Subterranean Blue Poetry: IX X

the bar noir

by D.B. Cox

there’s a decaying piano
in the “bar noir”
that nobody plays
whenever I feel
like I’m starting
to disappear
into the chorus
of shit-faced patrons
whispering conspiracy
claims into their beer
I stroll over
to the keyboard
& bend my ear
toward the piano strings
then I hammer
a low blue-note
& jam the pedal
to the dusty
dance floor
I close my eyes
& listen
as that solitary
son-of-a-bitch
rings out its
monotone song
to fit this
monochrome scene
of needful people
trying to make
something
out of the emptiness
that fills this space
of half-remembered
yesterdays

shotgun house

by D.B. Cox

rotting shack
watched over
by three ceramic angels
casting cold eyes
over a weed-covered
yard of wrecked cars
& a black cat parked
under a front-porch swing
that dangles
like a hanged man
from a single chain
a derelict mockingbird
rests on the rusting frame
of a 1964 mustang
& sings forgotten songs
stolen from
an unknown bluesman
who once slept here
small truths falling
in slow 6/8 time
12-bar compositions
concerning
Louisiana hurricanes
with hellish ladies’ names
& skies
that won’t stop crying

american business card

by D.B. Cox

the pitchless hum
of an idling greyhound
combines with the suffocating
fumes of diesel fuel
to soak the night air
with noisy poison
a skinny panhandler
wearing a camouflage t-shirt
sits crumpled
like lost luggage
outside the bus depot
hard times & places
chiseled across his face -
engravings
on a tombstone
two hollow eyes
like piss-holes
in the snow
stare out blankly
at the human caravan
flowing along
with an assured
sense of destination
a wrinkled
square of cardboard
at his side -
a kind of faded brown
american business card
the fractured graffiti
“out of work”
scrawled across the front
one look at this guy
& you know he’s done for -
his accusing eyes
look up at me
as if I could save him

monuments

by D.B. Cox

a passing breeze lifts dead leaves
& scatters them
over a tattered rag doll
lying beneath
the dramatic statue
of a bronze soldier
forever frozen
in an intrepid pose
of war movie bravado
clean-collar tourists
stare from the cover
of stylish shades
taking secret comfort
in a pathetic apparition
wrapped in an army overcoat
facedown in a pool of piss
baptized - purified - crucified
in the mute humility
of his own guilt
an unconscious monument
tangled in green
triple-canopy dreams
while inside crusty
rust-filled ears
the white noise of city traffic
hums like a Huey
spectral medevac
searching for a soul
lost more than fifty years ago
somewhere along the Mekong River

friday night in the drunk tank

by D.B. Cox

floating over drunk tank hum
a voice at the back
of the holding cell
demands a phone call
warm blood
begins to move
back into numb hands
from cuffs too tight
tiny shards of glass
from a beer-bottle bar fight
embedded
in blood-matted hair
crystal ringing
in my brain like
a beautiful girl’s name
left eye swollen shut
thirteen dollars stashed
in the soles of my old dingoes
not enough for bail
another friday night
in the city jail
for trying
to make something
out of the emptiness
that crawls
along a boulevard
of half-remembered things

A brilliant rendition of the blues in Americana poetics, stories of the night street in rain under the Allegheny moon, Blues: repetition of a blue bass line by D.B. Cox and Subterranean Blue Poetry. D.B. Cox (poet, musician, soldier) is from South Carolina. He is a Marine Corps Veteran and has written five books of poetry.

This poetic offering exists in the long spaces of the painting Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. Painted in 1942 during W.W. II a certain idea of alienation and shadowland, perfectly mirrored in Blues: repetition of a blue bass line. A soldier/Angel, rolling around the streets, amongst the ragged people, playing the blues in bars, writing into the night, the stories of shadowland. After the war, still living the war. An underlying theme of ended love affair, the poet pushes the bounds of post-modernist literature with the idea of paradise lost. The Beat of the bullet delivery crashes into the darkness, in lyrical rounds. Nightmares on the edge of violence, depression, the write is a considered truthtelling that shines in. Stories of lost and found, the in sync, out of sync rhythm of want and not rolls into poetics like a night of blues.

From searching for the door:

“sad eyes filled
with junk-sick rivers
she faces another night
made of waiting
swaying in place
staring back
over her shoulder
as if she’s searching
for the door
she came in through”

An original Beat progression, the work is iconic, in night moves, as if the poet, walking through a rancid, decaying post-apocalypse cityscape, is reciting poetry up to the nightsky. Stories of taxi cabs, street people, suicide, an old war, guitars, drunks and dance halls. The darkness is an imprint of hard edges rounded by the brilliant craft of the poet’s pen.

From shades of ray
- for Ray Charles

“dark shades of ray
swaying to fatback funk
& blue indigo - incognito
comping dirges so slow
the drummer’s lost
& looking for a tempo
sweet gospel
heal your soul”

The poetry is Kraftwerk, incredible spinning of language that creates the ambience of a nighclub with veiled lamplight, close, intimate, a night with a starlight friend. A fantastique New Age poetic jewel, Blues: repetition of a blue base line by D.B. Cox.

Available @ Amazon.com.

It is The Art Gallery of Ontario, 2005, the rooms are full of the works of Modigliani. Captures the artists/the lovers in sculpture and portraits from Paris (early 1900’s) a long time ago, all in rhythm, although the painted hands sometimes are awkward . . . like a song, the nude of Jeanne Hébuterne, the young art student calls at the end of the long room, her hands neatly tucked in behind her head, the stunning nude, surrounded in golded light.

Catching Desire, a book of prose, interspersed with poetry by Carmelo Militano, tells of the life of the great painter, Modigliani, barely recognized in his own lifetime, yet well known in the Artists’ milieu of Paris in the early 20th Century, his life, his lovers, his work. Carmelo Militano is an award-winning Canadian poet, his family originally from Italy and a former journalist at the CBC Radio One Winnipeg.

The biography, in poetic treatise, was researched in Italy and Paris, as the author/poet discovers the Artist in his homes and haunts and in the Archives, providing the background from which Militano spins his craft. Walking in the streets and bistros of Italy and Paris, the author/poet often intersperses the work with poems/prose written in the 1st person, using “I”, within the biography of the write in the storyline. Also, the author on occasion assumes the different roles of the principals in first person, creating an ambience of intimacy. The poetry within the prose is experiential tells a story in classical form, with the distant influence of the Beats.

This Art Nouveau biography is the magic of the Paris concourse, the Artists, the purveyors of art, their lovers, the quiet au sauvage that claims the moment, W.W. I and then W.W. II in the background the Spanish flu of 1917, the red plumes of tuberculosis. How the Artists commune together, the soirées, the broken love affairs, often the tragic, the shadows of poverty and disease. Also, the story of light how patrons give monies, how Modi is known to people, how he is given place. A story of the Artist dilettante, consumed by drink and dark passions of the heart. The recounting of how Beatrice Hastings (Modigliani’s wealthy lover, a publicist) is thrown through a closed window in an argument with the Artist, and how Modi is shot at by her new lover Alfred Pina (sculptor) all occurring at public night soirées.

He meets Leopold Zborovski an art dealer who becomes his patron, he shuts him in a room with a model, a bottle of wine and his canvas, brushes and paints. Zbo arranges an Art Gallery exhibition at the Mansard Gallery in London, Modi sells some of his work and is given favourable reviews in the press. The living history, the stories, the days and nights of Modigliani are infused with a quiet violence of the heart, a dark suffering. When he dies there is a mad scramble to acquire his paintings . . . his painter’s palettes, his hats. And the triumph of the art of Modigliani, the nudes painted in archetypes, the golded bright that lasts long into the dark of night.

From Paris, April 1910 & May 1911
(an affair with Anna Akhmatova (poet))

*5*
“On a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg
We recited Verlaine under his old black umbrella
Delighted we remembered the same verses
Soft tap of summer rain kept the beat
At night it was his footsteps under my window.

*6*
His door locked
I toss a surprise bouquet of roses
One by one through an open window
He returned to find a formed charmed pattern
Convinced I somehow entered.”

A brilliant recounting, moving from Livorno, Italy (Modigliani’s birth place) to Paris, France, to Nice, a travelogue, a life lived in the escarpment of lovers and poverty, a certain madness, brought into cinematic with poetry and Archives notes, quotes from the greats. Capturing the life of the Artist, Modigliani lives. Capturing Desire by Carmelo Militano.

Available @ Amazon.com.

A Strategy of Mirrors
Derek J Brown
Rymour Books, £9.90
138 pps.

‘In opposition to Aristotelean logic is what one might call paradoxical logic … Paradoxical logic was predominant in Chinese and Indian thinking, in the philosophy of Heraclitus, and then again, under the name of dialectics, it became the philosophy of Hegel and Marx.’
- Erich Fromm (i)

Part of what motivates the poetry of Derek J Brown is concern with the impotence and ingenuity of humanity faced with a universe that our minds seem ill equipped, as yet, to fully grasp and understand. There is wonder at the things human beings can achieve and disconsolation at human stupidity and the limitations of our senses. Within this paradox (or dialectic) can be found other paradoxical conundrums, we may enjoy consumption while destroying ourselves: we see the surface of a vast array of phenomena yet do not fully comprehend them. Where does belief begin and fact end?

This is a highly impressive first collection of poems. It asks many important questions and explores them relentlessly through paradoxical iterations: such paradoxes range from those within details of the minutiae of daily social life, to the broad, the visionary and the universal.

A Poetics of Place and Time

The setting for much of the thought and action in these poems is Brown’s home city of Glasgow. Both the city’s centre and periphery are given equal attention and appreciation. Brown brings the same concentration and focus to all parts of the city that come under his scrutiny. There are no easy categorisations of social class or urban/urbane political certainties. People are observed in their places with the same sceptical reverence wherever they happen to be. The Glasgow encountered by the reader is both a real and recognisable 21st century city and a mythical place: an allegorical backdrop for exploring such questions as -

1. What happens to us when we die?
2. Is it possible to love another human being?
3. Are we all liars?
4. What is the moral universe?
5. Where do our values come from?
6. Does scientific reason tell us the truth?
7. Is there a purpose to human existence?
8. Why do we exist in the first place?

Clearly these are big questions which may have no answers, or multiple answers, or, how ever unlikely, one true answer. Nevertheless, it is by looking at Glasgow (and the world) in this way that Brown constructs the poems of ‘A Strategy of Mirrors’. It is commonplace in Brown’s poetry to find the mythical, mystical and mysterious rubbing shoulders with café interiors, bar stools and someone smoking a cigarette outside a hospital entrance.

Underlying all of this is the feeling that Time, and its flow, is a matter of chance, of probability often so remote as to render events miraculous to the human senses. Perhaps all is serendipitous, all is random, or by way of counterpoint, perhaps all is fated under the master plan of an unknowable being (or God) and free will is not what it seems? Then again, possibly, there are junctures and hinges in history whereby in parallel realms all possibilities of every conscious decision are played out with different results: something along the lines of certain ideas advanced by Philip K Dick. What ever the case may be, it can be asserted with some certainty that for Brown, Time is a slipping thing, layered like Russian dolls.

It generates its algorithms

Despite this reader’s interpretation of Brown’s methodology, or poetics, Brown’s world view is emphatically that of a poet. The seeping of philosophy into the poetry is by virtue of attention to those fundamental poetic tools, language and language use. Language is an active lens, reflecting and refracting the light of meaning, which is in its turn ever evolving, being and becoming, negating certainty to find new ways of looking at our lives, presenting life as fresh and vibrant: even the dull and jaded is alive through deployment of notions of transience and paradox, which only just save Brown from jaundiced cynicism. While many a human being, including myself, like to think of humans as creative beings, as part of a complex and creative ecosystem, which exists in a creative universe, Brown gives us the metaphor of “The Glass Harmonica” hiding behind a curtain and if we strain our ears hard enough, or tune in properly, we can hear its call. Brown tells us:

There is no telling
what I misconceive
You call seductively

to a universe
whose ears are full of wax
Quintessential orphan
you raise your holy hands
to the follies of the world
Instruct your threadbare czars
to play their dead guitars
I will pretend to listen

How can we trust in our senses to tell us the truth about the universe when we are the universe and the universe is us:

it generates its algorithm
like there was
no eternity

take this body
bruise it until it heals
Take your myths,
unite them in flesh

What soul is hidden in the music of the universe is reflected in Brown’s attention to syntax, cadence and rhythm. Browns poems have subtle but pointed rhythmic patterns imbued with the resonance of song. As in the famous Gillespie algorithm, ‘What happens is what is possible to happen, drawn from a random choice’ of variables available to Brown’s observational psyche. (ii) This same principle probably applies to all generational language creation though rather than go further down this road it might be beneficial to mention that Peter Clive has written an excellent short introduction to Brown’s collection which gives ease of access to the poetry itself.

Language as Music

As I strolled, fully possessed by 21st Century wonder, through Glasgow’s Alexandra Park I overheard several groups of young people arguing amongst themselves over the question of ‘What is poetry?’ One young woman cried passionately into the Spring-like 1st of March sky that ‘Poetry is language as music’. Yet another declaimed ‘poetry is metaphor’. To which a very serious seagull answered, ‘All signifying-systems of representation are metaphors: mathematics, music, sculpture, painting, language written and spoken, but only language as sound is truly beautiful. Poetry and song are the greatest achievements of leaden-footed humanity, and I can fly, so fuck them.’

You know the kind of thing … happens every day. I was baffled by the fact that the Poetry Police weren’t on hand to keep order should anything go awry. In my day it would’ve been a swift boot up the arse… And I thought to myself, what we call metaphor is actually metaphor contained within metaphor. And home did I head to ponder. On pondering, the question arose as to what precisely are the algorithmic qualities of music? Surely modern synthetic sound production is algorithm dependent?

The magic thing is that human beings can perform such tasks of sound generation without ever having to know the first thing about algorithms, or whether the symbolic representation of sound is metaphor within metaphor. Our senses tell us. We know intuitively how to mimic the world - process our sense data. It is another of the great gifts nature bequeaths us and will continue to do so for as long as there is an eco-system on this planet, or anywhere else, of which we are a part. Brown’s poetry has a wonderful sense of music, of language as music, (and there are very few decent poems which are free from ‘language as music’). In Brown’s Strategy we find both formal and informal structures. There is close attention to the sound of the words, to the rhythm and cadence of the syllables, to line length, to stanza structure, though this does not come from counting the number of syllables and stresses in a line, but from the heart of Brown’s consciousness, from his familiarity with and feeling for music, for language as music, for poetry. It comes from something as vague as sensitivity or sentiment, yet is accurate, truthful and real. One such highly musical poem is,

The Day Gene Vincent Came to Glasgow (iii)
On the verge of almost reliving
the day Gene Vincent came to Glasgow
I linger, smoking cigarettes
in the infirmary’s dominant shadow,
following randomly time’s deceits,
bait and switch of gods,
pulse of constants in my eye,
magnetic ends and odds

furnishing this vast aloneness,
the mystifying value
of a question that can’t be answered.
Is this not the way it always is?
In the myth that never was
all happenings that happen
happen simultaneously,
science of music whispers,

moonlight’s cold infractions
accumulate then zero in
on epiphanies yet to be had.
Sirius appears to dance
and with its vanities gesticulates,
every ghost is living
in this revision of revision,
this script of what passes for transience.

I fill a small yet incurable space,
same one Gene Vincent filled
back somewhere in the 20th Century
I watch lovers escape
into prisons of their visions
I am not immune, I escape into my own
Here in December’s mortal grip
I dream sounds from lucent guitars,

howls of infants born in bitterness.
words of drunkards, unseen sages,
everything subject to impulse
of thermodynamic conundrums.
It will soon be Christmas Eve,
seems the lights have burned for ages
and it feels like I was there
the day Gene Vincent came to Glasgow

There is music in its content and its cadence. The location is just outside Glasgow’s somewhat gothic Royal Infirmary, but this location is entangled with the thoughts occurring in the narrator’s consciousness, a consciousness that while located in one place (the narrator’s mind) is contemplating other times, places and ideas. There is also the location of the poem itself as ink on a page in a physical book: contained within its closed world which is “A Strategy of Mirrors”. It is winter and perhaps someone close to the narrator has just died or is seriously ill. We are “in December’s mortal grip”.

Thinking of how Time behaves in this poem is instructive: Time is not linear, Gene Vincent travels from the early 1960s into the narrator’s present consciousness, and the narrator simultaneously is transported to Vincent’s world of the 1960s- “time's deceits … all happenings that happen/happen simultaneously … in this revision of revision,/this script of what passes for transience … and it feels like I was there/the day Gene Vincent came to Glasgow”. Even the natural world itself is not as it appears, it too contains various entanglements- “moonlight’s cold infractions … zero in on epiphanies yet to be had … Sirius appears to dance … and … every ghost is living”. The moon travels in Time and is not the actual moon observed but a future moon indicative of knowledge that can only be gained from future experience. There is the possibility that dancing Sirius brings our ghosts to life and somehow wraps all of time in an eternal present, in which past, present and future are united, it is all in the one-ness. A one-ness which exists to be transcended …

Needless to say, this a deeply thought-provoking collection of poems. It is an entire world, and a worldview, contained within 70 or so poems. Each poem is executed skilfully and reads with entertainment and ease. There is a lot going on here, reflection upon reflection upon reflection. Reading A Strategy of Mirrors is a fascinating journey, by turns melodic, philosophical and abundantly rich with images.

i. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 57, Thorsons, London, 1995. (First published 1957).
ii. Stuart A Kaufmann, Humanity in a Creative Universe, p 52, OUP, Oxford, 2016.
iii. Brown, A Strategy Mirrors, p, 46, Rymour Books, Perth, 2020. Brown can be heard reciting this poem on youtube at
http://youtu.be/yx62NK9Cbuk

Available @ Amazon.co.uk.

sitting alone in someone else’s movie a disconnected movie a movie in sky “Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL”* one long day everything is perfect until nightfalls the willowing bone the feather writes a postcard in blue “Pool’s Father: See you next Wednesday” sunbeams from heaven darkly “HAL 9000: “Dave, stop. Stop, will you?” cold winds above earth “Stop, Dave” rats and ratskellar “Will you stop Dave?” someone’s greyhound in white “Stop, Dave” someone’s rabbit in blues “I’m afraid” . . . the radio ceci that move in the nightfalls “HAL 9000: Daisy, daisy” places you have never been places you belong “Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL” for somewhere beyond the nightsky “HAL 9000: I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave” the space odyssey of 9 at the courtesy of . . .

the pink Azores . . .

to dance

and dance

and dance . . .

* Dialogue from 2001: A Space Odyssey (movie)

Rebecca Anne Banks lives in the New Age Renaissance Republique of Poetry. She has been writing and producing artistic content for 40 years and is the author of over 30 books of poetry, guides to the Holy Spirit, a primer on marriage discernment, a family cookbook, a book of children's stories, a book of World Peace Newsletters, all available at Amazon Stations. She has produced 3 CDs of Folk/Rock music and has 17 CDs of music awaiting production. She won an IARA Award for Top 55 Internet Airplays for Angel Song (2010). She is an Associate Member of the League of Canadian Poets. She is also the Poetry Editor at Subterranean Blue Poetry (www.subterraneanbluepoetry.com), CEO/Artist at Tea at Tympani Lane Records (www.tympanilanerecords.com), the Book Reviewer at The Book Reviewer (www.thebookreviewer.ca)and the Quilt Artist at Kintsugi Art Quilts (www.kintsugiartquilts.com.

Alexander Blok (poet, writer, playwright, publicist, translator, literary critic) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Blok studied at the University of St. Petersburg and wrote lyrical poetry. He married Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, an actress. He is best known for the poetry imprints, Verses About the Beautiful Lady (1904), Balaganchik (1906), The Twelve and Other Poems (1918), amongst others.

D.B. Cox is a Marine Corps veteran and blues musician/writer from South Carolina. His poems have been published extensively in the small press, in the US and abroad. He has published five books of poetry: Passing For Blue, Lowdown, Ordinary Sorrows, Night Watch, and Empty Frames.

Jim Ferguson is a Glasgow-based writer and performance poet who has been actively practicing literary art since 1986. This site provides free access to some of Ferguson's poetry, bibliographical and contact information, fiction and essays. Some of the author’s books and DVD can also be purchased safely on-line through this site or those of his publishers. youtube at http://youtu.be/yx62NK9Cbuk

Carmelo Militano began his writing career as a freelance journalist and broadcaster for CBC Radio One in Winnipeg. He currently is a poet, writer, editor, teacher, and radio broadcaster. Militano’s poetry, fiction, and non-fiction explores the intersection and meeting of a dual consciousness–Italian & English Canadian–in History, classical myth, family, identity and the erotic. Carmelo Militano hosted a weekly poetry show at CKUW FM 95.9 (Winnipeg). His poems, fiction, reviews and essays, and literary interviews have been published in a wide range of publications: Accenti, CV2, Italian Canadiana, La Macchina Sognante (Italy), Lemon Hound, Northern Poetry Review, Quebec Poetry Review, Sangara (Italy), The Lonely Offices, The Pacific Rim Review of Books, The Toronto Quarterly, PopMatters, and Prairie Fire. Militano is also a member of the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers, League of Canadian Poets, The Writers' Union of Canada, and The National Book Critics Circle (USA). www.carmelomilitano.com.