A Poem For Chris Toll by Richard Sober

for Chris Toll

An almost visible thin gray line
separates us. Sleep is more and less
what it is made out to be.
Sleep is the bed where we misplace
our words. It is the night
we forget to wake up.
A clown with a bomb
stands behind us the moment before
we invent a new letter. A wave goodbye
on the alien space station
where you are dressed like a boy
inside an ancient mind.
Your eyes are weighed down with the stones
of your serious solitude.
The ones with all the words
inside them, the ones where
the angry tones of prophets
always return to the people,
whoever they are.
You, too, are missing in action.
For you love is not somethiing to do.
It is somewhere to be.
Open all the time.

----------------------------------------------------------

Richard Sober is a wise, noble poet and painter who worked in the trenches of Baltimore next to comrade Toll in the '70s and '80s when Baltimore was at its wildest and woolliest. He now resides in Austin, but currently has a wonderful show of his paintings - which he drove here in a van across country - called "Borrowed Earth on exhibition at the Creative Alliance. Please go to see them and your heart will sing. http://www.creativealliance.org/events/2014/richard-sober-borrowed-earth

The Mole Suit Choir On Listen In with Ellen Cherry

Well my momma always told me when I was an ambitious teen writer and musician that she'd only take me serious if I got on the Johnny Carson show - (although she did once say she would pay for me to be on the Gong Show). Sadly Johnny is dead and Jay Leno took a long leisurely dump on his legacy, but last week I got to be on Ellen Cherry's "Listen In" web show with The Mole Suit Choir.

Ellen and her crew are top notch and great hosts. They even had a dog there so it would feel more like our practices at my house with Max nudging our legs to let us know he wants to go the park and hump Pitbulls (he's got a Death Wish, just like his poppa).

Here is the complete 51 minute show - interview and live performance - with four new songs that are post-"Campfire Spacesuit". One, "Bellies Empty, Asylums Full", we'd never played out before. It's brand new and Liz plays her groovy little Loog on it. Then there's our song taken from Bob O'Brien's poem "Increasingly Virtual Worlds", a new song based on Chris Toll's poem "Lonesome Cowboy On the Protein Deprivation Trail" and our big ol' country closer homage to the pharmaceutical Empire, "Pills".

http://youtu.be/we8TIFU5Qxk

The Starship Lands In a Clearing

This is my piece for LitMore's "The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions", an art show inspired by lines from Chris Toll's poetry. My line was "The Starship Lands In a Clearing".

"The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions", June 30th At LitMore

Megan McShea Rekindles The Fire of The Ancient Party

Long ago, when hairs gathered around heads, when more than five Baltimore poets would be home from touring or the madhouse at the same time, when Chris Toll and Blaster Al Ackerman still trod the earth like parallel universe Lenin and Marx respectively, when young Adam Robinson and Stephanie Barber still held partiers rapt with their wide-eyed tales of the fur trade in Milwaukee in the 1800's, when Amy Peterson still graced Normal's Books & Records on occasion before her step up into the rarefied world of modern New York and its tony celebrity filled co-ops, oxygen bars and petitions against mopery, before Ric Royer The Theater Lad, was thrown into the pee-stained trunk of a Dodge sedan by seedy barstool bard Gene Grigoritis, his fingers removed one by one over the course of nine days (Ric had already lost one as a child in Disneyland, bitten off by the Alexander Hamilton robot), each digit shearing videoed and posted to Youtube then sent to gadfly Tao Lin, with the thoughtful message "I bet this bitch's finger is bigger than your Johnson you poser" - before the writing scene spun out like the final crunchy tableau of "Fast & Furious XX" and toppled from its glorious peak, many disparate souls united by their weirdness and love of morphological word formation, jarring metaphors/contrasts and sometimes plain old oddball oddness scat goof met up every few weeks to become One Big Mind and Write As One With Many.

Usually within the comfort of Megan McShea's afghan-filled cottage where plump Sugar the cat would brush your ankles, yard sale Latin record finds would spin and Megan and Amy and Bonnie would quietly contend for "Most Raven Haired". Sometimes we would sit out on my ragged third floor balcony back when I lived in the Pego Mansion of St. Paul Street across from the Catholic High School.

(Ancient Party editor Megan McShea with author, artist and legend Al Ackerman in Austin in his post-Baltimore years)

Wherever we met, Blaster Al could be counted on to be there with beer and an anarchic spirit to keep the proceedings moving and not too academic and Megan would stir up the poetry machine gadgets to keep rust from forming.

Many nights after hours of scribbling, cutting up and jabbering the circle would fall briefly silent and someone would say "Hey, where's Lauren Bender? Did she take all the Hazelnut Breadstick Pop Tarts?" And there Lauren would be, stuck up in a ceiling corner, wide possum-eyed like a dollar store mylar valentines balloon temporarily forgotten as the young lovers moved into the love room to drop the needle on some Barry White.

(above - Lauren Bender mooshing Sugar the Cat)

But all things (almost all?) end. Or erode/evolve/mutate. Even though they feel natural as breath and just as rejuvenating as they are going on. Such be our writerly coven meetings. Oh they will still happen somewhere with some of us, but Blaster and Chris Toll are huffing ether and playing prepared harp with John Cage on the astral plane, Adam Robinson independent publishing pinup boy is off to Atlanta, Amy is in New York comforting Laurie Anderson and so on and so on, time marches on.

Luckily, though, Megan hung on to our sheaves of scribbles and pored over them, jiggling the ink until gold nuggets rose to the surface. Not only that, she assembled the best into an actual beautiful book and is throwing a Now Party for The Ancient Party at the Windup Space Sunday April 13, 3pm to 5. Come hear some reading from it, gaze upon it, pry greenbacks from your moneysock to buy for your very own. Here's the Your Face link:

The Ancient Party

Here are a few lines from "The Goofball Oracle" to whet your appetite. The Goofball Oracle exercise was everyone would write random questions and place them in one hat and random answers placed in a second hat. Questions would then be pulled from one hat and random answers from the other.

"Hey, what do you guys think of Pammy's new Bummer?" - "The sound of the louvre covered in mallo-mars."

"Was Lincoln a happy drunk?" - "A neon rose garden at the end of the world."

"How many of you are in there anyway?" - "Love is naturally pungent".

Or perhaps a "One Minute Story", s story written within 60 seconds, will win you over:

SKELETON
The way his skin sat on his frame, his skeleton, the whisper of ribs like an automatic round. I still see this sometimes and feel the recoil. Memory does that, transforming the banal into the fantastic.
- John Eaton

(John "Lucky Charms" Eaton, who has been trapped inside the Zoltar Fortune Teller booth on Coney Island since the last writers group gathering.)

SKELETON
The skeleton dancing across the lawn. The skeleton peeping out from behind the shower curtain. The skeleton in the bread box, smaller than the others, so obviously it was the baby.
- Blaster Al Ackerman

Here is one of the "Biographies". Each writer would write a false biography and then mouth the words to the other writers. Then each person would write down what they were lip reading.

"Mortimer Hadley" - by Megan McShea.

I am Mortimer Hadley. I was born in Challenger, Mississippi, along the shore of the Missouri River where seventeen dogs had recently died of exposure to second-hand smoke. No one really understood this at the time, but it would prove to be a fateful pre-episode to my life as an epidemiologist. I attended the Milton Military Pentecostal School for wayward boys until the 9th grade, when I ran off with my guardian angel and began practicing medicine on unsuspecting rural families. Some of my favorite and locally renowned diagnoses are Pale Ghost Disease, discovered in Fallow Holler in the Ozarks, Hollow Stem Fever, which overwhelmed a colony of rabbits in eastern Kansas, and Haddock Mouth, which infested a flock of tiny angels in my hometown of Challenger.

(Lip reading version by Bonnie Jones of "Mortimer Hadley"):
I am Putpott Riding. I was born in South Beach along the coast of whenever. It was heavenly and moldy. Although it was really strenuous for me in the formative years in Ecology I did my. It was wild but right after I was wasted in my family. Memory of an envelope water. Was a rabbit. Fine, back alley. Jaguar.

Well, to paraphrase Blaster, you don't want to sample too many of these deadly treats at one time. But I will leave you with a ritual, the rules of which were worked out in collaboration. This one was written by myself, Ric Royer, Bonnie Jones and Megan McShea.

How to March Into Jerusalem With Your Battle Dress On, Go On Girl!
1. Receive only the absence, not the presence.
2. Wave and pat pouch cloth. Form leg trumpet.
3. Make it ouchie in the Humvee.
4. Make sure that Kirk notices you by wearing so much makeup you look like a clown and appearing at his big gig at the MTV Music Awards with the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots and tell him you're pregnant.
5. Buy a custom fitted mouth guard, the kind for teeth grinding not hockey. Put your head down, groan a little, channel Cormac McCarthy, bend at the knees, wipe that tiny bit of spittle. Rush.

Come join in on the festivities April 13th at the Windup and hoist a glass of something for friendship, collaborations and a Spring much deserved.

Chris Toll Spirit Celebration Thursday March 14

The Assembling of a Mole Suit Choir

I haven't delved into musical collaboration or playing out live since Magic Gurney Ride rode out down South on the rails, the train car freshly tagged with "Soft Serv", but at last year's Shakemore I sang a few things accapella and the powerfully talented Liz Downing said we should get together. I've regarded Liz in the top pantheon of Baltimore mischief makers since back in the '80s when I first saw Lambs Eat Ivy and they singed the puffy scrub of my Glen Burnie fro off.

(Above in foreground is the back of the head of beloved Charles Brohawn of The Tinklers. The fact that he remained in the front row Is a testimony that we weren't sucking. Charles doesn't stand by for sucking.)

LEI performed Appalachian opera mixing Jung and mythology and Southern gothic into a wild giddy blend. Three swooping, soaring sets of lungs, brainiac but simple lyrics and homemade sets and costumes. So the idea of singing with Liz made me dust off the maple parlor guitar and hit a few verses of "End of the World".

The transmigration of Christopher Toll in October brought even more of a feeling of inevitableness and purpose to it, as one of Liz's first songs was putting "Moon Clue", a collaboration between Chris and I, to music. She also put three other pieces of mine from The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit to song, which blew my tiny brain. I've written a fair number of songs in my day, but for me these pieces had been ingrained as flat words on the page, their only music the rhythm of their syntax.

A few wonderful winter Sunday late afternoons went by with us hanging on the couch warbling with Kim Jong Ev, Max, Binky and Peanut as our audience and we suddenly had a set that included two other Chris Toll related pieces. The icing on the cake was Father Daniel Higgs asking us to open for him at Normal 's, an auspicious sign. It felt incredibly liberating to sing with Liz's beautiful voice and to celebrate life and comrades who had gone on beyond it.

And I bought a kickass triangle.

LAST CHANCE TO WIN A CHEVY MALIBU for Chris Toll by Joel Dailey

(Fell Swoop publisher and poet Joel Dailey wearing the NASA manufactured glasses that enable him to see up to five feet in front of him and two to three feet behind)

LAST CHANCE TO WIN A CHEVY MALIBU for Chris Toll

Urbane     urban      or simply 'ur'
77% of Americans live paycheck to Johnny Paycheck
Who placed the log in logic?
The form's the thing         ask Bob Zimmerman

Even in recession-cursed Europe chauffeurs hesitate
Top notch hillbillies populating Norway freeze
Why is taut in tautology?
The torque is possible        impossible

The official spokesperson for motion activated endtables
My string bikini skedaddle frontloader
My cloistered grief
Here's to your definitive thumbnail 24 hour coverage,
        wandering Brother Man

"A Visionary Friend Is Gone, Long Live His Vision", for Chris Toll

A Visionary Friend Is Gone, Long Live His Vision
for Chris Toll

Though not a licensed phrenologist and not able to afford calipers, I would have to start with his head, his majestic hairless skull. "Ambient light from a Lenin Lightbulb", is how Bed Bath Blavatsky and Beyond put it. He had thought it into a handsome planet of clearly defined paths, culverts and landing strips for minute travelers of all dimensions to set down on. His poems of quiet passion were the generator for untold powerful landing signals. Often when out at night he would gently bow his head and rub a spot, saying "I've brought many visitors with me tonight."

There are those of us who sculptors should memorialize into busts and those of us who would be more suited to jello molds. For the virulent, languishing in a potato sack as they bleed out in a donkey cart across the border as their captor bitches to a neighbor "No se puede vender el dañado gringo", is the only proper final tribute to their cranium.

For my friend, Lost Astronauts Who Knew Too Much work in a sealed chamber in deep space with the DNA of Helen Keller, silky webs spun by spiders surrounding Poe's crypt and the tears of broken hearted catholic school girls to create the hands that will one day bring the dimensions of my friend's dome into such glory that Rodin's bust of Balzac will shrink into a PEZ dispenser out of embarrassment.

About his small smooth arms what can be said that has not already been stated by a multitude of paleontologists about those of the late lamented T-Rex? The surprising disproportionate strength of them could perhaps best be measured by the incident when he shared the dias with populist poet Billy Collins. My friend got up to read right after Collins had read his somewhat musty, frequently trotted out, "Mother's Day" poem. Shaking hands with Billy before taking his place behind the podium, the shake went a few moments beyond the norm and Collins' face contorted into a wide grimace before a small shard of bone pierced the skin of his forearm. I will leave it up to YouTube viewers as to whether there was a trace of a smile on my friend's lips as Mr. Collins tried to muffle a shriek of agony.

It would take a book to enter into his heart and do it justice. Nancy Drew in fishnets would find Jesus in there playing lightning bolt toss with Dr. Strange. Drinks hoisted aloft to the downtrodden in a vast castle filled with toys, Bob Dylan passed out on a giant feather bed covered with absinthe bottles.

I woke up to my friend gone from my planet this morning and the goneness had gained immense weight. Shrugging into a shirt my shoulders had an attitude - "Yeah right, go ahead, put a shirt on." Even my car windshield had tears on it on such a cruel sunny day. My friend you should hear this, this beautiful song that's playing. My friend you wrote such beautiful songs.

--Rupert Wondolowski

"Life On Earth", Commander Chris Toll's Beautiful Last Testament Has Arrived

This morning was brightened considerably in a heartachingly sad way when the postal carrier pulled out a priority box from New Orleans containing 30 copies of the new and tragically final beautiful testament of poet and astral traveler Chris Toll.

The cover is seltzer for the eyes, one of Toll’s most colorful, and contains a bright jack-in-the-box, which was fitting since the books seemed to literally jump out of their container, eager to be devoured by the world.

Instantly diving into it, I was struck again by how in touch Chris was with the painful aspects of life on Earth, yet so cosmically hopeful and tender. Here is the first poem:

Download Universal Anguish
for Joel Dailey

The sun sings

while it makes its rounds.

Why isn’t lunch in melancholy?

God is an atheist.

The moon and stars render tender judgments.

A woman stands across the street

from a liquor store.

Her red sweater is stained,

and there are holes in the knees of her black jeans.

She aims her XM25

at the locked door of the liquor store.

If a constellation were different,

lonely would be lovely.

Jennifer the Christ plugs in her purple guitar and says,

“Where two or more electrons gather in my name,

there I am too.”

The baby dinosaurs scrabble from their nest

as a flying saucer lands.

The circular hatch oscillates open.

A rabbi steps out.

His right hand holds a cutlass

and his left hand holds a raygun.

——————————————————

“Dear Universe, thank you for the kindness of the way and the beauty of the pilgrims.” (Chris, from the copyright page.)

Remembering Chris Toll - Books - Baltimore City Paper

 I'm sure Chris is at this moment sitting down in a special screening room with Rod Serling to view a Batman movie that Bob Kane made just for them, Chris holding in his lap his Famous Cardigan Sweater that Sylvia Plath soaked with her tears.



Below is a beautiful piece written by Bret McCabe about him and his full life.  But how I already miss him.  We had a great show here at Normal's last night and I kept thinking especially during the theatrical accordion/trumpet vocal gypsy sea chanties for land lubbers of Dear Rabbit and Jon Lipscomb's beautiful rendition of Skip James' "Crow Jane", "I wish Chris could have heard that."




Remembering Chris Toll - Books - Baltimore City Paper

Pratt Chat | The Emily Dickinson of Mars: Gifts from Baltimore Poet Chris Toll

Pratt Chat | The Emily Dickinson of Mars: Gifts from Baltimore Poet Chris Toll

The Problem of How To Live by Joel Dailey

Even as I type these words,  damp half-chewed gummy bears blocking some of the keys, my vibrant ascot tied a little too tightly by my Japanese man servant robot, Joel Dailey, editor of Fell Swoop Press, is hosting our very own Baltimore's Special Angel Chris Toll in Dailey's hometown of New Orleans. 

Joel is putting out books by Chris and myself, mine being Mattress In An Alley, Raft Upon The Sea, Chris's being, I think - I'm paraphrasing - "I'm a Little Tart, a Fiery Little Tart, I Will Hump Upon Your Leg and Chase After Golfballs, Yes Thank You Please".

While Joel is distracted running a reading at some New Orleans hot spot with Father Toll wowing the boozy N'awlens crowd, I will run this gem of a poem by him.  It will be in Shattered Wig #29, which is beginning to stir like the Baltimore Orioles after decades of slumber.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



THE PROBLEM OF HOW TO LIVE
for Clark Coolidge



Caught a ride on a passing halibut

an ever-present IT Team jogging in place, "hut, hut, hut ...."

Drowsy on the non-drowsy

The ultimate status update

Yellow parasol sustains a straw hat or golden sponge cake with     creamy filling
Often mistaken for Sir Osbert Cribbage, infamous cave ejectee
A strident personality (speed bumps)
Riichly lyrical in nature
Conversant   yet slightly out of tune
Fact is   this here fingerblaster springs leaks

Here's the Complete Dickhead Forecast
Emanating from a testosterone based lifeform (free brochure)
Rapid fire beverage burps
Single out the Destination Oriented
The shift has focused   the focus has shifted

A Song For Shakemore

There are more storms these days
than I've got dollars
we eat breakfast
off the tree that
fell through our window
and one night when a wind
blew the candles out
Richard Nixon carried
off my woman
saw him eat her head on CNN


Oh Lord take me down to Shakemore
take this devil's grip off my soul
let me sway beneath the big tent
as Liz Downing's angel voice
makes my fried
puzzle pieces whole


Be brains for me Google
Be my energy shiny Starbucks
Hide my shameful secret Depends
Crackle my limbs and be
my forbidden mystic
soul power cocaine
in all your cash making variations
And you are God, Satellite Transmissions
bringing countless broken lives
into my home
I watch them on my box nightly
so I don't have to grow my own


Oh Lord take me down to Shakemore
take this devil's grip off my soul
I would buy me a felafel
but The Tinklers took my wallet
when I was hugging on Chris Toll

Take me down to Shakemore
I want to watch Barbara
buzz like a bee all day
some whisper human blood
from corpses
is her energizer bunny
secret that she passes
on to fans
but I just think she's got
super weird glands


Maybe Randy Austin
will take me
up in his spaceship
but to see heaven
I don't need to be
in the sky
I see the stars and light
in Fair David's dancing
and in my brush with
the crowd that
gives me a contact high




Don Peyton will tell you
he met Jesus
made him a uke
made of palm trees and
placed it in his hands
Well I don't know about Jesus
but Mark Jickling will be playing
in all but one of the Shakemore bands


And are we all a bunch
of misfit humans
who dreamt of Half Japanese
or did Jad and David
dream us
after eating late night pizza
with garlic and way too much cheese

"The We in Weep": Chris Toll Calls for Revolutionary Love

 Well, the danger in saying yes to writing a book review for a magazine you've never heard of by a guy you've never seen or heard from before is that you'll write the review and never hear back from the editor ever again.  The upside - especially if you knew you loved the book anyway - is that you write a book review and force your (my) feeble brain into forming some kind of passing logic for why you love what you love.







"The We in Weep": Chris Toll Calls For Revolutionary Love in his The Disinformation Phase


  

  Chris Toll's latest book, The Disinformation Phase (Publishing Genius Press, Baltimore), is awash in the baptismal, transformative fluids of tears and rain: "The rain,/heart in ruins,/staggers out of town"; "Rain sits/in the evicted easy chair"; "Raindrops are calling to the last in love./Them tears are a school that consoles."



   The outside rain mirrors the tears of the protagonists and cast extras in Toll's heartfelt lines. His freely running tears are the lubricant of a soul constantly searching for love - human to human, between nations and interplanetary - and rebirth: "How long can I stay at the inn in innocent?/Love is so hard/and it's all we came to do."

 

  Of course pleading a case for no holds barred love, is not new in Toll's writing, one of his older books is entitled "Love Everyone" after all, but there is an extra crisp sense of urgency to this collection. Due in part to the compact size - most are from 14 to twenty lines long, only running about an inch across, a few like "National Poetry Month" (5 lines) and "I Expand Before Nebulae" (6 lines), even less - but perhaps also due to the world around Toll in "reality" mutating and rocking ever harder with catastrophes that his "fictional" world of Everything At Once, Batman fighting it out with vampires, worlds teetering on collapse, makes even more emotional sense. 



    A day doesn't go by now it seems without a major earthquake devastating a population, a tsunami reducing humanity to chess pieces swept off the board by a raging loser, droughts, floods, war after war.  Recently the news was so full of cannibalistic violence - a college student eating his roommate's heart and brain, a teenager in Florida eating the face of a homeless man - some people blaming it on the over the counter drug called "bath salts", that the Center for Disease Control felt they had to state that we weren't in a zombie apocalypse since they had jokingly posted on their website over a year ago "How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse".  It truly does feel that anything could happen at any time and it's hard not to search the skies for some kind of winged hero.



    Because of the naked yearning and whimsy in Toll's writing and the interweaving of lowbrow/pop culture with his more erudite side, I've always thought of him as The Emily Dickinson of Mars. "The Queen of the Vampires" assembles her "army of zombie shamans./They storm Jerusalem and rescue Jesus./No cross is is erected on top of Golgotha." He is as familiar with The Bible as he is with Marvel and DC Comics, Poe and Plath sit comfortably in the mad swirl of zombies, vampires and werewolves. 



  After all, who's to say that in a hundred years sitting in some wretched post-apocalyptic bunker there won't be a surviving tribe of humans passing around Iron Man comic books as sacred text, like the worship of Punchinella in Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker?



    Although most of the pieces in Disinformation Phase are not radically different from those of other Toll books (why is "try in Poetry", "why isn't destiny in clandestine" - examples of the kind  of pop linguistic deconstruction that he's been doing since I first became aware of him in the '80s ), but more terse and urgent, this book does herald a new form by him. 



    In the pieces "What Have You Done for Global Warming Today?", "My Ruby Hat", "1776", "Money Never Weeps" and "Writing Groups of the Future", Toll introduces a rich, playful conceit of never before read poems by old masters - John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Dickinson again, Poe and Sylvia Plath respectively - being found under arcane circumstances and then translated by Toll himself.



   The prose introductions to these pieces are transcendentally effervescent and the first time I've seen fiction written by him:  "Correspondence from Emily Dickinson to Arthur Rimbaud was recently discovered in a farmhouse in France.  The three letters were hidden beneath the false bottom in a china cupboard.  Emily and Arthur were both Farsi scholars, and they particularly loved the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." (from "My Ruby Hat")



    Of course part of the humor and twists of these pieces is that after Toll sets up extravagantly bizarre circumstances to how these lost poems of masters are found, he then claims himself as the translator of these works and unleashes wild Tollisms in them, like in "My Ruby Hat":



"I love in 256 Dimensions.
A Prophet devours a Candle -
A Leopard sleeps with a Lizard -
The Word is on the wing."



    Toll's goal is beyond and he wants to reach your heart at any cost, with any tool. "The moon recites the same prayer over and over./Find me soon."



    The final lines of the final poem in the book, "Perfect Love", are a call to break down all walls, including gender, to reach divine love:



"O giant in chains,
O darling ,
let the eternal divine feminine energy
awaken within you."

 

  I've often heard Chris Toll speak of how "Giants once walked the Earth", like in describing seeing Bob Dylan live during his Highway 61 period and putting the words "Giants will stride the Earth again" in Dickinson's letter to Rimbaud in "My Ruby Hat".  Every impassioned and well crafted line he writes is a call to bring to life the giant that lives in each of us.

Julie Fisher Remained Clothed Throughout Book Release

(Picture above taken with Smeary Blurry App on my six year old Kellogg's cellphone)


For three years I lived imprisoned in the basement of a Unitarian Church. I forget now the circumstances. My only contact with the outside world was that Chris Toll, Baltimore poet and friend, would once a week bring me Popeye's spicy chicken and news of the outside poetry world:

"You know that scene in Monty Python's 'The Meaning of Life' where that overworked working class British woman whose house is already filled with dozens of unwashed wild urchins is washing dishes and drops another newborn without pausing from her labor so to speak? Well, this new kid Michael Kimball is dropping out new novels like that. His agent keeps finding new ones lying in different corners of the house whenever he goes over there for a glass of fine Malbec and to discuss Kimball's latest surgery.

"That Milwaukee guy Adam who works the internet and the reading series like Xavier Hollander worked Johns, actually ascended to the Heavens like that blessed girl in Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. No one else was raptured, but Joe Young claimed he was there when it happened and that he saw the face of the Supreme Being who summoned Adam. Apparently He had a big wide goofy grin and yelled down to Adam 'Be sure to bring a mitt! And a sixpack!'

"Other than that, Barbara DeCesares is keeping Big Boyz Bail Bonds in business, enabling them to crank out those damn pens that you see everywhere - including in the hands of a Hopkins biologist on a segment of Eyewitness News - and Barbara and this Julie Fisher woman are holding all kinds of 'Sex' and 'Per Verse' and nude reading series. Julie even hired a lawyer for this one event on North Avenue in case things got really freaky.

"Of course, my pastor advises me against going to these things, but as an Elder Statesman of Baltimore poetry I feel obliged to keep up with things, even when they tip over into wild-eyed hedonism. Plus, someone has to hold Barbara's mink while she recites Plath while belly dancing."

What Chris told me on these visits kept my mind reeling while the Popeye's he brought me kept my stomach roiling. Who was this Julie Fisher and what drove her to air her goodies at such a feverish pace? Eventually I wrote "And the Horse You Rode In On, It Too Shall Be Ridden Naked By Julie Fisher". I was fairly happy with it, I got to parade Allen Ginsberg and Sammy Davis, Jr. around in it, but where to read it? I read it at Jamie Gaughan-Perez' apartment once and the reaction was horror.

Then Furniture Press decided to put out a new book by Julie, Skittering Thing and my wait was over. Of course I had to swallow my pride and shame as I heard fellow readers Femi the Drifish, David Native Son and Olu Butterfly read beautiful poems of love and social justice, but luckily Sir Alan Reese brought the tone back down with a piece about barbed wire underwear. Ah, the bar was back down into the nether regions so I could read my homage illness.

The show was well assembled by Julie herself. She booked Baltimore poets they she interacted with in the chronological order of when she met them, with the most recent going first. And as Femi pointed out, Julie truly does mix with the most circles of Baltimore poetry. Another thoughtful touch of the evening was the introductions that Julie wrote for each reader that Furniture Press honcho and host Christophe Casamassima read. At least a few performers, including myself, have said they want to use the intros for future biographies. And for the good of ailing wobbly ego, here is what kind Julie wrote for me:


Rupert Wondolowski-I love Rupert's paranoid bravado. He tells us all about scary things, and perverse things and even downright disturbing things but with a kind of sensual attention to detail delivered in a juxtaposing stream of consciousness that makes it all seem almost comforting. And just when we feel at ease he shows us another clown!



Of course, little did I know that Italian Futurist Barb DeCesares had a counterpunch awaiting me after the break where I was cast as myself in one of her little infernal plays voyaging to the afterlife with Julie cast as herself in her version of heaven with nude beaches, nude thrift stores and an orgy loving granny played masterfully (a show stealer, actually),, by none other than Commander Toll himself. Another fine performance was put in by Alan Reese as poet Barrett Warner.

Below is one of the lines I was forced to speak at gunpoint while Eugene O'Neill clawed at the dirt above his mealy corpse:

"But this is a nude beachand all I have to conceal my genitals with is a handful of marshmallows from Lucky Charms cereal".

Thanks Barbara. Yes, it has indeed been a long, slow painful descent since getting the "Best Actor" award for playing a character called "Life" in a High School one act play called "The Slave with Two Faces".

After Mrs. Fisher read from her fine new tome the icing was put on the cake with a closing performance by one man band Her Fantastic Cats. He even put his own signature on the classic old traditional "The Cuckoo".

Father Toll and I then happily but wearily stumbled through the darkened Goucher campus seeking my car and Adderol from passing frightened co-eds.

(Picture below taken with Inadequately Captured Distant Image App)

"We Are Different Here In The Present" - Stephanie Barber & Megan McShea at The Benevolent Armchair

It was a glorious sunny, breezy Spring day after a Saturday of Biblical proportion flooding and howling winds. I had been to the Benevolent Armchair readings, hosted by Chris Toll in Baltimore and Barbara DeCesare in Pennsylvana, many times when it was called The Upward Spiral and was held at the El Rancho Grande coffeehouse on Falls Road, but I hadn't made it to their spot at the Bromo Seltzer Building. Mostly because Sunday afternoons are my time to haunt the dog parks with Max. And today being so beautiful it was tough to cut our jaunt short, but it was well worth it for the refreshing word craft provided by Megan McShea and Stephanie Barber and for perusing the various "dirt soaps" down in the first floor gift shop. Love the smell of dirt and the ironic thought of cleaning with it, but if I am paying a whole $15 for something to feverishly rub against my unclean body it must be something over the age of 18 and wearing either a nun's habit or a sailor's cap. Sadly, I crept in a little late, having to stop for a cold caffeine fix on the way and being overwhelmed by the old grandeur of the Bromo Seltzer building and the refurbished Hippodrome. I missed the open mic portion of the reading and the very beginning of Megan's reading, but luckily she did one of the longest most generous readings I've seen her do. Usually she pulls a Kool Keith and whips through one or two of her evocative micro-tales and then beats it to her trailer to feast on all the riders in her contract. There was a funny moment when she was flipping through pages, obviously reading a portion to herself and deciding to edit it from the afternoon, when an audience member encouraged her: "Why don't you read them out loud."

(Above is audience member and publishing mogul Adam Robinson sporting a handsome Normal's Books & Records 20th Anniversary t-shirt). Megan's reading was followed by a brief question and answer period and then Stephanie Barber joined Megan for a reading of some great collaborations they had done. Hopefully at the bottom of this post is a working video of this portion of the reading. (It has now been about an hour and the video hasn't loaded so I'll try a separate post for it tomorrow).

Stephanie read about twenty short pieces which were all descriptions of photographs. This was a great concept that Stephanie really brought a lot of life to - the evocative, mysterious nature of life being frozen for that split second. During her Q&A, Adam asked if the photographs were real (I like a chucklehead laughed at first, thinking he'd jokingly asked if the poems were real). "Some of them," Stephanie answered. The oldest piece had been written four years ago, the most recent was written yesterday when she was compiling what she was going to read for today and she received a photograph of her nephew.

Below is host Chris Toll engaged with the sweet Lynchian retro microphone. Co-host Barbara DeCesare was occupied peering in the window of a wedding reception in Red Lion, PA that the Elvis impersonator she is stalking was performing at. The day was somewhat bittersweet because now that I'd finally caught a reading at the nice new space it turned out to be the last one of the season until September or October.

Can Aliens Be Reborn? For Once It Is Not a BM Placed In My Hand But A Beautiful New Book By Chris Toll

When Publishing Genius mastermind Adam Robinson knocked, scratched and rubbed feverishly against my door at 3am two nights ågo, I thought the exterminator had failed in his job of eradicating the herd of raccoons that had invaded our neighborhood after "Lay Your Trash Out Resplendently In The Grass Week".

I hurriedly ran downstairs with my pellet gun after Everly refused to go first.

With beer foam still caught on his late 1800's baseball player neo-handlebar moutstache, writers of more purplish prose might have described Adam's state as "mad as a hatter", or "rabidly inflamed" or "downright batshit", but I will go for a more subdued description of him as beside himself. "Please calm down, Adam. Tell me what's going on. And why do you have that microphone with a ripped cord in your hand?"

"Justin, Steph and I were out karoaking and you'll never believe what we found out behind the building! This being from another planet that drinks beer and looks like Lenin! After we warmed him up some at my apartment and showed him cashmere sweater porn that he requested, he actually began to speak. And his language came out in almost poetic form - a weird cross between Emily Dickinson and some kind of cosmic spiritual sci-fi."

It was at this point that my spider senses began to tingle. Either Max my faithful collie was rubbing against my bare leg or I had a strong suspicion of "what" or more precisely "Whom" Adam had stumbled upon.

An hour later, after Adam and Justin had for no particular reason put a black bag over my head and made me empty out my bank account at two ATMs (my bank's ATMs only dispense $10 at a time), we arrived at the condominium that sits on the Inner Harbor where Adam resides with the city's ingenue mayor, Stephanie Rawlings Blake.

Sure enough, once we passed through the guards and the heavy penthouse door swung open, there facing us, sipping a Yuengling and looking like the cat who ate the canary or the Burt Reynolds who gave the Dom DeLuise a wedgy, was none other than my old friend and literary mentor Chris Toll.

When I first moved to Baltimore in the early '80s, the last glow was fading from the Orioles and there was a fantastic poetry magazine here run by Chris called Open 24 Hours. Over the next few decades many writers have succumbed to burnout or drugs or booze or death itself, but Senor Toll continues to evolve and shed skins. He even started a new reading series a few years ago with the Italian Futurist, Barbara DeCesare. Now here he was, youthful again, with a new book coming out on a powerful Baltimore press. The book in question is The Disinformation Phase and it sports an original Toll collage on its cover.

Chris Toll's precision with an Exacto knife, the main tool of his collage making, is so legendary at this point that when Dick Cheney was brought to Johns Hopkins for a tumor on his moral conscience, they had to bring in Chris to locate and excise the miniscule portion of Cheney's brain. Chris, despite whatever he felt about the former Vice President, felt obligated to carry out the task - such is the weight of his powers.

As always, Chris is irresistibly quotable: "Chaos is my preacher/A Big Voice pours through me" (Irregular Galaxy); "I call my sickness the Guest./The Guest will speak now." (No Blues Blues #43); "Satellite dishes drink stars,/a church falls asleep in front of the TV,/and you're a prayer just the way you are." (Love Your Enemies). As I pull these, more lines jump out waving their arms in stay pressed unitards of quirky timelessness.

As Magus Magnus, the frighteningly brainy poet with the eery saucer eyes says on the back cover of the fancy "Advance Review Copy" I am lucky enough to hold (but which may soon belong to Henry Rollins since his $50 bid on it on ebay is so far the highest):

"His is poetry of propulsion : for/towards a sonic age, every sentence goes off like a rocket, objects act, sonnets are psionic, civilization collapses while shafts of light break through the earth's crust. What's more, The Disinformation Phase, as a phase, suggests the next phase: if suns go out, manufacture new suns (through chaos magic, as in 'paradox is my toolshed'), manufacture new solar systems. Cosmic!"

The official release date for this book is June 28th and summer seems like an appropiate season for it. You can feel the ache of brutal winters past in these prayers to the skies, but there is a feeling of fresh urgency and rebirth to them; each one explodes with possible stories, possible new lives. Chris writes that "the job of the poets is not to explain the Mystery./The job of the poets is to make the mystery greater." and indeed with his dynamic new book he has given us many more cloaks to wrap ourselves in and feel like Cyclops strutting on the crumbling catwalk arching over the Milky Way.

If you are not already familiar with Publishing Genius or you want to contact them to pre-order this great collection, they can be found at:

http://www.publishinggenius.com/

WORMS! Buck Downs, Dave K., Chris Toll & Rupert Wondolowski - March 16

Time	Wednesday, March 16 · 8:00pm - 11:00pm
Location	Bell Foundry 1539 N Calvert Baltimore, MD
Created By	Robert Michael O'Brien
More Info	Just at the moment when March is a perfect lion/lamb hybrid, WORMS shall strike! Buck Downs, Dave K., Chris Toll, & Rupert Wondolowski perform! A native of Jones County (Miss.), BUCK DOWNS lives and works in Washington, DC. His books include Marijuana Softdrink, Ladies Love Outlaws, and Recreational Vehicle. ...www.buckdowns.com DAVE K. is a Baltimore writer whose essays and speculative fiction have appeared in Welter, Front Porch Journal, Battered Suitcase, ULA Redux, and the Nautilus Engine. He is also a regular contributor to Adfreak, Adweek Magazine's weblog. In addition to the experimental work he publishes through his 'zine imprint, Banners of Death, DK is working on a novel about clowns. When he's not writing, DK is a village and civil parish in Hampshire, England. CHRIS TOLL is a poet and collagemaker who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. He co-curates the Benevolent Armchair Reading Series. Publishing Genius Press will soon release his new book, The Disinformation Phase. RUPERT WONDOLOWSKI is editor of Shattered Wig Review and Press, which has somehow become Baltimore's longest running literary magazine despite no one knowing of it. He is the author most recently of The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit (Publishing Genius Press). His work has recently appeared in City Sages: Baltimore, The i.e. Series Reader, Everyday Genius and Fell Swoop. He also appears in Luca DiPierro and Michael Kimball's film "60 Writers/60 Places". He is currently clearing a spot in his house for getting down and ugly with some acrylic paints. Shattered Wig Press activities and Rupert's writing can be found at: http://shatteredwig.blogspot.com/ As always it's free, but bring $$$ for books and to help Buck make enough money for the train ticket back to DC; he's been stranded all day, & he has a good job, he'll show you his pay stub and his ID.

Mash Note From A Stranger

Though it is ancient as a tree in the forest, Shattered Wig is also mostly as hidden as an ancient tree in the forest. It inhabits a tiny little attic space of gibbering wonder that is not for everyone, that is for certain, but it's always so pleasing when someone runs across it and truly gets it. Just got this great little postcard of praise in the snail mail today lying squashed by the threatening letters of creditors.

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3/4/2011

Dear Rupert Wondolowski:

Tom Weigel mailed me a copy of your latest issue. I knew when I saw the cover that it would be good. But a lot better than good. I love the writing. Favorites: "TWNDATOETOAA", "Ode to Mescaline" and Chris Toll. But those are the standouts in an altogether outstanding publication. Brilliance & wit on every page. I also love the art work. "Jack LaLane School" cracked me up - words & image.

Your intro to the issue was its own special poem, setting the tone. This thing is a keeper. Please don't wait another two years to put out another issue. Bookmarked yr blog. Best,

Jim Cory (Philadelphia)