Essentially I have beaten two corporate attorney’s with a Star Wars binder of evidence… it’s fun.

Eventually I do get back into the post office in another town. It’s a hard working mail processing clerk job that requires a lot of physical exertion, not anything difficult and but not fun by any means as the mail room is not bright and shiny and full of exotic shoots like in the movie ELF. The job basically consists of sorting magazines into different route numbers and placing them in their correct boxes for the letter carriers to deliver, then sort mail and distributing to the correct carrier. It’s not difficult, it’s heavy work, rapidly paced, the kind of thing I enjoy. Except for the fact that I have wake up an hour early to get their at 3:00 AM as the position is in another town, hence my social life gets killed but the amount of solitude one gets at work is priceless as you are generally left alone, except by an ornery mail-man on the second day who gets pissed because he has three magazines from another route in his box.

“Sorry dude, I’m new this is my second day, sometimes shit happens.” I don’t know, I guess I really don’t care about these things anymore. I rectify the problem and I don’t dwell on any equities, move and do the job. I’ve had older women complain that I need to do things right-handed so everything faces the same direction the post-office boxes. The best part though is being told to take your breaks at the end rather than in-between jobs to keep the schedule of the mail going smoothly… nothing like getting paid to drink coffee for half an hour and then punching out for the day.

Again this presents a lot of time for reflection and I thought about it… the schedule causes me to rearrange my schedule for shooting films, networking and even getting laid. I’m not ungrateful but I have another job even though it pays way less lined up, my car is old and the timing belt won’t last the drive for more than a month, I should be networking with the local poets in my area to get a really cool and ambitious project up and running but have to be in bed by 9:00 PM… most events start around that time and end around midnight. I’m not complaining but making money is fine and dandy with a steady income if the steady income is not thirty-five miles away in 2-4 hour shifts. It may eventually lead into something bigger and better within the postal realm but to be honest it isn’t the dream but the dream isn’t so much what matters, it’s realizing who you are and where you belong.

I dig the post office, the people and the environment I work within. However, the schedule and the type of job I’m working interferes with where I need to be going and what I should be doing. This is not a some sort of high profile resignation but rather a declaration of my saying “I could care less about route numbers and people’s addresses and their fucking copies of PEOPLE MAGAZINE! I need to be filming, making connections and writing like a mad man full of speed!”

I can always get another postal job at night or mid-day somewhere down the line but right now the focus needs to be on school and fostering those connections to further hone my skills and make myself known.

I’m not angry, I’ve hit a really zen-centered moment in my existence. Where things don’t have to focused on a defined job that allows to be fully participate in the work and spend economy that is eventually going to collapse over and over again. There isn’t a purpose to living that way anymore. I agree with having a consistent cash flow so that I may live yet have the moments to develop network and harvest the opportunities necessary for myself to proceed in the direction I need to take to follow my bliss and be the person I not only wish to be but the person I am meant to be.

It’s not worth living even a fragment of regret or lost moments of venturing toward one’s bliss for the sense of a false security threatened by the agenda of petty destructive individuals.

Underground Poetry is one of those rare out of the ordinary downtown treats, that even those not accustomed to the art of poetry can really get into, with just the diversity of voices performing within a bright lit crooked center of a confined grotto-esque room surrounded by the audience,like reciting lyrical stories of ancient days behind a fire within a community binding cavern.

The voices of the fire range from host Azizi Jasper spitting rhythmic rhymes of flame, verbally and visually entrancing the audience as he slides about the room, speaking about sipping wine from the chalice of the mind and one really believes in the beauty that makes one grow from having lava in the blood…. Obviously this sets the bar for the evening and figures within the local poetry scene of Grand Rapids, both new and old take to the stage and transfixes those who have journeyed underground.

We meet Moneymaker Mitch, bartender and poet who makes the Unpopular Statement “Balloons are stupid.” And sure, there are laughs followed by the solemn head nods when Moneymaker Mitch confesses about his old soul dedicated to hard work and social civility, however there are women who do not necessarily appreciate the man putting a coat over a mud puddle for her to cross, because, why would you ruin a perfectly good coat? Grand Rapids poetry mainstay Diane Baum is another unique voice of the fire in her declaration of slavery to everything. The highlight of the particular evening was Roswell New Mexico, littering the floor with his papers when moving from page to page, reciting his poem Tight Fuck part of an apparently ongoing contest of themes between poets, then again the highlight could have been newcomer, poetic hurricane Stephen Gren, who wrote on his way to the venue about staring deep into the eyes of the soul and how bad reality TV is essentially art as the imitation of life.

Some people come from Holland, some people talk about the significance of orange shoes and sunflowers seeds sprouting into space, licking wet hotdogs as a massive oil line get laid into the heartland. Maybe you have something to say and you’re not sure, if you really do… there’s a “lightning round” just in case… short, sweet and striking.

Unbury yourself and enter the underground.

Kerouac and his cat, we’re in a dream of mine years ago. Black and white. I dream mostly in a cinematic black and white. Except Kerouac’s eyes were actually blue. We’re in the kitchen, immaculate fifties kitchen with a black and white checkered floor. That same damn cat in the picture I had never seen before until the dream is cuddling and rolling about my ankles, purring with his eyes closed with a serene grin on his face. I look up and Kerouac’s mother’s back is to us, she just put down a plate of pancakes and a pot of hot coffee and is now frying bacon in the pan. Jack (I call him “Jack” because somehow, decades past his death we’re meeting together in this realm between life and death called “the dreaming) hands me a cup of steaming hot coffee in a pristine white mug and smiles understandingly at me.

Everything is black and white except his crisp blue eyes.
I don’t dream like that anymore, but I saw this picture on a book awhile back and had to buy it. Kerouac or rather Jack from the dreaming is wearing the same shirt and cuddling the same cat from my dream seven years ago and it’s a dream, I wish I could go back there… because it wasn’t exactly a dream but some sort of untouchable and unintelligibly conveyable experience beyond mental comprehension. Like touching the magnetic field with its infinite snippets of consciousness with a psychic tendril of the mind and exploring in a rational, matter of fact manner, taking in the full philosophical, mind expanding and physically tangible experience of the cerebral formulation of a collective yet individualistic influenced realm of reality.

(that’s my problem, dwelling on the stone cold logical reasons on the system of reality or how the alternate systems of a malleable reality are capable of operation. I eradicate the sacred mysticism of emotion for the logical justification of having these sensations in order to restrict feeling as a living being to come off reasonable and be taken seriously and to be honest, it may have helped in me in some areas but it has seriously damaged the passion for writing and feeling in tune with that particular mode of expression and really diminished the risks of stretching and experimenting with the pages of consciousness. Dreams become boring and dull. Mundane flashbacks with asinine incidents. Ambition becomes banal. It’s nice to have reason and attain the an understanding of the logistics pertaining to the mechanics of society but how about an anatomy lesson on passion of the mind trading skin on skin for the quality of many minds?!)

So here, I am… mattress on the floor… ninety degree apartment… sleeping… blackness, portrait of Kerouac and his cuddling cat a staring at me. Hope you and I, can have breakfast again.

A review of local poet L.S. Klatt’s Cloud of Ink

To be destroyed, to be indestructible that is always the question. Finding an octopus in the snow and cutting it open to wear its ink on your hands like opera gloves in the moonlight also sparks a question. Or is just matter of being and peering into another world that is exactly the same world we live in? These are the experiences felt and perceptions inflicted on our cerebral eyes forming individualized perception in L.S. Klatt’s second collection of poetry Cloud of Ink. A surreal journey into ordinary myths of Midwestern America and the divine calamity contained in all of us veering between shamanistic wisdom and frenetic madness.

    While sitting during the final readings on the final night of the Grand Rapids Poet Conference, I had the benefit of encountering several poets and in particular I was not only impressed but totally and utterly transported to the reality underneath the realm in which we live in by Klast’s readings and performance who moved his hands like a shaman inviting the audience to a an entirely new level of reality with a boisterously hypnotic voice echoing unique combinations of words to illustrate the magic realism in the most mundane circumstances.. It started off with an octopus in the snow and a house being painted with water that transforms into a misshapen aquarium forcing the narrator to call upon a moon jellyfish to come by his window while reaching its tentacles into outer space. Trying to wrestle with such imagery or… trying to process such imagery is a wrestling match between pre-conceived notions of existence and nigh infinite potential for imagination. Outer space becomes inner space and the tentacles become our own psychic constructs for comprehension and evolution.

    Klatt is a professor of American Literature and Creative writing at Calvin College. Which should make a counter-culture and anti-establishment wordsmith like myself shun him at first glance but… when “wise moments are fireflies that the scar the countenance.” In the piece Insult is Necessary for the Perfection of Beauty, it’s like being unable to avert one’s eyes from a car crash featuring two sexy youthful corpse atop one another. We are introduced to Americans, Broadcasters and the in-between worlds they straddle, prompting one to wonder about their own little patch of brain-land each person (including the self) inhabits. An artificial sunflower yearning to be organic is melted out of pity by the sun, for the heliotrope cannot turn toward the sun like others and the creator of the pseudo flower soaks his hands in its liquefaction, only to have his hands welded and discovers a finch laying an egg in a trash can that he cannot handle but still a journey is made as he becomes content looking behind the yolk of a blue enamel sky. A parable for goldsmiths and what is the goldsmith to those who have also had their shadows trampled by bees on the sidewalk? The question spawned from “Where my Sunflower wished to go” might be answered or rather elaborated on by “Shakedown” in where music lines up bees and secretions.

Poetry is cool again or rather it’s always been underappreciated or overlooked. Perhaps that is what we are warned about in of the closing poems For Lack of a Better World in which piranha’s sleep on red velvet in small comfort smiles and many winged things such as seraphim will follow us to the clearing. The closing of the mind and not being accepted, then again if our psychic tentacle are strong enough the cloud of ink should be relatively easy to dissipate, should it not?

Eric Greinke, David Cope and Alban Fischer. “Small Press Panel: Local Publishers (Presa, Nada, Trnsfr).” Panel. The Grand Rapids Poet’s Conference. Grand Rapids Community College. 3 April 2012. 1:00-2:30.

Every aspiring writer, whether they be: poet, novelist, journalist, screenwriter or even screenwriting journalist poetic novelist, dreams of seeing something he carefully crafted out there in the world in a tangible form for real people to really read. Grand Rapids Michigan has a wonderful oral culture of poetics and a vast array of talented writers out there waiting to be collected and have those carefully refined words put into print. There seems to be an issue though of people waiting around to be discovered or not even seeking out local venues for publication which would provide even more networking opportunities for the writer searching for a bigger audience and an even larger opportunity to be read. The Small Press Panel comprised of several local publishers not only provided guidelines for submitting work and blatantly stated their existence but heralded the notions of authors in clustered groups getting together and self-publishing as getting into the publishing yourself as a writer is more than likely the best way to get read and noticed by an elusive audience.

    If a writer does not publish, his goes away with the wind or better if a writer publishes it sets up a mousetrap to capture a perspective audience. Eric Greinke a local poet and publishing juggernaut operating through Presa and Metamorphosis Press knows more than a bit about the proverbial mousetrap, publishing more than one-hundred books over the last several decades with worldwide

distribution occurring mostly in Europe, his mantra being “Start locally and the people will come.” And undoubtedly the people came when Greinke founded the Grand Valley State University literary magazine Amaranthus (now known as the Grand Valley Review). This led to more ventures in the publishing field in turn leading to a regular column in the Grand Rapids Press where Greinke would write poetry book reviews by now defunct publisher Black Sparrow Press, famous for publishing beat poet Charles Bukowski. In essence it is about immersing one’s self in the scene to garner awareness but also remembering not to forget about sales in the art of self-publishing and that is by knowing the type of work you are willing to put out there as well as honing a critical eye. Greinke holds undergraduate degrees in both English and Psychology and a Master’s Degree in Social Work; one would inquire if Grienke believes in the formality of a certain education to network with the right people in order to attain longevity in the field of self-publishing? Perhaps Greinke would respond with a certain Phillip Whalen quote “I do not put down the academy but have assumed its own function in my own person…”

    Alban Fischer, soft spoken poet and publisher of Trnsfr magazine unlike Grienke does not primarily layout themes when putting together an issue of one of his anthologies but he does stress visual content through eye catching covers and neat little gimmicks like fold-ins. A quality picked up over the years by the self-described working class poet and shut-in inspired by the Beat Movement and the Paris Review causing him to burst forth from his small town roots and settle in Grand Rapids working many odd jobs to support himself and his publishing ventures through careful saving which in turn made him his own graphic designer without any formal training and granted him the skills over the years to better support himself by working as a freelance graphic designer. Fischer believes it takes a certain amount of stubborn not give up and to be familiar with your contemporaries to compete on a local level and reach not just your local talent but your national talent as well.

    David Cope current Poet Laureate and Professor of Creative Writing, Shakespeare and Drama at Grand Rapids Community College as well as publisher of Big Scream magazine brings forth not only Grienke’s attitude and aptitude of publishing but also stresses the importance of networking to gain

contributors yet to be assertively willing to reject submissions. For Cope it started out with friends, poetry and a potato birthing the first issue of Big Scream that was noticed by great American poet Allen Ginsberg and it is through that friendship many more friendships were made where Cope found himself editing a piece by Gary Snyder.

    The Small Press Panel was very successful in relaying the concept of self-publishing as a way to get noticed and capture an audience’s attention. Through: Cope, Fischer and Greinke everything was communicated on the most base level for setting up the foundation in which the rest of the structure is up to the individual or collection of individuals who desire to be read and known. It is not entirely about formality but who you know and are willing to work with, keeping in mind what is needed to stay afloat through a critical eye of quality control, instead of consuming massive amounts of speed and rabidly devouring cake with your buddies jamming sheets of paper through a printer incoherently.

    Linda Nemic Foster is a poet who has published numerous books, including The Amber Necklace
from Gdansk which focused on her being the descendant of Polish immigrants and making the journey back to the old country to explore not only the beauty of such a rich culture but also the scars of Auschwitz . Being the grandson of a holocaust victim and dealing with my own sense of discrimination and adversity over the years, who has gone through the journey himself of what transpired those decades ago struck a proverbial cord of a shared collective memory. The haunting visions of collected

irises in jars proudly displayed on Joseph Mengele’s shelf in the poem “Mengele’s Butterflies” bring forth the vision of a violinist panicking in the snow looking for his severed hands so he can play the violin or else the guards will shoot him, Foster’s piece “Family Tree” give us portraits of a black smith in an intense natural world, bribery leading to a trip to Ellis Island and the loss of identity to a the printing press with the immigrant’s daughter feeling useless and classless. Lost in my own generation and seeing my own Hungarian Jewish culture diminish in those around me is a concept, I more than understand. To end the reading though, foster took us away from the darkness and ancient wilderness of an old Europe still caught in modern conflicts of Genocide and paid tribute to the Fellini film La Dolce Vita (first one to knock this film gets decked) in poem “The Absurdity of the Sweet Life” in which Foster wants to watch the film on the television but the preparation of dinner gets in the way and all she gets is a husband hungry for an Anita Eckberg nude scene, snippets of a disenchanted Marcello and a statue of Jesus in air looking for a place to land. The sweet life of the cinema buff contending with day to day activity.

    To end the evening and the Poet’s Conference, L.S. Klast, a professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at Calvin College as well being the recipient of the Iowa Poetry Prize for his collection of poetry titled Cloud of Ink (a book I am currently reviewing for a local zine). Klast is a boisterous reader that performs with hands like a shaman beckoning the audience to another world through even the most mundane setting that becomes flooded with magic realism brought upon by surreal imagery and a cleverly unique combination of words leading into different worlds. In the poem “Affliction” a house being painted with water, transforms into an aquarium, the house is misshapen and the painter asks for a moon jellyfish to come by his window reaching tentacles into outer space while simultaneously making us wonder, what exactly is being meant as we reach our psychic hands into our own inner space to comprehend. An artificial sunflower yearning to be organic is melted by the sun out of pity for the

heliotrope cannot turn toward the sun like the others and the creator of the pseudo flower soaks his hands in its liquefaction only to have his hands welded and discover a finch laying an egg in a trash can that he cannot handle but still a journey is made as he becomes content looking at the yolk behind the blue enamel of the sky. A parable for goldsmiths and what is the goldsmith to those who also have their shadows trampled by bees on the sidewalk? A question raised by Klast’s “Where My Sunflower Wishes to Go”. I began this review with a reference to the piece “Liquefaction” with finding and dissection of the octopus where passion is mistaken for gangrene and the narrator finds himself in an orchestra pit and aims a bassoon at the chandelier, in which the house lights come down and the audience loses its place in maelstrom of inklings.

How far out have we reached without really knowing who we are, devoid of past and blind to the undercurrent of a far more magical world than we realize constantly trying to communicate with us? This is what the reading of Linda Nemic Foster and L.S. Klast were able to achieve for me at the end of the Grand Rapids Poet’s Conference.

After an exciting week, it is the final day of the Grand Rapids Poets’ Conference. The poets who will be ending the conference include Linda Nemec Foster (works available via library catalog), L. S. Klatt (works available via library catalog), and Miriam Pederson (works available via library catalog). Readings begin at 7 PM on the second floor of the library.

More information about all of the people involved in the conference can also be found here.

Thank you for your participation in the free event here on campus. It has been wonderful!

Tonight’s poetry readers are comprised of 3 Grand Rapids Poet Laureates and the founder of the Smokin’ Spokin Word performance series. Follow the links below to take a closer look at these poets and their works, many of which are available here at the library.

• Patricia Clark: http://www.patriciafclark.com/
• David Cope: http://www.poetspath.com/Dave_Cope/
• Rod Torreson: http://throughthe3rdeye.com/
• Azizi Jasper: http://www.kzooslam.net/poets/azizi.htm

For information on these poets and others reading this week, click here.

It is day 2 of the Grand Rapids Poets’ Conference and two of the events are happening at the library.

First, at 11:30AM Mursalata Muhammad and Miriam Pederson (works available via library catalog) will be discussing art and poetry on the first floor of the library in the exhibit, “Ekphrasis: Poetry and Visual Art.”

The poetry readings will begin at 7 PM tonight on the second floor. Poets who are reading tonight include Eric Greinke (works available via library catalog), W. Todd Kaneko, Mursalata Muhammad (works available via library catalog), and David Landrum. More information on all of the people involved can be found here.

The event is free and everybody is welcome!

Tonight is the kick off the poetry readings for the Grand Rapids Poets’ Conference. The event is hosted by Professor David Cope and will be held here in the Library & Learning Commons starting at 7 PM.

Tonight’s three unique poets whom all have one thing in common – our very own GRCC. Barbara Saunier was & Kim Wyngarden is a faculty members at the College, while G. F. Korreck attended GRCC when it was known as GRJC as a student years ago. Each individual comes from a different background and has varying influences.

Click here to find out more about these three and other poets coming to read for Poetry Month at the library!

To celebrate National Poetry Month, Grand Rapids Community College is thrilled to host the first historic Grand Rapids Poets’ Conference, chaired by Grand Rapids’ poet laureate and GRCC’s own, David Cope. In addition to being a well-regarded and respected professor, Cope is also a nationally lauded and award winning poet.

The conference, which begin on April 2, will host numerous local and national poets, including poets from GRCC, Grand Valley State University, Aquinas College and Calvin College. In addition, all four of the Grand Rapids Poet Laureates and poets from all walks of life will be in attendence. Panels and sessions will be held during the day at 108 Sneden Hall and readings will be held on the second floor of the library at night.

Sponsored by GRCC, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the Arts Council of Greater Grand Rapids, the conference is free and open to the public.

For more information, please check out the conference’s Facebook page and website.