babylon crashing

“Mare mecum ~ The Sea is with Me”

Q: As a poet, which performance place do you like to recite your poems?

In the beginning …

… it really came down to which location had the best acoustics, since more often than not you’re trying to perform while a dozen different background noises do their best to drown you out. Book shops (the photos on the left were taken at Schuler’s Books) were better than cafes and their espresso machines that would make the most horrific noises every time someone ordered a coffee. The Milan train station, on the other hand, while having fabulous acoustics was a hopeless cause since the audience clearly didn’t come here to listen to a lisping American read poetry in English. They were more concerned about getting to their trains and I was simply one more obstacle in their way.

I would say that the most interesting place I’ve preformed, so far, is at the sacred temple, Garni, dating back to pre-Christian Armenia.

I don’t actually have a whole lot of photos of myself performing; partly because we didn’t have camera phones back in the 1980s and early 90s but mainly because the friend of mine who did bring his camera wherever he went has since passed on and I had other things on my mind besides asking, “I know you’re actively dying but could you get your hospice nurse to look around your office and see if you have any photos of me?” Whatever photos he did take have long since vanished from this earth.

… and yes, in the last photo this is what Alcohol Bloat looks like. It would be several years after this photo was taken in the Muskegon public library (again, great acoustics) before I started Recovery and AA.

Love Diary

I never dreamed that I’d meet anyone as exciting as Ritchie! I couldn’t keep myself from falling helplessly in love …

Oh, Ritchie, how can anyone who sings and plays as beautiful as you do be so … so … cruel! Can’t you see how much I love you?

Groupies loved him!

The Catholic Church excommunicated him!

Beelzebub called him, “Bad to the Bone!”

Read: “Hootenanny in Hell!”

Obey!

Q: Do other Tarot readers notice how often the same cards appear in readings and some hardly ever?

Yes, I have. Take, for example, this one. It has never, ever, appeared in a reading up until now … mainly because I just designed it. Actually I redesigned it. In the Rider-Waite deck a Priestess sits on a Chair holding a Book of Knowledge (in this case, the Torah); however, I thought, not all cultures keep their wisdoms written down in big ol’ tomes, scrolls and dusty whatnots. Some use storytelling, poetry, mimes and interpretive dance.

In the old version a Woman dances with a Dog puppet while Behind her costumed Dog Dancers … dance. The biggest problem with this design was that I had to keep explaining what was happening. “Yes, that’s suppose to be a dog … no, seriously … yes, dancing. Whadda you mean it’s not exactly obvious?!” I had been thinking about how there are several cards in this deck that use sacred dances as central themes, one of them being The Sun (19).

In Japanese mythology, the sun goddess, Amaterasu, locks herself up in a cave, causing the world to suffer due to not having a sun, I suppose. The gods and humans turn up outside of Amaterasu’s cave but nothing will get her to leave until Ame-no-Uzume, being awesome, gets everyone to start a drunken brouhaha, with much risque dancing and jokes. They seem to be having such a good time that Amaterasu finally leaves her cave to investigate and thus the world doesn’t perish horribly (yet again).

This is what I wanted the new version of the High Priestess to reflect: a Priestess uses an Amaterasu puppet to tell a Sacred story while behind them the Dance is performed by two Shinto priests and a Shrine maiden (Miko).

Q: Who is poetry supposed to be interpreted for, or is it intended for a specific audience?

I can only speak for myself but when I started all this I assumed I was writing for the rest of you, “all the world’s a stage,” and similar nonsense. It mattered, I thought, if The Reader (that vague, ghostly figure) liked what I had to say. So I fretted and published and rewrote and published and fretted some more … which was fine, since I was in my Glam rock phase, back when Poetry as Performance was pivotal.

[flowers of my youth: alejandra, ziggy, robert, patti, federico.]

Oscar Wilde’s cosmic spectacle was fine; as motivations to write went it served me well … right up until my first crisis of the soul, when I discovered to my frustration that Extravaganza, in and of itself, could not speak the truths that I suddenly needed to say.

I think (though there’s no way to prove it) that when poets, first starting out, suddenly stop writing and go off and do something else it’s usually because they find that their whole reason for writing suddenly no longer pleases. What readers I had at the time didn’t enjoy my new poems about dying orphans in Armenia, which led to my botched suicide attempt. “Being sad for a while was one thing, but where was the humor? the erotic? the excess?” Therein lies the tension, I suppose, in the end who am I writing for?

Again, I can only speak for myself but, these days, if I’m not writing for an audience of 1 then I’m probably not writing at all.

In French, the whiskers of the Weird Sisters,
les Bacchantes, meant plush pubes; or so said
Sarah Bernhardt, saint of Sapphic pleasures.
It was Belle Époque slang, “a lush spread;”
back when Lady Macbeth was still called Camp.
Sex starved starlets chewed more than scenery
with, “shrew’d deceiver,” and, “outrageous vamp/
un'sex me here.” Débauchées. Gay Parée.
Quaint old terms. Like me. You, dear Sarah,
shook your head, though. “Aphrodite’s cloven
fern? That’s fra Leeds. It’s daft innuendoa.
French? Theur wri’ porn: schmaltzy, sad, maudlin.”
Schmaltzy? Trust me the dead know. Here Hell’s curse
roils each time we poets say, “Damn, new verse!”