’s book asserting that in fucked up times just living a free life and questioning everything, as Miller had, can be the most radical undertakings you can embark upon. Just to exist beyond the influence of priest or politician, tabloid or therapist. Common human decency and a life beyond faith were the cornerstones of Orwell’s thought and he recognised them right to the core of Miller’s work. You don’t need to write some rambling diatribe against totalitarianism, simply live your life beyond ideology and faith and, to an extent, you’re untouchable. The autonomous individual, who places more importance on the constant search for truth rather than its ownership, is the real embodiment of freedom. The “voice in the wilderness” as the Bible calls it. And lord protect us from those who have found the answers.

Under any system that claims to have found the answer, the one truth or the faith whether it's Christian fundamentalist or Islamic, whether it’s communist or fascist or Francis Fukuyama’s "end of history" capitalism the most unlikely things can become political. Simply creating any music or painting under the Taliban would be a bravely defiant statement as would writing something like “Johnny Walker’s Blues” in the aftermath of 9 11 and the Afghanistan Invasion. Though the graffiti of the street-artist Banksy (http://www.banksy.co.uk) is not polemic in itself when he paints it on the Israeli security wall in the West Bank it’s more potent than a million manifestos -(http://arts.guardian.co.uk/gallery/0,,1543331,00.html). In today’s climate with the clash of fundamentalisms, whether they’re in the name of God or Allah or Mammon, writing that is freethinking, questioning, ambiguous, individual becomes a political act in itself.

So here it is Laika’s latest transmission. Beamed out into space to be listened to by some distant civilisation in thousands of years when Mammon has finally finished us all off, last words from our cold dead star, mumblings into the black box recorder. The following poems and stories have nothing in common aside from the fact each, in their own unique way, seem to embody Miller’s practise of keeping an open mind, of documenting all the triumphs and disasters, all the doubts and imperfections that make us human. From beyond the grave Henry Miller, the patron saint of hopeless cases, is our guide, "Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

- Darran Anderson

Cover Image

based on an original photograph by Caireen Burns (© Caireen Burns 2006)
Above image "Bomb" (© Darran Anderson 2006)
A variation on the above image has appeared on the Fact Magazine website.
www.factmagazine.co.uk

The Bad Man From Boolie

2006-03-23T14:34:00.000Z

“Here I am again…
I weigh a ton and when I walk the earth shakes.
Give me room and I’ll whip an army.
I’m a blizzard from Bitter Creek.
I can dive deeper and come up drier
than any man in 40 counties.
I’m a sandstorm inside a whirlwind.
I was born in a powderhouse and raised in a gun factory.
I’m bad from the bottom up
and clear grit plumb through.
I’m chief of Murdertown.
Don’t all speak at once or I’ll turn loose
and scatter death and destruction
full bent for the next election.”
- The Bad Man From Boolie

The Bad Man From Boolie was a fearsome cowboy who’d entertain his victims with this oration before dispatching them from this world.

"A Triple Execution at Juarez, Mexico" image (1916) is from the National Archives and Records Administration.

casual poem: send vodka - Chris Gilpin

2006-03-23T14:32:00.000Z

i’ve seen no animate
creature but my cat
three eagles, and countless ravens
in six days.
i’ve seen no sun in twenty-two.
i have been lazy beyond all reason,
consuming tissues at obscene rates,
and transforming them into grapefruit.
my walk to the supermailbox
at the end of my country lane
is every night a pilgrammage,
from which i return
bereft,
like a jew
who converted for a moment
only to find himself
abandoned by jehovah,
with jesus tasting like junkfood.

i nourish myself by chopping wood.
i try to count the omens, but there are too many.
the blasted black-winged tricksters circle overhead,
reminding me that god is a scavenger.
i use watercolours to paint
my sister a message:

send vodka,
i’m seeing this through.

Chris Gilpin is a writer and performer, based in Vancouver, BC. His work has appeared in The Vancouver Review, Forget Magazine, and others. Look for him at a Fringe festival, or poetry slam near you. You can find out more at http://www.chrisgilpin.com/.

“Drawing A Circle With A Compass” image is from “A Textbook On Ornamental Design” (1901)

Suicide Sushi - Ryan Lees

2006-03-23T14:24:00.000Z

Each and every time I see the ripples
feel the splash,
I bet 100 fry the dry ones are at sport.
Fools on stilts
their props work on me no more.

Rainbow feathers
knots on string
no longer stab me with their sting
they took my mother
father
brother
and still they try for me.

In shallow depths I listen to their talk
Of polaroids and panamas,
Rear drag and the tying of flies,
Of earthworms and maggots
breadcrumbs,
groundbait,
the right time to strike
and so on.

The spots they choose to cast their deadly threads
So fuckin predictable now.
How they they label my favourite haunts:
"Bessie's Dam!"
"The Ganders Neck!"
"That's where the boyos sit!"
Silly slivers of shit-filled knowledge.

The friends I've lost to them
Spotted tails thrash,
Swollen gills and flaking scales
paid no heed to the flap of my fins,
My mad red flag.
We speak in deep-sea mono hums
a tail thrash suffice to signal caution,
they failed to pay attention.

To speak the truth I must admit that once
I made the same mistake
plump bloodworm
could have sworn it was threadbare
two bites goodbye
a hook right through the eye.

The tension on the string
wore me out fast,
before long there I was
upon the rocks
furnace blast from the stone
somersaults in suffocation,
dead was what I thought I'd be
then string magician throws me to the sea
gills did breathe and sigh
relief the lucky and the few.

One eye blinded,
I still see.
My gills inhale
my thoughts turn to revenge
served cold
washed down with fine champagne.
Family and friends gone,
I'm ready for the fillet factory
for I know it exists
the dry ones speak of it often
Tides have turned
and now my bones are sharp and prickly
courtesy of their groundbait con.

Be it feather,
worm
or salted shrimp,
I won't resist
I'll play their game
Hook line and sinker swallowed whole
I'll be the bait
inside their bowl
their puckered lips shall savour my insides
as they slide
deep
inside
their greedy gullets,
warm and wet,
I'll be the fish they won't forget,
with backbone lodged firm in the throat
I hope it makes
the bastards choke.

Ryan Lees: Angler, dub-merchant, gentleman, scholar and a student of the word. Known to fear nothing except “the cruel sea.” Having spent a year living in South Korea he has recently returned to his native Ireland. Currently in the process of chanting down Babylon.

Copyright expired image of Joshua A Norton, the First Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. For more on this character see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_A._Norton

"PLEASE CONTACT US IF YOU NEED HELP USING THIS EQUIPMENT" - Ace Boggess

2006-03-23T14:21:00.000Z

"PLEASE CONTACT US IF YOU NEED HELP USING THIS EQUIPMENT"

[sign in a university conference room]

Not everyone was meant
to operate a poem like this.
In wrong hands
the lines may skip
across the page,
metaphors feed back
in shrieks,
white noise &
disconnect.

If you haven't
read the instructions
(style manuals,
encyclopaedias of mythology),
stay away,
step back,
please don't touch.
Call a professional.
There's bound to be
one standing by.
Close.
Closer than you know.
Contemplating
Minotaurs &
Shakespeare.

Ace Boggess is author of a novel, Displaced Hours (http://www.gattopublishing.com) and a book of poems, The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, Poetry East and many other journals.

“In the Library of the University of Leyden, from a print dated 1610” is from William Andrew’s “Curiosities of the Church: Studies of Curious Customs, Services and Records.”

London, 1975 - Mark Young

2006-03-23T14:18:00.000Z

Auditioning
for the next
Francis Bacon
painting, the
amputees
gather
in the square,
squashed in
together
as if, en
masse,
they
might acquire
that which
they are
lacking or,
at least,
come to
possess
a complete-
ness that
stays with them
right up to
the moment
when they
stand, fall,
crawl before
the audition
panel to be
judged
on their
singularity.

Mark Young is a New Zealander now living on the Tropic of Capricorn in Australia. He has been publishing poetry for more than 45 years & his work has appeared in many print & electronic journals.
He recently co-edited
The First Hay(na)ku Anthology with Jean Vengua (http://www.meritagepress.com/haynaku.htm),

has had e-chaps published this year by Moria Books (http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html)

& BlazeVOX
(http://www.cafepress.com/blazevox.48810121),

& his latest book of poetry, episodes, is due out soon from xPress(ed).
He maintains a couple of blogs,
pelican dreaming (http://pelicandreaming.blogspot.com/) from which this poem is taken,

& mark young's Series Magritte (http://seriesmagritte.blogspot.com/).

“Gas Masks For Man And Horse” image (circa 1917-18) is from the National Archives and Records Administration.

The Enablers - Paul A Toth

2006-03-23T14:17:00.000Z

This is a historical record. These are the sources: Sue; Ben; Randall; Cathy; Susan; Mitch; Vic; Tim. This document will be buried in a mason jar next to Meteor Lake. One day it will be found by architects.
The neighbor said, "You look like shit. How'd it happen?"
"Down the stairs."
"This is a trailer."
"Here he comes. Go, go."
The neighbor left as Sam headed for the fridge without a glance at Jen. Only his violence included her, but she hadn't given up hope that they could share other things.
"What's the problem?" she said.
"I told you I drank before we got married. I always serve notice."
"Get me a beer, please"
"You don't drink."
"I'm starting. Now what?"
"Nothing. It's wonderful."
Her plan to induce sobriety in Sam wobbled in her mind like a Frisbee. She slugged Sam's arm. When he reached for her, she threw him. The judo lessons had worked.
"How's it feel?"
"I like it. You should have fought back before. That's the way it's supposed to be. I feel better about the future."
They had sex. Afterwards, Sam said, "You ever think about adding to the party?"
"Add how?"
"Three-way, eight-way."
The next morning, she wondered how Sam made it to work every day, but as the hours progressed, she began to understand how a reward awaited him at the end of each shift. She poured hers as the neighbor arrived.
"You don't drink."
"Listen," she started, but the neighbor cut her off and asked for a drink.
Soon the next phase had been arranged. That night, the moon made a lunar triplet of their bodies. When it was over, the neighbor said, "Listen, I got a friend. He's a little lonely, not the type to do this kind of thing. But if we got him drunk, I'm sure he'd change his mind."
Within a few weeks, the trailer filled each night, the expanding platoon drilling without relief. When a session ended, they all clinked mugs of beer.
Saturday night, Jen said to Sam from the opposite couch -- because they no longer slept together and the bedroom was reserved for group sessions -- "You never hit me anymore."
"I'm sorry."
"Is it something I said?"
"I just don't feel like it. Christ."
"I'm sorry. I know you need space."
"It's not space; it's pressure."
"I miss the intimacy."
"I'm tired."
"I'm tired, too."
He slapped her face.
"Thanks," she said. "I'm better now. Good night, Sam."
"Good night."
Sam snored. Jen ruminated. She used to wonder how people came to engage in this swinging business. Now she wondered how they found their way into cults, if those worked the same and whether they could make one happen.
"Sam? We should have ranks. We should have privates and sergeants. We should have generals. We would be the generals, of course."
"That's not a bad idea."
"Let's think about it tomorrow, okay?"
"Let's do it."
The others initially refused the new order, but they came around after realizing it was one way or the highway that ran past the trailer park. It seemed less offensive to them once they understood Jen and Sam would no longer participate except to issue commands for various juxtapositions.
There had been one dissent, the neighbor insisting, "I won't do that, not with him. Never have, never will." After a kick in the ribs, she never disobeyed another order.
One Sunday, Sam and Jen found themselves ill with the flu. For the first time, they called off the gathering. It happened to be Memorial Day.
"God, I'm bored," Jen said.
"We've covered every base I'm sick of it, sick of them all. But I've been thinking."
"Thinking what?"
"How stupid are they?"
The next morning, they let everyone know there would be a meeting that night. At dusk, they all gathered outside the trailer.
"A meteor?"
"That's right," Sam said.
"What's that got to do with us?"
"Everything," Jen said.
"Everything like what?"
"Like the meteor is heaven, that's what."
"And you think we're going to heaven?"
"If we rebirth ourselves in the atmosphere."
"Now you're going too far."
"We haven't gone far enough," Sam said, "but I'll tell you how we will. I've got the plans right here. It's spiritual."
Work began that night. Inside the trailer, the generals listened to hammering and nailing, fusing and soldering. They drank mugs of beer, but soon all the clanging lulled them into a silence finally broken when Jen said, "We haven't gone crazy, have we? When they finish and come inside, the trailer won't fly, will it?"
"It's gonna burn.
"Oh, Sam," she said, "fuck me up good."
He obliged.
"I see it," somebody said. "I see the meteor."
"Christ," Jen said, "he actually think he sees it."
"Not yet, he doesn't."
When he threw the match outside, everyone "saw" a meteor. Then they all rose into the atmosphere, forming a constellation of body parts that rained on Jen and Sam like falling stars. A corpse lay atop Jen, and she could hardly breathe. Sam put Jen out of her misery, and then the police and courts put him out of his.
Twenty years later, the crater remains. In the summer, it is filled with water and makes a little swimming pond known as Meteor Lake. A few babies were conceived in the darkness by that pond. They're grown. Most have joined the armed services. They'll come back to better cheap housing. It will be different. There was 1975, there is now, and then there will be another now. It is hoped this document will assist the field of architecture in naming these eras.

Paul A. Toth returned to his home state of Michigan after spending eight years in Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Denver. His first novel Fizz and its successor Fishnet are available from retail outlets and major online bookstores. He has read in venues across the country. His short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Mystery Stories. Toth’s story The Pop Lady Comes On Wednesdays received honorable mention in The Seventeenth Edition of the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, ed. By Ellen Datlow. Toth is currently working on his fourth novel. His audio work, which often combines story and music, has been widely published. Two short films Fizz and Knotted have been based on his work. The latter was a semi-finalist on Triggerstreet.com and an IFilm Plus Selection.

http://www.netpt.tv/

“Letter L from Alphabet after Serlio” image is from Frank Chouteau Brown: “Letters & Lettering: A Treatise With 200 Examples” (1921)

"Hard Rock Returns..." - Etheridge Knight

2006-03-23T14:13:00.000Z

Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Hard Rock / was / "known not to take no shit
From nobody," and he had the scars to prove it:
Split purple lips, lumbed ears, welts above
His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut
Across his temple and plowed through a thick
Canopy of kinky hair.

The WORD / was / that Hard Rock wasn't a mean nigger
Anymore, that the doctors had bored a hole in his head,
Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity
Through the rest. When they brought Hard Rock back,
Handcuffed and chained, he was turned loose,
Like a freshly gelded stallion, to try his new status.
And we all waited and watched, like a herd of sheep,
To see if the WORD was true.

As we waited we wrapped ourselves in the cloak
Of his exploits: "Man, the last time, it took eight
Screws to put him in the Hole." "Yeah, remember when he
Smacked the captain with his dinner tray?" "He set
The record for time in the Hole—67 straight days!"
"Ol Hard Rock! Man, that's one crazy nigger."
And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock had once bit
A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit.

The testing came, to see if Hard Rock was really tame.
A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch
And didn't lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock
From before shook him down and barked in his face.
And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and looked silly,
His eyes empty like knotholes in a fence.

And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock
Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his first name,
We told ourselves that he had just wised up,
Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long,
And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed.
He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things
We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do,
The fears of years, like a biting whip,
Had cut deep bloody grooves
Across our backs.

- Etheridge Knight

“Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane” is from THE ESSENTIAL ETHERIDGE KNIGHT, by Etheridge Knight, Copyright Sign 1986. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by the kind permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

The first poet Etheridge Knight ever met was a guy called Hound Mouth, a street lyricist who haunted the local park rapping about floods and the Titanic, “pool-shooting monkeys” and dancehalls going up in smoke in Tupelo, Mississippi. It all just spilled out of his head. Nothing was written down. He was passing down these old stories and within each one were articulated worlds of joy and hope and discontent. Most people would have walked on by and taken Hound Mouth for a headcase but something in it showed Knight the way.

Born on the 19th of April 1931 in Corinth, Mississippi Etheridge Knight was one of seven children in a struggling southern black family. When he was a child they moved to Paducah, Kentucky. Determined to escape the confines of small town life Knight ran away from home a few times before finally dropping out of school in the ninth grade. He bummed around for a while shining shoes for change and experimenting with drugs. At the age of seventeen he forged his parent’s signatures to enter the army and escaped from a backwater existence only to plunge into active service in the Korean War. Years later he came back disillusioned, discharged with an agonising shrapnel injury that had given him a deep and enduring addiction to morphine. In street terms he was arriving back a heroin addict. Drifting around the dives and pool halls of Indianapolis he spent the next few years hustling and committing petty crimes to fuel his habit. In 1960 it caught up with him. Arrested for stealing an old woman’s purse he was charged and convicted of armed robbery and, despite having an esteemed military record serving his country, was sent down for eight years.

In his first few months of incarceration Knight was in such a disturbed state he later couldn’t recall a single detail of the time. Transferred from the State Reformatory to Indiana State Prison he was assigned the number 35652 and faced the all too familiar fate of young black males then and now. It seemed he was doomed to an early grave or a life wasting away behind bars. And yet faced with a choice between “hustling and poeting” he slowly found a purpose. From writing letters for fellow inmates to scripting a column for the prison newspaper he embarked on a new path. Poetry, as he would later claim, brought him back to life. In these early days his form of expression was “toasting” a precursor of rapping popular in the dancehalls of Kingston, Jamaica but also on the streets of African-American neighbourhoods. Knight employed this rhythmic form of storytelling with relish and gained a reputation for his skills among the inmates. And prison forged the poet he would be. Among the convicts of Indiana State Prison no trickery or pretence or snobbery would be tolerated. His work would be honest, fearlessly defiant, devoid of pomposity, proudly working class. There would be no bullshitting in Knight’s writing. Authenticity was everything.

To survive mentally and physically in prison Knight began to record honest depictions of his feelings and reactions to everything around him. The effects were stunning. Feelings of sheer horror and wonder towards the world have rarely been more incandescently burned onto the page in verse form. After hearing about the gang rape of a newly convicted young black man in the prison’s laundry room he wrote “For Freckled-Faced Gerald”- “Take Gerald. Sixteen years hadn't even done/a good job on his voice. He didn't even know/how to talk tough, or how to hide the glow/of life before he was thrown in as "pigmeat"/for the buzzards to eat… Gerald, sun-kissed ten thousand times on the nose/and cheeks, didn't stand a chance…”
In “Cell Song” he briefly transcended his despair, “Come now, etheridge, don't/be a savior; take your words and scrape/ the sky, shake rain/on the desert.”
"He Sees Through Stone" took this one step further, depicting an elderly prisoner who can venture beyond the jail in his mind.

On occasion the lowest moments brought the most inspired musings. Whilst spending a month in the solitary confinement of the hole Knight created “The Idea Of Ancestry” an attempt to immerse himself in the comfort of his roots and prevent himself going mad. The poem is simply a masterpiece. In the midst of his loneliness he surrounded himself with thoughts of his family, surveying the grandmother who keeps everyone’s birth date and death date written in her Bible, the empty space of the uncle who’d gone missing, the graves of his grandfathers “in the brown hills and red gullies of Mississippi” that call to him - “I am all of them; they are all of me. They/Are farmers, I am thief, I am me, they are thee.”
Conjuring up evocative images he recalls the affection of his family, “I walked barefooted in my grandmother's backyard/I smelled the old/land and the woods / I sipped cornwhiskey from fruit jars with the men” but even this paradise cannot save him from addiction or ultimately himself. At the end of his imaginings he finds himself still in his cell and the distance between his family, his future and his solitary confinement reasserts itself, all the more poignantly. As the Hebrew saying goes good times recalled in bad are agonising to bear.

Though Knight was writing about his own personal experiences of jail, addiction and struggling to survive his themes of imprisonment, black identity and the yearning for liberation mirrored what was going on outside the prison walls. This was the time of Rosa Parks, the Freedom Rides and the Birmingham riots, of black men and women getting batoned on the street by the US police for simply standing up for every principle America was supposed to have been founded upon. Dr Martin Luther King Jnr was prophesising a time when the apartheid of segregation would be overthrown and the Jim Crow laws, “Blacks need not apply” signs and the KKK would be consigned to the dustbin of history where they belonged. Founded by the radicals Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Richard Aoki the Black Panthers were patrolling black areas in countless major cities, educating and arming their communities against a frequently racist police force. By the time Knight was released Dr King had been murdered and cities all across America were in flame. His speech beginning “I have a dream…” seemed already a tragic distant memory, now Bobby Seale was preaching, “We’re gonna walk up on this nation, we’re gonna walk up on this racist power stucture and we’re gonna say to the whole damn government: “Stick ‘em up muthafucka, this is a hold-up! We’ve come for what’s ours!”

From within the prison walls Etheridge Knight captured the spirit of the times and people were listening. “Two beautiful people man” Knight enthused of Gwendolyn Brooks, the brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning poet laureate of Illinois, and Dudley Randall. The two writers began visiting him, bringing his work to an outside audience. In 1968 his first book Poems From Prison was published by Randall’s Broadside Press while Knight was still languishing in prison. The book burst into the collective consciousness, capturing the revolutionary zeal and the longing for black emancipation of the time. The political establishment had declared war upon the best of its youth, those who had dared to stand up for the values of liberty and equality. They were being batoned outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago, shot in Kent State University, conscripted and slaughtered in Vietnam attempting to bomb a proud people back into the Stone Age. But they were changing the world. Knight’s book both inspired and chronicled these happenings. It became a symbol of defiance, as pivotal a piece of revolutionary iconography as Situationist graffiti on the streets of Paris, Black Panther signs at the Olympics, Che Guevara flags or “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” painted on a gable wall. It happened that it was also a fucking fine book of poetry.

In such an enlightened radical climate Knight emerged a hero of sorts. Shortly after being released he married the revolutionary poet/playwright Sonia Sanchez, with whom he had been in correspondence, and was embraced by the literary counterculture. They had three children together and formed the Broadside Quartet with fellow poets Nikki Giovanni and Haki R. Madhubuti. And yet as much as the future seemed open he still struggled, labouring through frequent bouts of addiction even as his poetry was reaping awards and recognition.

The late 60’s proved to be not just a renaissance for black writing (from James Baldwin’s “Invisible Man” to Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul On Ice”) but was also a time when new artforms evolved. In Harlem Le Roi Jones was kicking off the influential Black Arts Repertory Theatre asserting in his poem “Black Art,” “We demand poems that kill.” Nearby was the Harlem Writers Guild led by John O. Killens, which featured future Nobel laureate Maya Angelou and Sarah Wright amongst others. In Manhattan’s Lower East Side the Umbra collective had been born and would develop into the Uptown Writers Movement. Many of these artistic/social endeavours were backed up by heavyweight political forces like the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Nation Of Islam. One centre of revolutionary black artistry would be the Black Panther’s Bay Area of San Francisco; another was Harlem, the traditional setting of black consciousness since the pioneering days of the Harlem Renaissance, the third was Knight’s regular haunt Detroit.

Alongside diverse talents like the Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron Etheridge Knight was at the forefront of what would many years later be baptised hip-hop. Where the Beats had performed their rhapsodies to the jazz of Charlie Parker or John Coltrane new black poetry, rhythmic and socially aware, was being performed alongside rhythm & blues and funk. Changing times needed changing artforms. Knight admitted the pressing need to do something fresh saying that the blues “allows me to get it out; it allows me to live. It does not move me to get up and do anything about it. It moves me to accept a kick in the ass and still make it.” The blues for all its many virtues wasn’t revolutionary, it taught you how to endure hardship but it didn’t teach you how to overthrow it, to create something new. It helped you to keep keeping on when perhaps the time had come to say, “Enough’s enough!”

This new black poetry movement was so compelling because it was never separated from reality. Knight believed that European poetry was almost beyond all hope because, since the time of Plato, it had been dislocated from real life. It had become something cold, distant, intellectual, bourgeois, an academic pursuit for the elite. It had lost its way. Any great European poet in the last thousand years had existed in spite of, and not because of, the prevailing literary establishment and it’s traditionalist consensus. The great poets the Rimbauds, Shakespeares, Marlowes, Byrons, Keats were all rebels who, once safely six feet under, were stolen by the very elite who’d either neglected or persecuted them when they were alive. For Knight poetry was no privileged indulgence it was as intrinsic to life as breathing or drinking or making love or travelling, it was something that would express all the heady awe and anger in life. African-American culture had never lost the tradition of poetry as spoken word, as the distillation of everyday life from field hollers to spirituals to the blues. Black poetry remained entwined in real life, in community, in god and work and love and protest. It was accessible, passionate, life affirming and in being so promised to be a storm that would sweep away all the tired old literary monoliths. You can hear it threatening to erupt in his memorial for Malcolm X "For Malcolm, A Year After" – “Compose for Red a proper verse/Adhere to foot and strict iamb/Control the burst of angry words/Or they might boil and break the dam.”

The next few years were booming for Knight. In 1970 he edited, and contributed to, Voci Dal Caracere (Black Voices From Prison) a selection of writings from inmates at his former prison commissioned by the Italian sociologist and historian Roberto Giammanco. Such was the refreshing radicalism of the time for three years he held poet-in residence positions in Lincoln University, the University of Hartford and the University of Pittsburgh. He led Free People’s Poetry Workshops, anyone and everyone welcome. He was co-editor of Black Box in Washington and received a National Endowment for the Arts Award of $5000. Today it all seems indicative of the sixties, a time of almost unbelievable promise. And we now know how it was squandered, how in the end the bastards won and how conservative, for all our celebrity distractions and our weekend hedonisms, these times really are compared to those. “The bums lost” as Lebowski said.

Knight struggled to stay on the wagon. His marriage to Sanchez fell apart and they divorced in 1970. There’s the broken-hearted blues of “Feeling Fucked Up” – his lament for losing his girl, “Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky/ fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds/ and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth” fuck everything in existence cause his girl has left him. Soon to be married to Mary Ann McAnally, with whom he’d have two children, he flitted between hospitalisations and attempts to free himself of his heroin and alcohol demons. Despite, or perhaps because of, this he produced what’s seen as his most eclectic, challenging and rewarding work Belly Song and Other Poems (1973). A thrilling collection it captures an artist exploring uncharted waters. Wilfully experimental yet musical he delved further into rhythm and an evocative form of romanticism. In “For The Black Poets Who Think Of Suicide” he answers Hamlet’s question “To be or not to be?” by urging, “Black poets should live—not leap…Let all Black Poets die as trumpets/And be buried in the dust of marching feet.”
In “The Bones Of My Father” he conjures up images that stay burned in your mind long after you’ve read them, “There are no dry bones/here in this valley. The skull/of my father grins/at the Mississippi moon/from the bottom/of the Tallahatchie/the bones of my father/are buried in the mud/of these creeks and brooks that twist/and flow their secrets to the sea.” Belly Song earned him universal acclaim, a directorship in the Indianapolis “Self Development Through The Arts” project, a $12,000 Guggenheim Fellowship Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

Just as it seemed it had the world to gain the black arts movement, and indeed almost all the revolutionary forces, in America fizzled out. There’s no single explanation for what happened. Altamont, the Manson Family, the deaths of hippy icons (Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin), the elevation of cocaine and heroin over cannabis and LSD, the inevitable comedown all played their part. But even more significant was that generation’s surrender to the petty miseries of domestic life – marriages, children, mortgages, careers all those everyday horrors. Most, it seemed, were only ever at play. Hippies became yuppies, set up computers firms and ice cream factories, gave up easy living and civil rights for the rat race. The carrot proved much more effective than the stick.

The black radical movement subsided due to a similar mix of repression, despondency and responsibility. Their leaders were dead: Malcolm X and Dr King had been assassinated shortly to be followed by the leading figures of the Black Panther movement gunned down one by one in confrontations with government forces. Then there were the rival factions, the internal disputes, the CIA, the IRS.

Just as damaging was the absorption of the radical into the mainstream. Dissent became a fashion accessory and not a state of mind. Radical culture went from being a genuinely dangerous force to being a sociological module on university courses almost over night. Radicals were paraded at the parties of Hollywood producers, Black Panthers were invited to cheese and wine parties at Leonard Bernstein’s luxury Park Avenue apartment (a time expertly captured in Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers). You were nobody unless you had the phone number of one of these hip urban guerrillas. Economically Nixon’s idea of killing the radical movement with kindness worked. The glittering promise of Black Capitalism overtook Black Power. Academically “safe” writers and political figures were raised up as spokes-people while radicals were isolated. You didn’t have to be shot down or imprisoned to have been picked off.

Divorcing from McAnally in ‘77 Knight wed Charlene Blackburn with whom he had a son the following year. His next work the tender Born of a Woman (1980) celebrated the life-giving characteristics of women in contrast to the brutality of men culminating in the universal call for solidarity of "Con/tin/u/way/shun Blues" with its tinge of sadness, “Cause even when we be free, baby/ Lord knows we still have to die.”

Throughout the Eighties Knight’s reputation was consolidated. In 1986 the University of Pittsburgh Press released the definitive collection The Essential Etheridge Knight a book of utter genius that should be as widespread as Gideon Bibles. His accolades were bolstered with a Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America and an honorary Bachelor of Arts Degree from Martin University. Sadly in the end the success, or even poetry itself, wasn’t enough to save him. Struggling to keep on the straight and narrow right up until the end he married twice to Evelyn Brown and Elizabeth McKim respectively. In 1991, several weeks short of his 60th birthday, he succumbed to cancer, which had spread from his lungs to his liver. Posthumously he received the Indiana Governor's Award for Literature, was inducted into the Literary Hall of Fame at the 8th Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Conference in Chicago, Illinois and had a Festival of Arts initiated in his honour to promote verbal arts and foster artistic talent in working class black areas.

The list of honours may appear to signify a drift into respectability but don’t be fooled. Even though his poems were written decades ago they make vast swathes of contemporary poetry, and indeed hip-hop, sound conservative, toothless, redundant. There are few writers today who can come near his power, his music and his eloquence. To call him the forefather of modern black poets like Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Chuck D is to do him both a service and a disservice. For while they are undoubted heirs to Knight’s legacy he is too fierce, too turbulent, too exciting to ever be some lofty respectable father figure. Blazing into being his poems invoke the deepest feelings of rage and awe and though they are almost riotous in intent and fury they ultimately seek to make the world a fairer and, in doing so, a more beautiful place. “Hard Rock…” requires no explanation, just read and re-read it and witness the immense power of words, words as explosives, words that seek to change the way we perceive everything and the writer as a prophet, a lone voice in the wilderness calling on us all.

The Essential Etheridge Knight can be purchased at the University of Pittsburgh Press website: http://www.upress.pitt.edu/

casual poem: illness - Chris Gilpin

2006-03-23T14:12:00.000Z

In love with illness,
you are,
my friend.

In love with your own tragedy,
which comes complete with
a piano soundtrack of variegated minor chords,
fresh cigarettes and dried roses.

In love with Humphrey Bogart.
In love with Cuba of the 1940s.
In love with Thomas Hardy.
In love with melancholy.

The lilting beat of
gradual decay,
the trembling stars,
the hideous day.

let me—
too bad—
here i—

A colonial garden of exotic blooms
surrounds your exquisite porcelain-top table,
next to which you recline in a wicker rocker
that, from the side, looks like an art nouveau snail.

I barge in
with eighteen Chinese New Year Parades
all lurid and screeching.
I sick the dragons on your snail.
the revelers trample your gladiolas.
I am smiling a Vincent Price Smile.

Welcome to Hong Kong, I say.

Chris Gilpin is a writer and performer, based in Vancouver, BC. His work has appeared in The Vancouver Review, Forget Magazine, and others. Look for him at a Fringe festival, or poetry slam near you. You can find out more at http://www.chrisgilpin.com/.

"First Aeroplane Flight by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk" from the National Archives.

Two Stories - Adam Jeffries Schwartz

2006-03-23T14:11:00.000Z

Next to Me.

Two old Egyptian women sit next to you. The one closer looks like Golda Meir, only not as sinewy. The other, Miss Apple Harvest 1938, now just the core.

We have a routine—we three. You watch a movie and they interrupt: Three times an hour Miss Meir announces, "Toilet!" and hauls herself down the aisle.

Then Miss Apple Core pleads, "Time!"

But which time does she want? Does she want the time in Singapore, which is already gone? Does she want the time in Melbourne, which hasn't happened yet?

Maybe she wants something else entirely. Maybe she really wants to ask, "How much time do I have left?"

You show her your watch; this seems to please her, it's hard to read a smile without teeth.

In Bed.

There was an earthquake last night. At four AM you felt a short, hard jolt. It lasted twenty, maybe thirty seconds. You made it part of your dream.
The second jolt left you groggy, but you willed it away.
After the third blast you looked at the bunk below. The German boy was trying out this sex thing. His girlfriend wasn't correcting him; so, this could take a while— a whole life maybe.

Adam Jeffries Schwartz--a two time nominee for the 2005 Pushcart Prize-- is a writer and a traveller. He has stories, essays & poems in: Descant, Grimm, Szirine, Jacaranda & Bleach Magazines. Online he pops up at many sites, including: Mosaic Minds, Melange, Ghoti (Fish), Litbits, Kaliedowhirl, The Big Ugly Review & Caprice.

Schlieren photograph of T-38 shock waves at Mach 1.1, 13,000 feet (1993) courtesy of Nasa.

Where Her Heart Lives – Tom Hamilton

2006-03-23T14:06:00.000Z

Tail lights strung like beads on a rosary.
Like crimson ladybugs on an asphalt lake.
That rigormortis foundry is unsafe for keepsakes.
The quaking euthanasia of the wrecking ball,
decks the halls in sesquicentennial fantasies.
But modern or archaic carnal reveries
still match even under your most fended lens
almost identically.

Two girls stand in the Dairy Queen bathroom.
One sits on the sink and begins to cry.
Her skin is as white and clean as the hand soap.
She's bawl/talking something about "Stupid Jerks."
The tears crest her eyes as heavy as a chain.
But just as I identify and start to hate her pain
they laugh/spit/speak in promiscuous American accents.
Their tongues click and flex, jokes about oral sex.
Those thick sickening words drive romantics to gin.

Tonight I'm too afraid to pray.
I think that Jesus might have it in for me.
She hasn't said much since the rumours started.
She hasn't won anything with my dollars.
Like that strapless dress she's squirming away.
Again the stuffed animal jumps off the crane.
She checks on my table to make sure I don't touch her
and drops in another 'Caesar Rodney' quarter.

Why do people think I'm so funny?
I don't even hear the jokes running from my mouth.
Noteworthy imitations are easy for me.
I come to a particularly ridiculous story.
As my mouth pronounces she picks up the bowling ball.
She's the only person who is not laughing.
She's concentrating on the formation of the pins.
She draws a breath into where her heart lives
and knocks the towers down without a childish scream.

Found myself a restroom with a jailhouse lock.
Let all the agents pound they'll never hear the sound
of the tears disturbing water and jumping on the seat.

Took my heart for a little ride this morning.
I removed it from my chest and placed it on the lane lines.
It took off like a sparrow through a tangle of trees
Way up and a -weigh- into one of those moons
You can somehow see during the day.

Tom Hamilton is an Irish Traveller. He currently lives withthe clan known as the Mississippi Travellers. His work has appeared in over seventy publications including “Old Crow Review,” “The Rockford Review” and “The Main Street Rag” among many others. Along with his wife Mary Theresa and their two small daughters, Tiffany and Hope Ann, he lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Close-up view of an astronaut's footprint in the lunar soil photographed with a 70mm lunar surface camera during the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity on the moon (1969) courtesy of Nasa.

Phone God - John Grey

2006-03-23T14:04:00.000Z

What does Ruth bring back
from her trip to Vatican City
but a Pope phone card.
She can not only speak to God
but to cousins across the ocean.
The Pope smiles wanly from
his plastic home,
His Holiness trapped in
a secular moment
that not even the beads
his fingers thread
can make sacred.
How he must turn his head
when he strolls by the gift shop
with its Pope postcards,
bottled water with a
St Peter's label that surely
those who buy believe
was personally blessed
by his right hand.
The world intrudes even here.
Sistine Chapel t-shirt to impress
the folks back home...not a problem.
Ceramic angel for the mantel.
Why not buy an entire host.
Well at least they're not selling
Michelangelo foam fingers,
(buy two and watch them touch)
or Last Supper jigsaw puzzle.
Ruth plans to never use that phone card.
Stuffed inside her purse,
it's become an icon.
The more desperate the moment,
the tighter she clutches it to her chest.
A prayer and an answer...
and still all of its minutes remain.

John Grey has been published in many magazines and journals most recently in Agni, Hubbub, South Carolina Review and The Journal Of The American Medical Association. His latest book is What Else Is There? published by Main Street Rag.

Turin Shroud Image from a negative of a photo taken in 1898 by Secondo Pia.

Obstreperous Meets Abstemious - Gary Lehmann

2006-03-23T13:53:00.000Z

Obstreperous meets Abstemious - Gary Lehmann

When the Potter brothers, both Quakers, built an inn near a fresh water spring in 1750,

they called it the Clearwater Inn not only to signify the clear well water

but to ward off those who would seek hard liquor.

It didn’t work.

Their only customers were farmers and drovers.

The drovers were an especially hard lot.

They came fresh from the cattle markets

with a few coins to spend and a powerful thirst for rum.

It came down to a nasty face off

which could easily have ended in bloodshed and fire.

The Quakers could not bring themselves to serve hard liquor,

and the drovers could not bring themselves to go to bed sober.

Finally, a compromise was reached.

A keg of rum appeared by the fireplace with a sign that read,

“Drink what ye will. Pay what ye may.”

Gary Lehmann teaches writing and poetry at the Rochester Institute ofTechnology. His essays, poetry and short stories are widely published -- about 60 pieces a year. He is the director of the Athenaeum Poetry group which recently published its second chapbook, Poetic Visions. He is also author of a book of poetry entitled Public Lives and Private Secrets [Foothills Press, 2005], and co-author and editor of a book of poetry entitled The Span I Will Cross. His poem "Reporting from Fallujah" was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize. His short play, "My Health Care Worker Stole My Jewelry" was selected for professional production in January 2006 at Geva Theatre, Rochester, NY. Visit his website at http://www.garylehmann.blogspot.com/

“Positively no beer sold to Indians.” (Birney, Montana, 1941) – Marion Post Walcott is from the Library Of Congress

Ambrose Bierce And The Power Of Negative Thinking

2006-03-23T13:45:00.000Z

"Gravestone" by Caireen Burns (© Caireen Burns 2006)

All is vanity the good book says. Not many people will admit it but almost everything we do, even acts of charity and goodwill… especially acts of charity and goodwill, we do for selfish reasons. You give that drunkard on the street a handful of small change not for him but so you can bask in the warm glow of self-satisfaction for a few minutes. You phone your friends not entirely for their company but so the yawning chasm that is loneliness doesn’t swallow you whole. When businesses donate money to charity you can be sure photographs of their chief executives will be plastered all over the papers. Almost everything we do we do for ourselves in some roundabout way. That’s what makes genuine compassion so remarkable and so rare. The only people who truly unconditionally live for others are saints or lunatics. Nonetheless it’s one of the central illusions by which we live our lives, one of our life-myths. It’s just one of many. Ambrose Bierce punctures these myths. He explodes our smugness. When he sees people patting each other’s backs or their own he reaches for his revolver.

To Bierce self-righteousness is self-delusion. Everything should be questioned. Nothing is sacred nor should it be. Everything respectable is an illusion. These are the cornerstones of his philosophy. In his work, particularly The Devil’s Dictionary, he demonstrates with great wit and humour that at the heart of almost every institution, every deed, even morality itself is self-interest. By revealing that everything is bullshit he produces a funny, uplifting and blissfully cynical guide to life. It’s self-help for the hopeless cases, filled with a pessimism so profound it somehow ends up being optimistic and life affirming. For though Bierce was a misanthrope he was one who loved life in all its fucked-up-ness.

Born in 1842 near Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was the son of Laura Sherwood and Marcus Aurelius Bierce. His father’s unusual name would be an uncanny portent of things to come. Following a life of continual warfare in the wilds of the frozen barbarian north the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius developed an intense gloom but a liberating one, a sort of celestial pessimism that is filled with humour and a kind of warped hope.
“Life is marrying, raising children, dying, waging war, throwing parties, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining…you can hold your breath until you turn blue but they’ll still go on doing it…it’s a wretched, whining monkey life” he claims in his existentialist collection of ramblings Mediations. His teachings range from the sublime "Take it that you have died today, and your life's story has ended; and henceforth regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus and live it out in harmony with nature" to the almost ridiculous, "Do unsavoury armpits and bad breath make you angry? What good will that do you?" If his philosophy could be condensed into one sentence it would be this: Life is bullshit, none of this will last, none of this matters so why worry? It’s a sort of deadbeat Buddhism but without all the nonsense about Dharmas and reincarnation and the Dalai Lama.

“Before long all of us will be laid out side by side” even “doctors who tell you you’re going to die if you don’t stop drinking. All dead, it’s the only thing to be sure of. Once accepted there’s nothing to fear…Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen tomorrow embalming fluid, ash…to be remembered is worthless. Like fame. Like everything." He continues, “Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, only to be swept away in its turn.”

Not that he suggests we surrender to the void. Instead “do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in life.” The pointlessness of life is not our damnation but our salvation for if nothing matters everything is possible. If nothing matters what the fuck have you got to lose? And why spend our lives in the pursuit of wealth and prestige when these things simply do not matter?

If we accept like Marcus Aurelius that life has no meaning, no rules, no grand scheme we have immense power to simply do what we want, to undertake the endeavours we enjoy. Rid your life of all the myths and frauds and all the running around like headless chickens over nonsense that doesn’t matter. For we’re all doomed and it all means nothing. Hence the liberating power of negative thinking.

If Marcus Aurelius is the Emperor of negative thinking Ambrose Bierce would grow up to be its court jester. At fifteen he left home to become a printer's devil for the anti-slavery paper The Northern Indianian. Two years later he was falsely accused of stealing money and in a state of disgrace his family made him enroll in the Kentucky Military Institute. At the age of nineteen as a Union soldier and cartographer he was plunged into the horror of the Civil War. What the next four years did to the mind of the young man is anyone’s guess, he emerged at its end a twenty three year old man who had stared into the abyss, he had seen massacres, headless bodies and boar-eaten corpses, the best young men of America thrown into the fires like chaff. Yet he had found his vocation and had the dubious accolade of being the only American writer to have served in the Civil War and lived to tell the tale.

He rose quickly through the ranks of the Ninth Indiana Infantry, due to his bravery and intellect, becoming a sergeant and then a Second Lieutenant. Active in at least six major battles he witnessed the depths of the horrors involved. At Shiloh amidst the chaos he came upon a dying Union sergeant "taking his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts, and blowing it out in sputters of froth which crawled creamily down his cheeks, piling itself alongside his neck and ears." He was seriously wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain when in his own words " a Confederate bullet broke his head like a walnut." But he survived, escaped capture and ended the war in the temporary rank of Major. In an early forerunner of such war journalism as Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia he turned his Civil War experiences into a groundbreaking book of short stories entitled Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, a book that bravely and innovatively spoke of the violence, death and destruction without flinching or censoring the realities of war. Among them the eerie tale “Chickamauga,” telling of a child discovering the aftermath of a massacre, still haunts.

When the war was over Bierce found work for the Treasury Department in the reconstruction of the ruined Southern States then for the government exploring and mapping unknown and dangerous regions of the West. Promised a commission in the freshly reformed regular army he travelled to San Francisco but found he had been deceived and so decided by accident to embark on a literary career. At the U. S. Mint Bierce found a job as a night guard and found in the midnight hours the time to read and to write starting with several tracts expounding atheism. He also became a skilled artist, drawing cartoons mocking both candidates in the 1867 election, which were published by the respective candidates failing to realise Bierce characteristically was ridiculing both. This natural anarchic streak ignited when he began to read the satires of Swift, Voltaire, Juvenal and Pope. In particular Candide, Voltaire’s extraordinary satirical odyssey, and A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift's pamphlet suggesting the poor children of Ireland be fattened to feed the rich, were inspirational showing Bierce a way to combine wit, humour and defiant outrage in his writing. Finding employment in the San Francisco News-Letter he effectively hijacked the “Town Crier” section filling it with his merciless remarks and devastating criticism. Mysteriously the editor Watkins left suddenly for New York without explanation leaving the entire newspaper in Bierce’s hands. He became a newspaper editor at the advanced age of 26. Over three years later he left having established himself as a feared and respected Svengali of Californian current affairs, “Bitter Bierce”, a man with power enough to advance or destroy careers at the slightest whim. His initials A.G.B. became “Almighty God Bierce” to his enemies but he had already gone beyond the intrigues of criticism and newspapers. His motto was typically the nihilistic but liberating "Nothing matters."

Within a year he was gold mining and shotgun-riding in the Black Hills of South Dakota for Wells Fargo & Co (think Deadwood territory) and could have disappeared then into relative obscurity had William Randolph Hearst, owner of the San Francisco Examiner, not offered him a wealthy position writing the "Prattle" column and providing caricatures. And so would begin the most prolific period in Bierce’s life, for the next 21 years he would work for Hearst the media mogul on whom the megalomaniac Citizen Kane was based. Bierce ended up eventually hating his patron. While it became an era in which Bierce found national fame it also brought heart-breaking tragedy. Bierce's marriage started to fall apart, and he developed a destructive drinking habit. His son, Day, had run away from home at fifteen. Day killed a rival suitor of a sixteen-year-old girl and eventually was killed in a duel in 1889. Bierce's other son, Leigh attempted to drink himself to death finally succumbing pneumonia at the age of 26. Grief-stricken Bierce’s wife left him and when she died he retreated into a level of despair and bitterness that made his earlier self seem cheerful. But though he was mocked as “Bitter Bierce” he had at his core a deep humanity, his bitterness was an external shell, bravado hiding a vulnerable philanthropist. He had been to the bottom and somehow discovered he could bear it.

In 1897 Bierce became famous nationwide when he successfully battled Leland Stanford and the railroad barons, industrialists who were refusing to pay colossal debts to the government. Victorious he was proclaimed a hero of the people and it seemed destined to be his last triumph before retirement. From 1908 to 1912 he settled down to compile his writing into a twelve volume Collected Works. The set contained his Civil War writings, his journalism and his highly influential macabre stories, in the style of Edgar Allen Poe, that serve as a forerunner of The Twilight Zone or the X Files. These included the story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” with its final genius twist that has been stolen and used in a thousand films and books since.

Safe in the knowledge that his life’s work had been captured for posterity it was expected that he would retire to some backwater and spend his last days tending a garden or writing his memoirs. As if to say goodbye to the world he revisited the places of his youth: the battlefields of the South, New Orleans, San Francisco, Washington. In San Antonio Texas he was given an honorary dinner by his old Civil War comrades. Meditating on his haunting desert surroundings he wandered along the Mexican border for several days. What happened next is one of the most extraordinary and elusive tales in American history.

What is known for sure is that at the age of 71 he crossed the Rio Grande into a Mexico that was exploding into revolution. In a letter to his niece Laura he wrote, "Goodbye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a gringo in Mexico ah, that is euthanasia… I shall not be here long enough to hear from you, and don't know where I shall be next. Guess it doesn't matter much. Adios, Ambrose."

His last letter was sent from Chihuahua on December 26, 1913 to his secretary and partner Carrie Christiansen. He explains that the next day he is leaving by train for Ojinaga, where he planned to join the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa, who was preparing to attack a cornered Federal army and overthrow the governing regime. It ends “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.”
Ambrose Bierce was never heard from again.

There are many theories, claims and counterclaims, books and even a film, Old Gringo starring Gregory Peck, surrounding his disappearance. Theories have been advanced as to why he did it. Some see it as the adventure of his youth rekindled, others as an act of suicide; the truth is likely to be a mixture of both. At the end of a remarkable life the only way to leave was to go down guns blazing. Nobody knows when and where exactly he died. Some conspiracy theorists say he was killed by hitmen from his old chief Hearst, who owned hacienda lands in northern Mexico. Hearst was allied with the dictatorship and was seeking to wipe out an expose Bierce had written on him, which then suspiciously disappeared from a safety deposit box in Laredo, Texas. According to another explanation Bierce did not go to Mexico at all but, instead, committed suicide in the Grand Canyon and wanted to throw his loved ones off the scent.

It is more likely that shortly after Villa captured Ciudad Juarez, Bierce crossed the Rio Grande and marched with Villa’s army to Chihuahua. At Tierra Blanca, a railway station thirty miles south of Juarez, Villa’s army defeated a strong force of federal soldiers. According to eyewitness accounts Bierce took part in the battle in which, after having been taunted by young soldiers, he killed a federal soldier by picking him off with a rifle from great distance. The revolutionaries were so delighted that they reportedly gave the elderly gringo a large sombrero as a prize for his marksmanship. From here it is likely the aged, asthmatic Bierce either passed away in the savage winter of 1913 or was killed in the frenzied battle of Ojinaga on January 11th 1914. Some, displaying a very un-Bierceian optimism, say he boldly ventured further into South America. All that matters is he left this world in spectacular fashion and more importantly while he was here he created works that will ensure he is never forgotten.

The Devils Dictionary is arguably Bierce’s masterpiece. It is not a conventional text but even over a century later it remains a remarkable satire. The original title The Cynics Wordbook is appropriate though not in the “cynical” sense of the word. Rather he was a cynic as the original Cynics were, a Greek sect who ridiculed the absurdities of society and held those in power to account through humour and derision. Though presented as a dictionary the book goes beyond the standard dictionary format including snippets of thought, quotes, sonnets, poems and limericks. Rather than discuss how it mocks our self-deceptions it is perhaps best to let his definitions speak for themselves:

Happiness, n.
An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

Rubbish, n.
Worthless matter such as religions, philosophies, literature, art and science…

Bigot, n.
One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

Debt, n.
An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave driver.

Brandy, n.
A cordial composed of one part thunder-and-lightning, one part remorse, two parts bloody murder, one part death-hell-and-the- grave and four parts clarified Satan.

Mammon, n.
The god of the world's leading religion. The chief temple is in the holy city of New York.

Egotist, n.
A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Blackguard, n.
A man whose qualities, prepared for display like a box of berries in a market -- the fine ones on top -- have been opened on the wrong side. An inverted gentleman.

Fidelity, n.
A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

Cabbage, n.
A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.

Optimist, n.
A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.

Apologize, v.i.
To lay the foundation for a future offence.

Ghost, n.
The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.

Patience, n.
A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

Dawn, n.
The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.

Intimacy, n.
A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

Peace, n.
In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

Bacchus, n.
A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.

Idiot, n.
A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a deadline.

Alone, adj.
In bad company.

Bore, n.
A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

Alliance, n.
In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Barometer, n.
An ingenious instrument, which indicates what kind of weather we are having.

Christian, n.
One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbour.

Disobedience, n.
The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.

Famous, adj.
Conspicuously miserable.

Gunpowder, n.
An agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted. By most writers the invention of gunpowder is ascribed to the Chinese, but not upon very convincing evidence. Milton says it was invented by the devil to dispel angels with, and this opinion seems to derive some support from the scarcity of angels

I
is the first letter of the alphabet, the first word of the language, the first thought of the mind, the first object of affection.

Labour, n.
One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

Love, n.
A temporary insanity curable by marriage

Needless to say the book is damned funny and almost too close to the bone. It is scathing in its honesty as only real honesty can be. Everything is a lie it says we’re all a bunch of self-deluding frequently tiresome cunts and the world will be all the better if we admit it to ourselves.

Bierce’s time seems to have finally come. A new edition of The Devil’s Dictionary, containing all of the above and many more, has been published complete with exploding inkblot illustrations by the brilliant Ralph Steadman, he of Fear And Loathing… notoriety. Bierce blazed a trail for others to follow. The Simpsons, the late great Bill Hicks, the almost horrible honesty of Curb Your Enthusiasm are all Biercian in their perceptions and attitudes. From Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Luis Borges in South America to Akutagawa Ryunosuke in Japan he has influenced a multitude of writers. In 2004, 180 years after his birth, the writers Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss and Eli Horowitz compiled The Future Dictionary of America as a political act of satire and a literary descendant of The Devil’s Dictionary. 200 writers supplied entries and the book promised to benefit groups who are “devoted to expressing their outrage over the Bush administration’s assault on free speech, overtime, drinking water, truth, the rule of law, humility, the separation of Church and State, a woman’s right to choose, clean air and every other good idea this country ever had.”
Feeling blue?
Throw the latest talk-show book club choice onto the fire, put your feet up, pour yourself a whiskey and reach for the Bierce.

An edited draft of this article originally appeared in http://www.litkicks.com/

General Acknowledgements/Copyright

2006-03-23T13:40:00.000Z

All writings are used by permission of the authors.

“Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane” is from THE ESSENTIAL ETHERIDGE KNIGHT, by Etheridge Knight, © 1986. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

“Gravestone” image and front cover pylon image (© Caireen Burns 2006) are used by kind permission of the photographer.

The following images are public domain/copyright free:

From Old Books
http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

“In the Library of the University of Leyden, from a print dated 1610” is from William Andrew’s “Curiosities of the Church: Studies of Curious Customs, Services and Records.”

“Letter L from Alphabet after Serlio” is from Frank Chouteau Brown: “Letters & Lettering: A Treatise With 200 Examples” (1921)

“Drawing A Circle With A Compass” is from “A Textbook On Ornamental Design” (1901)

Images of American Political History:
http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/

“First flight of Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk” 17 December 1903 - J. T. Daniels, Surfman, USLSS.

“Boxer Rebellion" (1900) is from the National Archives and Records Administration.

"A Triple Execution at Juarez, Mexico" (1916) is from the National Archives and Records Administration.

“Gas Masks For Man And Horse” (circa 1917-18) is from the National Archives and Records Administration.

“Positively no beer sold to Indians.” (Birney, Montana, 1941) – Marion Post Walcott is from the Library Of Congress

From Nasa

Close-up view of an astronaut's footprint in the lunar soil photographed with a 70mm lunar surface camera during the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity on the moon (1969)

Schlieren photograph of T-38 shock waves at Mach 1.1, 13,000 feet (1993)

The Joshua Norton and Turin Shroud images are copy-right expired.

Laika Poetry Review Issue 1

2005-12-16T14:23:00.000Z

Coming Soon Laika Poetry Review Issue 2. Watch the skies...

Laika Poetry Review Issue 1

- Featuring work from Tom Leonard, Rennie Sparks, A.D.Winans, Alex Galper, Adam Jeffries Schwartz, Colin Dardis, Corey Mesler, Ryan Bird and Jakob Van Hoddis.

Issue One - Laika Poetry Review

2005-12-16T13:21:00.000Z

Issue One - Laika Poetry Review

Contents

Editorial - The Conflict of Language

In Dharmasala - Adam Jeffries Schwartz

The Elect - Tom Leonard

Web Of Gold - Rennie Sparks

Escape From Winter - Alex Galper

The Electric Insect Graveyard - Ryan Bird

In Scotland - Tom Leonard

Two Little Words - Adam Jeffries Schwartz

Dumpster In Connecticut - Colin Dardis

Brooklyn Siberia - Alex Galper

In The Latter Days Of Minor Saints - Corey Mesler

Poem For Bob Kaufman - A.D. Winans

4 Piece Dinette Set $799.99 - Rennie Sparks

Jakob Van Hoddis and The Neu Club Revolution

Jakob Van Hoddis - Part Two

The Conflict of Language.

2005-12-16T13:15:00.000Z

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell.

There were places, and no doubt there still are, where admitting to writing, or even reading, poetry would be a guarantee of getting your head kicked in. Most people either hated or had nothing above indifference to verse. Poetry was seen as the preserve of men in tweed jackets, something boring and old-fashioned you were forced to study at school. And in a way they were right, it had been effectively stolen by snobs or soured in school syllabuses. There was nothing more alien to someone growing up in a city than an 18th century sonnet dedicated to a nightingale which they’d be forced to endlessly analyse. Equally people were intimidated and irritated by postmodern poetry that was shrouded in pretentious, cryptic language.

Increasingly inroads were made with people challenging the literary establishment. With the Beat movement and the emergence of performance poetry the focus of literature shifted. No longer was poetry the sole property of conservative laureates, now poetry could be found in basement jazz bars and along the highways of America. This was followed by successive revolutions in literary thought and practise; the explosion of rock n roll when poetry could be found on records by anyone from Dylan to the Velvet Underground, the rebellion of the sixties and then the late seventies, the emergence of the internet and its vast proliferation of journals and websites. And in the late sixties there was a revolution in poetry itself, one initiated by working class poets like the Glaswegian Tom Leonard, Etheridge Knight and Charles Bukowski.

By producing poems of great energy and wit in their native dialects they demonstrated fiercely that the cultured inhabitants of Middle England, or for that matter Manhattan, have no monopoly on truth and beauty. The reaction to their work established one thing; that there are two sides conflicting over language itself.

On one side there are those who believe language is something that has strict rules and is set in stone like some set of commandments given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, that it cannot change, that cursing and emotion and playfulness are wrong and that the Queen’s English cannot, must not, be tampered with. That language is something sacred and dead.

Then there is the alternative. On this side are those who claim language is something constantly changing, that there are no strict rules, no one sacred unalienable truth but many truths. That there is as much beauty, and perhaps more truth, in the working class langwij of Glasgow or Derry or New Jersey than there is in Received Pronunciation. And in this alternative way of thinking things like curses and emotion can enliven discussion. For this language is true to life and in being so is fundamentally alive. This is the side spearheaded by the likes of Tom Leonard. It is also perhaps the only thing the works in this e-zine have in common.

In this the first issue of Laika Poetry Review we are proud to present a diverse selection of exciting and accessible writing from all over the world: from Glasgow, Albuquerque, Toronto, Tyrone, Kiev via Brooklyn, Tennessee and San Francisco right back to Weimar Germany.

We are delighted to be able to showcase two previously unpublished poems from Tom Leonard that manage to be both fearlessly political and hilarious.

We are also proud to present two hauntingly beautiful, yet disturbing, short stories written by Rennie Sparks, lyricist and musician from the alt-country duo The Handsome Family. The works, first published in her book Evil, are reproduced here with Rennie’s kind permission.

It is a pleasure to have onboard the San Francisco Beat poet A.D.Winans of whom Charles Bukowski once remarked, “A.D.Winans can go ten rounds with the best of them.” One of the driving forces behind the San Francisco literary renaissance A.D.Winans has contributed a tribute to his friend the late great poet Bob Kaufman, a poem brimming with his trademark compassion, rhythm and energy.

In addition we have a thrilling selection of new poetry and short stories from Adam Jeffries Schwartz, Alex Galper, Colin Dardis, Ryan Bird and Colin Mesler all of which are lucid, imaginative and exciting examples of vital contemporary writing.

Finally we have a study of the tragic German poet Jakob Van Hoddis who kick-started the most incendiary and ultimately doomed of artistic movements: German Expressionism.

The philosopher Wittgenstein once defined language as, “an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses." In this city there are high streets, luxury apartments, mock Tudor mansions, suburbs with white picket fences.
But there are also side streets, run down areas, subways, old rickety houses that local children are afraid of, smoky basement bars. Places frequented by barfly prophets, street corner preachers, mad offspring locked in the attic that nobody talks about, the places where things get interesting…

In Dharmasala by Adam Jeffries Schwartz

2005-12-16T13:13:00.000Z

In Dharmasala I met a Polish Princess/Filmmaker who didn't own a camera.

"Darling," she said, " it's all in the head."

Who can argue with a thing like that?

After a few drinks I asked Princess, "How can you be a Princess in a country with no royalty?"

She blew out smoke and said, "It's not like there's a warranty. You wait for the next revolution. Until then you take long baths. You read."

Bio:
Adam Jeffries Schwartz--a two time nominee for the 2005 Pushcart Prize-- is a writer and a traveller. He has stories, essays & poems in: Descant, Grimm, Jacaranda & Bleach Magazines. Online he pops up at many sites, including: Mosaic Minds, Melange, Ghoti (Fish), Litbits & Caprice. This year he's in Asia.

Copyright Adam Jeffries Schwartz 2005

The Elect by Tom Leonard

2005-12-16T13:12:00.000Z

one of those with quiet, naturally restrained, insistently monotoned voices

with that little self-contained smile, always going on about respect for history and the sense of the traditional

who want all poets to have a sense of “basic form” and who are always quoting Yeats’s “Under Ben Bulben” about poets having to Learn Their Trade and not be All Out of Shape from Toe to Top

who think this has nothing to do with Yeats on eugenics and that it would be unfair to quote his contemporaneous “The Fascist countries know that civilisation has reached a crisis, and found their eloquence upon that knowledge, but from dread of attack or because they must feed their uneducatable masses, put quantity before quality... They offer bounties for the seventh, eighth or ninth baby, and accelerate degeneration”

who complain of people with voices yclept loud, varied, opinionated, up and down, showy, the insufferably “engaged”, the political johnnies, the performance crowd, the “disastrous influence of the sixties”

who hate poets who carry electrical appliances and have no evident respect for Aristotle’s dictum that a poet is a poet insofar as they have a command of metaphor

who do not want to know all this stuff about “the page as a field of semantic tension” or blethers about “the connection between lower case and democracy” or pontificatory nonsense about “the punctuation of spacing” and “the reader being present at the shared point of articulation”

one of them leant over and said to me quietly

do you know if the 44 bus still goes to Knightswood?

Bio:
Born in Glasgow in 1944 Tom Leonard has been a vital part of the Scottish literary renaissance for the past forty years. He has revolutionised poetry, both in form and content, and ranks as one of our finest contemporary poets. With Alasdair Gray and James Kelman he has been appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University.
Published in 1969 his Glasgow Poems kick-started a literary counterculture. Written in his native Glaswegian dialect the poems are confrontational, compassionate, proud and very, very funny and prove that the “langwij” of the working classes is not just as valid as the language of Oxford or Harvard but is, in fact, a more potent living force. The collection proves you don’t have to be part of the conservative, condescending literary elite to write or enjoy poetry, for these are poems by and for those on the apparent periphery, those who, in Leonard’s words, “live outside the narrative.”
All of Leonard’s work is informed and inspired by his socialist beliefs, which have at their core a deep humanism and empathy, corresponding with George Orwell’s definition of real socialism as simply “common human decency.”
In 1984 he released Intimate Voices, a selection of his work from 1965 onwards including poems and essays on William Carlos Williams and “the nature of hierarchical diction in Britain.” It shared the award for Scottish Book of the Year and yet was promptly banned from Central Region school libraries. Despite such censorship the collection received widespread acclaim. Peter Manson, in the Poetry Review, claimed the poems, “speak so precisely and with such a fierce, analytical wit that they transcend their status as poems and become part of the shared apparatus we use to think with. I don't know any other contemporary poetry of which that is so true.”
Whilst working as Writer in Residence at Renfrew District Libraries in 1990 Leonard compiled Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to the First World War, an anthology resurrecting the work of long forgotten poets from the West of Scotland and proving the “traditional,” fictitious belief that Scotland at that time was a cultural wasteland. T S Eliot, that beloved pretentious anti-Semite, once claimed, to the effect, that Scotland has no literary culture. Radical Renfrew not only exposes the ignorance of Eliot, and company, but also lays bare their motives in denying the existence of a native Scottish culture, denying Scottish people “the right to equality of dialogue with those in possession of Queen's English or "good" Scots.”
Three years later he released Places of the Mind the only 20th century biographical novel of the Scottish writer James Thomson. Best known for his epic poem The City Of The Dreadful Night Thomson’s life and works are captured by Leonard in a riveting study of poetry, alcoholism and freethinking.
His most overtly political work followed in 1995. Reports From The Present compiles work from 1982 to 1994 including political satires, collages, essays, “antidotes, anecdotes and accusations” ranging from explorations of the differences between poetry and prose to scathing attacks on the forces of power that corrupt culture for financial or political gain.
With Access to the Silence (2004) he has compiled his poetic works from 1984 to 2003, exploring the experimental and the surreal to a greater degree without losing any of his truthfulness or openness. The highlight of the book is perhaps nora's place, a remarkably compassionate and moving piece focusing on a simple domestic day in the life of “just a human being/totally representative/as anyone is/outside the self/(and in it).”
Perhaps his greatest achievement has been bringing honesty back into poetry. By mirroring and articulating the way we actually live, speak and think Leonard has undermined, and provided an alternative to, all that is stuck-up, pompous, cryptic and deceitful about modern poetry and journalism. In the process he has exposed the power, and class, structures that command language and which hide behind the veil of respectability. His work exists outside of institutionalised culture and is all the more vibrant and meaningful because of this. To say this is to capture nothing of the music, humour, rebelliousness and compassion in his work. To do that you can find his work at:
http://www.tomleonard.co.uk/
http://www.word-power.co.uk/platform/Tom-Leonard-Books

Copyright Tom Leonard 2005

Web Of Gold by Rennie Sparks

2005-12-16T13:10:00.000Z

I had a room in a sooty brick building that leaned forward toward the street as if preparing to collapse. Winter came and stayed, shining the sidewalks dark with ice. The dim courtyard, swirling with garbage, filled up late at night. Angry drunks stood around in drifts of grey snow, screaming and smashing bottles and spitting on the frost-covered windows.
I was happy in that building. I had a pile of blankets, a rickety card table and a Monet print of haystacks I’d found under a bag of rotten onions at the end of a dead-end street.
I lay awake nights in my narrow room, staring up at my cracked and buckling walls, listening to the steam radiator drip and spit – revelling even in the mad silence of roaches whispering across my face and arms in the darkness.

There was a retarded girl, Marie, who lived in a cardboard box in the front hallway. Grey-green teeth speared out between her slack lips as she rushed at people crossing from the stairwell to the front door.
“Gimme ten thousand dollars!” She screamed, grabbing at arms and woollen coats. “Gimme fifty condoms!”
Some nights Marie got locked out of the building, pushed down in the snow by the last laughing drunks heading inside. She’d stand screaming in the frozen courtyard, howling herself hoarse like a starving dog- the wind whipping up her stained raincoat and swirling through her knotted black hair – as one by one the lights darkened above her and she was forced to curl cat-like on the grating above the boiler room, waiting for daybreak and a chance to rush in again as the first of us stumbled out to work.

I drifted from job to job – selling light bulbs over the telephone, offering samples of sausage in shopping malls, watering plants in hospital waiting rooms. Eventually, by eavesdropping on the interviewees before me at a temp agency, I figured out what I needed to lie about in order to secure myself a position as a receptionist for a plumbing supplier. Mostly I did less than nothing, dropping staples out of the window and feeding unopened mail through the paper shredder. As long as the coffee pot stayed filled, and the phone got answered by the fourth ring, my boss was happy. But, the days passed slowly and sometimes, standing in the falling elevator surrounded by smiling workers, I found myself shaking with rage- like a wolf cornered in and poked at with sticks.
At first I consoled myself by stealing people’s lunches from the refrigerator in the breakroom or by flushing felt-tip pens down the toilet. One day after work as I wandered around downtown, an idea took shape.
I went into Marshall Fields and circled the displays, pretending to shop. I grabbed a pair of leather gloves and a fancy electronic day minder and slid them down the neck of a beaded gown. Inside the fitting room, I pulled the gloves and minder from the gown and shoved them down the front of my pants. I buttoned my jacket and walked out of the store.
The next day I took the train out to a Marshal Fields in the suburbs and, after convincing the saleswoman that the items I’d shoplifted were a gift from an uncle who had died in a car crash, I had $300 cash.

I never went back to work. I wandered between the stores downtown and the stores in the suburbs, stealing things hauling them to another store in the same chain then bargaining my way into cash. If I had to, I’d exchange for merchandise again and again until finally I found a department that gave cash. Sometimes, to facilitate the proceedings, I wore a neck brace or a stained bandage over one eye.
I became adept at pickpocketing men on escalators and reading ATM PIN numbers as they were typed in across a crowded room.
There was a fancy, downtown lounge that served a hot and cold buffet during happy hour – Swedish meatballs, Buffalo wings, make-your-own-tacos. I waited for women to head up to the buffet line, leaving their purses dangling, half-open, from the back of chairs.
As the days passed, I noticed a man slumped at the bar behind the hot and cold buffet, rocking slowly on a corner stool as if barely able to hold himself upright. He was sickly, with the kind of pale, mushroom skin seen in people with inoperable tumours. I watched his pathetic attempts to attract the bartender’s attention- stick arms wavering weakly, voice barely above a whisper. I slid down on the stool next to him and held my whiskey to his lips.
His name was Paul and he made his money betting a high-stakes sports pool run by an old Italian from the back of a card shop. I took Paul home with me like you might take home a shell from the beach. I stared at him, turning him over and over in silence. His watery blue eyes opened something in the pit of me until I was covered in sweat. We had slow, grunting sex on my narrow pile of blankets, kissing with open eyes, tongues dragging jagged against the other’s front teeth.
Oh, I became too alive! Each night we shared cartons of milk at my wobbling table, white drops running down our necks. We slept twisted – Paul under me, clinging to my neck as I held his waist firmly in my arms. I clung to him hopelessly like a tree holding on to the last of its fruit.
One night the old Italian sent some men to collect a sum of money that Paul owed and did not have. They sat me on the floor against the humming refrigerator and then beat Paul with a pillowcase full of potatoes. They dragged him up in front of the bathroom mirror and held him a moment in front of the wreck of himself then smashed him face-first into the mirror. They carried him out inside two of my black garbage bags and I never saw him again.

The absence, the hole in my heart. I lay awake at night watching the moon slowly tracing and sparkling the broken bits of mirror in my bathroom sink. The blood dried to brown, indistinguishable from rust.
Each morning instead of heading downtown, I sat at my window, staring down at Marie on the front steps, sunning herself like a lizard in the spring air. She lay drifting in and out of sleep, saliva glistening at the corners of her mouth, fingers tracing the slack weight of her own breasts.
I chased roaches up my walls, fists slamming down on their black feathery shells.
When a cloud of small, black flies began hovering over my last carton of milk, it cam to me – a hole in the heart can be filled with blood.
I dropped puzzle pieces of my shattered mirror slowly into the milk carton then mixed in a few tablespoons of sugar and carried it downstairs to Marie. She drank greedily, swallowing in long gulps then she lay down, drifting into sleep. Back upstairs, I waited.
By nightfall she had begun to scream. TVs blared uninterrupted, doors slammed. Marie’s voice rose higher into the night – like wind through a stand of dead trees.
Eventually she quieted. I crept down the stairwell. Marie was on her side inside her cardboard box, panting like a dog preparing to give birth. Her face and neck glistening. Her hands clenching and unclenching – grasping at the empty darkness. She stared up at me, unable to speak, heaving and heaving with blood pouring from her mouth.

The next afternoon, I walked out of Henri Bendel’s with an 18-carat hatpin under my tongue. The dazzling sun stretched out above the tall buildings like a web of gold. A small cockroach crawled the shaded mouthpiece of a pay telephone and I reached forward, gently taking it up onto my fingertips. I laughed as it crawled tickling up my arm.

Bio:
“Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing…music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice”- Greil Marcus on The Handsome Family.

Rennie Sparks, along with her husband Brett, is a member of the alt-country duo The Handsome Family. Together they have created a succession of highly acclaimed albums including Milk And Scissors, Through The Trees, In The Air and Twilight. Their music is a multitude of things from dustbowl gothic tales of madness and murder to country laments for ghosts and dropouts. It is Americana tempered with dark romanticism, songs where The Bible and the tales of the Brothers Grimm seep into the everyday world. The thread running through them all is Rennie’s poetry. That same strange and haunting near-fairytale poetry, all the more beautiful and unsettling because it mixes the most everyday images with the most surreal and otherworldly.
Rennie described their last album Singing Bones as being intended, “to rip holes between this world and the next with its songs of haunted Wal-Marts, lovers who chase the fire in streetlights, the madness of very deep holes, a lake that can only be visited in dreams and the shadows that whisper inside a modern office building.”
She and Brett live together on a quiet street in Albuquerque, New Mexico where they are currently recording their next album. They also appear in the film Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus, which follows the musician Jim White on a road trip through the churches, coalmines and bayous of the South.
She has kindly allowed Laika Poetry Review to reproduce two short stories, "Web Of Gold" and "4 Piece Dinette Set $799.99," from her short story collection Evil (Black Hole Press).
For more information drop by:
http://www.handsomefamily.com/

Copyright Rennie Sparks 2001

Escape From Winter by Alex Galper

2005-12-16T13:09:00.000Z

That December,
Rocking in a chair
And reading Rumi,
I ceased to reflect in a mirror.
You broke into tears:
"How can I trust you ever again?"

In January,
I began to levitate
By the chandelier
Reading Hayam.
It made you nervous.
You learned to
Throw the rope like a cowboy,
Pulling me back into the bed.

And in February,
I went into spontaneous combustion,
But you, ready for contingencies,
Slept with a fire-extinguisher
And put the flames out,
Destroying my plan
Of daring escape
To 12th century Persia.

Bio:
Born in Kiev, Ukraine Alex Galper came to America at the age of 20. In 1996, he graduated from Brooklyn College majoring in Creative Writing (his professor was Allen Ginsberg). His work has appeared in many Russian publications whilst his collection “Rybnyi den’” (Fish De Jour) has been published by the Koja Press. His writing has been translated from Russian with the assistance of his friends Igor Satanovsky and Mike Magazinnik. More details can be found at the Koja website, which is dedicated to the exploration of the Russian-American avant-garde crossroads.
www.kojapress.com

Copyright Alex Galper 2005

The Electric Insect Graveyard by Ryan Bird

2005-12-16T13:07:00.000Z

Mother Nature has always been gracious enough to bring
all the dead insects I could possibly need, straight to my feet.

All I ever had to do was look down, once in a while.
You see, every single body that goes dead, has a story to tell.

But once I lay claim to that body, that story becomes mine.
Don’t worry, they get their story back, just with a little added flare.

For instance, I laid the King Beetle to rest beside his golden toilet.
Unable to let go, his fans will report seeing him for years to come.

As per her parent’s wishes, I dressed the Lady Bug according to tradition.
The corset cracked her wings, and her bound-feet broke my heart.

The Praying Mantis, she was laid beneath the greenest patch of grass.
Her grave was covered by rocks, which up close, resembled severed heads.

The Firefly though, I keep that one secret-- no one knows about that body.
It’s strapped to a gurney in my laboratory, awaiting a lightning storm.

Bio
Ryan Bird is man of a few words, most of which are dirty. The few clean words have been organized into sentences and dutifully filed into publications such as: Peter F Yacht Club, Quills, Iota, Opium.print, Grimm Magazine and dANDelion.

Copyright Ryan Bird 2005

In Scotland by Tom Leonard

2005-12-16T13:03:00.000Z

Click Page For Enlarged Image

Two Little Words by Adam Jeffries Schwartz

2005-12-16T13:01:00.000Z

My mother practised a kind of Chinese Communism; you
Will agree with the state (meaning her) or you will be re-educated.

In one memorable twenty-four hour period in June 1974
The issue was washcloths: blue or yellow (camp
Colours). I was ten years old and wasn’t going to use either colour.

To great effect my mother used: sleep deprivation,
Bright lights, loud noises, good cop/bad cop and repetition.

There were two little words that never came up:
Drinking and problem.

Bio:
Adam Jeffries Schwartz--a two time nominee for the 2005 Pushcart Prize-- is a writer and a traveller. He has stories, essays & poems in: Descant, Grimm, Jacaranda & Bleach Magazines. Online he pops up at many sites, including: Mosaic Minds, Melange, Ghoti (Fish), Litbits & Caprice. This year he's in Asia.

Copyright Adam Jeffries Schwartz 2005

Dumpster in Connecticut by Colin Dardis

2005-12-16T12:59:00.000Z

Sarah and I were in New York.
Sarah was a health therapist who works in a number of clinics in and around Belfast. One of her clients had won two tickets; all expenses paid, full board, to NY, and had asked her if she wanted to come along with him. This was during an Indian head massage; he thought it helped his receding hairline. Anyway, he was a retired school teacher: poor fucker probably had no one else to take along with him. Sarah and I talked about this over dinner in the Metro. She had roasted butternut squash on Italian rocket, followed by seared salmon on wild mushroom couscous with asparagus spears. I had salmon hearts with pear, complimented by Hungarian sausage with a vegetable medley, garnished with orange. Odd that I remember that. Maybe I can recall the meal because that night I told Sarah I would kill the old man.

There were two of us and one of him. And only two tickets. He was old and on his own, its important you remember that. Basically, his life was expendable. So that night, we talked about how we might kill Jack Carruthers. I think Sarah only cajoled me in order to have the conversation. Wine and dinner mean nothing to her unless there was some kind of mental stimulus to compliment her dining, even if she considered my homicidal musings just a fantasy.
I didn’t know how serious I was either. Maybe I just wanted to shake Sarah up a little in order to test her. Her middle class mundanity was beginning to annoy me. Anyhow, the old man came back for a reiki session the following Tuesday. He had been diagnosed with heart disease and therefore couldn’t fly. He then handed over an envelope to her: the fucker had transferred the flight tickets and everything else over to her name. We were going to the Big Apple! And the guy who was going to pop it anyway survived a little longer than he was expecting.
So, we get to the hotel. I want sex, but Sarah’s too tired from the jetlag. She turns to me and says that we have to go down and visit Old Man Carruthers’ brother and family while we’re over here, as a favour to Jack for giving us the tickets. Fuck that, I said. “He gave you the tickets, not me. I’m not wasting my time visiting some hick ex-pat and his inbred wife and kids. No fucking way.” She replied, like only a woman could, that she knew I would say that, and that’s why she waited ‘til we got here to tell me. She threatens to keep her legs shut for the whole two weeks we’re over here, and shit, I want pussy. She wins.

So like I said, we were in New York. But now I have to drive our rented car two hundred miles north in order to meet up with this shithead’s family, thinking all the way, ‘When the hell did Sarah gain a sense of moral duty?” I’m doing all the driving, while she’s reading Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘She Came To Stay’, the 1984 Flamingo edition that I lent her with the Guy Pene Dubois painting on the cover. I wanted to read my copy of ‘American Psycho’, so I ask ‘”Why the fuck are you not driving?” A reasonable question, I think. She looks at me liked I just kicked her mother to death. “Because I have my period,” as if this is explanation enough.
We argue until we reach a truck stop forty miles from our destination. The sign says ‘O’Hanagan’s’, and there’s a sign depicting a leprechaun pumping gas. It’s probably the only Irish truck stop in the whole of the desert plains. Immediately the owner, a sagging old cloth cat of a lady, picks up on our Irish accents, and falls in love with us. I don’t feel in the mood for small talk, so I mutter to Sarah to get me coffee and pancakes, and head off to the gents. I take two Xanax to calm myself down, balanced by what I think is enough milligrams of speed to get me through the rest of the journey, thinking that Sarah would have to take over and drive, menstruating or not.

I come out of the restroom and see some hairy-assed trucker monkey trying to crack onto Sarah, like his grasp of the English language was even enough to read the menu in this shithole diner. Thankfully, the cloth-lady has disappeared. I drop down beside Sarah, and the trucker looks at me like I’m the one who is interrupting something.
He grunts, “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” I stare with a wide eyed stare, “you can stop laying your sweaty, grease-ridden skin over the surface that me and my girlfriend are about to eat off and go and learn some manners. In fact, you can leave the vicinity completely.” I point to Sarah. “She’s no good to you anyway.” I pause to
compose myself in the sauntering heat. “She has her period.”
Truck monkey doesn’t like this. Either does Sarah. She starts shouting at me, saying that she was only asking for directions, pushing me out of the booth. During her near-spastic rant, she spots a few crumbs on my left nostril.
“For fuck’s sake Jack, are you freebasing again?” I shake my head, confused. “I can’t take this shit anymore. How am I suppose to take you to see the Carruthers when you’re high?!” She shoves past me, grabs the keys off the table, and seemingly within the same second, drives off, probably to eternal happiness with Old Man Carruthers and his inbred protégés. I’ve left standing with truck monkey, now joined by two friends of his, hair sprouting out from every possible angle.
“Round here, we treat women with respect.” He spits out the last word through plaque-heavy teeth. I wipe my nose and start to say something, but the drugs are kicking in, and my tongue is melting to the side of my jaw. I have time to note that the two truckers that have just joined us are wearing matching baseball caps before they picked me off and drag me towards a backdoor. One of them shouts out “Doris, just got some business to do out back here,” and I see the cloth-lady from the kitchen turn around and simply nod before I’m flung out the back.

I wake up surrounded in garbage, my nose so full of bloody snot that I might never snort anything again. My head and ribs feel like they’ve anatomically switched positions. There’s a pizza box of my lap, the carton saying “Tonio’s, the best pizzeria in the city.” For some reason, I open it up, and there’s a discarded coffee-stained map of the city inside. The sun sets in the dust above me as I look for a cigarette, and only find some matches from the New York hotel, with the telephone number for the old man’s brother written on the inside. I need to call and try to find Sarah to apologise, otherwise I’ll be stuck in this dump forever, but I can hardly move to lift myself thanks to the pasting I’ve received.

And that’s how I found myself in a dumpster in Connecticut.

Bio:
Born in Omagh, Co. Tyrone, Colin Dardis is one of a number of Belfast performance poets emerging into the literary spotlight. He has been a regular performer of live poetry in Belfast, for the past five years and has worked as a Poet In Motion, for the New Belfast Community Arts Initiative, helping organise a number of one-off poetry events in Belfast. Notable appearances include the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, Between The Lines and the Castlereagh Verbal Arts Festival.

www.colonyink.tk

Copyright Colin Dardis 2005

Brooklyn Siberia by Alex Galper

2005-12-16T12:57:00.000Z

I live in Siberia

In the very heart of Southern Brooklyn

In the mornings people flock to the taiga of Wall Street

Returning in the evening barely alive, frozen, stock-bitten,

Bleeding from computer-bug wounds

Some disappear forever

Mauled to death by the bears of big corporations

Or buy houses in New Jersey

In the spring I see their corpses

Inviting me to follow the same path

From the pages of respectable publications.

Bio:
Born in Kiev, Ukraine Alex Galper came to America at the age of 20. In 1996, he graduated from Brooklyn College majoring in Creative Writing (his professor was Allen Ginsberg). His work has appeared in many Russian publications whilst his collection “Rybnyi den’” (Fish De Jour) has been published by the Koja Press. His writing has been translated from Russian with the assistance of his friends Igor Satanovsky and Mike Magazinnik. More details can be found at the Koja website, which is dedicated to the exploration of the Russian-American avant-garde crossroads.
http://www.kojapress.com/

Copyright Alex Galper 2005

In the Latter Days of the Minor Saints by Corey Mesler

2005-12-16T12:56:00.000Z

We were all out paving the old roads,

looking for a little understanding

in the remaining light.

Sue picked up a pick,

said, lemme ask you a question.

We waited for what we knew was coming.

It was the question we all wanted to ask.

It was the one about our ultimate purpose.

The sun was so hot

it made our hesitation broil.

Up ahead we heard tell was a horizon,

as wide as God’s last smile.

Bio:
Corey Mesler has published prose and/or poetry in Turnrow, Paumanok Review, Yankee Pot Roast, Monday Night, Elimae, H_NGM_N, The American Drivel Review, Poet Lore, Forklift OH, Euphony, Rattle, Dicey Brown, Cordite, Cellar Door, Heat City Literary Review, Ghoti, Cranky, Three Candles, StorySouth, Canopic Jar, Juked, Pindeldyboz, Mitochondria, Mars Hill Review, 13th Warrior Review, Monkeybicycle, Arkansas Review, Stirring, Red River Review, Center, Small Press Review, Jabberwock Review, Orchid, Quick Fiction, Timber Creek Review, Hobart, Poetry Motel, Bullfight, Potomac Review, Big Muddy, Slant, Texas Poetry Review, Rockhurst Review, Wavelength, Lilliput Review, Pearl, Ducts, Sunny Outside, Fish Drum, Mid-American Poetry Review, Dust, Cotyledon, Iodine, Snakeskin (England), The Melic Review, Spillway, Thema, Kumquat Meringue, Lonzie’s Fried Chicken, Electric Acorn (Dublin), Blue Unicorn, Black Dirt, The Spirit that Moves Us, Wind, Red Rock Review, BlazeVox, Concrete Wolf, Memphis Magazine, Rhino, Visions International. He has had work published in the anthologies Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball (Breakaway Books), Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure (New World Press) and others.

He has been nominated many times for the Pushcart Prize. With his wife he owns Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores.

Copyright Corey Mesler 2005

Poem For Bob Kaufman by A.D.Winans

2005-12-16T12:54:00.000Z

he walked the streets of North Beach
an ancient warrior with hollow eye sockets
that seared the dazzling lights of the city
of Saint Francis
his eyes boring into you like a silk worm
carrying decades of heavy sorrow
like a bent over hunchback
overcome with the rust of time
flesh stripped to the marrow
the mirror of his eyes doing a slow dance
up and down Grant and Green
a dark shadow riding clouds of Ancient Rain
his life measured in hot jazz and verse
a surreal mirage where hip cats
wailed in perfect rhythm
as he walked an imaginary zoo
looking for tigers to talk to
runaway poems blaring in his ears
like a stuck car horn
the Ancient Rain falling
falling falling
washing away his wounds.

“A.D.Winans is one of the few writers I have met (and I’ve met too goddamned many of them) who doesn’t act like a writer or think of himself continually as a writer and maybe that is why he writes better than they do. I always prefer a poet I can tolerate for more than ten minutes. That’s rare and so is A.D.” – Charles Bukowski.

Bio:
A.D.Winans is a San Francisco-born poet, writer, editor, biographer and literary dynamo. Born in 1936 he served three years in the US military in Panama before returning in the late 50’s to become a leading light in San Francisco’s North Beach Beat movement. His work has appeared in over a thousand magazines, journals and anthologies and over 40 books of his poetry and three books of his prose have been published. His writing has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Polish and Croatian. As well as being a member of PEN he is also listed in the Who’s Who of America and has been active in the Folsom Prison and San Quentin writer’s workshops.For 17 years he was the editor of the Second Coming magazine and press, a formidable force in multi (and counter) cultural poetry and an integral part of the San Franciscan poetry renaissance. During this time he became a close friend to such writers as Charles Bukowski, Jack Micheline and Bob Kaufman, a time documented in his book The Holy Grail: Charles Bukowski and The Second Coming Revolution.
.
A D. Winan’s Poem For Bob Kaufman is a moving tribute to a poet often unfairly overlooked. “The American Rimbaud” Kaufman was a multitude of things: one of the original Beats, a pioneering black poet decades before the emergence of hip-hop, a remarkable street poet whose work had the energy and flow of the jazz music that would accompany his readings. Born in New Orleans, his father a German Jew, his mother a Catholic from Martinique, he joined the US Merchant Marines at the age of thirteen. He spent the next twenty years on the seas, sailing round the world nine times and enduring three shipwrecks before settling in San Francisco. There he joined the first wave of Beats carousing with Jack Keroauc and Neal Casady in Big Sur and North Beach. He produced some of the finest works of that era: Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness, Golden Sardine, The Ancient Rain. Co-editing the magazine Beatitude with Allen Ginsberg he became noted for his poetry performances and his defiant stands against all forms of authoritarianism, which, it is said, often resorted in beatings and arrests at the hands of local police. After Kennedy was assassinated he took a Buddhist vow of silence until the end of the Vietnam War, nearly twelve years later. In 1978 he withdrew into solitude. After a period of declining health, hot helped by his heavy drinking and drugs/electro shock therapy received while a patient in Bellevue hospital, he passed away in 1986. In accordance with his wishes his ashes were scattered at sea.

Copyright A.D.Winans 2005

4-Piece Dinette Set $799.99 by Rennie Sparks

2005-12-16T12:53:00.000Z

I live in the part of the city where the pay phones all hang broken and the sidewalk cracks are filled in with beer bottles and lottery tickets. My doorway is recessed from the street and is the perfect place to pee or vomit or just take a nap.
It’s a forty-minute drive west to my job, but it’s impossible to find work downtown. This city is bankrupt. The skyscrapers are all empty and the buildings are being torn down, replaced by weedy lots full of broken glass and lost shoes.
Everyday I inch through the traffic until liquor stores and pawn shops fall away into strip malls and then finally nothing but fields of pussy willow and swamp water stretching out to the grey horizon.
Sometimes I see prairie dogs standing on two legs in the waving grass along my exit. I used to think this was cute until I read somewhere that prairie dogs only do this when they’re terrified and trying to signal other prairie dogs, “Run!”
There’s a slight grade to the parking lot at work and so the far spaces are always covered in water. Sometimes I se ducks gliding along these gravely puddles or waddling between cars, leaving muddy, wedge-shaped prints.
At the end of the day when I head back out to my car, there are crows lined up along the telephone wires and sometimes deer clattering off across the asphalt in the orange dusk.
But, there are deer everywhere now. There’s an outlet mall just south of the city where they sell everything from discount vitamins to raspberry cappuccino. They had so many deer tearing away at their graceful, curving flowerbeds, they offered coupons for frozen yoghurt to anyone who shot one. Then a girl who worked at an ear-piercing booth ended up shot in the leg and they had to call it off.

My grandfather Morris tried to kill himself in 1946 after reading an article in some newspaper about the town in Poland where he had been born. They’d found a mass grave behind the train station full of Jews and their empty suitcases.
My mother came home from the beach, a seven-year-old girl with a bag of paper dolls and she found my grandfather sucking on the gas pipe in the basement of their suburban split-level. So, my grandfather ended up living to see his son killed in Korea and my grandmother put away in a mental hospital and my mother married off to a pharmacist before my grandfather slipped on a bar of soap and smashed his head against the toilet seat.
I inherited his office furniture – heavy steel chairs, a rickety floor lamp and a wooden desk rolling with pencils and crammed with typewritten lists. Lists of every vacation he’d ever taken and what he’d paid for coffee. The Niagara Falls list reads, “39 cents for a cup of lukewarm espresso and the prime rib was not tender.” Below that in parentheses, my grandfather had felt obliged to note, “All the restaurants here are run by Chinamen.”

I work in the sign department of a large corporation. We make pricing signs for a chain of furniture stores. You’d think furniture stores could make their own pricing signs, but that’s not the big business way. Everything must be produced in its proper department. I’m not even allowed to pull a paper jam out of the Xerox machine. We have a number to call in the maintenance department. My job is making signs. Nothing more.
I’ll spend four hours printing out sheets of paper that say, “Brown leather recliner, $499.99,” hundreds of sheets that say this except down in the bottom right corner there’s a twelve digit store code that gets changed on each one. When I finish, I start over again with another sign, maybe, “Sleeper/loveseat $399.99” or “4 piece dinette set $799.99.”
I work on a floor that stretches endlessly, one identical cubicle after the next, underneath ghostly, fluorescent lights. These lights keep you feeling slightly seasick all day but plants love them. Tiny potted sprouts grow vine-like, out of control – winding up cubicle walls, stretching out green, hungry tentacles toward those glowing, buzzing tubes.
I’m a good worker or at least no worse than the rest except for Post-its. I like to steal them. Everyday I grab a pad or two off someone’s desk as I head out to my car. Driving back to the city, I toss Post-its out my car window and watch them through the rear-view mirror, skidding and rolling in the dirt. I don’t know why I do it. I guess I don’t really want to know why.

Kenneth sits next to me at work. His cubicle is decorated with pictures of animals he’s killed – bobcats lying bleeding in the snow, dead trout held dripping over his head, strings of broken geese slung over his shoulder. He also has a picture of himself shaking Willie Nelson’s hand in front of a McDonald’s and Willie has the same expression on his face as the dead animals: defeated, surprised to find himself suddenly caught in Kenneth’s meaty grip.
Sally sits across from me. She’d decorated her office in what she calls “Country Kitchen” which means wooden ducks wearing bowties, stuffed pigs wearing wire-rim spectacles and red gingham contact paper lining her in-ox.
Our boss is named Ida. She’s been here thirty-five years and still hasn’t even hung a postcard in her office. For lunch she eats five saltines and a mug of hot water.

At the end of the day Monday, I get in my car. I hug the right lane even though the highway is empty. I drive fast. Faster. I’m thinking about what I’ll watch on TV when I get home. I’m thinking about what I’ll defrost in the microwave for dinner. Then there’s a thump. My car bucks toward the shoulder and I stop and get out. There are no other cars in sight, but back about twenty feet there’s something, a dark shape rising up from the black pavement.
I walked closer thinking maybe its just a carpet remnant fallen off a delivery truck, but then I see that it’s a dog – a poodle with neatly clipped white fur and a pink collar with a tiny metal disk hanging from it.
I lean in but all the metal disk says is “Scamp.” No phone number, no address.

Once upon a time there were wolves along this road, back before the buffalo disappeared. I think about this as I lean in over the dead dog, seeing its insides pulled out in pink and yellow layers of fat and skin. I think about wolves and buffalo and about my brother Michael and how once, when we were young, I watched my brother Michael kill my mother’s green and orange parakeet while my mother was outside planting a gardenia bush.
There was no good reason for it. We were bored on a Sunday afternoon. Michael pulled the bird from its cage and smothered it inside a Wonder Bread bag. The parakeet barely struggled but I remember feeling this horrible presence, a terrifying void, as my brother pulled the limp bird from the bag.

Crouching down at the roadside I can’t resist the urge to lean it and touch the dead dog. But when my fingers graze its fur, the dog’s eyes open and it rears up and bites my hand so that I fall back hyperventilating, blood dripping down my wrist. The dog goes slithering off down into the woods at the edge of the road, dragging itself on two legs, leaving a trail of blood like an oil slick.
It’s dark out and I do not have a flashlight but I take a few steps down into the silent trees. My fingers are throbbing, wet with warm blood. After a minute my eyes adjust to the darkness and I spot the dog, wedged against a rotting tree stump, staring up at me with frightened, crazy eyes.
The dog’s breathing in short, panting gasps but each time I make a move towards it, it rears up again, snapping and spitting and making this strange, high-pitched noise that sounds like a human baby crying.
Finally I just stop. I sit down in the dark woods, crushing pine saplings under my ass. I just sit there in the cold listening to the dog’s ragged breathing and watching blood drip down my fingers to the ground.

Bio:
“Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing…music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice”- Greil Marcus on The Handsome Family.

Rennie Sparks, along with her husband Brett, is a member of the alt-country duo The Handsome Family. Together they have created a succession of highly acclaimed albums including Milk And Scissors, Through The Trees, In The Air and Twilight. Their music is a multitude of things from dustbowl gothic tales of madness and murder to country laments for ghosts and dropouts. It is Americana tempered with dark romanticism, songs where The Bible and the tales of the Brothers Grimm seep into the everyday world. The thread running through them all is Rennie’s poetry. That same strange and haunting near-fairytale poetry, all the more beautiful and unsettling because it mixes the most everyday images with the most surreal and otherworldly.
Rennie described their last album Singing Bones as being intended, “to rip holes between this world and the next with its songs of haunted Wal-Marts, lovers who chase the fire in streetlights, the madness of very deep holes, a lake that can only be visited in dreams and the shadows that whisper inside a modern office building.”
She and Brett live together on a quiet street in Albuquerque, New Mexico where they are currently recording their next album. They also appear in the film Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus, which follows the musician Jim White on a road trip through the churches, coalmines and bayous of the South.
She has kindly allowed Laika Poetry Review to reproduce two short stories, "Web Of Gold" and "4 Piece Dinette Set $799.99," from her short story collection Evil (Black Hole Press).
For more information drop by:
http://www.handsomefamily.com/

Copyright Rennie Sparks 2001

Jakob Van Hoddis - Part Two

2005-12-16T12:49:00.000Z

From 1915 to 1922 Jakob was accepted into the family of the rector Emil Siegling and was privately cared for in Frankenheim village at the edge of Thueringer Forest. He avoided conscription and spent the duration of the war here and it is likely at this stage his mental illness actually saved his life just as later it would seal his fate. After many peaceful years here his mental health deteriorated further, it is said he became known for running at high speed through the town and became noisy and disruptive at night. After a disturbed episode he was moved away, leaving one last poem as a gift for Elizabeth Siegling, the rector’s daughter.

In the cities of Germany following the cessation of the war Expressionism was finally exploding into mainstream culture. While Van Hoddis and the Neu Club had been influential in artistic circles they remained a purely underground phenomenon. A new form of Expressionism, known as Die Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity), had seized the imagination of those who had seen hell in the war and for whom all the old ideas, for which they were suffered, appeared fraudulent and in need of demolition. With the abdication of the Kaiser the Weimar Republic was formed, a state haunted by the deaths and defeat of the war and yet a place paradoxically where everything appeared possible.

In 1918 the sailors mutinied forcing the beleagured Kaiser to abdicate and flee to Holland. In Bavaria the aged left-wing editor and theatre critic Kurt Eisner organised the overthrow of the government declaring the region a socialist republic. After bringing in relatively moderate socialist policies Eisner was assassinated by a fanatical right wing extremist Anton Count Arco-Valley, who was linked to the faux-mystical sect The Thule Society.

A brief period ensued when the region was headed by a group of “coffee-house intellectual” socialists including the Expressionist playwright Ernst Toller, the anarchist poet Erich Muhsam and the translator of Shakespeare Gustav Landauer. Perhaps the most refreshingly insane government of all time they included a Finance Minister who believed money should be free and a Minister for Education who opened the universities to everyone. The new Foreign Minister Dr Lipp had been brought straight from an asylum. Filling his offices with red carnations he dispatched telegrams to the Pope and Lenin complaining that the keys to his ministerial toilet had been stolen. The final straw came when he announced, “I have declared war on Wurrtemburg and Switzerland because these dogs have not at once loaned me sixty locomotives. I am certain we will be victorious. Furthermore I will ask the Pope with whom I am well acquainted to grant his blessing for this victory.”
Lipp was promptly sent back to the asylum. After a brave and successful defence against a right-wing insurrection, in which Toller personally lead his troops into battle, communist rivals conspired to overthrow the government.

The professional revolutionary Eugen Levine assumed leadership, ordering luxury apartments to be given to the homeless and seizing control of factories. He also ordered the assassination of many of Munich’s former aristocratic leaders. With the aid of the proto-fascist ex-soldiers militia the Freikorps and the self styled “White Guards of Capitalism” the Weimar government brutally suppressed the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Such were the amassed numbers and firepower of the invading troops that the streets were already deserted as they entered. Everyone had gone into hiding. A few hundred die-hard Reds made a last stand at the central railway station but they didn’t stand a chance. Having massacred them the Freikorps then went on a killing spree leaving 1000 dead in their wake and 800 awaiting execution. Landauer was taken to Stadelheim Prison where he was tortured and shot, his body left to rot in the prison courtyard. Levine was executed by a firing squad his last words, “Long live the world revolution!” Toller was sentenced to death but the firing squad refused to fire. His sentence was commuted to five years which he spent producing plays like the Man and The Masses. Years later he escaped Germany via Republican Spain and crossed the path of the young William S Burroughs before hanging himself with his bathrobe cord in a New York bathroom.

Other horrors abounded in the fledgling state. Pieter Kurten, the vampire of Dusseldorf, preyed on his child victims, the cannibal Karl Denke sold smoked human flesh as goat meat while a failed postcard painter called Adolf Hitler would soon begin agitating in the beerhalls and offices of Munich.

Into this chaotic climate came the only book of Van Hoddis’ to be published during his lifetime. Compiled from various readings and journal contributions the collection Weltende had an inspirational effect on post-war poets and artists. Van Hoddis was hailed as a prophet of the World War and a genius by the poets of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich who read his works in tribute at their gatherings. Georg Heym even had a resurgence with the release of his novella The Thief and the poetry collection Marathon, an unlikely feat considering he’d been dead for half a dozen years.

It was in 1920 however that the real impact of Van Hoddis’ work was felt. Weltende and four other poems appeared in Kurt Pinthus’ seminal Expressionist anthology Menscheitdammerung which, in trademark Expressionist fashion, could be translated as either the Twilight of Mankind or the ironic Dawn of Humanity. The collection was indisputably brilliant and became an instant classic. It contained a wealth of fantastic poetry but the real praise came for the two lost heroes of the movement: Georg Heym for his Umbra Vitae, in which people stare up at comets then commit suicide as the seas and trees die around them, and Van Hoddis for his five poems.

It was the first time thousands of people had access to the work and the effect was electrifying. They burst into a world their creators could only have dreamt about all those years earlier. Expressionism was everywhere. In the cinema you could watch the beautiful lunacy of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Fritz Lang’s tale of terror and hysteria M, you could listen to the distorted dissonant polyphonics of the composers Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, at theatres and galleries you could see the plays of the newly released Ernst Toller (such as Transfiguration with its Dance Of The Skeletons), the wood carvings and bronze sculptures of Ernst Barlach, the haunting paintings and woodcuts of Kathe Kollwitz, Oskar Kokoschka’s The Bride of The Wind, Conrad Felixmuller’s Death of the Poet Walter Rheiner or the paintings of Die Brucke (The Bridge) and Die Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). You could even see it in the streets in buildings such as the remarkable Einstein Tower designed by Eric Mendelsohn. And there was an immense beauty in it all. It is often thought that Expressionism was anti-beauty but it was not. Rather it was against false beauty, against sentimental picture postcard fabrications that hide the harshness of life, against beauty that only a few rich and privileged individuals can really enjoy. As Bertolt Brecht asked back then, “What times are these when to talk about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence on so many things?”

The distortion and criticism of reality, which Expressionism had initiated, continued further into the abstractions and chaos of Dadaism, a subversive half-lunatic artform. Dada was the mad unruly stepchild of Expressionism. Artists from John Heartfield to Georg Grosz employed various techniques from collages to painting to word cut-ups to expose the corruption and hypocrisy of the old order. Their works often portrayed bloated businessmen and generals feasting on banquets and prostitutes while mutilated limbless veterans begged on the streets. It was all about confronting the whole rotten regimented edifice that was this post-war German society. This implicitly involved attacking the institutions of Church and State. During a religious service in Berlin Cathedral the pastor asked rhetorically, “What does Jesus Christ mean to us today?”
To which the head Dadaist Johannes Baader stood up and shouted, “To your sort, he doesn’t mean a damned thing!”

While the country was in the throes of a cultural renaissance socially and politically Weimar Germany was terminally ill from its birth. The leaders of the revolutionary Sparkatist movement Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were captured by the Freikorps whilst planning the overthrow of the government. Liebknecht was tortured, shot through the head and dumped at a mortuary. Luxemburg, one of the finest Marxist thinkers and a tireless advocate for social change, was raped, tortured and then battered to death with rifle butts. Her body was thrown off Lichenstein Bridge into Landwehr Canal. It was washed up days later. In dealing with the threat of revolution the Weimar government had alienated itself from the left and allied itself with barbaric elements of the right wing, the precise elements that were constantly seeking the Republic’s destruction. It was a Faustian pact and they had sold their souls to the devil. Further disasters followed. Hyperinflation had meant that by 1923 German money was becoming useless. Prices could double in the space of an hour. Eventually it cost 200 billion marks to buy a loaf of bread and beggars threw 100, 000 mark notes into the gutter. A period of prosperity eventually returned in the later years of the twenties. But it was illusory and ended dramatically with the domino effects of the Wall Street Crash.

A sign of the times was the opening of a cabaret in Berlin in 1929 called the Katakombe an admission that, from now on, artists and radicals would be like the Christians in Rome. As Georg Grosz foretold, “Dusk falls on liberalism.”
For various reasons (fear of inflation or economic depression, bitterness at the arguably unfair Versailles Diktats, the fear of Bolshevism, hatred of socialism and anything liberal, latent anti-Semitism, the desire to plunder Eastern Europe, the promise of “living space” to the east of a new Third Reich) the middle classes were embracing the Nazis. It was explicitly clear to anyone, from his speeches and his book Mein Kampf, what Hitler intended to do should he gain power. And yet they were beginning to vote for him in their millions.

Van Hoddis sat out the beginning of the end of the world in some comfort. From 1922 he had been staying in private care with the restaurant and bar owner Julius Dieterle in Tubingen. After an incident with his neighbours, on the 15th June 1927, he was brought by the police to be treated at the local University. There he was noted as a jovial patient who spent his time playing chess and writing poetry. He was also diagnosed as schizophrenic with the words “final condition” added to his report. His move to the Christophsbad Clinic in Goeppingen marked the date of his permanent institutionalisation in mental hospitals. His mother had lost all the money she had inherited from her husband during the hyperinflation and effectively penniless she was forced to live with her daughters. Thus she was in no position to care for Jakob and so was forced to have her oldest surviving son sectioned.

Within six years the Nazis were voted into power. Though they never received an electoral majority on their own they came within a hairs breadth of it and seized power aided by conservative and catholic parties. In the same year Jakob was transferred to the nursing home sanctuary of Israelitische Heil-und Pflegeanstalten in Bendorf -Sayn near Koblenz. Almost immediately the Nazis began to implement their persecution of Jewish Germans. With Van Hoddis in the apparent safety of an isolated Jewish care home his family were forced to flee to Palestine. His mother never recovered from the experience and died several months later in Tel Aviv.

Jakob Van Hoddis was a radical poet, he was Jewish and he suffered from mental illness. Just one of these factors would have almost certainly guaranteed his death at the hands of the Nazis. Jakob’s fate was sealed threefold.

At the beginning of 1939 the Nazis officially initiated the murder of “mentally deficient,” “racially valueless” and handicapped children. Operated by the Reich Committee For Scientific Research Into Hereditary And Severe Constitutional Diseases under the codename “T4” children and adults suffering from mental illness were subjected to “mercy killings” which initially involved being herded into sealed trucks and poisoned with carbon monoxide. It was effectively a trial run for Auschwitz.

The Nazi treatment of the Jews had incrementally descended from boycotting Jewish businesses to stealing Jewish property, forcing Jews into ghettos and finally sending millions of Jewish men, women and children to the concentration camps and the gas chambers.

Writers and artists suffered individual fates. The Nazis believed that Expressionism was part of Kulturbolschewismus or Bolshevik culture. For the philistine Nazis Expressionism was treasonous due to its anti-war, humanist message, its acceptance of the Jews and its association with the decadence of Weimar. Many artists were targeted though the persecutions varied. Some were blacklisted from employment or forbidden to paint, some had their works paraded for derision in Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibitions (one visitor suggested placing the artists next to their work so the public could spit in their faces) or incinerated in mass burnings such as the one, which took place in Berlin’s Opernplatz. Some of the figures on the Nazi hitlist made it into hiding or escaped before it was too late. Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud got out while the going was good.

Jakob’s friend the painter Ludwig Meidner made it to England in 1939. The rest of his life was lived in varying degrees of poverty. His rediscovery by the art world occurred decades later. At an arts festival in Germany in the 60s a debate took place over the work of the late artist when suddenly an old man with a white moustache announced his existence by shouting from the back of the hall, “I’m still alive, I’m Meidner!”

Kurt Hiller, the activist and founder of the Neu Club, was high up the Nazi’s hit list of “subversives” the very first group to be targeted due to his left-wing activism and his founding of the German gay liberation movement. In the very year they took power he was sent to a concentration camp. Miraculously he was released by mistake and escaped to London. He lived until 1972.

Less fortunate was the poet Ernst Blass, “the German Verlaine” as Hiller had called him, a founding member of the Neu Club and a Jew, who died in a Jewish sanatorium of a lung disease shortly before the Holocaust. Others such as the writers Walter Benjamin, Walter Hasenclever, Stefan Zweig and the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner took their own lives rather than be captured.

Many artists were murdered in the concentration camps: the writer Josef Capek, the playwright Jura Soyfer, the composer Gideon Klein, the surrealist poet Robert Desnos, the painter Felix Nussbaum, the poet and critic Max Jacob, the actress Dora Gerson, the writer Milena Jesenska, the anarchist poet Erich Muhsam, the novelist and painter Bruno Schulz, the painter Charlotte Salomon… to name but a few of the thousands.

They came for Jakob on the 30th of April 1942. He was deported along with 500 fellow patients and nursing staff of the Jewish care home. None of them were ever seen again. It is thought they were taken to the ghetto of Krasnystaw near Lublin, a tiny sector of the town known as Grobla where Jewish families were crammed into small wooden houses with no electricity, the only water being that of the river. From there they were transported, almost immediately, to Sobibor extermination camp. The camp functioned primarily to kill as many Jewish men, women and children as possible. It is thought that he and all the staff and inmates of the hospital were murdered in the following weeks. The horrors of Sobibor, and the other concentration camps, defy description. Aside from the gas chambers reported deaths in Sobibor included stabbings, forcing inmates off rooftops, sewing people up with starved rats, using human beings as target practise. Whipping and burning inmates to death was not uncommon while babies were pulled apart and thrown onto rubbish pits. A year after the last sighting of Jakob there was a rebellion by Jews in the camp. The prisoners lured individual members of the SS guard to the tailor and cobbler areas and split their skulls, one by one, with an axe. When the alarm was tripped they forced their way through the wire and escaped into the surrounding forest. They killed twenty guards in the uprising. Eighty prisoners immediately lost their lives as snipers in the watchtowers opened fire and as they ran the hundred yards through the adjacent minefield. Of those who escaped one hundred and seventy prisoners were hunted down and executed. Some of the escapees, having got lost in the forest, walked in circles and inadvertently returned to the camp and their tormentors. Shortly after reinforcements arrived and liquidated the camp, murdering all the inmates that remained. Of the three hundred and twenty people who escaped only fifty-three survived. Jakob was not one of them. Nor were any of his transport. (For more information on the holocaust including refutations of the cretins who deny that it happened see http://www.holocaust-history.org/).

Today, outside Germany, Jakob Van Hoddis is barely remembered. He appears on rare occasions only in the appendices, footnotes or the indexes of reference books. His poetry is out of print and untranslated in English. There are various reasons why such an important poet and cultural figure is so neglected today. Much of his work was lost or destroyed during the years of Nazi rule, the Second World War and the Holocaust. But there is also a sense of wilful neglect, perhaps not a deliberate exclusion but certainly a tendency to put the more traumatic details of the past to sleep. If we forget Van Hoddis he may as well cease to have ever existed. This will mean the Nazis have achieved their goal of wiping him from existence.

Thankfully there are many people who are skilled in the art of remembrance. The New Synagogue in Berlin (run by the Centrum Judaicum Foundation) ran a major retrospective of his life and work in 2001 featuring photos, drawings, paintings and poems. To accompany the exhibition a catalogue and CD of his life and work, conceived by Irene Stratenwerth and accompanied by music composed by Vlatko Kucan, were released.
The theatrical reading with cello accompaniment Jakob Van Hoddis- A German Fate has been recently arranged and performed by Antonin Dick and Sonny Thet while in Achim von Borries’ 2003 film Love In Thoughts the poetry of Van Hoddis and Heym serves as inspiration for the tragic protagonists.

There is something Expressionist about the post 9 11 world. The resurgence of religious fundamentalism, in its Islamic and Christian forms, has made the Expressionist’s assertion that god is dead as shocking and revolutionary as ever. And with the daily appearance of tsunamis, pandemics, biological and nuclear weapons, “the war on terror,” institutionalised torture, fish speaking of the end of the world in Hebrew, the Virgin Mary appearing on fajitas the time is right for resurrecting the work of Van Hoddis and the Neu Club. For the apocalypse, it appears, has returned.

- Darran Anderson

The above article has been compiled from a variety of sources. Much was obtained by trawling through German documents, a task made infinitely more difficult by the fact I do not speak a word of German. Anyone with any corrections, feedback or information on Van Hoddis or on anyone mentioned here feel free to contact laikapoetryreview@hotmail.com

Jakob Van Hoddis and The Neu Club Revolution

2005-12-16T12:48:00.000Z

Jakob Van Hoddis and the Neu Club Revolution.

German Expressionism was one of the most incendiary and imaginative cultural movements of the 20th century, awash with dark forests, clay figures that come to life, men who wake to find they’ve turned into giant cockroaches, cities that are washed away by storms. There were many precursors: the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, the Hebrew stories of floods and Golems, The Book of Revelations, the paintings of Edvard Munch, Bosch, Durer and Grunewald but the real birthplace of the movement was amidst a group of friends and poets in the bars of Berlin in 1909. Christened the Neu Club the prophet of the group was the young poet Jakob Van Hoddis. Tragically by the time Expressionism took hold just ten years later many members of this group were dead and Jakob, who kick-started it all with his short masterpiece Weltende (End Of The World), had already slipped into a spiral of madness and persecution that would end in the Nazi extermination camp Sobibor.

Doris Kempner, a teacher from Silesia, gave birth to two twin boys in Berlin, 1887. One was pronounced stillborn. The other survived. He was named Hans Davidsohn. His family were respectable, Jewish, left-leaning liberals. His father Hermann Davidsohn was a doctor, who had volunteered to treat German soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and had run a clinic for treating down and outs. The oldest child in the family Hans was extremely intelligent but his academic studies were adversely affected by a rebellious temperament. Forced to leave Freidrich Wilhelm High School in 1905 after continual conflicts with his teachers he broke off his architecture studies to study philosophy. While studying he began to write poetry influenced, at first, by Stefan George and the Art Nouveau movement, which had flourished in Vienna, Paris and Barcelona at the turn of the century. It was there he met the activist Kurt Hiller. Together they set up the Neu Club in 1909, an underground literary group who socialised in the Café des Westerns, Berlin. The finest emerging talents of European poetry were members or affiliates of the collective including Hiller, Davidson, Georg Heym, Ernst Blass, Alfred Lichenstein, Ernst Balcke and Erin Loewenson (who went under the pseudonym Golo Gangi).

The abundant ideas of the Neu Club would find expression in the Neopathetic Cabaret. What would begin as an informal gathering of like-minded spirits would become the epicentre of an artistic revolution with hundreds of spectators assembling at each successive meeting. It was baptised by Hiller after the Ancient Greek concept of “pathos, not as a grave gesture of suffering prophet’s sons but as universal celebration, a Pan-like laughter.” Influenced by Nietzsche’s attacks on morality and Rimbaud’s calls for the intensification of life and the rational derangement of the senses the Neopathetic Cabaret was the first blossoming of Expressionist ideas and talent. Through a combination of poetry readings, acting, music and drinking they expounded their philosophies.

Industrial civilisation was seen as having become something corrupt and decaying and decadent. To create a new world the old one would have to be destroyed a sentiment embodied by the anarchist Bakunin’s phrase, “The urge to destroy is a creative passion.” Combined with alienation was a sense of spiritual destitution in a world where, as Nietzsche had declared, God was dead. Only through a new way of thinking, even a shared suffering, could society be levelled and a brotherhood of man established. These were the concerns that fuelled the Expressionists disruption of established values, their rebellion against everything they saw as belonging to the old, corrupt order. The revolt against timid impressionism, the inhumanity of materialism, militarism, even civilisation itself reached apocalyptic levels in their work.

The Neopathetic Cabaret only existed for nine evenings in a two year period but by the end it had developed into a cultural spectacle that articulated the thoughts of, and influenced, an entire generation. In 1910 at the age of 23 Hans Davidsohn produced what was later called the anthem of the Neopathetic Cabaret. It was called Weltende meaning “End Of The World.” First published in the magazine The Democrat Weltende came to encapsulate all that was wonderful about the Neu Club. In a mere eight lines the poem manages to be a vision of the apocalypse and an attack on respectable bourgeois society. It is written in a strangely calm, passive way, as if the narrator is witnessing the end of everything but doesn’t seem to mind. The effect is at once amusing and haunting, like a newspaper account of Munch’s The Scream. It reflected the ominous signs and portents of that year. Halley’s Comet had appeared in the skies. Einstein had begun shattering Newton’s laws, the very foundation of physics. The Seine had flooded through Paris, filling all but one line of the Metro with water. The Titanic sank. When Hans read Weltende in the cabaret the effect was electrifying, capturing the imagination of those assembled, a soon-to-be lost generation who stood at the brink of annihilation in the First World War. This was no ordinary poetry reading. It was the bridge between Rimbaud and John Lydon roaring Anarchy in the UK. It was a call to arms and a declaration of war.

Weltende (End of the World)

The hat flies off the bourgeois’ pointed head.
There is a sound that shrieks through all the air.
Tiles tumble from rooftops and shatter in two.
And on the coasts, we read, the tide is rising.

The storm has come, the wild seas lurch ashore
to crush the bloated dams.
Most people have colds, their noses running.
The trains plunge off the bridges.

Hans’ dedication to his writing had its price. In 1911 he was unceremoniously kicked out of university due to “laziness.” His fortunes took another, more dramatic, turn for the worse with the death shortly after of his father. Understandably devastated he reacted by changing his name, creating the vaguely aristocratic-sounding pseudonym Jakob Van Hoddis, an anagram of Hans Davidsohn (and possibly a tribute to the Expressionist pioneer Vincent Van Gogh). On a literary level his reputation had soared. Many of his poems (“The Death Angel,” “Aurora,” “The Dreaming”) had been published by the new rival groups to the Neu Club: the experimental Sturm, Revolution and the politically radical Aktion. His vaudeville cycle of the time Varietezyklus is the earliest recorded poem to praise the emerging artform that would become Cinema. Ironically the popularity of the Neopathetic Cabaret had ensured the downfall of the Neu Club. Tensions and rivalries began to overcome the group and their notoriety had ensured that soon there were similar cabarets springing up all over the country. Less than two years after its creation the Neu Club was capsizing.

The last act came on the 16th of January 1912. Georg Heym was one of the most prodigious talents of the group, having published The Eternal Day the previous year. Sharing a similar respectable but rebellious background he and Van Hoddis had become close friends, a year earlier Heym had dedicated his poem Those to Jakob. Aside from a promising literary career Heym was learning Chinese for planned diplomatic service in the Far East. He had also fallen in love with Hildegard Krohn, to whom he dedicated what would turn out to be his final poems. Then on January 16th Heym and, fellow Neu Club poet, Ernst Balcke went ice-skating on the frozen lake The Havel in Berlin. At some point the ice broke and Balcke fell into the freezing water becoming trapped under the ice. In a vain attempt to save his friend’s life Heym too was killed.

Shortly after being informed of the death of his friends Van Hoddis suffered his first breakdown, voluntarily admitting himself to a psychiatric nursing centre in Wolbeck. He returned briefly to Berlin but was sectioned after threatening his mother during a psychotic episode. He was taken, against his will, to the mental hospital Waldhaus Nikolasse while his friend the poet Erwin Loewenson petitioned psychiatrists for help. Such was his following that his forcible hospitalisation (“Gewaltsam ins Irrenhaus”) appeared as a headline in the latest issue of Aktion. A month later, on the 7th of December he escaped from the hospital with the police and his family reportedly in pursuit. Travelling extensively to Berlin, Paris and Heidelberg he returned to Berlin in the spring, filled bizarrely with a religious fervour for Catholicism. During that time he visited Munich, his effective second home and the radical, avant-garde capital of Germany at the time. It is likely he was drawn to the city by Lotte Pritzel (an artist, maker of small wax dolls and the subject of a poem by Rilke) and Emmy Hennings (poet, musician, writer, founder of the Cabaret Voltaire and later wife of the Dadaist Hugo Ball) both of whom were talented beautiful women who he had been infatuated with since the beginning of the Neu Club. Sadly in both cases his love was unrequited.

It was at this time he developed a friendship with the painter Ludwig Meidner. Both were Jewish, relative outsiders and crucially both were haunted with thoughts of the impending apocalypse. A notoriously eccentric individual Meidner had been friends with Modigliani whilst living in Paris and had returned to Berlin to provide illustrations for the Aktion publication. His own paintings, for example The Burning City which was painted around that time, were like visual incarnations of Van Hoddis’ verse: urban days of reckoning filled with collapsing buildings and writhing civil servants and skies bursting into flame above cobbled streets. “Sometimes I feel like hopping out of the fourth floor window,” he once wrote offering a glimpse into his psyche. Van Hoddis found in him a like-minded soul, a person who could look out the window and see not a summer’s day in Berlin “but a thousand skeletons jigging in a row. Many graves and incinerated cities writhing across the plains.” He was perhaps not the most conducive company for Van Hoddis’ unstable mental state but he was fascinating and inspiring. A brief period of activity followed with Van Hoddis’ work appearing in Aktion, Sturm and a host of other journals. His appearance reading poetry at an Aktion evening resulted in his dismissal from the Neu Club, a largely symbolic act considering the group was effectively defunct by then. Heym and Balcke were dead whilst Hiller was preoccupied with his emergent left wing political activism, which would result in the creation of the Linkspazifismus– the Leftist Pacifist movement against imperialist wars. Yet the symbolic exile no doubt affected the sensitive Van Hoddis and could only have made him feel increasingly paranoid and isolated.

All the intrigues of the left-field artistic cabarets of Germany were drowned out by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Nations on both sides of the conflict were seized by waves of populist pro-war hysteria. Germany was no exception. The desire for a share of imperialist plunder and the mistaken belief that war would be over by Christmas fuelled the frenzy. As the various armies of Europe mobilised to commit collective suicide the artistic underground was thrown into chaos, the young talents of a generation were conscripted and thrown into the threshing machines for the benefit of a handful of businessmen and aristocrats. Avoiding conscription and having lost touch with his friends Van Hoddis wandered aimlessly around Munich before his family had him moved to private care in Thuringia. He led a quiet life there: walking in the forests, playing with schoolchildren, sketching and writing. At the same time all across Europe the initial successes of the German Schlieffen Plan had faltered and the hostile armies faced each other in the stalemate of trench warfare. Between them stretched the hell of No Man’s Land.
It was in such a location, at Vermandovillers on the Somme, that the poet and the Neu Club associate Alfred Lichtenstein was killed shortly into the war. He was 25. In his poetry he shared Van Hoddis’ sense of approaching catastrophe but the end of the world would come sooner for Lichenstein. Heavily inspired by Weltende his poem Prophecy foretold the horrors of the First World War that would consume him and millions of others, “Sometimes I have premonitions/a deathstorm advancing from the distant north…the walls of all the buildings crack/fish are rotting in the streams/everything comes to its own sticky end/screeching buses are overturned.”
The spot where he lost his life was retaken four years later by an English regiment commanded by the poet Wilfred Owen who was killed shortly afterwards just one week before the war ended. That same location is the final resting place for 26,000 German soldiers alone. Though sheltered from the war Van Hoddis could not remain immune from its effects. Almost every family in Europe was affected and the Davidsons were no exception. A world away from the flooded trenches, the rats and the shell-shocked in his beautiful wooded surroundings Van Hoddis received news that his younger brother Ludwig had been killed whilst serving at the Front.

A curious aspect of the war that would decimate the Neu Club’s generation is that it was sparked off by one of their contemporaries. On the 28th of June 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia were shot to death by a Serbian revolutionary on the streets of Sarajevo giving the competing empires of Europe an excuse to go to war. The young assassin was Gavrilo Princip. Calling themselves The Black Hand he and his fellow conspirators were the same age as Von Hoddis and the members of the Neu Club. Similarly both groups were doomed: The Black Hand conspirators were all dying of TB when they acted while the fate of the Neu Club members came in many tragic forms. And both groups were apostles of Nietzsche, that great disruptor of order. Princip and Van Hoddis both recited and ultimately lived out Nietzsche’s poem Ecce Homo with its lines “Insatiable as a flame I burn and consume myself.”

Part Two

Laika Poetry Review

2005-11-23T18:41:00.000Z

There’s a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up.
- Anton Chekov (The Three Sisters)

Laika (pronounced LYE-KUH) Poetry Review is currently accepting submissions.
For details click "Aims of Laika Poetry Review/Submission Guidelines."
Issue 1 will appear online in the New Year. It will contain a study of the life and works of the forgotten German Expressionist poet Jakob von Hoddis as well as a wealth of new poems and short stories from around the world. Watch the skies.

Links - Poetry Journals

2005-11-23T18:39:00.000Z

“Life is only interesting at the edges” – Francis Bacon.

http://www.tarpaulinsky.com
http://www.gumballpoetry.com
http://www.dogmatika.com/dm/
http://www.subterraneanquarterly.com
http://www.deaddrunkdublin.com
http://www.drunkenboat.com
http://www.montereybaypoetry.com
http://www.pragueliteraryreview.com
http://www.laurahird.com/
Website of the writer Laura Hird (Nail, Born Free) and the most comprehensive guide to all things exciting in contemporary literature.
http://www.hodmandod.blogspot.com/
Scarecrow (Reviews :: Fiction :: Poetry :: Art :: Comment ::)

http://www.threepennyreview.com
http://www.thebluemoon.com
http://www.oysterboyreview.com
http://www.monsoonmag.com
http://www.opencity.org
http://www.bornmagazine.org
http://www.poetlauren.co.uk/
Website of the poet Lauren McCarthy, author of "The Haunted Birdhouse."

http://www.absinthe-literary-review.com
http://www.qlrs.com
http://www.voleur-de-feu.com/
http://www.ravennapress.com/snowmonkey/pages/newworks.php
http://levity.com/corduroy
http://www.acarts.org/mystic/index.html
http://www.uidaho.edu/fugue

http://towerofbabel.com/
http://www.bigbridge.org/
http://www.bullfightreview.com
http://www.caffeinedestiny.com
http://www.failedpromise.org/index.html
http://www.dreamingmethods.com/
http://www.eclectica.org

Dee Rimbaud/ AA Independent Press Guide:
Website of iconoclastic Scottish writer and artist Dee Rimbaud
includes the AA Independent Press Guide, a comprehensive guide to over 2,000 literary and genre magazines and publishers from around the world.
http://www.thunderburst.co.uk/

http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/
http://www.42opus.com
http://webdelsol.com/5_trope/
http://www.fifthstreetreview.com
http://www.failbetter.com
http://www.corpse.org
http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com

http://www.elimae.com
http://www.atticusbooks.com/gargoyle/gargoyle.html
http://www.theglut.com
http://langtech.dickinson.edu/sirena/index.htm
http://www.gutcult.com
http://www.sleepingfish.net
http://www.kitchensinkmag.com

http://lit.konundrum.com/
http://www.slope.org
http://www.lapetitezine.org
http://www.smallspiralnotebook.com
http://www.blackdresspress.com
http://poetsonfire.blogspot.com/
http://www.litrag.com
http://www.freewebs.com/lilylitreview/

http://www.sporkmag.com
http://www.milkmag.org
http://www.nthposition.com
http://www.monkeybicycle.net
http://www.storysouth.com
http://www.mipoesias.com
http://www.stickmanreview.com

http://www.3rdbed.com
http://www.wordforword.info
http://www.pompompress.com
http://www.pindeldyboz.com
http://www.2river.org
http://www.threecandles.org
http://www.poeticamagazine.com/
http://www.octopusmagazine.com

http://www.plumrubyreview.com
http://www.3ammagazine.com/
http://www.crowdmagazine.com
http://www.magmapoetry.com
http://www.lungfull.org
http://www.fivefingersreview.org
http://www.26magazine.com
http://www.jubilat.org/n10/
http://gavroche.org/zine/

Aims of Laika Poetry Review / Submission Guidelines

2005-11-23T14:46:00.000Z

“I grow weary of the old tongues.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“Rock and roll adolescents storm into the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face. They open zoo's, insane asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers, chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot out lighthouses, turn sewers into water supply, administer injections with bicycle pumps, they shit on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass with treaties, pacts, alliances." - William S Burroughs (Naked Lunch)

What are the aims of the Laika Poetry Review?

Laika Poetry Review is an online poetry and short story journal that seeks to promote a literary counterculture. Our inspirations are the alternative poets, the prophets rather than the kings, the disgraces and embarrassments of their day who chose the ditch to the middle-of the road. We wish to revive the French tradition of the "poetes maudits" (damned poets) those like Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire. It is a counter-culture that stretches right back to Li Po, who drowned in the Yangtze River while attempting to drunkenly embrace the moon. We believe poetry must be seized from the snobs and post-modern charlatans who have stolen it. In Laika we will seek to showcase writing that is exciting and accessible.

We will promote a diverse range of work but will primarily search for writers fuelled by rebellion and intoxication, who’ve no concern for respectability or being bought and sold. We are more interested in writers who get their kicks from the Beta Band, Jane's Addiction, Iggy Pop or Arcade Fire than from T S Eliot. It will be by and for those who have no interest in smug elitist literary cliques. We are particularly eager to hear from eager young writers who have been banging their heads against established poetry outlets to no avail. We encourage work that combines boundless imagination with the realisation that the writer is the natural enemy of the tyrant, the puritan and the materialist. We seek to be more Brautigan than Betjeman, more Holub than Hughes.

Writing can, and must, follow film, which has become democratised with the advent of cheap digital media. In 1977 there was a brilliant directive by Mark Perry on the cover of the punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, it demonstrated, "This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band." The same ethos that revolutionised music is needed for literature. Take a pen, a page, the contents of your head, now start writing. In the absence of writers to believe in we must become them ourselves.

- Darran Anderson.

Submission Guidelines.

We accept original poetry contributions and short stories if they are particularly good and relatively short (less than 2000 words). No chick lit, no science fiction, no abstract self-indulgent pretentious stuff or introspective angst please. No poems about flowers, having to take prozac or working in an office please. No haikus. First preference will be given to poems that do not contain the word "I." We are looking for work that surveys the world rather than indulging in introspection. Any blatant diatribes against say war or capitalism will have to be almost impossibly good to make it. We want you to be as imaginative as possible, think magical realism with a radical edge. Surprise us.

We regret, at present, we cannot offer any financial payment for accepted works. All work must be previously unpublished and must be all the persons own original work. We accept simultaneous submissions but please please inform us immediately if it is published elsewhere. Due to the large amount of correspondence we regret we may not be able to reply to all mail however we will try our best. Do not be disheartened. Send all submissions (no more than 6 pieces at one time plus a brief bio) to laikapoetryreview at hotmail dot com clearly labelled and spaced on the body of the email (no attachments) and title all emails “Poetry Submissions.” Due to the danger of viruses we cannot open any work that does not have this title. We welcome work from all over the world and accept any poems in any language as long as a high quality English translation is provided.

Legal Note.

We reserve the right to publish and reproduce submitted material in electronic formats. Upon publication rights revert to the author. We do however reserve the right to archive the work online. By submitting your work to Laika Poetry Review, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to all submission guidelines.

Who was Laika?

2005-11-23T14:44:00.000Z

We are all in the gutter but some of us are gazing at the stars – Oscar Wilde

Who was Laika?

Laika (pronounced Lye-Kuh) was the first living creature to make it into space. Scooped off the streets of Moscow the stray dog was selected for the mission aboard Sputnik Two. Despite answering to the name Kudryavka she was known as Laika, meaning “barker” in Russian. Though she was a mongrel it is likely she descended from huskies native to the frozen forests of the Siberian taiga. It is a matter of much debate as to how long she survived in space: some claiming she died of overheating and panic after a few hours while official sources claim she lasted four days. Either way she was the first living creature to live and die in outer space.

A black box inside my mind records the time we spend together
- Steve Mason (The Beta Band - To You Alone)

Why Laika?

As well as being a tribute to the Soviet wonderdog there is something in the story of Laika that symbolises how ridiculous and tragic and wonderful life can be: a stray dog being snatched from the gutters of Moscow alleys to be fired up amidst the stars without a clue as to where she was. It is these qualities, somewhere between the celestial and the subterranean, between dog and god, between the gutter and the stars, that the Laika Poetry Review seeks to capture.