Once a month we host an Open Mic here in Florence at the Hostel Tasso. Last night I got Nadia Koski and Marcello from Sushi Rain to help me with out with an old love poem of a sort.

Newly uploaded to Bandcamp, Sputnik, the aural companion to my anthology of stories and poems about the mystery of place, Sojourner. Here for your streaming and downloading pleasure are 17 pieces from the book and two others that didn't quite make the cut, performed a Capella, with drums, with music, and sometimes other, more interesting sounds. If you already own the book, help yourself to this free download, otherwise consider donating a bit o' cash towards all the artist's hard work here, or sending me a whopping 15 Euro through Bandcamp/Paypall, for which I will mail you a signed paperback copy of Sojourner anywhere in Europe, the US, or Canada.

Cheers!

 

An interview with the author as an old man

Ghanian poet and blogger Geosi Gyasi interviewed me! Click on this text to check it out.

Survived By

Heart strap

thread of renewal

blood through a mucus membrane

stop. it don’t stop

thread through a needle’s eye

wet throng of need

don’t ever stop

need, the relative

            pronoun implying possession

            Demons

in the boom box

strung over shoulders

resent rhythms

life’s train

            don’t derail

            dare not stop

            taking ways

            away.

                                    9/14/94

                                      NYC

Syndic Literary Journal

The Syndic Literary Journal edited by LeRoy Chatfield  has devoted a whole page to my work in issue #11 in both textual and audio versions. You get: "Seventh Street," a short story fragment from Poison and Antidote, "What if Words?" a poem from Sojourner, and "Liberation," an as yet unpublished prose poem from my Paradoxa series. Enjoy! Comment! Share! Make me (in)famous!

Excellent blogger and dear friend M. E. Evans has kindly allowed me to write about my book Sojourner on her blog. If you've been curious about what's in it this should clarify matters--and the eBook version should be available any day now. It would be terrific sell a few more copies before my new collection comes out--you can get it at Paperback Exchange in Florence and Green Apple Books in San Francisco, directly from the publisher, or on Amazon. (Click on the picture to read the entry.)

Also, if you've never read Misty's blog on expatriate living you really should: it's perceptive, charming, and often hilarious. It's Italy's world, we only live in it!

I got interviewed by THE FLORENTINE, one of Florence's English-language monthly papers--twice!

(Click here to read and watch)

At the Stork Club

Me performing at Paul Corman-Roberts series "Crows in the Stork's Nest" at the Stork Club in Oakland, CA on August 14th, 2013.

For a full Write-up and film of the entire event see this page of the LITSEEN Blog.

An Update

It's been a long, hectic and wondrous summer focused upon publicizing, launching, and performing from my first published book of fiction and poetry, Sojourner. So much emphasis on travel and performance--and now the preparation for a second book I hope to publish this coming spring--meant not much new creative work posted here. Now that I'm back in Florence ("Tanned, rested, and ready" as Dan Aykroyd's Nixon) I should be back to my work-in-progress with new tales soon. In the meantime, I'm now writing a literary column and reflections on books for Florence News and Events, and English-language newspaper here in Italy. You can read three (count 'em, THREE!) articles by me here on page 27. As always feedback and/or suggestions welcome--what have you read about Italy lately that might interest my readers?

Also, coming up, I'll be Inaugurating The Florence Writers and St Mark's Cultural Association's first literary season with the inimitable M. Elizabeth Evans at 6:30 PM on Monday, September 16th, upstairs at St. Mark's English Church at Via Maggio, #16 in Florence, Italy. Drinks and nibbles will be served and a festive atmosphere guaranteed. Hope to see you there! (I'll be reading from Sojourner and I'll be happy to sign one for you!)

Reading / Book Signing

My West-Coast book promotion tour begin this coming Thursday evening at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. I will perform texts from Sojourner in the spirit of artistic anarchy with my trusty Dada drum. Come have a glass of wine, say hello, listen, shout back, sing along, and get a book signed.

Full Book Tour info here.

The Neapolitan Befana

Florence

A Dream

AFTERWORD (to Sojourner)

AFTERWORD (to Sojourner)

This compilation of short stories, poems, prose experiments, and prose poems is, for me, a literary framing of a few of the many occasional texts culled from the notebooks that I have filled with writing over the years; it represents a kind of selective diary of narratives, observations, and tonal meditations upon this author’s fascination with place—both in terms of a physical landscape, an imagined geography, as well as a conceptual space either of belonging or otherness, a home or a strange place that one visits for whatever reasons: curiosity, escape, or for that measuring of the self that unfamiliar places seem to invite—even provoke.

As the title of the collection suggests, perhaps the best way to access the various narrators’ experiences recounted herein, to define their singular lack of a stable personality or literary method, is to think of each text as a sojourner, a voice who enters, inhabits briefly, and then, for one reason or another, abandons each place in favor of the next. A dear friend once remarked that, like a bird, I tend to settle into other people’s nests, hatch myself there, and then fly off toward some distant horizon. It remains for the reader to decide if it is I who have left my mark on these many places, mostly cities, by inscribing their names and some words about them into the notebooks that have fed this collection or vice versa.

Taken together, the disparate texts that make up Sojourner can be read as the fictionalized and poetic chronicle of my wandering years, which began in 1986 when, at the tender age of twenty-four, I left San Francisco for Europe planning never to return, and which have more or less continued up to the present day. I have lived these, my adult years, at first willfully, later accidentally, as a transitory sojourner, experiencing first several European capitals as a traveler, then Florence and New York City as an itinerant student, and finally some ten years in a little piss-trough of a town outside of Florence called San Francesco as a teacher, a husband, and a father.

During my decade in San Francesco I used to joke that my autobiography would be called From San Francisco to San Francesco, but my ex-wife had other plans. Which brings me to what putting these texts together has taught me is the overriding theme of my writing (and I suppose my life as well): solitude and companionship, otherness and familiarity, both between people as well as with places—a situation that constructs, in these texts, the themes of chance encounters, identity, self-destruction, escape and dreams, compromise, resurrection or transformation, desire, and, of course, traveling. We fly, “like a demon, from station to station,” as David Bowie sings.

I write this afterword from a rented room back in Florence, Italy, during my fifth sojourn in this city. I have a four-year lease, with an option for another four, which I might see out or which I might break any day in favor of a room in Naples, Oakland, Rome, New York City, or anywhere else they will have me. Just as the day I left San Francisco some twenty-six years ago, with three thousand dollars in travelers’ checks and a one-way ticket to Brussels in my pocket, the world remains my oyster.

I hear that, with a little Vernaccia, they slide down pretty smoothly.

 

       11/19/2012

       Florence

"Don’t you dare quench my insatiable boredom"

 

Don’t you dare quench my insatiable boredom

in yr breathtaking clothes, that mask you wear

on the back of yr head—bang

that tambourine, Dick! Evolution

makes you taller. Tempting terrain

of pissed-on boots, aquiline noses

and the return of knickers,

boxers, and big-bra biddies

moving off towards the powder

keg in the backroom where the tap is

always dripping.

Mustache man falters with the cigarette

bit, bumble nose boy weaves

,not looking, past his mascara

lips lubing the slick beer stem,

spittle warming the cool glass knob.

Face powder becomes your holy-

cost, hologram, hot-toddy thump

of the mechanical bass on the lower breast

bone.

Touch

            and go, porno sonorous gaydar

has released all of our mysteries to the wheel

but for the odor. Rawer meat

and standing water. Heat comes down

a fool to her weight, pats herself off

to it. Aglow, I spy Ms. dreamy beneath the telephone

light, before the piss-pots. Having

been groomed by the doorman, shy abdicates

my face to the wall: flower pot

caught in the hoar-frost. Hep hep me

realign ‘er, get her offa that harp, ‘at ship

of our ingenuity sailing to some higher service

out of a blinding night as white as this

to that great, golden

fuck up in the sky.

6/16/1992

San Francisco

(Kennel Club, née VIS, now Independent)

‘AT OLDE TRAIN IN VAIN (House Hunting II)

The 97^th street gate, portals to the scraping underbelly of the beast. We’re just fleas, sittin’ up at the counter, sittin’ up at the bar, ready to eat. Gateway to out of control, Grand Central, the zoo you can’t look at but only see to. “Yo, whas up? Whas up?” She can’t hardly perch on them heels down skeleton row on her way to 110^th Street, crackling commuter trestles, tombs, an end to torment. (That other junkie crying: her black-eyed boyfriend ex-Hell’s Angel puts a silver bullet in her handbag and stomps away in slow motion. Not getting’ whatever it was ‘at she was pleading to get she calls him back with, “Hey! Fuckface!”)

 

 I’m beginning to feel awkwardly alone all these transitory days long. The waiter hates me writing on his counter, pushes coffee, confused pancakes in my direction. Back o’ the border, falling off a’ their fork before reaching my mouth. Nodding on the platform. “Do you know what time it is?” Stares. “Do you?” Salsa, soul, salsa, soul.

Anyway, she was teetering up by the playground through the George Washington houses. He let her go like a stage mother shoves her little girl out in front of a blind audience, pushing her into that spotlight, the sun, in 95˚ humidity, as if shorts were really the answer to those legs with barely enough fat on ‘em to keep the bruises blue. De rigueur to ask for clean silverware here. Obligatory map of Greece. No second cup a’ coffee unless yas ask.

In comes a white “HOLLYWOOD” visor. You don’t even know where she’s goin’. “Yo.” There comes another. “Whas up? Whas up?” A rolled up newspaper cradle. Then a scuffed-up bike accident loser slumps on a stool too. Her boyfriend? “Gone,” she says—pregnant pause—“long gone.”

Walkin’ in circles. It all stops if there’s a cop stationed on the corner. “You can’t touch this.” Sleeping so huddled up for it, can only go with a nod, like last Christmas and the icicles pointing down from under the trestles at what used to be Park Ave. like the subway’s frozen teeth—commuter train—they all correct me. Seriously too cold to get mugged. Ye olde el.

Whatever it is that’s your mission you go on, you don’t just lie down and die, do ya? You put on your makeup and sway off across the borough, the bird that kept on fallin’ off a’ the wire and getting’ back up on it. You listen to so many stupid conversations about the same damn bullshit you get a little too eager to speak your mind. You left off the bra, got out the tank top, climbed up on them shoes and did what you had to do.

She might even climb up that steep slope just for the pleasure of being stared at, to say that she had done it once outside of the subway—anyhow it always ends in a fight, getting’ yourself thrown out, like you like it like that. While I go racin’ up outta that tunnel and into the blue December-light smear of the hazy day over Harlem. I go up like a shot light bulb, browned out in a power surge to a blazing new home. I call, but ain’t got no.

Never even saw 111th street; is that fair?

Feelin’ so alone to be jes doin’ all these things I done so many other times before.

9/30/1992

NYC

The Siege of San Marco

The event staves off its message / each picture begetting another on down the isle / a day’s work / done the humble meal / a fire at night / no doubt, in winter / Savonarola’s tears / on the pulpit to come  //  Staves off the decision / marks down the outlines / on down the isle / images that return / “The same damn saint,” says the American turning away  //  They won’t be able to blame us for bullets / resting assured of some king of kings / for whom they have voted / and all that judgment crap  //  They hire / executioners all day long / up against these walls / each one with a paintbrush / and then to sleep / in the simple cell  //  The making and the undoing of the day and the night / stacked out by the outhouse / grinding glass for the red (bloodpaint) / soaking in the sin / to contain the sight, the stare / looking into the sun / or hugging a cross / with blind faith  //

6/26/1990

Florence

CATHOLIC WILL: A Perfect Roman Poem

Roman Fortune (innately
Mannerist) smites a curb-
    side tournament, its turn-
    stiles timed to mimic
land mines, whilst tragic
fame, mitred in disguise,
prizes suicidal maidens and
allows demijohns decisions—
                                  to decant tanks, for favor,
                                  to take arms against
                                                  a sea of turbines,

                                    which
by all rights should have been
shed by Fortinbras' cat,
                                    whilst
hopping over Roman bric-a-brac.

                           However,
                           tout court, our tongue
had strangled all our firm intent
and lent its charge to chance
    (said Cheshire to the waif)
of interactions all, both small and large.
Therefore, onward friction's
shoulders!      Bearing the boss
across the bridge of bad
humor (angels!)      to Papal precipices
'n' grumbling, placated
    Tritons & Britons
in the rain, we trod on.

And just like that!
A spat!
Between perfect strangers.



1/6/2010
Rome-Florence, in transit

BETTI BLU'S MORTGAGE

Winter streets and frozen

fountains how easy

to forgive oneself the chill

leaves burning on the plain

'neath Orvieto. Your eyes

the same skewed colors as

my own, turned down

sterile, stern, on

our child in disapproval.

And now these giggling girls

you forgot yourself in

putrid memories this train

sunk in soggy ponds

and the bloody chamber

of Bluebeard's secret room

where you walled us all up.

           2/17/2009

           Florence-Rome, in transit

Betti Blu's Mortgage by Lee Foust

ZWARIOWANY KAPELUSZNIK

(For Jeff & Karolina and also for Magdalena, Chris and Anna)

“When you live in a place, you must eat the bread of the people.”

–Jeff Gburek

Will the Mad Hatnik ever relinquish his hoary grip on our hearts? He is a fickle fiend who desires his own undoing above all other enterprises. He met the Devil at the crossroads—Zürich, by chance, when his flights were rerouted—and had no need to sell his soul, having recognized in himself his own single double indemnity policy’s sole and only beneficiary.

Hitchhiking back to Algeria, by way of Abernathy, he consoled himself with erotic daydreams and vodka suppositories. However, even in this he was not alone. Alhambra Akhmatova, his accomplice, has laid the road bare by vanishing again and again into imaginary existence. The very trees trembled at the power of the misadventures that they silently vowed never to actually have.

And lies? He could tell nothing else, not even time, and yet his cell phone bloomed yellow and blue in the sun through cracks that led, all too predictably, to the underworld.

Yet suicide might actually be a way, so say I and James Hogg, of rooting out the Devil’s truffle. However—no, not “but,” anything but “but”—however, descent was unnecessary for this, our land, turned out to be that of the dead, a salvific portal to all places, a Slavonic city of the central plain, so necessary to the nomads of the steppes and the rioters of ’56, a place of heartening renewal, where union is celebrated from the bottom of beer glasses upwards, where love cannot matter and, devoid of matter, is ever so lovely.

Craven indeed is that helpless double who cannot look himself in the eye, buy at least half of his own soul, ring his imaginary lady’s finger, smile at the camera, doff his hat, and save himself through the suicide of a lady’s man.

Poznan-Florence

 6/21/2010

Zwariowany Kapelusznik by Lee Foust