January 28, 2009

THE RECESSION AND HOW TO LIVE THROUGH IT
by Charles Potts

[Arthur editor] Jay Babcock has tempted me with the phrase, “It would be great if you wrote something on this subject,” referring to the subject line of his email, “The recession and how to live through it.”

I’ll take the bait. This is more than a recession. This is going to be a huge depression, with the “recovery” way off in the distance.

A recession, per Christopher Wood, desk chair person for The Economist in Tokyo circa 1995, is “a superabundance of inventory, and can be melted off the shelf; a depression is a superabundance of capacity” and takes much longer to get out of. Remember that it took the bean counters in Wash DC a full year to confirm the economy was in recession, and there’s a lot of over-the-counter chatter about how this recession is already longer than the one in, take your pick: 1976-1980-1991-etc. However, look around you and notice the superabundance of capacity. The industrial hind end of Europe, Japan, the US and China plus all else, can easily produce multiple times more automobiles, cell phones, TVs, computers, refrigerators, et al. than anybody with funds can buy.

This is the fourth major deflationary price collapse in the past 600 years. In the three previous price collapses, there was a long period afterward when prices did not recover their pre-fall levels for decades. Prices last collapsed hard in 1815 after Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo; the period from 1815-1896 has been called by economists The Victorian Equilibrium. Many things contributed to this low-level stability, but it is sobering to realize there was scant inflation in the United States during the 19th century. (Inflation, by the by, is not necessarily a bad thing. Inflation simply moves assets around the game board from creditors to debtors; it doesn’t actually destroy anything except purchasing power if all you have is cash. In deflation, which we’re going through now, cash will buy a lot. During inflation it is better to have hard assets that increase in value at least at the same rate as cash.)

Will it take eight decades before the world economy is go-go again?

My reference to 1815 isn’t casual. I just re-read David Hackett Fischer’s The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. His book is about the three previous big price collapses: in the early 14th century when the Black Death ended the so called “Middle” ages; then, circa 1492, when prices collapsed during the Renaissance, and we encircled ourselves globally; and the aforementioned 1815. What’s so crucial about 1815 is it is also the date and the event that Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West) identifies as the moment Western culture went sideways and into “civilization,” cf. Napoleon at Waterloo. Fischer’s graphs of how the prices rose and fell, can be superimposed one over another. This collapse we’re in, the big one for the rest of our lives, started 20 years ago in Japan in 1989, has hit Argentina and most of Latin America, Russia twice now, and finally the big fish, the rest of Europe and the US. Even Doha is scaling back!

The powers that be with their printing presses will print money and throw it at the wall until enough of it sticks. Some activities will appear to return to normalcy. But you shouldn’t wait for the influx of money to turn deflation into inflation, just as you shouldn’t wait for the bailout to trickle down to you. Unemployment is going to increase and stay high for some time. Challenging moments are upon us.

My advice in hard times would be the same in good times: find something you love to do and master it, become as good as or better at it than anyone has any reason to be. Look up the people who do it really well right now. Study the masters. A musical instrument, a physical activity, painting, movies, art of all kinds, the writing of poetry or other books, whatever makes you feel better about yourself and contributes to our well being. Try enough things until you are satisfied that your fascination with the subject will lead to mastery. Six or eight hours of focused effort a day should suffice. I think this is reasonable advice, coming from an old man who has squandered most of his life by being interested in too many things to master any of them.

We don’t exist as individuals; we exist as the sum total of our relationships. You’ll need all the friends you can get, so be honest, fair and generous in your dealings with other people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or take unseemly risks. The future does not belong to the risk aversive.

It will be difficult to get rich in the onrushing hard times, but it will be easy to get poor or poorer. Watch where your money goes. Make sure you get good value for it. Avoid buying things you don’t really need. Add value to your activities by putting forth effort. Expect others to do the same.

Spend time with children and if you have children of your own, take the time to understand the world from their point of view.

Assets are things that have to be used up creating additional assets. Almost without exception, your biggest asset is your time. I could have gotten rich teaching a seminar I created called “Seize the Day,” essentially a series of sensory exercises to stimulate your imagination to take over and live your own life. But I preferred life in a small town and didn’t want to see the inside of every airport and convention center in the country.

Maybe it’s time to skip the addictions, look up old friends, or visit long-lost relatives. Life is a gift of such presurpassing value that we sometimes hardly notice. Learn to appreciate simple things, the taste of water, the odor of flowers, the great way gravity contributes to your ability to walk and run.

Some of the things people love to do and do well don’t pay that much: poetry for example. Nobody really gives much of a fuck anymore if you can understand the world and set it to music. You have to feed yourself, and if a family, contribute to their well-being. You may find yourself bearing an overload of dissonance, earning your daily bread and wishing, as the Colorado poet and painter Joe Lothamer said, “I dream of being a janitor.”

Every changed circumstance contains opportunities, which accrue to the first people to recognize them. Since circumstances are in constant flux, there is a steady stream of opportunities. Learn to spot them and make them your own.

Keep the basics in mind. People will still be buying food even if the rest of the consumer economy blows completely up, as it so richly deserves to. Heal the sick, wake the dead, feed the hungry. Food shelter and clothing. Eat slowly and chew your cud well.

Biographical info on Charles Potts.

Previously in Arthur:

“The Dope From Muskogee” by Charles Potts

Muntader al-Zaidi named Arthur Magazine “Man of the Year” 2008; Charles Potts salutes al-Zaidi with new poem, “Balls Out.”

“A Case of Cheney Paranoia” by Charles Potts

Poem in Arthur No. 5

“Spasm Empire” by Charles Potts

CHARLES POTTS & SUNN 0))) AT ARTHURFEST 2005 – video footage

Virginia Aste, Black Rock Cafe, Pahoa, Hawaii, Mother’s Day, 2008. Photo by Susan Kay Anderson

“Freedom?”: Richard Brautigan’s first wife, VIRGINIA ASTE, speaks in a new interview

Interview by Susan Kay Anderson

Edited with Introduction by Mike Daily, with biographical information contributed by John F. Barber, Richard Brautigan scholar

Less-than-revered by his Beat peers (Ginsberg gave him the ungainly nickname “Bunthorne,” Burroughs once observed him—drunk—crawling along the floor of a hotel after a reading event, Ferlinghetti said he “was all the novelist the hippies needed” because “[i]t was a nonliterate age”), Richard Brautigan became internationally famous in the late ’60s for writing simple-yet-surreal poems, short stories and novels that made readers marvel and burst out laughing. Brautigan’s personal life, however, was no laughing matter. Severe alcoholism—drinking a bottle of brandy and two fifths of whiskey a day during binges, according to friend Don Carpenter—and depression over declining book sales led to Brautigan’s suicide in September 1984. He was 49.

Brautigan began writing Trout Fishing in America in 1961 on a camping trip he took with his first wife, maiden name Virginia Alder, and their one-year-old daughter, Ianthe. Married in 1957 and separated in 1962, they officially divorced in 1970. Before the separation, Virginia Alder had become involved with one of Brautigan’s drinking buddies, Tony Aste, with whom she later had three children (the first in 1965, the second in 1968, the third in 1969). There is no known record that she and Tony Aste ever wed, though she took his last name. Virginia Aste eventually moved to Hawaii in 1975, without Tony, who remained, living in Bodega Bay, California, and then San Francisco, where he died in 1996.

Today, 75-year-old Virginia Aste is a political activist working as a substitute teacher in one of the most violent school districts in Hawaii. Susan Kay Anderson, a fellow educator at the school, recently met Virginia Aste and interviewed her about her early life and travels with Brautigan.

“Virginia Aste is not a ‘little old lady type,’” Anderson reports. “She is almost six feet tall and wears glasses, well-fitting outfits and interesting jewelry. Her gaze never wavers. She laughs easily and speaks in a measured, self-paced, quiet tone. She is quite funny and self-effacing, able to laugh at herself.”

“Much of Brautigan’s past has remained shrouded in mystery for so long as to become mythology,” says John F. Barber, curator of the comprehensive, multi-media online resource Brautigan Bibliography and Archive. “Virginia’s comments and insights [in this new interview] are important because they help us better understand the stories behind Brautigan, his life and his writings.”

Like a Waterfall

Arthur: What were the ’60s like?

Virginia Aste: The ’60s were a lot like the ’50s, a continuation of [the '50s], except for ‘68 and ‘69. Then, everything changed. For example, I took Lamaze [childbirth classes] for Ianthe’s birth. They didn’t know what I was talking about in the hospital. They gave me some pillows and helped me lie on my side. That was that.

The change came with the music. There were concerts every day—really, really good concerts every two weeks or so. Groups from New York came. The concerts were in Golden Gate Park.

At that time there was the Cow Palace, a big stadium—George Wallace was to speak. All I remember was the atmosphere of hostility and women there. This [Cow Palace] was a place where women burned their bras; where riots happened. It was a feeling of a mob and impeding violence and we just had to leave. We had gotten Ianthe a new raincoat from her dad. Ianthe’s raincoat pocket caught on a car as we were leaving and she started to cry. It was no real riot that time, but it felt like it could’ve been. What we were witnessing was a lot of yelling and Wallace was yelling back. He was ranting. It was an awful ending to an awful day.

For a year, there were free concerts every other week. It was wild. Of course, there were precursors to this, pre-’60s. I purchased a Rudi Gernreich bra—it was see-through—and took off my shirt during a party. We saw how many people could crowd into a phone booth at a time.

In one house where we lived, there was something wrong with the plumbing so the water ran and ran. It was like a waterfall. We turned it stronger and then back again or we just got water.

We moved out of North Beach and out of Haight-Ashbury. There was a lot of alcohol and pot use. There was the Ice Cream Store where bikers and bus drivers took pills—early speed, the chicken egg-producing drug, methedrine, cheaper than heroin. It was the time of the Alphonse Mucha art style on concert posters: big bicycle wheels on bikes, elongated figures riding, and the skulls and roses of the Grateful Dead.

Richard admired the Diggers. Our whole thing was a proletarian idea that you take care of everybody. I remember baking bread in coffee cans. I did. We had everything available to us at the free store. We never had any money. I don’t remember paying for anything for a while. This was the last half of the ’60s.

Trout Fishing In America

Arthur: How did you meet Richard Brautigan?

Virginia Aste: I met Richard Brautigan at a laundromat in North Beach. I had wanted to meet him. He was very alluring and I thought he might’ve been from Germany. He didn’t say much. I had Ron Loewinsohn introduce us.

Richard was working in a lab that manufactured barium powder. People drank the powders for X-rays—there were different flavors like peach, strawberry, lemon. He came home smelling like those different flavors. They hired Richard for one dollar an hour.

I was working downtown as a secretary. I carried the typewriter home with me. It was very heavy. I typed up his poems. He began sending them out to places like The Nation. He started with fifty poems.

I was working for two dollars an hour. I was good at Dictaphone. From our tax return and claiming Ianthe as a dependent, we bought a 1951 Plymouth station wagon and took a trip across Idaho, five hundred or six hundred miles across the Snake River. This became Trout Fishing In America. Jack Spicer helped edit it. I helped edit, too, and typed it because I could read his handwriting. I used to read lots of [scrawly] doctor and lawyer handwriting.

In the Afternoon

Arthur: Did he read a lot? What was his writing routine like?

Virginia Aste: He would write in the afternoon because he watched Ianthe in the morning. That became a routine because I was working. He needed time and space, time and silence, but not totally. He did not lock himself away.

Between me and Jack Spicer and Richard reading us stuff, we would tell him to take out a lot. There wasn’t much left. That was Spicer’s thing.

He read incessantly at the Mechanics’ [Institute] Library. It was a library founded by a union in San Francisco. He’d read fiction on the second floor. He’d read the Ladies’ Home Journal. His earliest reading was the National Geographic. He’d read old issues when he was in elementary school and later read the Ladies’ Home Journal. He read Faulkner, Jack London, he read poetry.

I translated Neruda’s work for him into English. Also Mayakovsky. I took Russian then. A lot of people were killed under Stalin. People still talked a lot about the Spanish Civil War in those days.

B Vitamins

Arthur: Did you see his writing as genius writing?

Virginia Aste: Yes, Richard was a genius in his writing because of his humor. He was like Mark Twain or Saroyan because of his use of irony. He would be right on target.

He also had a sense of the tragic. He had sentimentality for his dead relatives but he was never syrupy sweet in that way.

He was very caring…cared very well for Ianthe. He paid the rent six months in advance. He had a stockpile of food in the cupboards. Probably because he cared for his sister, Barbara, while they were growing up. He had grown up very poor. I almost got him sobered up. I gave him a lot of B vitamins. After our baby, he began drinking heavily. Lots of socializing.

I read on the Internet that he had had homosexual liaisons at this time. It was when Ianthe was about four.

He had new fame. It was tremendously exciting. He began drinking heavily and became abusive. One night, he wanted to have sex and became violent—I shut him out of the bedroom. There were these thick wooden doors. The next day I left with Ianthe.

What happened was totally against what we were all about. We were so pacifistic. This was the dark side of what was going on. On the other hand, he did love guns and loved going shooting.

To Say the Least

Arthur: Did he talk the way he wrote?

Virginia Aste: Yes. Yes! He had a constant dialogue going and had constant jokes. He was interested in everything about art. Dada was one of the themes. Jack Spicer said that one should pick out the worst thing from a piece of writing and keep that and then write from that. He told Richard that and he did that.

He was experimental like William Burroughs and the same [in the sense] that he traveled around and had a huge following. Burroughs would tear a page of his writing down the middle and then match up the halves to different pages, creating interesting sentences, to say the least.

I think Richard was very sad when I left him, taking Ianthe with me. People didn’t talk about addiction—about drinking—then. Oh, I should’ve…maybe stuck with him. It was a few years later when the lawyer had me sign for a divorce. I didn’t make any claim to his work.

All of his early books, I know exactly what and where he is talking about—even though the writing is ambiguous on purpose. I can picture this or that place.

Once we lived in Big Sur, in a cave that was carved out of a hill with a little roof jutting out of it to keep the rain off. He was very interested in the history of WWI and WWII. Especially WWI and the Civil War. He was particularly interested in the campaigns of the southern generals. He talked about the Holocaust. He was fascinated with the personalities surrounding Hitler and in the atrocities dictated by the S.S.

Into the Creek

Arthur: Was he a history buff, a ghost town buff?

Virginia Aste: He was very interested in graveyards; gravestones. Interested in imagining what people’s lives were like—the food they ate, the clothes, one hundred and two hundred years ago. He was interested in the working people.

On our trip to Idaho, we read gravestones on old cemeteries.

He was always connecting different times and people and places together. He did this constantly—made connections. He had a maniacal laugh. Ianthe has the same…a real wild laugh.

In ‘57-‘58, we did crazy things. Climbed up on the Palace of Fine Arts and looked over the city—all the heads of statues toppled over. Once with Kenn Davis, who was selling paintings at the time, we went to a reading. The hood of our car flew off at one o’clock in the morning as we approached the Bay Bridge. Richard jumped out of the car, opened the trunk and threw it in. He could move really, really fast when he had to.

We were cooped up inside five days once in Big Sur, up a little creek. Water came down and we could not get up to the highway. He jumped into the creek and got me. He never could swim. He never did learn to swim.

He was capable of athletic feats nobody thought he could do.

In Big Sur, Richard was very interested in Price Dunn, who was “the Confederate General of Big Sur” [from Brautigan's book of the same name]. Price read the Greek classics, et cetera, as a child in Alabama. He took us down to Big Sur. We were two or three weeks there. We talked, fixed meals, had two cases of wine. I remember there was an invasion of frogs there. We poured wine around the porch to try to kill the frogs. They were kind of like the coquí in Hawaii.

As one of my friends said about Richard, “He was like shining too bright a light on too small a thing.” His writing was not voluminous. By the time it got pared-down, and pared-down, there weren’t a lot of words. There wasn’t a lot to work with.

He was good at listening to criticism. He worked with and listened to Ron Loewinsohn, an academic and a poet. He wasn’t like Robert Duncan who was a traditional poet, or Ken Rexroth, who was a target for poets because he was so academic.

Richard was contemptuous of literature taught in college. He got to become the flavor-of-the-month for a lot of them. He liked the Black Mountain College poets [Creeley, Dorn, Olson]. Richard knew Lawrence Ferlinghetti; some of the artists. Artist Tom Field was a really neat guy. He lived with us for awhile and was an inspiration to Richard. He taught Ianthe drawing when she was two.

A Great Fan

Arthur: What do you think he would’ve thought about current technology, the Internet?

Virginia Aste: In “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” [1967], Richard anticipated the impact of computer technology. He was happy to get an electric typewriter. It was a lot of work making corrections on copies of his work, and typing it over and over. It took a lot of time. It was a lot of work.

He would’ve been a great fan of the word processor because he couldn’t spell.

I think he ran out of things to write about, unlike Styron and Mailer—who he didn’t like. Alcohol shut down his spontaneity and depressed him and accelerated/exaggerated the parts of his personality that was pessimistic about people. I’m pretty sure he did not believe in God or an afterlife. He believed in art and the arts as the highest people could live for.

Freedom

Arthur: Was it unusual to be traveling and camping—going on a road trip—with a child in Idaho? Did you grow up there, is that why you went there on the infamous Trout Fishing In America road trip?

Virginia Aste: I grew up camping a lot. In those days, if you were a hundred miles out of L.A., in Mojave, for example, you were in the mountains. My father was a fisherman, he liked to fish. He was one of eleven children. My mother was a school teacher. It took her sixteen summers get her teaching license.

We took two trips. We had an Indian theme going with Ianthe in a little pack. We almost suffocated Ianthe.

Arthur: A cradleboard?

Virginia Aste: Some misguided Indian thing. We were gone two weeks to the Klamath River. Ianthe was too hot. When we took her out [of the cradleboard] she sort of unwrapped herself and threw a fit.

On our trip across the Snake River we could watch Ianthe because she had a pink fabric leash [harness] like a dog that we tied to a tree. We used it one time. We had to be absolutely sure about her because we were very close to the river. It had a steep cliff. A sharp drop-off to the river.

We almost didn’t make it. The first night, we drove down into an old lake bed— I think it was called Dollar Lake. Oh, was it there? Anyway, we had boxes in our 1951 Plymouth, books, boxes of clothing in the back of the station wagon in wooden crates, paper bags, baby stuff. Lots of Dostoevsky, we couldn’t go without Dostoevsky! God forbid we go without that! Ha!

That night we slept inside the back of the car. Everything was on the ground. Then, within minutes, a huge cloud burst. There was going to be a flood of mud, huge raindrops, dollar-sized, the area began filling with water. I put Ianthe somewhere. I started driving up this road and I couldn’t see.

Arthur: Richard was guiding you up?

Virginia Aste: Yes, we were in the middle of a huge cloudburst, we were stuck—Dollar Lake, or wherever that was. The road wound around and around. It was so impossible to see. That was the first or second night of the trip. That was the beginning of Trout Fishing In America. Sleeping in the back of that station wagon. That’s why it was so crazy. It was a shift car with the shift on the wheel.

Richard ate a lot of watermelon and had to pee in the night. That’s how we found out the lake bed was filling in.

Arthur: Lucky.

Virginia Aste: So, I don’t know why we did the trip. Re-visiting Idaho, I guess. We saw the Snake River in the beginning of its decline and urban development. It was Indian-based.

Arthur: Romantic.

Virginia Aste: So romantic. Very romantic idea.

Arthur: Did a lot of writers take off with their families at the time and camp?

Virginia Aste: We were ahead or behind the times. Having a child was unusual at the time. Well, some had children. David Meltzer had three kids. Ron Loewinsohn had a child later. Robert Creeley. But from what I read of Kerouac, his trips were not family-oriented.

Arthur: This seems a bit different compared with trips other writers were taking across the country. Do you think?

Virginia Aste: Yes. It was quite amazing. The clutter of the station wagon. Now, there are containers for everything. There weren’t then. [We used] wooden crates and paper bags. We had a ridiculous tent. Stakes for the tent, food. The tent had to have stakes. It was canvas. It did not pop up. If a stake was lost, you had to find a tree, cut a new one.

Arthur: It sounds like homesteading.

Virginia Aste: Re-enacting a whole bunch of stuff—it was a long trip. A canvas tent during the day is hot. Washing diapers in the streams…we weren’t conscious of the fact that it was polluting.

Arthur: You were mostly alone at the camp spots?

Virginia Aste: Yes, usually the only people except for local fishermen. We saw some sheep, sheep farmers, and had to go through the herd of sheep and then came back round again. The sheep men just smiled. They knew [we weren’t getting anywhere]. Richard wrote about this.

Arthur: You were really wild, adventuresome.

Virginia Aste: There were no maps, no guides. We went up and down the creeks until we found a good place. Taking that tent up and down…we were re-enacting some parts of our pasts.

We had traveler’s checks and finding a place to cash them was hard. There was nowhere to cash them. Like in those novels where you read about the South, very backwoods. It wasn’t convenient.

Our baby was always an icebreaker. Richard had a song he sang, “Orofino Rose.” He sang that over and over to Ianthe to get her to sleep.

Arthur: Why didn’t you just use cash? I mean, what was the point of traveler’s checks? Because you were travelers?

Virginia Aste: Yes. We had gone to Mexico, to Oaxaca and had traveler’s checks there. That might’ve been a role model for that. Richard was paranoid about losing money.

Arthur: It sounds sort of urban, but you were both raised in rural areas. Or at least, not in big cities.

Virginia Aste: I was raised in the San Fernando Valley. It doesn’t exactly inspire your imagination there. San Francisco was really inexpensive when we lived there. It was a city life, lots of poetry, but then—

Arthur: You wanted nature, adventure, taking the trip to write about it on purpose?

Virginia Aste: Richard was always writing. He sat at a card table with his Royal typewriter during the trip. I didn’t know what he was writing until later. He was always taking notes. His short paragraphs were like poems. Real different writing. Coming back [after the trip], it was very short on words, not prolific, turned into short chapters that were almost poems. They were so funny.

But everything changed. Ianthe was two when I met Tony [Aste], my later lover. Richard had become so abusive from alcohol. What boys see done to women in their youth…Richard and I weren’t about that at all, we were into Camus—not towards others, but how we viewed ourselves.

Richard was fascinated by war—by WWI and WWII. He shot up one wall of his house in Montana which had a clock on it.

Arthur: That must’ve been really loud.

Virginia Aste: Yes. It was like a war, the sound of war. I didn’t mind him going shooting, but…we had this spaghetti party, and afterwards he yanked the door open. He didn’t wake Ianthe, but he was very violent. I left soon after with Tony.

In Richard’s poem, “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace,” his writing is a predilection in a way. It has come true. There isn’t anything you can do. The ether is full of good deeds and misdeeds—it all gets recorded. I’ve never looked back. I don’t sit around and reflect on the past. I’m in the moment, in the now. I’ve lived that way my whole life.

People were living in communes and trying to be peaceful. What it came down to was falling into prior patterns. Richard just fell into that as far as I could see. He liked Katherine Anne Porter a lot and also Eudora Welty.

I think he had a special admiration for writers who were profound and humorous at the same time. He really liked the Armenian short story writer [William Saroyan] who wrote My Name is Aram. There were so many things that I didn’t ask Richard about. It was us against the world and rebellion. Like living in a bubble. What did we want?

Arthur: Freedom?

Virginia Aste: Freedom from the society that had jammed people into unhappy relationships and war. Freedom from that.

“one for jack”

jack rose was one of those guys
with whom one feels an immediate bond
he wasn’t a physical giant or anything
but he had an immense presence
something, perhaps, more spectral than tangible
which filled a room easily
enveloping you in a kind of bear hug
that could seem either threatening or comforting
depending on the look in jack’s eyes
and on the level of self-assurance
in which you held the quality of yr record collection

jack was an excellent drinking partner
even if you weren’t imbibing yrself
he would see that yr portion was duly taken care of
without so much as a peep of complaint
and he had a set of ears and hands as big as his heart
which was huge as his thirst
once he’d left pelt and started his serious acoustic journey
we’d talk sometimes about guitarists and how they did certain things
i could almost never follow him after a while
but i figured his observations were right, because almost every time i saw jack
his technique would have moved to a whole new level
beyond his models, beyond his friends, almost beyond the bounds of the possible

occasionally we’d see each other for an intense string of days
then not again for a year or so…even more, i guess
but it was always great and easy to hang out with him
we’d make fun of each other’s cooking and record collections
maybe arm wrestle a bit, or at least talk about who was stronger
damn…
jack was just one of those people you knew you were gonna know for a long time
there was an agelessness about him that gave you the sense
he was built to last, like a bull
or a china shop
although what i guess he resembled most
was a bull becoming a china shop
his transformation from drone thug to master primitive
was amazing to behold
and we are so lucky – all of us
to have known him, or at least his music
because that music will always be available
as long as people can still perceive brilliance
and let’s hope that’s forever

so long, jack
tell fahey he’s goddman fatso
i’ll never forget you, man

–byron coley
deerfield ma 12/08/09

photo by dan cohoon

Shivastan Press presents the “Small Press Revolution!”
book release & readings for “wildflowers- a Woodstock mountain poetry anthology”
featuring Lee Ann Brown, Donald Lev, Janine Pommy Vega, Andy Clausen, MJ Lamontagne
(+ special guests! – hopefully Ed Sanders)
followed by a celebration of the new release of “Atlantis Manifesto”
featuring Robert Kelly & Peter Lamborn Wilson.
hosted by Publisher Shiv Mirabito, info 679 8777
admission only $5

Because the living room did not lie down a super highway,
Spike had to put up signs to have the big trucks detour through.

ZZZZWOOOOOMMMMM
said the red
sign Phospher’s wife
blew into
the air. It took off down the road after
the red truck.

Klyd Watkins’ first chapbook of poetry, pete’s improvizations [sic], was published by Owl’s Breath Press in 1969. During the seventies he produced ten lps of Poetry Out Loud with his wife Linda and with Peter and Patricia Harleman. These records are still collected. He has alternated between writing poetry and creating poetry by direct audio recording of improvisation. Since the ’90s he has sometimes combined the two, using text as well as improvisation in his recordings and publishing written poetry. His CDs include Listen The Night, as part of the band What Are We? with Mike Panasuk, and “Harp All Made of Gold,” which presents chapter one of his long poem Jack spoken over world class rock and roll. Books include Ghost Trees from Sugar Mountain Press and 5 Speed from The Temple.
His own poetry and that of friends, both well know and never heard of, appears on his website: http://www.thetimegarden.com/
http://thundershack.net/ is devoted to his backyard recording studio.

St. John’s Fire

Next time you stand at the foot of a spiral stair,
look straight up,
into the dome, owned by
the gold and green brothers, Polaris and Sirius.
And there, you’ll see
the dove and the raven,
the flood birds, entwined,
in the pupil of a god’s eye, and the
god’s double tongues—one of leather, one of steel—
carving silver peacocks
into the backs of liars and other faithless.
They fill the streets
with their gunpowder cries, but
intrepid, you kick past their glittering,
bottled hollers, approaching
the mossy queen with
tiny lions climbing
from her open collar.
Your fresh supplications, awkward and
skinless, hover near the queen’s feet,
until the twin cubs devour them
and run. You must chase them,
without wheels or engines or bullets this time;
only your untried calves and thighs and lungs, only
your untested heart.
And you chase them, every midnight and midmorning,
past the tribes of the hopeful
tending St. John’s fires,
and camping at the ocean’s fingertips.

T.M. Göttl, a member of the Buffalo ZEF Creative Arts Community, has won a Wayne College Regional Writing Award and a Franklin-Christoph Poetry Prize. She won first place on the first time she ever competed in a poetry performance competition. She travels throughout the state of Ohio, writing and performing her poetry, and her work has appeared online and in print, in places such as Deep Cleveland, The Poet’s Haven, The Mill, The Hessler Street Fair Anthology, and a bilingual poetry collection to benefit victims of the Sichuan Earthquake in China in 2008. Her first collection, Stretching the Window, was published in February 2008.

write with the tv on
building the houses
finance the education
save the nation
fraud the credit
use my number
file a claim
get a new card
find a new password
keep it a secret
forget about it
fall in the house of still
the tall frame no blame
listening to a voice within
the secret number
the subway train
the snow is god
and the snow is falling

by Jeremy Gaulke

we found whiskey in bottles
without labels
in charred ruins and secret places
draped in rust and toadstools

we knew they were there but could never see them
but we prayed for them
and left the whiskey
in the ruins off the road
adorned in rust and natures squalor
to make them mad
to make them strong
to make new gods of slaughter

My Neighbour Has a New Girlfriend

every first time that I’ve done them.

Valerie Webber
In her own write: Valerie is a reluctant academic and proud smut peddler. She has lived in Montreal since abandoning her maritime home 7 years ago. When not writing she alphabetizes her cd collection, chews the skin around her fingernails, and shamelessly indulges in legal drama television. She generally shares too much information concerning genitals, her own or otherwise. Previous work includes thin little arms build castles (big baby books) and lignin diadem with Genevieve Dellinger (big baby books, rain ridge press & glasseye books co-publication ).

we pray
for bigger mouths

Travis Catsull, from Year of the Girl

Other books by Catsull include Open Spirit and Isle of Asphalt from Effing Press in Austin. Catsull is the editor/founder of Haggard and Halloo and co-founder of The Charles Potts Magic Windmill Band Which won the Austin Chronicle’s choral CD of the year award in 2008 for The Golden Calves.