happy new year!

here's to another trip around the sun!  sure 2025 doesn't sound or look much different than 2024.  but we are thick in la comedie humaine.  e.g. just a couple of months ago our incoming president mimed fellating a microphone onstage!  oh my!  as the great bugs bunny would say, 'it is to laugh!'  i might even break a rib or have a heart attack from all the hilarity.  at any rate, we are now a quarter way into the new century.  our world has shifted into a new register.  even if i can't define it very well, i get the sense, like i did at the end of the Cold War, that we are living in a new era.  we are living in the FUTURE, no?  if so, where are the flying cars?!  where is my jetpack i was promised that would be waiting for me in the FUTURE!  wherever this Weird Road that all of us are travelling on takes us at least we are on the journey together.  

i don't do new year's resolutions but i might take up the briar.  smoking pipes is cool, right?  i will do what i do.  read/write poems.  listen to music.  watch really bad movies.  observe the world as it is & do what the cuban poet omar perez suggested all poets do, observe & have fun, & have fun with what you are observing.  cherish my family & friends.  & know that the world, & everything in it, in all its terror & beauty, is a magical place.   my life is made of the world; i will do what i can, a la james dickey. & try not be afraid of the blank page.  making mistakes can be a beautiful art too.  

below is my new t-shirt given to me as a christmas present by my sister in law.  she always picks the perfect gifts!  so beware the dangers of CATNIP MADNESS to your felines!  it started with one sniff!

happy new year 2025!  

as always MAKE IT COUNT!

 

good vibrations

 dylanthomasesque

i'd rather live off of guile & beer & poetry & music & movies & kindness & love & family & friends in life & in the art 

i'd rather live off the terror & ecstasy of this modern life 

odi et amo mon ami

watching from such great heights

'it's hell on wheels!'

 

it's the friday nite after xmas & you wanna hear some sloppy drunken live rock&roll!

'it's only rock&roll but i like it, yes i do!'

two interview or not two interview

to which the title of this short piece is a goofy pun on shakespeare!  but as the great steve martin used to say, WELL, EXUUUUUUUSE ME!!!  

at any rate, i love reading interviews.  especially interviews with poets.  i mean, i'm no guild man but i am a human being who loves poets & poetry, & who is doing his damnedest by making his life in poetry.  not as a career.  i have no professional poetical career at all.  i think i've made all of 15 bucks in the selling of my chapbooks.  usually, when i am, in the odd occasion, offered to read in public i set up my chaps with a sign that says, gratis.  people are usually confused by this notion of free poetry.  so i countenance their confusion & respond to it thusly, 'okay, the books are free, but my signature will cost you 5 bucks!'  har har har!!!

so then back to interviews.  this evening i read two.  one from 2011 & one published just this year.  both are wonderful in their own ways.  

bill bissett is a wildly prolific canadian poet with an orthographic style that takes a little practice to read but is utterly worth the effort.  bissett is an outsider's outsider that manages to let all of us inside to find a strong, warm & inclusive person.  but rather than have me use adjectives to describe bissett let him do the talking.

you'll find bill bissett interviewed by ryan j. cox here https://eeevee2.blogspot.com/2011/11/interview-with-bill-bissett-by-ryan-j.html.

eileen myles needs no introduction cuz they are prolific as hell too & pretty damn popular.  i dig myles' poetics & practice that if it is 'worth doing it is worth doing badly.'  as the old marketing catch phrase for nike shoes used to say, just do it! in re writing & reading.  

you'll find eileen myles interviewed by james yeh here https://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-eileen-myles/.

it came from the trailer park!

it's christmas time!  that means it's time to watch the trailer to this crazy flick, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians [1964].  you read that right!  no subtlety here!  martians kidnap old saint nick & bear him up to the red planet because the martian kids are all kinds of gloomy, dull & boring.  their martian parents figure they'd cheer up their green little tykes by introducing them to the christmas holiday spirit along with ol' santa claus himself.  but lo!  a couple of human rugrats stowaway on board the martian spacecraft to help rescue kris kringle.  santa then proceeds to kick some martian booty!  oh my!  i first saw this movie when i was a wee lad at a matinee movie house where it was showing during the holiday season.  i thought it was futuristic!  at any rate, i believe this pic is in the public domain & you can easily find the movie on youtube.  this flick's definitely one of the odder sorts of holiday fare!  merry christmas!

ho ho ho!!!

squeeze & let go!

                what rough beast comes round at last waiting to be born!

self-portrait of the poet sailing the high seas!

 

in homage to today's date, & the friday the 13th film franchise

dig this video collage of the long-running slasher series & song by alice cooper!

hoping your Friday the 13th was fun & filled with love & adventures!  

camp richardson, lake tahoe

 

& in the end this is what the old man had to say

there

was still

so much

to do

so much

to discover

so much to learn

i tried to do it all

& failed deliciously