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Roger & Antidisestablishmentarianism & Me

November 27, 2014
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One of my most prized possessions is an e-mail I received from Roger Ebert on April 3rd, 2010. He was telling me that I’d inspired a Twitter tweet of his, and he screen-printed the tweet for my perusal. I still have the e-mail in my Outlook Inbox, and so was able to take a screen print, thus:

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Here’s the journal page Roger saw that inspired his tweet that compelled him to send the e-mail:

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And here’s a link to another tweet, that awards Roger’s tweet Best Use of Antidisestablishmentarianism: https://twitter.com/kbeninato/status/11552988313

Lastly, here’s a Roger Ebert page I just finished today. It wasn’t the first Ebert page, and it won’t be the last. And let me make something clear: Roger’s generosity with his fans was thousandfold. What is a huge thing to me was something he did dozens of times a day. He read EVERY SINGLE THING his myriad fans sent him, and responded to an incredible number of them. I’m grateful for this tangible evidence that we interacted–it’s no coincidence that I’m doing this post Thanksgiving Day–but I’m sure that the number of people Roger similarly interacted with is well into four figures, if not five. And the number of people who miss him is in the millions.

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What Gave

November 26, 2014
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In some attempted creative expression the end product offers the creating party a trade, saying, “You don’t get to get me completely–I’m ungettable by my very nature–but I’ve got something you’ve never done before, and you better keep it.” I think this is one of those.

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What Gave

Wizened horseman sought a gig
Wayward daughter worked the trig
Had some talk at 8th & Shea
Hopped a plane unto LA
Added travel slow & rev
And a Stan with last name Lev
Thus the Trickster plays a fife
Tuneful of an orphan’s life

NOTE: The “Stan with last name Lev” is probably Stanislaw Lem in disguise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem

the process

November 24, 2014
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we put some stuff in our mouths
and open the food-intake part of our throats
and the stuff goes down the esophageal chute
and in about eleven seconds
it goes to a holding area known as the stomach
which uses an acid bath to leach the good stuff
and sends it on its duodenal way to be absorbed
via fingerlings called villi
and on down through windings of sausage-casings stuff
and the good stuff gets taken some here some there
and the extra or bad stuff gets packaged for offloading

and it all bears a resemblance to taking a stream of thought
and worrying the good engagement out of it
and refining it into words
while extracting the extraneous and the wrong
via backspace delete and cut

each of our glorious bodies are editors
chemical processors
and fertilizer manufacturers

and why that is a source of shame and not pride
is in the labyrinthine history of our convoluted culture

Fire & Bone and Bone Fire

November 23, 2014
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My first Life Drawing class was in the Spring of 1973. My eighth or so was sometime in the early 2000s. Outside the classroom there were a few occasions, and today I found an unfinished drawing circa 2010. I believe the model was Valley-local legend Crystal Cruz. Shoplight lighting and a skeleton made for a good erotic/macabre ensemble.

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Bone Fire

Balderdash & one naïf
One in love with fluffy Fifi
Neither wishes to demur
Either’s ether’s too unsure

Fire & Bone

Flimsy limb & leg of lamb
IED goes off & Wham-O
Rip a tide & keep it keen
Enter Now & make the scene

Charcoal Galore, but not

November 20, 2014
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This celebration of Charcoal in its various forms was done not in charcoal but in pencil. Without proper charcoal paper, charcoal, a real chamois, at least two kinds of eraser, and fixative, it is unwise to attempt a coherent charcoal drawing.

I here galorify Charcoal with three acrostic poems and one drawing of four Charcoal incarnations:

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Charcoal I

Carbon & gum arabic
Have a vine & dandy go
Add your dark and scarabic/A
Righteous DARK’ll Rock & Roll

Charcoal II

Could be it’s a stick with colic
Half a shadowed calico
Anti-talc or -tapioca
Rich rococo cocoa local

Charcoal III

Crackled screeches: cacophonic
Half a circle makes a halo
And a matador’s veronica
Robbing feedlots of a payroll

Jack Being Nimble

November 18, 2014
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Five years ago Thursday I was watching Jack Evans, “the Godfather of Phoenix poetry” according to Phoenix New Times, co-host and perform in the Caffeine Corridor series, and I was fortunate enough to have pencil and scrap paper on hand and a ringside seat, so I did a sketch. That that was five years ago attests to the longevity of Caffeine Corridor, and of Jack.

Today I was delighted to see that Jack had made that long-ago sketch his Facebook avatar, probably in acknowledgment of the five-year anniversary of my sketch. Jack, you REALLY MADE MY DAY, doing this! Thanks so much!

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done places, gone things

November 17, 2014
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done places, gone things

[Satan, to a newly arrived Chicagoan]
The trouble with you Chicago people is,
that you think you are the best people down here;
whereas you are merely the most numerous.
Mark Twain (“Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar”)

in our language of euphemism and shorthand,
first we get older and then we get old.
we go there and do that and get the t-shirt.
if we like it enough we go and do and get again.

when you’ve already been older and are heading for old,
life’s increasing limitations elbow their way in,
so you stroll along the strand rather than running tirelessly through it
on the way to something else,

or get quietly smashed instead of raising hell.
you turn in your young-person card
and start referring to young adults as “kids.”
in our language of euphemism and shorthand,

we “slow down” as we “get on”
though we tell ourselves “fifty is the new thirty”
and other nonsense,
and some of us take desperate measures:

doctors saw at the skin of our faces
or inject paralyzing toxin into it, or both,
and sometimes the masquerade works,
and sometimes it doesn’t.

we get offered “rewards” that are enticements
for the dispensation of our disposable and not-so-disposable cash.
we get mail about cremations and cruises
and we get fading music.

the cradle rocks and the grave is still.
in between, the speed limit will go from 75 to 15
and there’ll be a wiggly pointed line on a yellow background.
it is then that we find out what we’re made of.

rats/tsar/star/arts

November 16, 2014
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Here quadruple acrosticism is pushed to its limit. Nineteen words are arrayed in four lines that yield four more words. Each row summons an image; each acrostical column is illustrated by contrapuntal images. Talismans is to Arcana as Secretariat is to Racecar. The two middle acrostics are the bookends of those four words, and the first word in every row ends in the same letter of the acrostic column next to it, and the last phrase of each row begins with the same letter of the acrostical column to its immediate left. Why all these strictures? My guess is I do it for the same reason Henri Matisse painted a green stripe down the middle of the face of his portrait of Madame Matisse. We’re pushing on something, seeing if we can get away with it, and seeing if it matters.

Curiosity may be satisfied by doing an Internet search on “matisse green stripe.” Meanwhile, here’s mine:

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Some fine day I may push the envelope further with “spot/opts/pots/stop.” I’d be overjoyed if someone beat me to it, though. [rueful smile]

Cover Story: Three Covers, Forty Years

November 15, 2014
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Recently my e-mail included an attachment of the cover of SANDCUTTERS, the quarterly publication of the Arizona State Poetry Society. The cover design is by Carol Hogan, and features a ceramic work of mine on the front cover, and a journal page of mine on the back. It looks like this:

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Naturally I’m thrilled about this. I’m no stranger to literary publication covers, but there have been so few in my artist’s checkered career that I am at most a casual acquaintance. I have designed the covers of two out of three of the chapbooks I’ve self-published. (My old and truest friend Steve Boyle designed the cover of SAVAGE SONNETS AND OTHER WHYS, and I here reward him by not featuring that cover on this post. I am a Stinker.) Here is the cover of my first chapbook:

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Behind The Bird are thumbnails of some of the 600-odd journal pages I’d done, scanned and posted to the now-defunct website Eons.

To see the one other cover I’d done before then, we have to set the Way-Back Machine all the way to 1973, when I was an 18-year-old pup attending Glendale Community College. That year’s GCC literary magazine, The Traveler, featured my white-on-black portrait of my then-girlfriend. There’s awful clumsiness in the drawing, but there is also love. Here it is, courtesy of GCC’s Memory Project:

traveler cover 111514

Bob Dylan’s line from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” comes to mind: “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.” Forty years of covers and I STILL am on the day shift. [smiles] C’est La Vie–that covers it!