Portland, Oregon's Orange Lining Art Project

“Hi Jason, We had over 1100 submissions of lines for the Orange Lining project and have chosen 103 for potential use.  Your line, EVERY RUIN IS A THING WE HAVE MADE, was selected, during our second round of reviews.”

I’m pleased to announce that a line from my book Salty as a Lip has been chosen “for potential use” for an art installation that will accompany a new light-rail (metro) extension deep into SE Portland, Oregon.

Other authors include people I’ve read with in Portland (e.g. Hurricane Katrina Benefit, Wordstock/Poetland) or whose work and professionalism I’ve admired over the years, and I’m honored to be listed among them:

Anatoly Molotkov, David Abel, Jules Boykoff, Kaia Sand, Laura Winter, Paulann Petersen, B.T. Shaw, and David Biespiel.

More info: http://orangelining.net/

April, the Kindest Month

2011 has been a year of mostly Mondays. Maybe something to do with the moon's closest hovering in decades... or simply a convergence of obstacles to test my endurance. Regardless, April promises a new mentor in my life, a second daughter. My little Zoe will be a big sister to.. baby Chloe.

On the poetic front, I'll be reading at the U.S. Embassy's American Center here in Prague, along with legendary Czech underground writer/musician/artist Pavel Zajíček and the notorious American fiction writer Brad Vice, to celebrate the release of a new Czech-English anthology (with a theme akin to 'self-exile') recently compiled and translated by poet-professors Matthew Sweney and Bob Hýsek.

2010 in Literary Terms

In terms of English-language literary endeavors in Prague, 2010 was a flourishing year, seeing multiple launches and events surrounding:

• GRASP Journal 
• the Rakish Angel Poetry Pamphlet Series
• the Czech issue of Ekleksographia (which I edited)
• The Return of Kral Majales: Prague's International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010 anthology
• VLAK Magazine
• and many other notable publications I am currently forgetting.

Czech Literature Portal interviewed me (in English) early in the year (Czech-language version of the interview here), followed by a an interview with Black Heart Magazine at summer's end.

Haggard & Halloo Publications (Austin, Texas, USA) released the first printing of my own first book, Salty as a Lip, which SOLD OUT by the end of the year!

After various readings during the year at Shakespeare & Sons (Rakish Angel and Prague Microfest), Globe Books (GRASP), Anglo-American University (AAU Library - Spring Series), and Radost (Kral Majales launch), I was invited to read at Ostrovy bez hranic (Islands Without Borders festival, in conjunction with Palacky University), in the Moravian city of Olomouc (eastern Czech Republic), an experience that has turned out to be loosely connected with my poetry starting to be published in Czech (e.g., January 2011 issue of KAM v Brně, as well as an upcoming dual-language anthology of "self-exiled" poets in Czech Republic). Hopefully, my work will eventually make its way also into Slovak and Polish.

Goth Poetry Generator

In an earlier post I provided a link to the Post-Modernism Essay Generator, which creates the kind of schlock written by many unfortunately aimless academics.

Well, here is a parallel machine geared for many of the black-clad hipster students who worship these sad professors... It's called the Goth-O-Matic Poetry Generator, and a few moments with it yields the kind of poetry many overworked editors must reject daily (in order to maintain some semblance of esteem in the literary landscape).

Types of goth poetry you can generate include:
Supernatural Violence & Horror
The Feeling Very Sorry For Yourself
The Fear of Religious Persecution
The Eternal Love of Vampires
The Black Abyss of Righteous Hatred

Cool Words

or Aeon Iota

A cool word is abscond, I said
to which Stephen responded with timepiece

Yes, an oxymoronic compound, I wrote
and we thought about this

Charles Baudelaire: Two De Profundis Poems

DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI

O my sole love, I pray thee pity me
From out this dark gulf where my poor heart lies,
A barren world hemmed in by leaden skies
Where horror flies at night, and blasphemy.

For half the year the sickly sun is seen,
The other half thick night lies on the land,
A country bleaker than the polar strand;
No beasts, no brooks, nor any shred of green.

There never was a horror which surpassed
This icy sun's cold cruelty, and this vast
Night like primaeval Chaos; would I were

Like the dumb brutes, who in a secret lair
Lie wrapt in stupid slumber for a space...
Time creeps at so burdensome a pace.

(translation by Sir John Squire)


OBSESSION

You forests, like cathedrals, are my dread :
You roar like organs. Our curst hearts, like cells
Where death forever rattles on the bed,
Echo your de Profundis as it swells.

My spirit hates you, Ocean ! sees and loathes
Its tumults in your own. Of men defeated
The bitter laugh, that's full of sobs and oaths,
Is in your own tremendously repeated.

How you would please me, Night ! without your stars
Which speak a foreign dialect, that jars
On one who seeks the void, the black, the bare.

Yet even your darkest shade a canvas forms
Whereron my eye must multiply in swarms
Familiar looks of shapes no longer there.

(translation by Roy Campbell)

Great Tom Waits Quotes

Tom Waits is no ordinary songwriter. He's probably one of the greatest American writers in American history - and partly because he has soaked up so much of it. The guy doesn't just reinterpret all things Americana, he's basically a walking Smithsonian. Here are a few of my favorite lines from his music, as well as another quote or two from interviews:

"Money's just something you throw off the back of a train"

"You'll be buried in the clothes that you never wore"

"My daddy told me, lookin back, the best friend you'll have is a railroad track"

"You can put all my possessions in Jesus' name"

"How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves the porch light on?"

"You know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk"

"Come down off the cross, we could use the wood"

"She's my black market baby, she's a diamond who wants to stay coal"

"I'll bet she's still a virgin, but it's only twenty-five to nine"

"The piano has been drinking, my necktie is asleep... And the combo went back to New York, the jukebox has to take a leak... And the carpet needs a haircut, and the spotlight looks like a prison break... Cause the telephone's out of cigarettes, and the balcony is on the make... And the piano has been drinking..."

"Disneyland is Vegas for children" (interview in Playboy, March 1988)

T-Shirt Haiku

Saw this on a t-shirt @ www.threadless.com and loved it!

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refridgerator

Publication History

(UPDATED: 23 February 2014)

Since around 1997, I've had poetry or prose (reviews, prose poems) published in the following:

Journals: 

Uut Poetry  
Beat the Dust
Lummox
Amsterdam Quarterly
Kumquat Poetry 
Unshod Quills
Protimluv (in Czech)
Kam v Brně (in Czech)
Past Simple
Cerebration
Super Clod Clod
Rakish Angel
GRASP
Turntable and Blue Light
Gently Read Literature
Willows Wept Review
Heavy Bear
Black Heart Magazine
The Smoking Poet
The Refined Savage
Eight Octaves Review
Venereal Kittens
Poetica
Black Lamb
Oregon English Journal

Haggard and Halloo

The Poetry Pole

Get Underground

Out of Order
Open Wide Magazine
The Other Side of Ragged Edge
Zino's Paradox
The Mercury
Alchemy
Radioactive Pickle
In-Synch

Anthologies:

Ars Poetica 2013 (in Slovak)
 
Open Wide - 10th Anniversary Edition

From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology

PRCHAVÉ DOMOVY: Mezi vyhnavstvím a vnitřním exilem / FLEETING HOMES: Between Banishment and Inner Exile (CZ & ENG)

Bending Light into Verse II

The Return of Kral Majales: Prague's International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010

A.D. Winans Tribute (Open Wide Magazine)
Destination Anywhere (Open Wide Magazine)

Raising Our Voices: Oregon Poets Against the War

Murrican Haiku

Expat damsels
crochet cuz they have to
- th'accordion's that intense

~written at Globe Bookstore & Cafe, during Pavel Brycz's reading from his book I, City (Twisted Spoon Press).

The Origin of 'Terrorism'

"DON'T EAT THE BIG APPLE," God said to the first humans, and so they cut down the tree that held it, all the other trees around it, and built two towers in its place.

They called these Babel North and Babel South, both majestic and, to them, superior to anything God had made.

And since God saw the humans' hubris, He sent a score of brown dragons to destroy their towers.

Then the terrified humans said, "Surely our God would not do such a thing," and so they waged war on the brown dragons, for they could no longer see the works of their own God.

Prague Sonnet #3

From New-in-Prague...

My favorite cafe serves kerosene matches
that go out only with sirens
thump thump thumping at cardiac doors.
I've tried to drown them in pilsner falls.
Flapping arms I've taken flight... and still
they burn. I am sleepless over this
pending inferno. This game between hops & scotch,
studying white lines thick as pages,
counting quarter-to-two cracks in the plaster
waiting for the pipes to burst. I am
a medieval rocket - destined to hoist
red flags on the moons of dark ages.
I satellite spires, awake as a wheel
in the midst of zodiac clocks.

17 October 2006