The Work of American Poet Igor Goldkind

Header image courtesy and copyright of Wendy Farrow

The Stories, Accounts and Adventures of Igor Goldkind, Poet, Author, Techno Trouble Maker, regarding the binary language of images. The computational narrative, neuro-phenomenology, mindful computation and the tales our data will tell us once we slow down and listen to their hum.
  • Igor Goldkind

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Doggy-Dog People


Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people get on my nerves with the things they make their dogs do
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people love their dogs more than they love you.

Doggy dog people think that four feet are better than two.
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people
Can’t go out without a leash in their hand
They just can’t interact with their fellow man.
Without a doggy dog.

Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people do pick up their doggy’s dog poo in little plastic bags
But sure don’t like being called out for what their woof-woofs do do.

Doggy dog people
Doggy dog people
Doggy dog people don’t have a clue.
That they’re accountable for the things their doggy dogs do.
Like beg food from your bowel when what you need is some peace in your soul.
Doggy people won’t leave you alone.
They need you to ask them what kind of a cute doggy dog they own.

Doggy-dog people,
Doggy-dog people get on my nerves with the things they make their dogs do.
Doggy dog people don’t have a clue
That they’re accountable for all the things their dogs do.
Doggy-dog people have no sense of esteem that doesn’t come with a leash wrapped round its throat and spleen.

Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people,
Doggy dog people have no sense of their own
So they sniff each others butts as its safer than being on their own.
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people

Doggy dog people got nothing to say
They just walk their dogs all over my day
And look for other doggy dog people to cross their way.
Doggy dog people won’t answer for the things their dogs do
Because they’re Doggy-dog people and haven’t got a clue.

Doggy People got no love for mankind
They can’t stand themselves or the friends that they have
So they put their ids on a leash, follow their slave surrogate friends and Hope that petting a dog will somehow make amends.

Doggy-dog people,
Doggy-dog people get on my nerves with the things they make their dogs do.
Doggy-dog people don’t have a clue
Doggy dog people never answer for the things their dogs do
Doggy-dog people can’t talk to boys or girls on their own
They need a doggy-dog to break out of being alone

So If you see a doggy person walking down the street just throw them a bone.
And hope that they take their doggy dog home.and leave the unleashed people alone.
Doggy-dog people
Doggy dog people.
Doggy dog people,
Please leave me alone!

© Igor Goldkind 2022

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Breathless: A Nostalgia for Oxygen


Breathless Spoken Word Poetry

I’m a Poet, a Producer and lately a Publisher of aesthetic, sometimes eclectic content that speaks to the truth of living your life in today’s moment of existence. Beyond the Real World is the Actual World, which I prefer to inhabit. There really is only one world but social delusions, language and mathematics make us concoct a duality between the “Real” and the “Actual”. It’s just a trick of the light on our senses.

Oddly and recently, I’ve received a lot of flak and unarticulated hostility from people who just like the way things are. Either they get some advantage out of our current state of disconnect or they’ve become so habituated to futilely struggling, to being dehumanized that they prefer what they’re familiar with rather than facing the unknown of change.

Having a back ground in ‘technology’ I do know one universal truth about ‘systems’ and that is ‘systems’ can always be improved upon. In fact if ‘systems’ aren’t being perpetually improved, they fall by the way side and become impediments to useful change.

As is with technology, so it is true of the human community and its social structures. My father was an anthropologist and a sociologist at a time when the very word ‘society’ was being challenged as having no meaning.

My work is about returning meaning to the term “society”. to the set of complex interactions we consider collectively as the norm and worth compromising our individuality for. Society is us and what we make of it, every day of every interaction you have with another human, either well known or a stranger to you. How you treat others out of fear or openness is multiplied by millions and the sum total consists the society we are all part of and are all living in.

No man is an island and no woman can be exiled to one.

This is not about politics or ideology, this is about awareness and mindfulness as to how each of us is as part of a whole. There’s only one race, the human race and you are part of it. The only question is with what degree of awareness are you running in the human race?

Looking backwards, in hindsight, I now realize the the steady stream of anonymous antagonism and threats I’ve received over the past year all started when my album BREATHLESS – A nostalgia for Oxygen was released last year on Bandcamp by my spoken word producer Frédéric Iriarte and largely composed by my art brother Jair-Rohm Parker Wells.

I believe it is the most popular track from the album, I CAN’T BREATH, the last words of George Floyds recited as a spoken word, ‘found’ poem by a ‘white’ voice that triggered the attention that all to soon became menacing and I have had to take unprecedented steps to protect myself from.

It is a tremendous album and well worth the free fee by which you can listen to it. I assure you that you’ve never heard anything like it before although I’m sure you’ve heard Ornette Coleman, Laurie Anderson, Willian Burroughs, David Byrne and Anthony Braxton. If not, you should listen to them too as they are the inspirations for our album.

Thank you for your attention, it’s the most precious commodity in the universe: your attention.

Sunflower Seeds Inside Your Pockets


Take these seeds
And thrust them deep inside your pockets
So that when you die and your body becomes the earth
Sunflowers will grow once again from the land you killed to claim.

© Carl F Emerich 2022

Ballerinas and camouflaged beauty queens will greet you in the streets
With pirouettes of spinning bullets behind barricades of sheets.
My grandmother will serve you up Molotov’s cocktails.
The orphans you murdered will dance around you sleepless until dawn
So that sunflowers will grow once again from the land you killed to claim.

Do you fear for war?
Ask of the stillness evermore,
Ask of the field, or ask the breeze, and ask the birch and poplar trees.
Ask of the children who now lie beneath the birch trees and the sky,
and let their mothers tell you once more
Whether or not you should fear for war.

They died so that the children from ev’ry shore
might live without your fear of war.
Ask those who fought, and those erased,
ask those planted in the rubble of Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast
Ask the women you embrace.
ask your mother –ask my wife–,
So that you will wonder never more
Whether you have cause to fear for war.

Who longs for war?
Who longs for war?
No one but those who are no more.
No one living longs for war
But war cares not for your longing or yearning for living.
Or your fears for war
War will always arrive uninvited to your door.

When war comes calling to your front door.
You cannot lock the war outdoors.
You cannot run and hide behind your chair
Or bury your head under the covers of your bed.

When war comes to your front door
There is nowhere to run, nowhere to go
The corpses of your neighbors will hinder your flight
You cannot let fear become your general
To give up the fight
To surrender to might.

Instead, you must stand with the sunflowers in the golden fields
Stand with our heads facing the sun.
Pour your bravery into an empty coke bottle
And pick up a gun.
Stand for freedom, for the children we have lost
Stand up for liberty, against the tide of tyranny.
Stand up for yourself as much as any other.

Summon your courage to stand like man,
Like a like a clown, like a woman, like a child.
The cries of their answer rises loud and clear
for all people, ev’rywhere, to hear.
The message now is as before:
Do not fear,
Do not fear,
Do not fear for war,

For war is already here

© Igor Goldkind March 27, 2022

For the Ukraine and for America

Painting by Katarina Anderssen © March 27, 2022
The Seeds of War
Recitation of ‘Sunflowers in Your Pockets’ with accompanying improvised score by Jair-Holm Parker Wells from the EP “Breathless” produced by Frederic Irriart (available on Bandcamp)



https://tinyurl.com/Sunflowerseedsinyourpockets

La Holy Cove


In La Jolla, California there is a holy cove
Hiding beneath the palm-tree hotel lawns
That match the pacific blue hues with emerald park greens,
In La Jolla there’s a holy cove where my childhood still lies sheltering,
Down the stairs below.
Beneath the seagull soiled sand stone, the slapping sounds of flip-flop-feet, the pelican congregations and the belching, barking mad seals who think that they are lions. 

La holy cove is a tiny sand-globe of cave and rock and
Frolicking white puppy waves.
A shelter for children  learning how to swim
Within reach of their parents’  gaze
La holy cove stretches her arms out yearning for La Jolla Shores
Across the underwater canyon, beyond the curvature of her embrace.

I jump in to swim  through the open canyon, towards adventure, towards the churning waves beyond me.
No longer confined by her protection,
I am a wild, happy seal with a snorkel to breath and fins to fly.
Swimming free, through the  miniature underwater circus of la holy cove
Past the orange Garibaldi clowns, the spotted leopard sharks, the casually waving anemones.
Overhead, trapeze-less gulls are calling out, reminding me to come up for air.

La Jolla Cove
La Holy Cove – Margarita Zuniga


Now I am beyond the cove
Beyond the underwater canyon, beyond the shoreline caves
Beyond the reach of Sunny Jim and the White Lady’s grin.
Beyond  the Tombstone markers
Where there are no bodies, just the memories of long gone Bottom Scratchers,
Ancient Greek fishermen, fallen on their spears.

I swim deep inside the Clam’s open cave
Where I first saw the world’s sunlight bouncing off an ocean mirror,
To dance on the walls of my darkness.
Where the real and unreal collude
To make memory a sanctuary,
Where childhood warmly welcomes our return.

When I emerge and meet my mother’s scared eyes
I lie down and breath in waterlogged undulations,
Of sand made liquid by my body’s memory of the oceans sway
The warm sand is a rocking cradle
My mother puts a towel around my shoulders and asks
“Why do you always go out so far? 

It scares me”.

The Rocks of La Jolla Cove – Margarita Zuniga
Ocean Spray at La Jolla Cove – Margarita Zuniga

Banned From Facebook, Again…


What can I say?

The month of January was silent due to my having accused a local mask-denier of demonstrating “a lethal stupidity”. 30 day suspension for “bullying’. I assume based on her complaint that I was telling her not to spread misinformation.


My latest trespass, again for another 30 days (first 7, until I appealed the decision), was for taking issue with a Trump supporter on one of Alexandra Cortez’s threads.

The woman was claiming that AOC had made up her account. A Portuguese participant commented in AOC’s defense whereupon the virulent QAnon proponent told the Portuguese national that he was a foreigner and to mind his own business, going back to his own country. I immediately responded in his defence by inviting him as my guest, to comment on anything he wanted to in the land of freedom of speech and then chastised the woman to stop being an ignorant American.

She complained that I was nationally slandering her for being an American manifestation of supreme ignorance. I was again suspended from using Facebook for 30 days, 27 more.

My appeals have been well reasoned and completely ignored.

I am awaiting the moral judgement of the algorithmic overlords by which human employees make decisions at Face Book. Repeatedly, I have been censured and censored for challenging misinformed comments that Facebook itself, if it contained one iota of the moral standard it claims to hold, should have caught in the first place!


If challenging and taking issue with those who question the legitimacy of the election, the validity of the pandemic or its remedies and continue to spout dangerous, Trump inspired, racist and and anti vax madness goes against Facebook’s Community Standards then those standards and their deployment are in serious need of actual public review and scrutiny.

In the meantime, I shall wallow in the righteousness of my exile.
Dostoievski won’t be drinking alone tonight in the Facebook Gulag.





Take a look at my new book and get yourself a Free review copy!
https://takeadeepbreath.one

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COMING SOON! The Cure for Pandemania


Take a Deep Breath – Living With Uncertainty 

A book of poetry and art, fables and philosophies aimed at the pandemic of crisis anxiety so many are facing.

In uncertain times people turn to uncertain means.  This is a book of poetry and art, of fables and philosophies aimed at  the pandemic  of  crisis anxiety so many of us are going through right now in our daily lives and in our inner spaces. We are all of us and each us in this together. 

The sciences but also the arts do provide remedies.  The ancient Egyptians wrote curative words on fragments of papyrus to feed their burnt ashes to the afflicted. Lacking morphine, Walt Whitman read verses to fallen soldiers on the battlefields of the first Civil War.  

At their best, the right words are more than therapeutic, they can be  curative. Take a Deep Breath  emulates this ritual here in administering remedies for living in these times of crisis, in living with uncertainty. 

Poetry Therapy: Towards an Uncommon Sense


A Brief History of Poetry Therapy
From the collection of poetry, philosophy and art TAKE A DEEP BREATH: Living With Uncertainty
by Igor Goldkind (Chameleon Publishing, 2021)

Poetry Therapy, or poetry which is used for healing and personal growth, can be traced back to primitive Man, who used religious rites in which shamans and witchdoctors chanted poetry for the well-being of the tribe or individual. It is documented that as far back as the fourth millennium B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, words were written on papyrus and then dissolved into a solution so that they could be physically ingested by the patient and take effect as quickly as possible.

The first poetry therapist of historic record was a Roman physician by the name of Soranus in the first century A.D., who prescribed tragedy for his manic patients and comedy for those who were depressed. It is not surprising that Apollo is the god of poetry as well as medicine, since medicine and the arts were historically entwined. For many centuries the link between poetry and medicine remained obscure. The poet John Milton wrote in 1671:

“Apt words have power to swage The tumours of a troubled mind And are as balm to festered wounds.” Pennsylvania Hospital, founded in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin and the first in the United States, employed many ancillary treatments for their mental patients, including reading, writing and the publishing of their work. Dr. Benjamin Rush, called the ‘Father of American Psychiatry’, introduced music and literature. The writing of poems was was encouraged, and the results were published in The Illuminator, their own newspaper.

On the battlefields of the American Civil War, Union field medic  Walt Whitman would administer recitations of verse to fallen soldiers who were well beyond hope long before the use of morphine. He was later to pen the classic Leaves of Grass, the greatest celebration of humanity in the midst of its own despair. Pennsylvania Hospital employed this approach as early as the mid- 1700s.

In the early 1800s, Dr. Benjamin Rush also introduced poetry as a form of therapy to those being treated. In 1928, Eli Greifer, an inspired poet who was a lawyer and pharmacist by profession, began a campaign to show that a poem’s didactic message has healing power. He began offering poems to people as prescriptions, and eventually started “poem-therapy” groups at two hospitals with the support of psychiatrists Dr. Jack L. Leedy and Dr. Sam Spector. After Griefer’s death, Leedy and others continued to incorporate poetry into the therapeutic group process, eventually coming together to form the Association for Poetry Therapy (APT) in 1969.

Librarians also played a major role in the development of this therapeutic approach. Arleen Hynes was a hospital librarian who began reading stories and poems aloud, thus facilitating discussions on the material and its relevance to each individual in order to better reach out to those being treated and encourage healing. She eventually developed a training program for those interested in teaching poetry therapy.

In 1980, all the leaders in the field were invited to a meeting to formalize guidelines for training and certification. At that meeting, the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) was founded. As interest grew, books and articles were published to guide practitioners in the practice. Hynes and Mary Hynes-Berry co-authored the 1986 publication Bibliotherapy — The Interactive Process: A Handbook. More recently, Nicholas Mazza outlined a model for effective 188 poetry therapy, also discussing its clinical application, in Poetry Therapy: 189 Theory and Practice.

The Journal of Poetry Therapy, established in 1987 by the NAPT, remains the most comprehensive source of information on current theory, practice, and research. There is also a relationship between psychological healing and incantations, either repeated as a musical chant by the patient or recited by the attending medicine man. Of course, modern medicine and science consider the notion of magical incantations possessing healing or restorative powers as so much superstition.

But this, of course, begs the question that if recitations and incantations had no evidential result and no beneficial property then why would have nearly every human culture have adopted the method and repeated it for thousands of years? Surely if there was no value to vibrating the air with the sound of one’s breath, rising from the abdomen, pushed upwards by the lungs, shaped by the throat, mouth and tongue, with the added stimulation of associative meanings being understood cognitively by the patient’s mind, we would have given it and its sisters, singing and chanting, up aeons ago.

I am not advocating a supernatural or spiritual causation for the effectiveness of poetry as a healing agent, but rather the supra-natural mystical cause which is grounded first in human nature and cognition, and for which there maybe a myriad of imprecise explanations, none of which can fully explain why it works. Today, poetry therapy is practiced internationally by hundreds of professionals including poets, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, social workers, educators and librarians. The approach has been used successfully in a number of settings — schools, community centers, libraries, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and correctional institutions, to name a few.

SO HOW DOES POETRY THERAPY WORK?

• Poetry is beneficial to the process of introspection, and can be used as a vehicle for the expression of emotions that might otherwise be difficult to express

• Poetry promotes self-reflection and exploration, increasing selfawareness and helping individuals make sense of their world.

• Poetry helps individuals redefine their situation by opening up new ways of perceiving reality.

• Poetry helps therapists gain deeper insight into those they are treating.

In general, poetry therapists are free to choose from any poems they believe offer therapeutic value, but most tend to follow general guidelines. Some poems commonly used in therapy are: The Journey by Mary Oliver Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov The Armful by Robert Frost I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman Turtle Island by Gary Snyder as well as the poetry of Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg and Antonin Artaud.

TECHNIQUES USED IN POETRY THERAPY
Different models of poetry therapy exist and are being refined all the time, but one the most popular is the model introduced by Nicholas Mazza. According to this model, poetry therapy involves three major components: Receptive/Prescriptive, Expressive/Creative, Symbolic/Ceremonial.

I. In the Receptive/Prescriptive component, the poet merely introduces the subject of how to focus on their own issue. The aim is to establish concentration and cognitive focus on the details, none which is revealed to the poet. Only when the poet feels confident that the subject is cognitively attuned to and non-verbally focused on the problem or issue of concern does he or she begins to ask suggestive questions as to how the subject feels, not thinks, about their issue. This provocation of tangible emotions usually comes in three distinct phases of emotional content. First is the predicament, when the subject becomes aware of the existence of the issue. This is a gateway phase, where anticipatory feelings are illicit and registered by the poet.

II. Then there is a further stage when anticipation of the issue has given way to the full experience of all the emotions, anxieties and fears related to the issue. This is usually overwhelming (or it wouldn’t be ‘an issue’ in the first place), and it is paramount that the poet guides the subject through distinct words to describe the layers of emotions experienced by the subject. The poet must ground the subject’s emotions in language. Language and the use of words is the key here, because emotions always come in complex clusters that make it difficult for both poet and subject to distinguish them and focus on the underlying causes.

“What kind of anger do you feel?”, “How would you describe your sadness?”, “How much shame do you feel? What would you compare it to?” This is a sophisticated method of word association, but rather than creating bridges between seemingly disparate words the goal is to drill down to the core emotions of the issue by refining the language, as led by the subject. Achieving exactitude of description is the task at hand. The poet makes careful notation of everything the subject says in regard to describing their emotions. It is important to keep them focused and not to succumb to intellectual distraction. Thoughts are illusions and often lies, whereas emotions are facts. Get the subject to correctly describe the facts of the matter. All meaning is metaphorical.

III. The final stage is waiting for an exit strategy. How do the feelings begin to recede? How does the issue move back into the background? What are the parting emotions? Is there anxiety about the leaving? Anticipation of an issue yet unresolved? Or is the issue impermeable, and subject to a rhythmic return? Again, the subject’s wording, their adjectives, adverbs and phrases are the material of the poem. At this point there is usually a short break to give time for the subject to recover from the emotional transitions and for the poet to briefly skim their notes and begin to focus on the flow of adjectives. It is preferable, if possible, to compose what amounts to a first draft, a flow of words which the poet can read back to the subject to confirm its accuracy.

At this first reading stage it is possible to start interjecting logical bridges between the emotional descriptors. This is the creative factor 194 unleashed. The poet, assisted by the subject, creates coherent sequences 195 between the emotional states. The poet suggests and the subject confirms or vetoes the phraseology, one line at a time. Now we arrive at a second draft which is the property of the subject. It is their poem. The preference is that the subject now reads the poem aloud and takes ownership of its content. The subject can redraft the poem a third time, or many more times, claiming it as their own. The poet has merely provided poesy prompts, the poem is the creation of the subject.

The expressive/creative component involves the use of creative writing — poetry, letters, and journal entries — for the purpose of assessment and treatment. The process of writing can be both cathartic and empowering, often freeing blocked emotions or buried memories and giving voice to one’s concerns and strengths. Some people may doubt their ability to write creatively, but therapists can offer support by explaining they do not have to use rhyme or a particular structure. Poets can also provide stem poems from which to work, or introduce sense poems for those who struggle with imagery. A poet might also share a poem with their subject and then ask them to select a line that touched them in some way, and then use that line to start their own poem. In groups, poems may be written individually or collaboratively.

Group members are sometimes given a single word, topic, or sentence stem and asked to respond to it spontaneously. The contributions of group members are compiled to create a single poem which can then be used to stimulate group discussion. The symbolic/ceremonial component involves the use of metaphors, storytelling and rituals as tools for effecting change. Metaphors, which are essentially symbols, can help individuals to explain complex emotions and experiences in a concise yet profound manner. Rituals may be particularly effective to help those who have experienced a loss or ending, such as a divorce or death of a loved one, to address their feelings around that event. Writing and then burning a letter to someone who died suddenly, for example, may be a helpful step in the process of accepting and coping with grief.

HOW CAN POETRY THERAPY HELP?

Poetry therapy has been used as part of the treatment approach for a number of concerns, including borderline personality, suicidal ideation, identity issues, perfectionism, and grief. Research shows the method is frequently a beneficial part of the treatment process. Several studies also support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression — it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the articulation of feelings. Researchers have also demonstrated poetry therapy’s ability to reduce anxiety and stress. Those experiencing post traumatic stress have also reported improved mental and emotional well-being as a result of poetry therapy. Some individuals who have survived trauma or abuse may have difficulty processing the experience cognitively and, as a result, suppress associated memories and emotions.

Through poetry therapy, many are able to integrate these feelings, reframe traumatic events, and develop a more positive outlook for the future. People experiencing addiction may find poetry therapy can help them explore their feelings regarding substance abuse, perceive drug use in a new light, and develop or strengthen coping skills. Poetry writing may also be a way for those with substance abuse issues to express their thoughts on treatment and behavioral change.  Some studies have shown poetry therapy can be of benefit to people with schizophrenia, despite the linguistic and emotional deficits associated with the condition. Poetry writing may be a helpful method to describe mental experiences, and can allow therapists to better understand the thought processes of those they are treating.

Poetry therapy has also helped some individuals with schizophrenia to improve social functioning skills and foster more organized thought processes. It is important to note in many instances, especially in cases of moderate to severe mental health concerns, that poetry therapy is used in combination with another type of therapy and not as the sole approach to treatment.

TRAINING FOR POETRY THERAPISTS 

Poetry therapists receive literary as well as clinical training to enable them to be able to select literature appropriate for the healing process. While there is no university program in poetry therapy, the International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy (IFBPT), the independent credentialing body for the profession, has developed specific training requirements. Several studies support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression, as it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the expression of feelings. 

However, the only qualitative measure of effective poetry therapy is in the poesy and the results. No accreditation can guarantee or substitute for the quality of cognitive empathy that is achieved during a successful session. Ultimately, there can be no real separation between the experience of the poet and the subject. This methodology provokes a meeting of mind in confrontation with universal truths. The poet is there merely to reassure the subject that there is no hocus-pocus, no supernatural or alternative reality, and that the cognitive associations that ring true are true in the present mind of the subject. The poet is on hand to reassure, to validate the responses of the subject to radical new perspectives into their own most intimate selves, and to relieve and dispel any accompanying trauma as grounded in the normalcy of human experience.202 203 

CONCERNS AND LIMITATIONS OF POETRY THERAPY
In spite of its widespread appeal and broad range of applications, some concerns have been raised about the use of poetry therapy. 

Some critics have pointed out it is possible for people to analyze a poem on a purely intellectual level, without any emotional involvement. This type of intellectualization may be more likely when complex poems are used, as a person might spend so much time trying to decipher the meaning of the poem that they lose sight of their emotions and spontaneous reactions. Poems that are unoriginal or filled with clichés are unlikely to stimulate individuals on a deep emotional level, or challenge them to think in ways promoting growth. 

Just always keep in mind that poetry therapy may have little or no value for those individuals who simply do not enjoy poetry. 

References: 

Chavis, G.G. (2011). Poetry and story therapy: The healing power of creative expression. Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. 

Gooding, L. F. (2008). Finding your inner voice through song: Reaching adolescents with techniques common to poetry therapy and music therapy. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 21(4), 219-229. 

International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy. (n.d.). Summary of training requirements. Retrieved from http://ifbpt.org/obtaining-a-credential/getting-trained 

Mazza, N. (2003). Poetry therapy: Theory and practice. New York: Brunner-Routledge. 

Olsen-McBride, L. (2009). Examining the influence of popular music and poetry therapy on the development of therapeutic factors in groups with at-risk adolescents (Doctoral dissertation). 

Rossiter, C. (2004). Blessed and delighted: An interview with Arleen Hynes, poetry therapy pioneer. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 17(4), 215-222. 

https://www.facebook.com/realpoetrytherapy

realpoetrytherapy@gmail.com

Fear, Loathing & Trembling in America: Election 2020


Beginning on Friday, October 30th until the afternoon of November 4th, 2020, I will be reporting on the US Presidential, California State and San Diego local elections from inside a Super Poll Station at the Luther Banks School in Logan, San Diego.

Working this year as a paid bilingual Poll Station Technical Inspector, I will be assisting voters operate electronic devices, checking registration rolls, managing lines and helping get out the vote.

12 hour days so I will be reporting on each day here as to what I’ve observed from the inside looking out.

See you here on Friday!

Pandemic: The Cure for Panic in the Face of Uncertainty


What if we thought of this uncertainty
as the Jews consider our Sabbath—
As a sacred space in time?
Stop travelling
Stop buying and selling.
Stop working.
Give up for now,
trying to make the world
better than it is.

Instead, Sing. Dance. Pray.
Write songs and read poetry.
Paint the pictures from your eyes.
Walk amongst the leaves and the stars.
Touch only those to whom you have commited your life.

Sit down.
And when your mind and body have become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected in ways that are both terrifying and beautiful.
No one can deny that now.

Do not reach out with your hands.
Reach out with your heart.
Reach out with your words.
Reach out with all the curled tendrils
of compassion that connect us invisibly,
where we cannot touch each other.

Promise this world your love
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
For as long as we all shall live
In this time of mass uncertainty.

On Poverty and Consciousness


A new acquaintance asked me why I endured relative poverty and uncertainty in California when I could easily take a tech copywriting or PR job and be living comfortably.

I answered, for which I’m sure someone reading this might wonder the same.

The answer is not simple and all has to do with my commitment to art and to the art of writing. It’s somewhat like a religious or spiritual calling; certainly as requisite of sacrifice and discipline as a monastery. (Read James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, if you need further elucidation on the subject). To become a great artist, which is what I believe I am becoming at this late stage of my life (or will at least die trying to be), takes total focus and constant dedication.

Not just to creation but to observation. Many of my best friends are not just poets and artists but scientists and mathematicians because they are processing their own observations through their own disciplines. When we talk and share words they read me and hear me, they comprehend how we’re all pursuing the same thing: the truth about life and the lives we are living.

Science and Art are really just two different vantage points in the same universe. During our Rennaisance there was no such separation between science, engineering and art. Just look at Da Vincis’s sketches if you don’t believe me. And this underlines the true failing of the formal education systems. No purely structured system can account for, much less process the unstructured data of experience.

But one truth I have learnt along this way is that we are all connected; both as a species and as sentient beings. Not just to those existing in the moment we all share but for all of us, from the very beginnings of awareness and rational self-consciousness. We are all brothers and sisters of the same mind, the same awareness that is awake and cognicent.

We all share the same biology of the mind.
I imagine that when extraterrestrial sentient life is contacted, it will be the poets and artists most open to the new who will not only best describe and communicate qualitative meanings with them but decipher their language(s) to communicate with them (more of “us”?), before the actual scientists can interpret their data and the military can rationalize the threat.

From the point of commonality; this sentience itself has a common shape or form in all of us throughout time and geography. It is our human nature.

My words try to sketch its outline.

Without needing to name a god, the Buddhists have been attempting to describe this commonality of all sentient beings, for thousands of years. In art and yes, in poetry too.
It’s what poetry is for: to describe the indescribable that is true for all of us, to all of us.

The known shining its single torch down a darkened corridor to the unknown.
The unknown (not the unknowable), has always been our mind’s final frontier.

We weren’t born yesterday. We did not just become aware of consciousness. The history of consciousness is the history of us, of the ‘you’ that is reading and comprehending these words.

You are no different in awareness than the Neanderthal who stumbled out of her cave and looked up at the stars in wonder. Every astronomer I have ever known harbors that exact same wonder. Our tools maybe bigger, faster and deadlier but our minds haven’t changed, just adapted to our tools. They’re physiologically still the same; and only enhanced by the evolution of language, both associative, symbolic and metaphoric.

This is where we alll connect. The commonality of our senses’ perception and their comprehension. This is what is meant by ‘realisation’. When we make the world real. When we realise that the truths we know from our senses connect us to the world as intimately as to each other.

These are the materials I use to create art.

But why not get a day job?
I will have to.
I have learned all I can stomach for now about the tangible reality of poverty. I have made some great and tragic friends outside my walls of privilege and comfort. But when I first detected my dwindling resources, I panicked. I borrowed gas money from friends, slept in beachside campsites for free and spent too many days in chic cafes nursing one cup of coffee and a refill just to write, just to connect with the non poverished. I. applied for every job I was qualified for and hustled my books even harder.

But this did not avert my panic and the fear, until it passed of its own. And you already knnow: nothing is ever as bad or as long as we first imagine it to be. That’s when I understood how many of my needs, weren’t needs at all and that I could live without the comforting requisites of a middle class existence, just fine. In some ways better.

Less consumption = less waste.

There’s what I want and what I can have and if I diminish my wants, I can have have everything I want.

When you don’t have any money, you don’t spend any money and that initself is a good thing.

The last argument that pursuaded me of the virtue of experiencing this lifestyle is that if I really wanted to write for wider audience in a profound and meaningful way, that I might need to understand and empathize with the truth of our human condition across the entire economic spectrum, not just those who can afford to buy books

And the truth is that the vast majority of “us”do not live a middle class lifestyle and that the majority of “us” struggle every day to earn what is called a living and yet seldom ressembles it.

I have met so many, so many poor people living on the streets in one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest state in the union, in the wealthiest nation in the world.
None of us can afford to rest within our illusion of justice and freedom until poverty is no longer the default state of the human condition in America. Remember, poverty is a prison from which escape is difficult. But if we truly want to say that we live in the land of the free, then we must free our citizens from the prison of poverty.

They are “us” as well. Not charitable”us”, not pitiful “us”, not lazy, drug taking, alcoholic “us”.

Just us.

I have talked in depth with enough of the so-called “homeless”. to recognize them for who they really are: The Poor. You know, those people Jesus was always talking about and Charles Dickens and Emile Zola wrote about? The idea that those without homes choose to live that way is a bigoted urban myth that need to be quashed.

Yes, may of the poor have real problems with alcohol, drugs and severe mental illness. But so does every other group and class of people I have ever known. The rich and the middle class aren’t exempt from alcohol, drugs and craziness; in fact they can afford more!

How then are we less connected as human beings?
Or is “humaness” only measured by level of income?

When I moved back to California to look after my mother, I was immediately struck by the avalanche of poverty that had engulfed my home town. As is every other foreign visitor to California, by the way. No tour of Balboa Park or visit to Sea World can eradicate the open poverty that everyone can see on the streets of San Diego. Which now more closely ressemble the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti or the extreme poverty that can be found in some places in Mexico, than any American city.

The first thing that went was the last vestage of regional or even national pride.
It is a crime against humanity for so rich a city as San Diego to maintain the level of homeless poverty that is evident to anyone who visits us. It is “our” fault. Because we are also connected to the impoverished and the socially weak.

You know, what Jesus was saying.

If I am to write the truth for those who want to read or hear the truth, then I ought to know what is lying outside the walls my middle class habits and worldview. What is it really like, not just for the impoverished but for the vast majority of Californians who also now live beyond the walls of middle class sensibilities, paycheck by paycheck?

Haunted by the memories of its long gone comforts.

What does it mean to be a human being living in America right now, in 2020. Aren’t we all supposed to have jertpacks by now?

What is the Truth of our American selves?

As Tony Morriosn said “The whole point of freedom is to free others”.

To my friends who have offered their support, I thank each one of you.
I will never forget your kindness and your humaness.


Yes I have a new book coming out in the fast approaching Spring.
It’s entitled TAKE A DEEP BREATH, A Book of Remedies and will feature much of the writing and accounts of experiences of truth that I have had living in California these last 5 years.

I hope that you will take a look.

San Diego Beats Poets


San Diego poets are wet gutter snipers
Taking pot shots at frivolous affluence and misspent eternities
From the street corners and back alleys of our prematurely grey dementias.

San Diego poets cast lines like fishing reels
Screaming curses at angels in heels while
Humming blues tunes to the damned, under our breaths.

San Diego poets spit surreal spiels into ribbons of unfurling images
That rain down like bright pathetic confetti
Against a blank horizon of an empty human empathy.

San Diego poets slide their wild, horse hair bows
Across taut, tied strings that sing
Above a psychedelic landscape of the gradually worsening human condition

You and me are not blind instruments of self-immolation.
We do not have to sit at the center of the fire to make it our home.
We can play our songs on sad air violins
And dance in the rain to drown our sorrows in the sea of greater uncertainty.

San Diego poets press our runny noses against
The pained windows of badly lit coffeeshops and crafty bookstores,
Hosting poetry readings for the over groomed;
Those educated only in the blind arrogance of their own judgements.

San Diego poets litter the streets with our menial typewriters
Preaching doomsday fire sales to tourists and
Liberation to those still hounded by carnivorous ambitions
In the current climate of fear that tries to pass itself off as survival.

San Diego poets never have enough money to buy you a drink
But will spare you a cig-regret –
–if you’re willing to spare the change you need you to make
–to make your tomorrow just a little bit better.

San Diego poets are all clowns, fools and charlatans
Keeping ourselves amused on the ragged streets of cold hangover dawnings
Whilst skipping around and dancing through the circus of mediocrity that pervades us.

San Diego poets migrate like flocks of hummingbirds
Seeking warmer climes and heartfelt compassions.
Blurring our wings the whole distance in getting there.

© Igor Goldkind, January 2020

Gatha


Gathas————————————>

Each moment of daily life is an opportunity to arrive in the present moment. Gathas are short verses that we can recite during daily activities to help us return to the present moment and dwell in mindfulness.

As exercises in both meditation and poetry, Gathas are an essential part of Zen Buddhist tradition. Using a Gatha doesn’t require any special knowledge or religious practice. Nor does it adhere to one style or structure. It only follows the rule of leading the reader back to their present moment of existence.

Here is my attempt:

“The reflection of a reflection is your reflection

Upon the surface mirror of a pool,

Being slowly filled by the very source of the life

You first reflected on.

Now jump in the pool!”

Facebook is Anti-Culture


Facebook is Anti-Culture

I’ve started this post after returning from a 60-day ban from Posting, Liking, Communicating, Joining, or Connecting with anyone else in the Facebook Community.

Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are “offensive,” happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. ~ The ACLU

What Was My Crime?

My posting one of my own published poems from my book Is She Available? that had been posted in Facebook at least thrice before without repercussion. and is currently available in dozens of libraries and bookstores throughout California and soon to be released in the UK. The visual interpretation of a love poem by the Designer/photographer and internationally renown artist/typographer Rian Hughes entitled:

I Missed Your Scent in Paris

Although his image was a black and white stylized photograph of a woman where if you squinted and looked real close you could make out the shadow of half a nipple showing, (which is exactly what a Facebook employee would have had to have done in order to render judgement that Tian and my work contravened Facebook’s community standards.

Words by Igor Goldkind – Image by Rian Hughes
Censored by Facebook

The Poem and Rian’s photo interpretation of the poem were not obscene, disgusting nor gratuitously offensive in any way. Unless of course, you consider the human body in itself to be obscene, in which case I strongly suggest you seek therapeutic help as you clearly entertain unhealthy, self-hating, anti-social thoughts.

Instead, if not the poem, then certainly the photograph of the semi-nude woman is a work of art. It is obvious to anyone who reads and looks that it had no other intention. Not being able to distinguish between pornography and erotic art is one of the great threats Facebook’s dumbed down lack of discernment poses to the thriving of a culture.
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Art is the science of culture. Both are experiment–driven.
Igor Goldkind
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As community-oriented and community-sounding Facebook professes to be (in its language and self-justifications of its censorship), Facebook is the enemy of culture. As well as the enemy of the community of humanity that shares the values that a free society comes hand in hand with expression free from censorship; as long as the expression poses no harm. Otherwise, it is not a free community.

“To destroy a people, first destroy their culture. 
~ Mario Torero

What is it exactly about the half shadow image of a woman’s left nipples poses a threat to anyone? The last time I checked, a woman’s nipple is the source of nourishment for all of us, male and female at one time or another.

To censor the image of a human nipple is to censor the truth of what it means to be human. How can I prove this? Look for yourself! Apart from a minority of our fellow hairless apes who have lost them in accidents or horrific burns, we ALL OF US HAVE NIPPLES! It is the truth of who we are and as an artist, as a poet, I am only interested in the truth of who we are. Not the twisted Calvinist attempt at reversioning a reality where angels never fart and genies have no belly-buttons.

We Must Protect You From Yourself

I know for a fact that genies do have belly-buttons, I’ve seen them with my own eyes! And as far as angel farts go, they smell better than your own.

Article 10 of the United Nations Human Rights Act protects our right to hold our own opinions and to express them freely without government or private interference.

This includes the right to express our views aloud (for example through public protest and demonstrations) or through:

• published articles, books or leaflets
• television or radio broadcasting
• the internet and social media
• AND WORKS OF ART
• The law also protects our freedom to freely receive 
information from other people.

The US The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment’s protection of artistic expression very broadly. It extends not only to books, theatrical works and paintings but also to posters, television, music videos and comic books and personal social media pages including FACEBOOK — whatever the human creative impulse produces.

The right not to be censored by an arbitrarily superimposed moral hypocrisy of a minority…. is articulated in the Human Rights Act signed by the US as treaty and thus bound by US federal law in 1964. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the United States renewed its commitment to the international human rights system by signing, though not yet ratifying, several major human rights treaties.

Including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS (ICESCR).

Liberty, Freedom & Justice
But Not From Facebook

These are the laws of the land that FACEBOOK has violated in unceremoniously and without warning censoring my work. Judgement without respite and only the cosmetics of appeal.

Facebook is not a community in any shape or form as long as its private owners impose their narrow, petty, puerile, and juvenile morals on us without listening to everyone, not just the complainers, who make up that community. That includes us good for nothing, when-are-you-going-to-get-a-real-job? artists.

There is no one to talk to at Facebook. No one to appeal to; no one to reason with and no one that takes responsibility for its actions. Human beings wrote the algorithms, built the servers and the browsers to increase the human bandwidth, not to distance us from ourselves!

There is no reason to fear the takeover of robots, algorithmic judgements and machines, for we have already surrendered.

Please repost this in part or in full on your wall and please share with your friends across all social media. Maybe Facebook will recall what it means to be a human with nipples one day and stop emulating the machines (who have no nipples).

Thank you,

Igor Goldkind
Still Human & Nippled

PS You think that I’m overreacting? Just another crazy, good for nothing artist making pointless noise? The Modigliani nude, the Picasso, the Rubens and all fell foul of Facebook and are all pictured as depicted after being defaced by Facebook in the name of their hypothetical Community Standards.

The Woman I Never Got to Love


 

 

I never really knew Hannah Northedge apart from our Facebook exchanges. I think it was she that first started commenting on my postings. I read her comments with bemusement and replied.   Earnest, sincere, a bit young girlish but always quintessentially English. That refined contrivance that is both over-mannered and elegant at the same time.  And yet we shared a sense of humour, which is an astonishment between an Englishwoman and an American.

31880675_10156077867485609_4580787757411991552_n-1The real English, the softcenter at the core of the cracked, hard surface, English remind me no one more so than of the Japanese. Both island peoples deeply suspicious of foreign invaders and both sewn tightly within an intricately embroidered fabric of ritual, custom and politesse. Both peoples’ have a tea ceremony; one with boiled spring water and green leaf powder, the other with scones, clotted cream and jams.

I did not really know Hannah Northedge but I knew what she was like. A middle-class Midlands girl from Leicester with financially nurturing parents and an early gift, really, a passion for music. She must have dreamed as a young studious girl coming to the Big Smoke, to London to make it big as a chanteuse, as a professional jazz singer. Hannah’s own cover version of Dick Whittington sans cat. This would have been for her a dream logically constructed from sturdy childhood building blocks. Each carefully poised upon the other, pushing gradually upwards into a stern, determined tower of accomplishments.

Hannah would teach music on the side, to students both male and female to make ends meet in a rapidly escalating London that had long driven me from its financial borders. Living in London is not an easy thing. Not for any young man or woman and certainly not for a high strung, talented musician intent on being the best at what she could already do quite well.

The dedication of an artist is blind. Blind to all things that do not further the acts of creation. There is no greater earthly power than to suddenly plug one’s hours, days, years of practice into an unearthly circuit that seems connected to the very essence of one’s living. That sudden bursting propulsion ever further, and ever greater into what you had always wanted to attain and seemed now to be as effortless as a second nature. Suddenly you are living your higher nature!

Any artist, any writer, any dancer and any musician will tell you that this moment of being ‘experienced’ of being played upon what feels like the very aesthetic strings of life is at best indescribable. This is much more than being “in the zone” as an athlete or card player might venture. This is about the zone being in you and all around you; in every pore and molecule of your being until it would take more effort to stop the momentum than to just let yourself keep falling forwards. Pulled into the very gravity of creation.

The Red Shoes is a 1948 British drama film written, directed and produced by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and based on the story by Hans Christian Anderson about a pair of red shoes that are enchanted and when worn enchant the ballerina dancer into dancing more powerfully, more perfectly than she has ever danced before. Until tragically in the end, the dancer cannot stop the shoes from dancing her to her death. A glorious death brought to life by a magical realism. One that many would gloriously surrender to just to be swept up in that dance unto death.

Hannah had no red shoes to speak of, but her throat, her lungs, her diaphragm and her instinct for music were as enchanted as they were enchanting. They were her soul and at very least they enchanted me. I never really liked what she sang. Of course I never told her that; (why would I?) To me, perhaps unfairly, it reeked of nostalgia and a wonting for a long disappeared time. Her numbers were swing, pre-integrated jazz; the time of Louis Armstrong and grinning happy black men.

This music came to England via the American GIs that were stationed there, much to the resentment of the male British population and much to the erotic delight of the female one. Courting and bedding an English girl was the kind of overseas exotica an American GI could handle, easily overlooking the cultural gap by virtue of a common language; in fact magnetically attracted by that difference of language and nuance. We said elevator, they said lift; we asked how many blocks; they answered how many streets; what could be more enchanting? All to the sound of swinging jazz.

Hannah in many ways embodied that stalwart and determined optimism of the English. Being bombed by a vastly superior air force, on the very brink of invasion and yet somehow, against every indication to the contrary, still anticipating a break in the weather. Raining bombs on old London town. By the time American GIs were deployed to England the response of the British and I can hear Hannah saying exactly this, was “About bloody time! How nice of you to finally show up for the party!” “Better late than never, I suppose!”

This was the playful sarcasm of the English by which they kept themselves and each other bemused whilst coping with the obstacles at hand This has always been lost on my American comrades. We think it’s rather mocking, which of course it is; it’s merely a democratic mockery, a Monty Python hysteria at the awesome absurdity of Life and it all. When it comes to jokes and putdowns and the English, no one ever gets out alive, no less so than the English themselves. Self-effacement and self-mockery are not part of the American skill set and we would be fortunate in having few English Life Coach instructors to teach us a thing or two about the proper positioning and placement of the ego.

But I digress from my digression. Hannah was quintessentially English, youthfully so. Although merely some ten years younger than me, she somehow always made me feel that she was much younger than that. A child’s wide-eyed openness beaming from a woman’s face I believe that that child-like disposition, as well as her nervousness and constant stress, were hand in glove with her talent. She desperately needed to keep performing, to keep belting out those numbers because her life really did depend on it.
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I was supposed to take Hannah out on a date this Spring in London. Not really a date, more like a shared joke. Both of us had frequently traded our frustrations with the opposite sex and one night I asked Hannah to describe her perfect London date to me. It involved dinner and dancing and her description was so lighthearted and life-affirming fun that I immediately promised her that as soon as I got to London I would take her out on that exact same date. I made that promise not to impress Hannah or woo her but because what she described sounded like such god damn fun that I wanted in on it! Hannah’s lust for life was infectious. Most important of all, Hannah laughed at all of my jokes, even the ones that didn’t merit laughter.

Alas, our date to laugh is not to be. The one woman in 3 years who had finally agreed to go out with me, drowned herself instead at the very prospect. Now that’s a good joke. One that Hannah would have heartily laughed at.

What can I say about suicide? And I understand as of late through a mutual friend that that is exactly what Hannah Northedge had planned in advance and self-executed (so to speak). Albert Camus said that the only question worth asking in life is whether or not to commit suicide; each and every morning when we awake we should ask ourselves that very same question. Because in all honesty, in asking ourselves that question we are never freer. Simply because if we do not choose to end it all; (and I assume that anyone reading this has chosen other than that), then what we have chosen is everything else instead. Because we could have chosen the only alternative to living there is, but we did not to.

I don’t know if Hannah asked herself that very question waking in her luxurious hotel room in Eastbourne, near Beach Head, Britain’s top suicide spot. She certainly had chosen a fine hotel in which to waylay her return to London. Perhaps I will pay that hotel a visit just to catch that final view of the sea we might have shared and toasted. I do not know what state of mind she was in when her parents sent her back home to London from her childhood home in Leicester. English parenting can be harshly stoic at times.

All I do really know for sure about suicide, and in fact, that is what Hannah committed herself to, is that it is an act of self-agency. You may not want to hear this, but please listen because it’s true. Take this bitter pill from one who knows: Suicide is a determined act to strike out against a world of pain and futile injustice. It is not weakness nor surrender that causes one to take one’s own life. It is instead the ultimate act of defiance, an act of unnatural courage and entails a great act of will against all instinct; against the very will to survive.

To look at the universe that gave birth to one’s own conscious mind and in full consciousness scream “No!” “No, this life was not worth the pain, the agony, the empty suffering of my existence!” “You can just take it, just have it all back”. “This was never going to be good enough and I’m putting an end to it here and now because it is my choice my freedom, my volition to do so!”

I do not know of Hannah’s pain apart from what she told me of it. I do know that her despair at romance and at its betrayal weighed heavy on her. If there is any lesson to be garnered from her passing, be it what I tell my own daughter time and time again: never ever believe that you will ever need a man to be happy as a woman.

It’s possible to have both, but by no means mandatory; nor is a man ever the sole path to happiness. We are at best unreliable and at worst, much worse than that.

Hannah did seem determinedly desperate in her remaining months; determined to be believed and desperate not to be dismissed as a hypochondriac lunatic. Which from my own experience with medical authorities. their tendency to treat the symptoms more urgently than the patient surely is lacking some benefit.

I know that there are those of us who in trying to find some salve for our confusion and our anger will demand answers from doctors, from landlords and mould experts; from Hannah Northedge’s own family, even. I know that righteous confusion first hand. To you, I say what my baby sister’s widow said to me at the time of her untimely passing: “nothing that we do, nothing that we try, no matter how hard is ever going to bring her back”.

We need all to find our peace with that.

Igor Goldkind © 2018

The Last Refugees: Syria in Crisis


Protest Poster
The time has come,’ (I am) the Walrus said,
To speak of many things:
Of shoeless children — and refugee ships — and the things
that all of us need…
Of arresting civilian protesters — and blood-letting priests and kings.
–– And why the sea is filled with fleeing families
And whether falling bombs have wings.’
This is the time of confusion perpetrated by those whose power is built upon the bedrock of our confusion.
We are told that all information are biased lies. To not trust what anyone says; apart from the words of those who tell us not to trust what anyone says.
In America and around the world there is a crisis in the authority of information. Never in the history of our tribe, the human tribe, has so much information, so many facts, so much data been at the command of so many of us.
The World Wide Web is truly an amazing thing, as is its name: World Wide.
And yet too much is never enough. With such abundance comes scarcity. Scarcity in the reliability of what we read, hear and see. We can no longer afford to listen to simply one voice. Uncle Walter is no longer alive to comfort us with the nakedness of facts, disrobed from opinions.
That’s just the way it is.
So we listen to the many voices inside and outside of our heads and try to tune into a signal through the rising noise levels. That signal, that wavelength, that fleeting photon of energy we’ve always known to be the Truth. What is the Truth? I don’t really know but you and me can always recognize it.
Right now the truth comes in the numbers:
In 2016, from an estimated pre-war population of 22 million, the United Nations (UN) identified 13.5 million Syrians requiring humanitarian assistance, of which more than 6 million are internally displaced within Syria itself at the mercy of the Syrian authorities, and around 5 million are refugees outside of Syria.
5 million refugees! 1.5 million in Lebanon alone. This is the biggest refugee catastrophe the world has seen since the millions of Jews who fleeing the Nazis were denied entry, turned away from this ‘Great’ nation of ours. To be deported to the death camps that awaited them and at the time no one believed were real. How could they be real? How could this be real again?
Never Forget really means Never Again.
How could a booming population of 22 million be gutted of 13.5 million civilians, more than half the country, of men, women and their children?
How could we, our tribe have let this have happened? Why didn’t somebody do something before it got this bad?
Where was our compassion deported to?
Pasted Image 0
But I’m not answering questions about how we got here. Instead, I’m asking you to do something about it right NOW. Set aside the luxury of your political opinions and focus on the reality, the facts. What we know to be True, right here and right now. There are children crying out in the desert. I can hear them, believe me, I can hear them and if you pay close attention, you can hear them too.
The facts are that families, just like yours, fathers and mothers just like you and yours and children, yes children exactly like yours are living and dying in unimaginable squalor. Right now, today. And there is something you and I can do:
syria3
They need medical supplies, doctors, and nurses to treat their external wounds and trauma counsellors to tend to their internal wounds.
images
The teenagers’ survivors of Florida school shooting were transformed from children into adults in the course of a few short hours of a single death-defying day. Being American, they were treated and counselled for the trauma caused by the actions of one young man and a single gun he should never ever have obtained.
These young adults’ transformation, Emma Gonzales, David Hogg and the others, was miraculous. They took the worst trauma they had ever experienced in their lives and changed it into action; an effective action that has yielded results. Like alchemists, they changed rusting iron into gold. They are an example for us all, especially us adults.
I’m telling you here that we don’t just have to admire our children, we can, we must follow their lead.
Now imagine, hundreds of fully automatic guns being fired around you, at you. Imagine the infernal thunder of bombs falling all around you, decimating your home and the streets of your childhood, obliterating your school, your neighborhood, your city and everything you have ever known to be safe and solid. The destruction of your entire your life while leaving your body if injured, still intact.
Please imagine this with me now, right now.
Stop reading this.
Close your eyes and use your mind to
Reach out beyond yourself and you will hear the bombs dropping and the sound of never-ending gunfire.
Now open your eyes and do something to answer the cry of that child in the desert. Follow the children, they know the way, the golden road into a better future.
Finally, please forward this post, share it with your friends.

 

 
We’ve all got to make the effort to be the human beings we would like to imagine ourselves to be.

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I Am A Paper Bag


 

 

I am a paper bag, I am.
I am only as good as what I can carry.

I am a paper bag, I am.images-1
I’m not the smart one,
I’m not the successful one.
I’m not the tall one who always won and
Then died.
I am a paper bag.
I’m only as good as what I can carry.

I am a paper bag,
I’m not plastic or burlap, not I.
I am paper: rough, brown and thin
I’m not waterproof, you know.
And I can’t hold any liquids or gases within.
I only have the energy for stuff that really matters.
I’m a paper bag.
I’m only as good as what I can carry.

I am a paper bag.images-2
Wrinkled and used and too often abused
Thrown on the floor.
Buried deep inside your drawers.
I am a paper bag.
I cannot ask you for anything more
I’m only as good as what I can carry.

©IgorGoldkind 2018

The Diamond Rain



imagesCaught in the Diamond Rain
Caught unawares in a diamond downpour.
When did Karma get so immediate and so personal ?
So judgment-like and familial?

When did I last escape from my room
And begin to orbit outside of time?
That vantage point that surrounds me,
Is not just this moment,
download-1But every moment you or I have ever lived.

A handful of jewels lie scattered at my feet.
Each crystal catching and tricking the light into
Reflecting each and every possible face of existence that there is,
All at once.

Each stone weighs down heavily on my stomach.
Forced downward by the sheer gravity of events.
When did I last step outside of myself again?th

I am no longer there.
Or rather I am here, just not in this world.
Instead, I’m living in a different world
built on longing, solitude, and reflection.

Two mirrors face each other
One rag wipes the dust and the sweat from both our dirty faces,
Go on, reach out with your finger tips to
Caress every surface of this jewel
We call living.

Can you see over there, that distant surface we exist on?
That reflects the face of every other face.
On all the falling jewels that surround us.
THIS is what it is to be caught in the Diamond Rain.

 

 

images-1

It’s Alive!!!!!


It’s official, I’m back on line with my periodic musings about life in the computational age.

Kind of a stone’s soup of insight, speculation, and anecdote all wrapped up in a bright ribboned visual package for you to peruse.

The long hiatus was largely due to a Singapore based company highjacking my domain name igorgoldkind.com.  Please go to that page and defecate your discontent with corporations stealing the identity of artists, just because we’ve gained some popularity.

What kind of on line world are we constructing here that permits commercial interests to pose as real people, even steal their names and profit from their hard work building their brand reputation?  Some people live shameful lives on the backs of the labour of others.   Tell them what you think before they steal your identity too!

Tales of Sedition and SUBVERSION welcomes your comments, opinions, condemnations, outrage and commiserations.  Don’t be shy, I like to have my feelings hurt!

This publishing platform also offers me the chance to post drafts of on going work which eventually see publication either online or on the backs of trees; sometimes both.

Here is the most recent draft of the most recent poem I’ve written this week:

images-10

There is No Escape

None of us gets paroled
From the prisons we locked ourselves into.
Just so we all fit together inside
These jigsaw lives that we lead
That eventually of course, blow apart,
We are the fragments awaiting reassembly.

Each moment of thought is a small drop in time.
Each piece fits the next piece.
Though we may try to live without
The murmurs of our own thoughts,
It is our hearts that yawn and awaken slowly
From their long winter night’s sleep.

You and I are mere mortals,
Who dreamt up life without end.
We are the ones who made up immortality.
For the sake of comforting sad joys.
This is now just the story we tell ourselves while
Slumping back to our death beds.

images-9downloadimages-11 Read the rest of this page »

San Diego Comic Con 2015: And Here We are!


Press Release

PR

Dolls


1886_lWomen that like to dress their men

Liked to play with dolls

As little girls.mZ4DECgEKf0KaeeQ_bwk71Q-1

As little girls will.

But boys who do not know how to dress

Themselves as dolls

Will be dressed by little girls grown

Who know exactly how to dress their dolls.50722-L -font-b-Doll-b-font-accessories-girl-toys-Chiristmas-gifts-font-b-black-b-font

Confetti






There’s an emptiness at the heart of any space:
The air that escapes a room; an unanswered echo,
a vacant womb.
There’s an emptiness in my heart
That reminds me that
All of my ideas are empty.
Floating leaves from a fumbled folder.
Coloured streams falling from the sky.

This emptiness reminds me
How slight my desires really are 
How gently they fall from the sky 
A confetti of mercy and discarded emotions,
They are in the end
Compared to nothing, 
Merely the litter from an emptied mind.

Breathing Time


I am not a connection.

I am a conjugation of every verb you have ever uttered,
Before the action you took, just now.

Hidden and mistaken
Slipping between your shadows,
Your ideas,

And a Reality that long ago,
Left you way behind:

The moment you thought you were in.

I am not your connection,
I am your conjugation, So
Stop spitting out your words

And start breathing in time.

46fc84fcf9e45dafffb0ea2b92376a36

IS SHE AVAILABLE? Hardcover edition

IS SHE AVAILABLE? Hardcover edition

INSOMNIAC AWARENESS by Igor Goldkind


We who are hiding in our second bedrooms,

Licking the silver from the backs of our screen,

Are living in a differently timed zone

Of insomniac awareness.

Sometimes 2, sometimes 3, sometimes 4 or more

Lives are lived and lost each night.

In our rooms, by ourselves

Sitting too close to the edge of our beds.

 

This is our legacy 

The lasting  perpetuity of our sensory species:

The glow that contests the light that once shone from our eyes,

Right up to the razor’s edge of our understanding of

What is not yet known.

The un-utterable.

What can barely be thought , much less said and

Yet still dances these words so merrily across this page.

In the ballet of silence that surrounds them.

 

Who are you reading this?

What perturbs your eternal sleep-walk into the night?

Are there questions you are pondering?

Or are you merely waiting for the screen to pull through for you?

Into your own quiet, private world,

Where  things that count never change.

And no one is dreaming you, but your mother

Who has left you now for another child.

© Alex Grey: Insomniac Awareness by Igor Goldkind

Pillow Thought

Who has left you now for another child.

THE OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE: IS SHE AVAILABLE? AVAILABLE NOW ON iTUNES.


Date: March 31, 2015 at 21:38:22 PDT

Subject: To my friends: THIS is What We Have Done – Is SHE Available?

From: Amy Sterling Casil , Chameleon Publishers

I can honestly say, this is like no other book we have ever seen before; we think perhaps – like no other you may have seen as well.uc

31 March 2015

For Immediate Release

IS SHE AVAILABLE? PUSHES BOOKS AND PUBLISHING FORWARD THROUGH POETRY, ART, AND MUSIC

Southern-California based publisher Chameleon Publishing releases its first major publication: Is SHE Available? by Igor Goldkind April 1 via the iBooks store.

What We DoIs SHE Available? pushes the edge of what is possible with present EPUB3 technology and how books are created and made. It is not an App, it is a true book that marries pop art, comics, avant-garde, jazz, spoken word poetry, video and animations, and type design. Its creative journey was more than a year in the making, growing from the collaborative work of artists, musicians, editors, and designers on two continents.

The poet, Igor Goldkind, is a San Diego native who lived in France and the UK for two decades while promoting the work of today’s most notable comic and graphic novel authors and artists. As a teen, he was one of the co-founders of San Diego’s legendary Comic-Con.

According to Bleeding Cool, “It was Goldkind who popularized the phrase ‘graphic novel’ with the media and found that gave them permission to cover the previously-considered childish medium of comic books . . . . Now, Goldkind’s vision of what graphic novels could be, is returning.”

Is SHE Available? was produced using an international collaborative model, but the book is one man’s voice and one man’s story.  Goldkind’s words and voice inspired the art of over 26 internationally-known artists, including cover art and interior illustrations by Eisner-winner Bill Sienkiewicz (Elektra Assassin, Daredevil and more), additional interior Advance Review pdf of IS SHE AVAILABLE_Page_76illustrations from other graphic novel illustrators and award-winners including Glenn Fabry (Hellblazer, Preacher), David Lloyd (V for Vendetta and many others), Liam Sharp (Judge Dredd/2000 AD/Madefire), fine artists and illustrators Lars Henkel, Mario Cavalli, Mario Torero, Wendy Farrow, and many more.

Music and spoken word were recorded in New York with UK Jazz Album of the Year winner, author and ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon. A US-based jazz and spoken word tour is scheduled for July 2015.

The type design and hardcover book are created by the eminent London-based designer Rian Hughes (2000 AD, Vertigo, Dan Dare), who includes an afterward about the collaborative design process. E-book production, incorporating Madefire animations, audio and additional animation, were provided by Chameleon Publishing in Southern California.

Due to the inclusion of video, audio and animations, and fine type design, it is playable only on Apple devices, and available only through the iBooks store. The hardcover (without music, spoken word or animationAdvance Review pdf of IS SHE AVAILABLE_Page_20s) will be published July 15, 2015.

Other “enhanced e-books” have been produced with budgets of $100,000 or more, and few have sold well. The “wisdom” is: poetry doesn’t sell. Enhanced e-books don’t sell. Most jazz doesn’t sell, either. Comic and graphic novel artists struggle to show their fine art to the public. And what publisher would take on a completely unknown poet whose claim to fame was selling fancy comic books to grown-ups and co-founding a big comic/media/scantily-clad women-fest like Comic-Con?Advance Review pdf of IS SHE AVAILABLE_Page_39

Twenty percent of North Americans regularly buy and read books. Nearly a hundred percent can read. Chameleon’s mission is to make books for everyone, not just a selected few.

Is SHE Available? Yes.

by Bill Sienkiewicz and Rian Hughes   ©2014

by Bill Sienkiewicz and Rian Hughes ©2014

Published April 1, 2015, in honor of National Poetry Month.

 

-END-

For more information and to obtain a copy of Is SHE Available? eBook for review (EPUB3 only on iOS devices – iPad, iPhone and Apple computers) or an advance reading copy of the hardcover edition contact the publisher:

Amy Sterling Casil

Chameleon Publishing Inc

YES, I AM AVAILABLE . . . . . . for a price . . . .


OK, you can buy it now.

My book that is, the one I have been going on and on about on these pages for the past 9 months.

It took awhile, a little longer than I planned on.

Igor Goldkind

Author/Poet/Producer   Igor Goldkind

But it’s here now: SHE IS NOW AVAILABLE!

My apologies to everyone I have kept waiting, but I think you’ll find that the end result was well worth it.

You really haven’t seen anything like this before.

Somewhat in recompense, my publisher is offering a SPECIAL INTERNET OFFER to my FB and blog followers:

As of tomorrow, you’ll be invited to pre-order the 164, fully illustrated Hard Cover Edition designed by Rian Hughes featuring an original cover by Bill Sienkiewicz for the regular price of $24.99 and

Get the eBook Download RIGHT NOW FOR FREE.

This offer starts tomorrow for a limited time only. The hardcover edition ships this month and will be available in May. This is your chance to get a copy before your friends can steal theirs from the library, for a LIMITED TIME ONLY.

This is a book of Poetry and a book handcrafted by love, tears and the visions of 27 artists, musicians and animators.

IS SHE AVAILABLE? Hardcover edition

IS SHE AVAILABLE? Hardcover edition

Poems are a way to talk to a side of ourselves we cannot talk to and a way to take pictures of things that we cannot take pictures of. But like a picture, it also holds moments in time. It works in the space between words, where connections are made, meaning is formed and the poem is ultimately owned by the reader.

And still, for so many of us, you only notice poetry when you need it.

Read poetry.

Because while all the poetry in the world might not be worth as much as one good doctor, if there is a reason we are alive, if there is a reason we’re here, it can be found in poetry. It is the barest bones of the human experience and it captures the soul in flight.

Kind Regards, and please may I ask that you share my words with your Friends.

http://is-she-available.com

BUY IT NOW! Even the Truth is For Sale

BUY IT NOW!
Even the Truth is For Sale

THE FOOL’S LAUNCH PAD


The book is finally ready.the-foolI’ve seen it, played it, read it, listened to it so many times it’s near driven me mad.

The act of creation is an explosion, a maelstrom of emotional energies seeking form, vying with their own legacy of fragile structures, to Break Through to Something New.

That is the goal.

But the monotony of honing the perfection; wherein the hot metals cool and adhere to the cast,  is the labour that seems unending compared to that first ejaculate of inspiration.

So we toil as we complain.

But there never really ever was any turning back

And now there’s no looking back, because the book is uploaded and now for sale on in iTunes, the Books Online Directory and the publisher’s own site: Is She Available?

If you’re reading this, you can get a special discount offer on the website; a kind of 2-4-1 deal.  The kind of incentive that is supposed to get you to read my stuff.

The official release is Wednesday,  APRIL FOOL’S DAY, which I consider entirely appropriate.  A day like any other day, displaced by a change in calendar; a recalibration of our instruments that measure time makes fools of us all when we forget what the calendar really measures:theFoolDetail

our own steep descent  in running out of time.

So like you, I am a Fool

I took the  opportunity to be published and turned it into something more; something different, something that I felt should have been tried by now.  But it hadn’t been.

So I did.

Try.

Doing something new.

Whilst the  machinations of publishing both print and online, grind into gear, releasing steam and a rumbling thunder, I prepare for my flight from the north to the south.

I will be in the air when this book lifts off from its pad.

I hope it flies.

I hope it flies high enough to break this orbit.tarot___the_fool_by_marmot_art

With your help, it very well may.

Thanks, Igor

p=m√


This moment is dead.Momentum
But your life is momentum.
It’s the only life you know:
Everywhere you look
Is exactly where you’ll go.

(Paying attention like a fine,
Sniffing out the muddied footprints of the divine.)

This ticket that you’re riding,
Fare-less and Free,
Is merely the impetus of your Desire
Conserved, unaffectedly
By any other force or swayconservation_of_momentum_7
Upon your singular trajectory through time.

For Tatiana Iosifovna Doubro  who is ejected from planes and recites Pushkin by heart as she is flies through space.

df13

YES, SHE IS AVAILABLE! OUT NOW !!!!! How Exciting.


I am posting this to announce the official publishing of my book IS SHE AVAILABLE? On April 1st, 2015.  the ebook will be available for download on a variety of commercial websites; not least of which is the official website http://is-she-available.com where you will be able to both download the book and pre-order the hardcover edition. 

Cover Illustrations by Bill Sienkiewicz; Design by Rian Hughes

Cover Illustrations by Bill Sienkiewicz; Design by Rian Hughes

Please, tell your Friends.

“Friends”: how strange that word now seems to me given the dilation of its meaning over the past what 5, 10 years?   I recall using the word in reference to a small circle of familiar intimacies; varied in nature and personality but common in values and how we choose to pass our time.

Of course now my Facebook tally shows that I have somewhere near 2,000 such Friends, comprised mainly of people I have never met, with whom I have exchanged a few words at best; and yet in that exchange of Words, have widened the circle of that meaning: Friendship.

Which is why I have come to not so much to write poetry (I started when I was 13), as to publish it. In a form that suits it’s purpose: to reach out to as many people as I can, the Friends of my Friends (and their Friends too), through the channels that will reach them across this sea of data, signs and meanings our attention now spans.

But even the word ‘book’ now seems to have acquired a fluidity of meaning that transcends its original reference. My work is a tangible, page-turning book designed by maestro Rian Hughes; an electronic book with music and animation, a CD of 15 music tracks by the musical enfant adorable Gilad Atzmon; a portfolio of art prints and a selection of Poet-T-Shirts, bearing a selection of fine art images and illustrations from my dozen collaborators on this book.

The Revolution in Only 2 Digits by Jeff Christensen  © 2014

The Revolution in Only 2 Digits by Jeff Christensen © 2014

This ‘Book’ is also a live spoken word/jazz music tour in the US this coming this early summer and a UK tour this Autumn.

I apologise to my Friends who have been hanging on, hearing fragments of news, awaiting the date they can hear less about it and more what it says.                   I confess, like many things,

it was all my fault.

Advance Review pdf of IS SHE AVAILABLE_Page_42

The Birth of Fire by Margarita Zuniga © 1959

The inception of this project dates back nearly a year to March 2014, when the author/publisher Amy Sterling, after a long dialogue about writing on Facebook, suggested that her nascent publishing company CHAMELEON Publishing Inc. would be interested in publishing my work. Chameleon Publishing Inc. was a new, next-generation publishing company based in Southern California that’s opening new market channels for books with new readers, mainly for and about women. When I first mentioned my sole discrepancy in this area, Amy replied casually with the second greatest compliment a woman has ever paid me: “But your sensibility fits”.

And I’m thankful that it has, because without the efforts of the women who have supported this project, it would not have come to be. From Eleanor Brooks my firm, caring editor, to my daughter Olivia Goldkind-Brooks, to Addie Kaplan my business manager, this vehicle is powered by a uniquely feminine drive. Since the start gun fired, I have been on an unimaginable roller coaster ride of magical serendipity, dazzling disappointments and a severe lack of funds. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that the career of a writer or any artist is easy; sure you have more freedom, but freedom costs what money can’t buy: time, effort and persistence.

PETER SAID TO WENDY by Wendy Farrow

WHAT PETER SAID TO WENDY by Wendy Farrow ©2014

I had hoped to announce the publication before Christmas, then the New Year. But the practical demands and hurdles involved in this kind of innovation and creation (thank you, Adobe!), persists with its own priorities, own issues to resolve. I also encumbered myself with the urgency of my mother’s impending demise late last year. I had to unburden myself of the notion that I needed to place a copy of my book in her hand before she passed. It wasn’t practical it wasn’t possible and in the end, it wasn’t necessary.

The personal is always constrained by the impersonal.

Now we are resolved.

First Page of THE FARMER AND THE SOLDIER comci strip by David Lloyd  © 2014

THE FARMER AND THE SOLDIER by David Lloyd © 2014

My persistence on this project, (some would add, against all reason), is about to see fruit. Whether the fruit is sweet or bitter (or both) will soon be for others to determine.   What I can tell you is that I have put all of myself into this this deeply confessional, personal work. All of my sweat, all of my anger, all of my love, all of my hatred, all of my blood, sinew and bone into the making of this creation.   My intent is to connect with you, with your emotions, your experiences and your sense of your self by sharing the most personal in the most universal way I can. I believe, at the depth of our selves, in our own most solitary, private existences is where we find each other gathered, maybe huddled, in the same exact corner.

It will not be to everyone’s tastes, I’m sure.  But if you care to take a look you will find a work that endeavors not to entertain, nor offer safe refuge from harsh truths; but rather to be that truth in Word, in Image, in  Music and in Movement.

Because . . .

When you stare into the Abyss long enough,

the abyss will stare back at you;

and if your gaze remains unflinching,

the Abyss will speak to you

And this is what it says . . .

THE DARK CLOUD  Typographic layout by Rian Hughes

THE DARK CLOUD Typographic layout by Rian Hughes

Bubbles


Life goes on without you
and within you:
shiney-wet-pebbles-bubblesRound pink pebbles
Polished by the constant flow of
Bubbles that burst like dreams
Just above the stream.
All I am is the movement in between:
The pebbles and the burst-bubble dreams.

bubbles-119-1

Rainbow Bridge


You know I owe it you my friends, those of you who have been generous in your thoughts for the loss of my mother to tell you something: Although it has been a long, arduous road from my mother’s first diagnosis of dementia 4 years ago to her leaving my world 2 weeks ago and in spite of the struggle (not least with the authorities), to see her way clear to a happy death; it has been an extraordinary, indeed enlightening experience.

I’ve been distracted so much of my life by shiny, trivial things and this last year certainly, has brought me into a focus and permitted me insights into things I had never known. The most pedestrian insight being the sorry regard our institutions have for the aged, the infirm and the demented. We don’t treat our weakest very well and I’m afraid that is because

we really don’t treat ourselves very well either.

The insight that I do want to share or at least attempt to convey is what I did feel this past month observing my mother’s diminishing capacity to engage with her surroundings first socially then practically. I had a tactile, visceral sense of an arc of a life; a universal trajectory from birth to death, as something that comes and then goes.

(The Rainbow in Norse mythology Yggdrasilis the bridge to Asgard and Valhalla, the hall of fallen warriors.) I have no experience of the supernatural.

It’s all natural to me. But I did feel a deep and distinct tone, like the pealing of a bell resonating beneath my feet in her passing.

Between the last evening that I saw her, held her hand and spoke to the steady light in her eyes and the morning I visited her room from where life had been so recently evicted, I knew I had seen a life depart and the place in the world that it had left. I did not catch a glimpse of death.

I saw life very clearly as it fled my mother’s corpse.

That thing, that is everything, that same thing that still animates us all. Until our clocks wind down as well or are tragically, shockingly shut down. I saw life leaving me behind as it disappeared  around some bend and I saw the life that was me, within it’s own place, on its own trajectory of escape.

I saw the light in the eyes that created me, that cherished me; fight, fade and extinguish.

I know that I will go there too, following her footsteps and those of my father’s before her and my sister’s before him.  A  death parade towards an unknown horizon.   I don’t know where they went, I just know that they are no longer here; nor any where I will ever be again.

No ‘where’ to go to. Just end. Just stop. Just no longer being.

And these fingers tapping on my keyboard are tapping out time too.

Igor

THE BORDER IS YOUR MIND


Yes, Available. 1267915_10152977966392755_3846847922395520293_oMicrosoft Word - New Poem-THE BORDER IS YOUR MIND.docx

LOVE IS AN ANGEL DISGUISED AS LUST by Igor Goldkind


LOVE IS AN ANGEL DISGUISED AS LUST 

Love is an Angel.medusa-on-the-sofa_for-Evan copy What is this thing that you can’t speak of?

This flirtation that will not hold its tongue but would rather hold yours between its teeth

And bite the thwarted anticipation of your mad fear’s confusion.

for fuck’s sake, what’s to choose?

Your body has already chosen for you

I hear it calling me on the telephone it anticipates my touch

it intakes your breath

it recalls my lips onto yours this tongue wets a damp crevice and summons the river

and it flows like no other desire from phone to train to bedroom

a churning current that carves out cliffs on the shoreline on the way plowing across the months and years exposing the bone and sinew of yes,

pure lust  

DESIRE!

Pure Beautiful Carnal Longing

that is the truthful stench of black damp earth pregnant with all of life;  pregnant with who you and I will become

when One again.

 When turning and churning, unraveling and raveling the bed sheets again.

The furious spinning of uplift resisting all gravity.

There’s a vertigo to our desire but no, I will not let you fall.

Recall, hear my cries of consummation in your arms, rising and falling, dancing between your upturned thighs

Recall your gasps of surprised delight

As the wings of a fallen angel unfurl to take in the return to paradise. You can feel this all again with me, baby.

There ever, ever was anotherLove is an Angel copy.                I’m just waiting to take you again.

Paintings of Medusa by Nancy Farmer © 2014  for the Poem in the collection IS SHE AVAILABLE?   (Chameleon)

PLATO’S RETREAT by Igor Goldkind; Illustration by Rian Hughes


Plato’s RetreatPLATO'S RETREAT IGOR'S BOOK FLAT

I want to be just like Socrates,


Grow a long beard and

Do what I please.


And be asking you allot of questions….

For a living.

I want to be just like Socrates

And not know for sure
 If I’m really real

or merely an altar In Plato’s temple.

I want to be just like Socrates,


And stand in the forum all day.


In the blazing sun that surrounds us,

Under the azure Athenian skies.

And philosophize,

To anyone who bothers to listen….

For a living.

I want to be just like Socrates

Corrupting my own youth in a hemlock cocktail

Every Friday night,
 2, 4 1 before 7 ….

For a living.

I want to be just like Socrates,

On a Saturday night
…

Asking, “hey you, at the bar”:

What is justice?

And where can I score some tonight?

After hours
..

Long after the widening sliver

Of your mind’s eternal dawn.

Image

IS SHE AVAILABLE..? by Igor Goldkind A Collection of Poetry, Art, Music and Motion in eBook, Hardcover and CD Spoken Word Editions COMING FOR THIS XMAS!!!


THIS IS THE HOLDING PAGE FOR THE OFFICIAL IS-SHE-AVAILABLE.COM WEB-HUB LAUNCHING DECEMBER 6, 2014

On this page you will be able to order the book directly in time for Xmas; Download the eBook; pre-order the Wall Print Portfolio and the Music CD IS SHE?  

BOOK MARK THIS PAGE AND GET SPECIAL DISCOUNTS FOR BLOG-FOLLOWERS AND FACEBOOK FANS

CHECK OUT SAMPLE FROM THE EBOOK AT MADEFIRE.COM   HERE

THIS IS THE COVER ILLUSTRATION FOR THE BOOK AND THE POEM THE DARK CLOUD

by BILL SIENKIEWICZ  © 2014Copyright Bill Sienkiewicz 2014 for the collection IS SHE AVAILABLE? by Igor GoldkindI

am

the

Darkness.

I

am

the

Darkness.

I

am

Oblivion.

I

am

the

MeaningDK4

of

Meaning,

Which

is

Nothing!

I

am

contempt

incarnate

I

am

the

self-loathing,

the

wriggling,

The

squirming

of

your

soul

I

am

the

reason

you

are

suffering

Because

IDK1

enjoy

the

show.

I

am

the

Darkness.

I

am

the

Darkness.

I

am

Oblivion.

I

am

the

Meaning

of

Meaning,

Which

is

Nothing!

I

am

the

dropped

eyes

and

fallen

smile

of

your

mother

When

she

realizes

what

a

little,

masturbating

shit

you

really

are!DK2

I

am

sickness.

I

am

despair.

I

am

the

hope

you

hide

behind,

Strangled in thin air.

am

the

Darkness.

am

the Darkness.

am 

Oblivion.

am

the Meaning

of

Meaning,

Which is

Nothing!

You

are

the

particle,

I

am

the physics

You think

you matter?

Am the Matter,

Dark Matter!

I

am

where

all

energy

goes.

Entropy is my mistress

and

fuck her every day!

DK4

I

am

Where

you

come

from

Where

everything

comes

from…

am what comes to you all.

I

am

where

you

go

when

you

don’t

really

know,

When

you

can’t

recall

Who you are anymore.

am the Darkness.

am the Darkness.

am Oblivion.

am the Meaning of meaning,

Which is Nothing!

Stop

talking

now.

Stop

thinking

now.

Stop loving and living and dying.

Come with me now.

Come with me now.Raven and Woman Branch

Come with me now.

There’s

no

denying

what

you

already

know,

What you’ve known all along.

I am the Darkness.

I am the Darkness.

I am Oblivion.

I am the Meaning of Meaning,

Which is Nothing!

There’s

no

You.

There never was.

It was always

Me.

YouMan pulls cloud are just trick of the

lights that

own.

You are nothing,

You are the 

                                                                 Nothing

You are me

You belong to

ME.

Now come quietly now,

Come take my hand, now.

Out of the darkness,

Out of the darkness,

Out of the darkness,

Out of the darkness,

Where you belonged.

Out of oblivion,

Out of the Meaning of Meaning,

Out of the darkness,

into your Light

And come

Home.

FLASH BACK ’78


Basking in the Broken Down Casino of Americana the grated dead reside in.scan0015

Reading the Bones of old contentions…looking up at primary  school-lights; the ones that never change…looking down at the floor tiles; an endless sea of wrinkled faces….too many people to breathe in…

where’s the Exit Jean mentioned?…

Sound…check…test…test1…test2…test3…

Now!

Go You Sun of a Gun!

Locomotive train thunders through your head…groping… stumbling…tripping forwards into that warm glowing rush of the great unknown.  There’s a tunnel!… there’s a tunnel…there’s a tunnel up ahead.  We’re goin’in…we’re goin’in…we’re goin’in.watch your head!

Watch: Your Head.

 Gone!   Washed away under the Lowest Bridge:

The consummation of illusion onto the lockjaw of your reality.

Still falling forwards…forwards with time…moving…with no body…no mass…no mind…beating…truckin’…making that Bend-On-the-Road…past the Dooh-Dah man….Right turn….left turn…back turn…back-where-you-started-from turn…It’s happening man…all around you…all the time…with you…without you…no-you..no- more…no-you-no-more….KNOW-MORE-YOU!..Don’t look left…don’t look right…don’t get scared…

Dawn follows the Night…head straight into the Light… up ahead…right where you came from…another train comin’ down your track…Head On Tight!grateful_dead_skeleton__pencil_by_frozenpinky-d2ek9j0

One More Stop….

Farther Down the Road.

Just keep on truckin’… don’t fall ahead and do not fail…one…two…onetwo…want-to… want-to …onetwothree..….chugga-chugga-chugga-chew-chew…One-Two Three….chugga-chugga-chugga-chew-chew

One-Two-Three….

One-Two-Three….chew-chew:

you’re dead.

For shaky kane,  you better watch your head…

SHE’S COMING . . . HE’S WAITING . . .


IS SHE AVAILABLE?…………………………………………………………………………………Even the Truth is For Salecropped-10689672_732000606836698_9129833884739632966_n-1.jpg

405706_294992087204221_1568855981_n

HE’S WAITING . . .

340428_314648051905291_1879620096_o

461169_345102268859869_704018313_oIS SHE AVAILABLE?  

Chameleon Business Plan May 1 2014_Page_01The New Debut Collection of Poetry, Illustration, Music and Animation

by Igor Goldkind and 20 other Artists461511_335891136447649_1992636895_o

COMING THIS XMAS TO AN AMAZON TAB NEAR YOU

 This Christmas Make Your Gift Poetry.

IS SHE AVAILABLE ?  1601138_732002420169850_8147971876015536004_nEven the Truth is For Sale

Quote

NOTHING TO DO


We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future.

We have no present.

Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation.

mindfulness callifgraphy~ Alan Watts

LIAM SHARP: MAN, GOD or GOAT?


LIAM SHARP: MAN, GOD or GOAT?

I first met Liam Sharp in the editorial offices of 2000AD when he was a young jobbing artist. He had hair back then. He also had a journeyman’s attitude that stood out and distinguished him from the parade of amateur portfolio-ed artists who regularly hung out in the 3 floor reception of Greater London House, in the Camden of early 1990’s North London, where comics were being published.495

(We all worked in the neighborhood that Amy Winehouse grew up, sang and died in.)

Liam made his debut in the late 1980s drawing Judge Dredd for 2000AD, where I was working as the marketing manager in order to promote 2000AD and launch 3 new comics titles onto the newsstand market.   These were the days that a comic like 2000 AD sold 100,000 copies A WEEK. (80% newsstand sales!) I met many of the young guns at the time like Liam who later, established a deservedly high reputation in US comics.     At the time, I had the fortunate vantage point of being a “suit” that actually valued the artistry and narrative of the work being produced for a mass-market audience.

When Liam came to Greater London House, both Richard Burton, the then editor of 200AD and Alan Mackenzie, his deputy would meet him at reception, usher him in and introduce Liam to others and myself. This was, I observed at the time, special treatment I only saw on display for Grant Morrison on his frequent visits and Alan Moore on his less frequent ones.   So I knew that editorially, Liam was a VIP and it was when Richard gloated to me about Liam’s apprenticeship with the British comics industry version of Jack Kirby: Don Lawrence that immediately drew my attention to Liam.

Liam copyWhen I met and had a pint with him, (an essential communications tool in Britain: the pint), I discovered a young, working class man with a gift for art who had won both placement and scholarship in a reputable middle class school; and who had then chosen to askew an equally merited University placement in order to work instead, as an apprentice to Don Lawrence.

Don Lawrence was admittedly considered the finest British comics artist of the time, but still! This was not so much radically different as radically traditional. Liam chose his own path as a student and as an artist.   Regardless, one thing was crystal clear to me: Liam Sharp had balls.Old_Dredd_pin_up_by_LiamSharp

Liam later moved to Marvel UK, where he drew the best-selling Marvel UK title ever, Death’s Head II. Liam then was at the crest of the wave of British artists and writers invading the offices and comic book shelves of the US comics industry with books as diverse as the X-Men, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Venom, Man-Thing (for Marvel Comics), Superman, Batman, and The Possessed (for DC Comics and Wildstorm), Spawn: The Dark Ages (for Todd McFarlane and Image) and Red Sonja for Dynamite comics.

The pre-comics-fame Liam I met was a young, muscular Northerner from Derbyshire with a broader-voweled accent than his southern, countrymen. Liam and his ilk (English people from anywhere north of Birmingham; or as we used to call, the rest of the country) had a different style, a different way about them. More plain spoken, self-modest and more eager to share a laugh, than their southern counterparts, the Northern British seemed to have crossed a border from another country, sitting in the reception area of Greater London House on Euston Road.

It was a different time:

Alan Moore was still talking to people; Neil Gaiman was in perpetual leather-jacketed, Lou Reed mode,  Grant Morrison was shy and Warren Ellis actually seemed scary to me. And everybody seemed to be on the same side: you were either publishing comics or you were writing or drawing (or both) comics.

Hard to describe to comics fans these days. Comics writing, drawing, publishing, selling, collecting has always been about

LiamSharp1 money. But in London, because of it’s New York-density, spread out over the land area of an LA; everything wound up affecting everything else. Comics did become the new rock and roll. Comics’ design and styles infiltrated the print media. Comics characters costumes, the street fashion scene, comics stories (Halo Jones, Watchmen, Judge Dredd) were injecting the music scene and this was 10 year before the comic book movies.

I first met Liam in the wake of what seemed, to all of us at the time, a unique cultural explosion. Comics had infiltrated every corner of popular fashion. Just as in the 60’s, London record companies were overwhelmed by young English songwriters and bands; the office of British comics companies in the at least the first long train journeys from Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham and of course Derby hoping for a commission.   It was in the middle of this flurry of excitement, 3 new weekly and monthly comics being launched and work was on offer. It was the comics equivalent of a gold rush.   The impact was also felt in the aesthetic migration of artists from all media to the sequential, to the narrative textures of images.

Painters like Simon Bisley and mixed media artists such as Dave McKean were pushing the envelope on what was considered acceptable art for comics. I remember pages of artwork that were so densely painted or mixed up with objects that the printer could literally not bend the page around the drum needed to shoot the film. Layers of film had to be shot to turn these new, thickly, painted canvasses into comics pages. Experiments were being tried and barriers were being broken.

But 20 odd years later, Liam is still a working artist. More importantly, he has mutated into that essential modern mold, that survivalist camouflage, of entrepreneur. The smart businessman/artist/producer, all artists working in the popular arts, (not just comics), need to be in order to earn a living with their craft.

Liam Sharp is again at the crest of a new wave of artists who understand the entire cycle of creation, production and dissemination of a creative product to a market.

With the founding of Madefire.com in Berkeley, California, in 2011, Liam took his Northern English, working class creative drive to the edge of the medium again. Motion books are moving narratives, in both senses of the term and Liam continues to further his artistry both visually as an artist and producer, but also as a writer in his current ground-breaking Motion Book for Madefire.com “Captain Stone is Missing” written with his wife Christina McCormack.Capt. Stone and the Tyrany of the Ant Women (color)

Liam’s critically acclaimed first novel GOD KILLERS: MACHIVARIUS POINT & OTHER TALES was published in 2008 with a second edition in 2009.

Liam Aliens graphic novella Aliens: Fast Track to Heaven for Dark Horse, which he both wrote and illustrated, has been critically acclaimed.

Liam Sharp is not just a successful artist, producer and now publisher, he uses his expertise and now sizeable experience to not just accumulate money (and rare bourbons), but to generate new work, to create value that engages; which is after all, the duty of an artist, is it not?

If it is an artist’s duty to advance the medium they craft in, then Ladies and Gentleman I present Liam with my imaginary, CGI Medal of Valor beyond the call of duty in the field of creative endeavor.

“For Chrissakes, Liam! Keep your helmet on; that’s live ammo they’re using out there!”

LiamSharp2

Image

I Once Knew A Woman Thrice; in Santa Cruz, Paris and Philadelphia


recently returned some poems I had sent her from far, far ago when we ere young and in lust and barely able to bare the sight or scent of each other without fainting into reverie and floating together; clouds that had long since let go of their rain.

It is a gift to visit ancient ports and distant shores.

Time is as big as the world it passes by.

So it is with words:


mad dog

hiding in the rain.

sharp stone

never show your pain.

some kind of innocence

is nourished in your fears.

you don’t know how much

I’ve tried just to hold you near.

(there is no way out-

-there is no way out).

the poet earns his keep

from reading the pain in others eyes

while his eyes are fountains

of tear drops and shattered sunlight.

Igor Goldkind 1983


You love me, I know with your own hands

For I am faithful to your fingertips.

When you pierce me with your wide-eyed glances,

I am stilled.

The earth grows roots around my calves,

And my body is made of branches.

Your gaze shivers their leaves like an Autumn breeze.

Igor Goldkind  1977



Zen

you are

the vessal

made usefull

by the emptiness

within

Igor Goldkind late 70’s


And then Paris,  1986:

10013981_10152778885237755_3592292321445791211_n

CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY


My work in the late 80’sand 90’s in the British publishing industry led to the engineering and successful marketing  of the Graphic Novel genre; a new format of  hardcover and trade paperbacks of graphic fiction that bookstores would stack on their shelves.  It was my job at Titan Books to do so, for which I was paid some £7,500 a year by my employer Nick Landau, to do.

After I was given a raise by Titan Books to £8K per annum , I learnt solely by chance, that my work had increased the revenue for my employer by some 7 figure sums and that the rest of the publishing industry were all cashing in on the work I was doing in promoting 9-5, the new publishing category.   Cashing in, but not adhering to  to the implicit quality standards the likes of Moore, Gaiman, Morrison, Speigelman and other auteurs were actively pursuing.

The Medium, as we used to call it back then, had failed to live up to its own promise.

So I got out; for that and personal reasons.

Now when I read the interviews with my former partners in CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY crime in the press complaining that the industry had failed and that the term Graphic Novel  was just a manipulative tool wielded by the Moloch of Comics Publishing932f83ea7108237da3f82c1b8ec82261

(Batman in MOLOCH!  Wonderwoman in MOLOCH!  The Avengers, the Guardians of the Galazy, Superman and the Xmen are all drowning in the vomit of MOLOCH!)   

Which I believe, the premise of the new cross over series written for DC by Grant Morrison.Tree-Man-A-1000x1000

The most admired (and crafted), writer in comics ever, in particular; (someone I worked with closely with on the presentation of his seminal forensic crucification of the American superhero genre to a mainstream audience, refrains from even addressing me by name in print when he lambasts the CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY that still pays him a living), has repeatedly condemned the  publishing category Graphci Novel, as  effectively, just another  CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY from the publishign industry.

I have news for the revered scribe:  you may have relegated me to the dark side, but take a look in the mirror, man: you’ve been here with me all along.

[Added 9.18 for context], I realise now that the above might be interpreted as some kind of opening volley against the distinguished author.  Far be it.  I will always both  personally  and publically assert that Mr. Moore was the change in comics back in the late 80’s.  No single other artist in the medium at the time was so intelligently treating the medium like a literary and artistic platform for expression.  Most craftsmen (and women), I met at the time were desperaely trying to hustle their next wok commission.  Not Mr. Moore.  His posture was different:  he related to editors, collaborators and others  as an auteur sans pretension.  Intelligent, articulate and demanding of  ones wit and focus.   And from I observed, never intimidated or swayed  by the money or more often, the promise of money from publishers.

Just to make absolutely clear about my statements regarding this author:  I learned everything I know about comics by just listening to him, during interviews, casual conversations and direct discussions.  A the time, this man was a walking sandwich board for the the new comics,  the Graphic Novels, chiefly because it was only his writing (and that of a handful of there), that even came close to qualifyng as a novel or even literature.   I never was nor have ever been a Comics Fan (Senator and members of the committee), but I have always been a fan of literature, drawn or undrawn.    Which is why I cntinue to read, enjoy and learn from Mr. Moore’s work.

Although I do take exception (mildly, not really that seriously), to his most recent public damnations of the Graphic Novel, and it’s origins; it’s not that I object to his opinion as much as I question the accuracy of his recollection of events and of the times that he was actually there.    I don’t take issue either with Mr. Moore’s take on the industry  and publishing in general; in fact the more experience I gain the more my views align with his.

But regardless of the vocabulary used (or the fact that I was being paid a paltry wage at the time), I accomplished my task to his and his collaborator’s direct professional and financial benefit.  Not to mention the real world benefits: the successfull dissemination of the term Graphic Novel into the mainstream brought to literally thousands of other free lances in the form of royalty checks for the graphic novel edition of their work; a  now standard of the comics industry throughout the world.

I do not benefit from the use of the term of from the money generated by its use.

Bird-With-Letter-A1-1000x1000But I do not regret not hiring that CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY lawyer that would have secured my trademark on the use of the term and perhaps a penny off of every new Graphic Novel sale; which is what the business side of the industry tells me I shoudl have done.

I did not “create” the term graphic novel; as an outsider to the industry, I found the term on the back of a Will Eisner book and used it as the keystone of a campaign to bring new comics, well written, adventuerously drawn comics.    But yes, I coined the term Graphic Novel; having borrowed it from the back of a low print-run Will Eisner compilation of The Spirit.  His clever NYC publisher was struggling to get Eisner’s work into the bookshops too and had tried the term connotating Literary fiction: a novel.   My use of the term was different as messieurs Gaiman and Moore can both attest to; Grant got it about the same time but more remotely, in Glasgow.  Graphic Novel  was meant to mean  NEW Graphics, new graphic literature, new comics.

Coining, (in the sense of creating common usefulness; IOW: monetizing a vocabulary term into the common currency of language of transactional communication).  It derives from the coining of money by stamping metal with a die. Coins (also variously spelled coynes, coigns, coignes or quoins), were the blank, usually circular, disks from which money was minted. This usage derived from an earlier 14th century meaning of coin, which meant wedge. The wedge-shaped dies which were used to stamp the blanks were called coins and the metal blanks and the subsequent ‘coined’ money took their name from them.

{Coining later began to be associated with inventiveness in language. In the 16th century the ‘coining’ of words and phrases was often referred to. By that time the monetary coinage was often debased or counterfeit and the coining of words was often associated with spurious linguistic inventions; for example, in George Puttenham’s The arte of English poesie, 1589:

“Young schollers not halfe well studied… will seeme to coigne fine wordes out of the Latin.”

Shakespeare, the greatest coiner of them all, also referred to the coining of language in Coriolanus, 1607:

“So shall my Lungs Coine words till their decay.”}coin a phrase

Tree-Man-A-1000x1000

The NEW comics of the late 80’s and early 90’s that derived from Moore’s early work for DC, Spielgelman’s dabbling at biography in NYC, Miller’s pushing the edges out on Dare Devil and most of all (for me), Bill Sienkiewicz’s explosive rendering of ELEKTRA ASSASIN!  I had never seen anyone take the convnetions of comcis illustration like Faugere Egg and take a sledge hammer to it the way Siekiewicz did, literally splattering the edges of the pages and frames with the remnants of comics conventions.  Sienkiewicz brought commercial  art and later fine art sensibilities to Graphic Novels, something his admirer and pioneer in his own right Dave McKean would further in his career just like in a real popular arts medium.

These were the Makers of New Works.  I’ve forgotten everyone:  Brendan McCarthy, Jamie Delano, Pete Milligan, Frank Miller, Joe Sacco, Harvey Peckar, Gilbert and Jamie Hernandez . . . .  they all were making, new different work outside the stulpifying conventions aesthetic conventions.  So like superheros, they need a new name and Guardians of the Galaxy was taken, so instead you got Graphic Novelists.

I resent nothing.

It was my own fault for being more naive and less carnivorous than my employers.

So instead I have to work for a living; for which I have no complaint as at least I have work to do.

I did learn something valuable (whenever someone fails, they  always say that they learnt something valuble),  and that is to sell a product whatever it might be, you have to create a place in people’s minds and desires where they want that product.  The most intimate and subjective of products: the books we read, the music we listen to , the films we watch: you must give people a reason for looking an understanding for what they may see.

That is why a coded term like Graphic Novel works; it’s a cut through, short cut signifier that puts anyone who wants to know or needs to know in the picture immediately: you know what you know and now you know what it is.

In the case of Poetry, we have a different problem.

Everyone knows what  Poetry is, right ? It’s that stuff you had to memorize in school and  analyze with Mrs. Humphries who always crossed the naughty words out like ‘sweat’ and ‘blood’ and ‘toil’ with a thick, black, fascist marker pen.38_image_v2

Or it’s what you penned to your wife when you were courting her; or received form your husband, your boyfriend, you lover.  Anyone one of those people in your life who felt such passion, such ardour for you that they could not tell you, they had to find words from some magic place to convince you, to persuade you, to seduce you into the beauty of the passion they could see in you.

Perhaps a Poem was the only form your shattered thoughts could take at the loss of someone so precious to you that you would choose the pian of being hewn by swords than endure the truth of their permanent absence from this world.

Perhaps you have nearly gone mad and found Poems, like steps out of the abyss of self-loathing into the stark light of realisation and hope for your self.

There is no greater hope to lose than the Hope for Yourself.

So Poetry has a signifier, a pretty universal one; unfortunately it doesn’t point towards anything like what Poetry actually is.

Poetry is an art form, not a craft.

Poetry an aspiration to derive music and pattern from our deepest thoughts, the language of our dreams and the whispering, the lamenting, the singing, the moaning and the laughter of our souls.

Poetry is Liberation.  The words will set you free.

I am a Poet and to sell my ware  (my GRAPHIC POEMS ;~),   I must show people what it is that I do, that others do that is so far removed from the common currency of the term Poetry.   So this is not only a CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY, but a sinister sales strategy as well!   To get you to read my words, I must first who you what they are ouside the barriers of  your preconceptions.

So, come to a picnic and hear what Poetry is and the vital importance it has always played in our social and political lives.

*Poster for Marathon Rimbaud-100-THOUSAND-POETS-4-CHANGE-by-Henrik-Aeshna

September 27th, 1 pm Balboa Park, World Beat Centre/ El Centro Cultural de la Raza

Come One and All, Come All in One, Come to the 100,000 Poets-for-Change Marathon!  (Picnic & Reading)

79-penseefasciste-mauriziocattelan-fotopedia

It’s your duty ;~)

An Iron Balloon


You provide the bread and I’ll provide the crumbs.

Let us feed on our banquet of emptiness,

Like ghouls at a christening or body snatchers at the wake.

Let us scavenge for the barest morsels of eternity that may have gone overlooked

Slipped under the layered dust, 

Under the sediment left by crumbling ruins of  once proud memories now long obsolete.  

The mirror shatters into a trillion pieces, but who’s counting anyway?  

What is there left of the life once imagined?

Once rising above us, over the years, 

Once inflated by virtues and memories, and

Now collapsed like a defeated Zeppelin; 

Under an Iron Balloon.






© Igor Goldkind October, 2022

Why Being a Pain in an Ass is Essential to Human Survival:


From a Recent OxfordSEO Literary Representation Press Release: 09/23/2022.

A lot of people don’t like our resident unarmed poet Igor Goldkind. Although hard pressed to detail exactly what the source of their antipathy is, when asked most people who’ve met or know him agree on one thing:

Igor is a pain in the ass.

Some would go as far as to say a Royal Pain in the Ass; although any association with the recent demise of Queen Elizabeth or the Royal family in general, is merely conjecture.

When asked about his reaction to this near universal judgement, Igor Goldkind tends to shrug his shoulders and agree:

“Sure, I’m a pain in the ass, especially to anyone wedded to static protocols, conformist mediocrity and any rule that should be followed blindly because ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it'”.

Let’s look at a recent example of his ass-painery. Due to enormous stress and harrassment inflicted by certain individuals (to remain nameless until the court dates), Igor was recently diagnosed with a minor heart failure. After initial panic and a visit to the ER, the initial diagnosis, although precluding an imminent heart attack did necessitate a referral to both cardiology and vascular specialists to eliminate possible causes.

Both were seen and a routine series of tests were scheduled for this week including a Stress Echo Heart test, a heart monitor and a spectogram. Igor called his daughter and without freaking her out, brought her up to date and then gladly picked up the dice to his destiny and gave them a roll.

3 tests were scheduled for this past Monday, Tuesday and then tomorrow. A hectic week to put one’s heart through the paces.

On his way to his first appointment for the monitor last Monday, Igor was surprised to receive a text cancelling the appointment 45 minutes before hand. This was followed by two more text messages cancelling all of his heart monitoring tests without explanation apart from the fact that his insurance provider Molina Healthcare had denied them. Pulling his Thunderbird to the side of the road in Mission Bay, Igor proceeded to telephone his consultant and then his insurance provider to determine the cause of the cancellations.

As light transpired the insurance company’s independent arbitrator had determined that the tests were unnecessary as Igor had never had a pacemaker or open heart surgery. An insurance company administrator who had never even met Igor Goldkind, much less examined him, could overrule the expertise of his health provider and two consultants he was referred to who had examined him.

Hours of being placed on hold, waiting for supervisors, lodging complaints, grievances and appeals, Igor was able to get a call back from a Molina administrator who apologized for the last minute cancellations and reinstated the tests, albeit now delayed by two weeks.

However, our resident pain-in-the-ass wasn’t satisfied with his own private victory. Now that he has a member of the insurance company’s management on the phone, he demanded to know why Molina could adopt this absurd and potentially life threatening policy of over ruling of health specialists by a bureaucrat intent only on saving money?

A grievance was filed on his behalf and this morning he received a telephone call from an executive VP of Molina, once again apologizing for his treatment and then assuring him that based on his complaint, Molina had reviewed its approval policy and would from now on no longer deny a test recommendation without first consulting with the specialist who had recommended the test in the first place….across the board for all members!

This is the benefit of being a pain-in-the-ass, when you’re acting not solely out of personal interest but out of precedent and principle.

So like him or not, Igor Goldkind leads his life based on George Bernard Shaw’s Maxim:

“A reasonable man expects to adapt to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him. Therefore, all human progress is made by unreasonable men”.

And yes, we do do Igor’s PR!

A Throw of the Dice [excerpt]

Stéphane Mallarmé – 1842-1898

     NOTHING




              of the memorable crisis
                       or might
                                  the event        have been accomplished in view of all results  null
                                                                                                                             human

                                                                                               WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE
                                                                        an ordinary elevation pours out absence

                                                                                                                 BUT THE PLACE
                                          some splashing below of water as if to disperse the empty act
                                                                                 abruptly which otherwise
                                                                            by its falsehood
                                                                      would have founded
                                                                                      perdition

                                           in these latitudes 
                                                           of indeterminate
                                                                      waves
                                                                           in which all reality dissolves

EXCEPT
           on high
                       PERHAPS
                                  as far as place            can fuse with the beyond

                                                                                        aside from the interest
                                                                                    marked out to it
                                                                                                           in general
                                                              by a certain obliquity through a certain declivity
                                                                                                               of fires
                                                                     toward
                                                                         what must be
                                                                              the Septentrion as well as North
  
                                                                                                             A CONSTELLATION

                                                                          cold from forgetfulness and desuetude
                                                                                                         not so much
                                                                                                 that it doesn't number
                                                                                on some vacant and superior surface
                                                                                                    the successive shock
                                                                                                            in the way of stars
                                                                                of a total account in the making

                                                         keeping vigil
                                                                    doubting
                                                                           rolling
                                                                                shining and meditating

                                                                                            before coming to a halt
                                                                                     at some terminus that sanctifies it


                                                                                  All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice.

From Collected Poems (University of California Press, 1994) by Stéphane Mallarmé. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Doggy-Dog People


This is a great, truth full poem.

The Poesie of Igor Goldkind – Reciting Truth to Power

Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people get on my nerves with the things they make their dogs do
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people love their dogs more than they love you.

Doggy dog people think that four feet are better than two.
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people
Can’t go out without a leash in their hand
They just can’t interact with their fellow man.
Without a doggy dog.

Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people
Doggy-dog people do pick up their doggy’s dog poo in little plastic bags
But sure don’t like being called out for what their woof-woofs do do.

Doggy dog people
Doggy dog people
Doggy dog people don’t have a clue.
That they’re accountable for the things their doggy dogs do.
Like beg food from your bowel when what you need is some peace in your soul.
Doggy people won’t leave you alone.
They need you to ask them what…

View original post 278 more words

‘liv’s fit now’: the negative side to weight loss


My beautiful daughter recognizing her own beauty.

SWEAT

So last year I decided I was fed up of being overweight, unhealthy and self-conscious of my body. I had always thought of myself as a relatively fit person, however I was faced with the stark reality when I struggled to climb a mountain, I had easily been able accomplish when I was a child. For the first time the reality of how unfit I was hit me and I needed to change. For me it was all about fitness. I wanted to get fit and feel fit. To do this I needed to completely change my lifestyle and mindset towards food and exercise.

Illustration by Jade Ball

I started moving every day, I found a passion for running, I joined the gym, started weight training and general toning activities. When I went back to uni I added volleyball and netball to the mix and found myself transitioning from…

View original post 1,076 more words

Death Becomes You


Art by Rian Hughes

Thought for the day:

An old middle school friend’s father died yesterday morning.
So he called.

We’d been talking about the passing of his parent for a few weeks now…a drawn out disease where death has grown comfortable in the waiting room is no slow cruise. It is interminable waiting. It is placing your life on hold while the greater forces of life and death intervene in your routine.

This is death up close and centered. He’s in the waiting room sifting through the magazines. Death never entered the room. He’s always been there. Patient with our ignorance of his presence. He doesn’t care if we ignore or write poems to him. He does what he does, which is to attend and to await to present the final gift, the present life brings each one of us,

Wrapped in delicate personal memories; tied with a silver bow of faint regret.
I listen to my friend.
I listen to the scene he recounts in my head of an over eager hospice nurse, of a fatal dose of morphine.
He doesn’t want to sue, he wants me to write something,
to tell people what happened to his father.

Perhaps there is a story there to be heard but there’s the story that my friend is ignoring. The passing, the death of his beloved father, his parent, the man who held and protected him when he was helpless. Who first guided his clumsy thinking, his testing of the world. The source of advice, the font of all wisdom:

Pater meus a patre. Vos estis qui de caelo cadit, sicut pluviam et omnem animam in maius et luminare minus idem. Qui dedit nobis sitim extinguere pluvia rationem in radicibus excoquendi in sole.

Those of us who have lost a parent, both parents feel the shadow of our mortality move closer to us. It is not a selfish observation but a crucial one.
A glimpse into the truth of our own existence: short, meagre and thin.

The death of a loved one is tragedy but a necessary one. It is necessary to be reminded of the life we are living and the world that we are actually in. To wake up from the amnesia of wishes we have been distracting ourselves with, is to literally smell-the-coffee.

It’s bitter, it’s scalding and it’s blunt metal real.

Urgently real.

There is no solace for loss, just the empty space left behind by the one who is no longer there. Which is where you are, holding that space in your mind for them as someday, your loved ones will hold a similar space for you.

Maybe that’s where heaven is: the space your loved ones hold for you in their minds long after your body has left with death, the waiting room.

Video

Jack Kerouac’s Essential Rules for Writing: It Still Works, Man.


These are the rules to write by, to live by, escape the penitentiary of the mediocre into the wilder realm of raw living experience, Whitman’s sun burning warmth through the skin of our beings.

These are the rules to guide by, to breath by, to masturbate and fornicate by.
Rules to die by.

These are the rules, the markers of life as it is lived as it can only be truly known.
Believe it until it’s no longer true.

Igor Goldkind

Quote

Accept!


Accept
That there is nothing you can do.
Accept
That you cannot control or know for certain the outcome of events.
Accept
That you are merely one of trillions.
Accept
That your parents are dying or already dead.
Accept
That you are dying and this all means nothing.
Accept
That you are vulnerable, shatterable to the winds of fate.
Accept
That even the mountains die.
Accept
That you are truly alone
Accept
That you will die alone.
Accept
That you will remember none of this.
Accept
What you will not accept.

Igor Goldkind 2020

Illustration by Rian Hughes 2020 from: Take a Deep Breath – Living With Uncertainty

I Predict! Amazing and Almost True!


The real war between man and machine is about whose judgment is wielded and whose judgment prevails. This battle is fought every time we use the net to transact. At what point do our algorithmic interpreters control the game?You find human judgment in abeyance and retreat each and every time you deal with a call center.

Logic is now servant to system:

“This is the way it’s done, always been done”.
“It’s not set up that way.”

We are slowly but steadily surrounding human judgment to the computational power of machines.

Soon, ‘computation’ will be a competitive methodology for cognition itself and non algorithmic entities will be on the defensive. We will compete to be better machine-like people; while the machine have already crossed the finish line, miles ahead of us.

Nourish your exceptionalism.
Don’t be so distracted by expediency that you learn to overlook your common sense.
Machines were invented to emulate and enhance human judgment, but not to replace it.
Remember who you are.

The human mind is not a machine. But the machine was made by the human mind.

Master of Puzzles By Igor Goldkind


It is seminal to remind ourselves of what fascism does when you take off its leash…

The Poesie of Igor Goldkind – Reciting Truth to Power

My Credentials for “Bullying”, “Persecuting”, “Mutilating” and “Obsessing” over the racist David Kirke; or so say my critics. As my Sikh friend and young teacher Prabjot Singh would say “Dont’ blame them, they are only children who need to be guided”.

Master of PuzzlesImage

By Igor Goldkind

Ivan Moscovich has created more brain-teasers than most people have solved crosswords. Igor Goldkind set out to piece together his fascinating and harrowing life.

Ivan Moscovich has his life’s work wrapped up in a bundle of about 10,000 pages of A4 paper. On those pages there are some 5,000 separate puzzles, puzzles that range from the hang-on-let’s-look-OK-I-see to beyond the fiendish. Some are variations on themes, some utter one-offs. Some are to be made on paper or card, some are designs for tricky little – or big – devices. Moscovich calls them the S.A.M. archive – science, art and mathematics. The puzzles use…

View original post 4,043 more words

Second Hand Years


Haven’t you noticed?
I’ve been pulling my hair out not knowing who to call.
They’ve suckered us all in with another used year!
Sure, it’s been refurbished and looks a lot like a New Year, 
But don’t be fooled,
This is a counterfeit New Year being passed off as a real one.      
The surface looks sharp but its purely cosmetic.
It won’t load the latest Operating System
It’s warranty has long since  lapsed.
And its components are no longer compatible.
Don’t be fooled by fake years.
You’ll wind up forgetting the real ones.

Do something! Call somebody. 
Don’t just sit there lamenting
Demand refunds and store credits!
Stomp your feet and threaten court actions.
But whatever you do, don’t be taken in by second-hand years,
When what we really all need is a new one.

Bounce



My ego is a ball I like to bounce. 
When play is over, 
I have to take my ball back home.
Where we both live. 







'Take a Deep Breath. Living With Uncertainty'
 

You Know You’re a Nazi When…


You Know You’re a Nazi When…

You are more loyal to your party and it’s grand standing leader than you are to your fellow citizen.

You refer to and think of immigrants in terms of a problem.

You think political refugees fleeing violence are actually all con artists looking for a hand out.

You are repulsed by certain races.

(Be honest with yourself and recognize it. Then decide if you want to continue feeling this way. Reason is the stone path to liberation).

You ascribe personality traits and physical characteristics to people by race disconnected from culture (e.g. Caucasians are not genetically disposed towards excelling at Dungeons & Dragons; they just play it more.)

The way other people honestly love each other and what turns them on sexually makes you sick.

You think most, but not all people are worthless.

You wish your parents had disciplined you more as a child.

You think non white people can overall preferential treatment.

You think White is a culture rather than an embodiment of privilege and power.

You think certain music and art is debased and decadent.

ALL of your friends are White and the people of color you insist on citing…none of them call you their friend.

You support Donald Trump because you fear Freedom, which you call The Press and Socialism.

You like being told what to do.

You hate other people because you hate the secret weaknesses inside yourself, which everyone can see clearly while you think you’ve kept your self loathing so well hidden.

The Nazis Changed Their Uniforms


My paternal grandfather Mordecai Goldkind (Morris) was a Polish Jewish immigrant from outside Lodz. He came to the US via Ellis Island fleeing the Czar’s Cossacks first working on the New Jersey shipyards and then opening a successful shoe-maker’s shop in ’30s Brooklyn.

My father grew up listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio as every other Jew living in America at the time did. When he turned 17, he enlisted.
There was no choice in the matter.

My grandmother’s heart broke packing her son away to boot camp but even she knew that there was no choice. The Nazis were coming after us and we had to stop them or die trying.
The war crippled my father.
Emotionally, psychologically.
I know now that he had to kill other men, German men at close hand.
I knew that speaking fluent German he loved the German people and their culture. I know that killing another man killed part of himself.

He told me that he survived by giving up the idea that he would.
The story of what happened after his return includes the story of his son, my life. My father was broken by that war fighting the fascists in Europe so that we would not have to fight them here in America.
There was no choice.

When I was a boy and my grandparents came to visit or we visited them, my grandfather Mordechai would talk about Israel but he and my father would sometimes talk about the Nazis. I remember my grandfather pointing his finger at me in the middle of my silent witness of their conversation:

“Igor, don’t you ever fool yourself into thinking that we beat the Nazis and they all went away. They never go away. They wait for the right time and then they just change their uniforms.”

Was I 6, 7?
I don’t know.
All I recall was the deep bootprint of my father and his father warning me down the generational ladder to be vigilante. To watch for the signs. That the Nazis do not go away. That oppression, power, cruelty and inhumanity does not evaporate. That they linger waiting patiently for the right time to put their new uniforms on.

Now is that time.
I can see the MAGA uniforms.
I can see the detention camps, the forced hysterectomies, the torture by negligence of thousands of children.
Can’t you?

I can see the exploitation of a pandemic for deliberate eugenic population control under the mask of ‘herd immunity’.
Can’t you?

I can see dissidents and protestors being criminalized and imprisoned for 10 years for defacing a statue.
I see our civil rights being teargassed into the ground.
Can’t you?

I can see the violent racism on the streets, the white power fanatic infiltrating lawful protests to vandalize, destroy and cast blame on the citizen protestors.
Can’t you?

I can see the police getting more and more aggressive, shooting more and more unarmed citizens, jailing more and more dissidents like in Russia or China.
Can’t you?

I can see America’s future as a giant, fat man’s golf shoe stomping on the face of freedom and justice forever.
Can’t you?

Can’t you do something?
Vote Biden/Harris 2020
There’s really no choice.

Riding Johnny’s Train



I’m on your train,
Riding through the lower melodies like
Cars crashing through steel
Leaving twisted steel in our wake.

The speed of thought is a battering ram;
It’s momentum builds mass.
The faster we think the thicker we get,
The heavier gravity’s pull.

Can we escape our bodies?
Why can’t we just take our bodies with us?
Eternity surly has enough room
Our bodies are vinyl cartwheels spinning after us,

The tails of burning meteors.
We burn atmospheres so fast and hot
We don’t even know we’ve arrived
Until after we’re long gone.

And now that we’ve arrived, we’re much too early
For supper.
For the show to begin.
Unless of course, it’s already ended and we missed it again.

Riding Johnny’s Train

TAKE A DEEP BREATH by Igor Goldkind and Frederic Iriarte


The Cure for Pandemania is Here! 

An Album of Original Spoken Contemporary Poetry and Music

– Making Sense Where Nothing Else Does –

Original poetry by Igor Goldkind
Music by Frederic Iriarte and Igor Boyko

Launching September 5th at The 2020 International Beat Poetry Festival (Normally in Boston, now virtually everywhere!) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCilhqGXf2CAARg7N7EjwNQg

The Festival Will be streaming 3 original music videos from the album for the first time.

TAKE A DEEP BREATH is available for download  exclusively on Bandcamp 

9 Tracks, 40 Minutes, $18.00   $15 EU

Original Words, Music, Video and Antidotes for Living With Uncertainty


Internationally renown fine artist and producer Frederic Iriarte and American Poet Igor Goldkind have collaborated on 9 original tracks of musical interpretations based on Igor Goldkind’s forthcoming collection of poetry also entitled TAKE A DEEP BREATH
The album of 9 tracks is being launched as a complete work at this year’s International Beat Poetry Festival and will be released for download at midnight  this coming Saturday, September 5th.

This unique multimedia work was written and produced during the pandemic in Stockholm, San Diego and Moscow.  It is intended as an artistic attempt to help us live with uncertainty and survive catastrophe living.

TAKE A DEEP BREATH is most important piece of Spoken Word Art to come along at just the right time: right when we all needed it the most!” 
–  Henry Rollins

TAKE A DEEP BREATH and step out of your comfort zone.
Just don’t look down.

2020 has been a year of both social, economic and psychological upheaval.   Humans have been required to adapt to drastically changing circumstances without forewarning and without certainty as to the outcomes. 

We are being challenged as a species to adapt. 
Adaptation is our genus but it is also painful  and exhausting. 
TAKE A DEEP BREATH is a guidebook:  a pause for a moment of reflection.   Take a break from panic and get a clear view of where we are as individuals, as a people and as a species.

Covid-19 has literally attacked our humanity however in doing so has done us the service of reminding us of our shared humanity, our common mutual vulnerability.  These are hard lessons to learn and uncomfortable changes to be made for us to survive.   TAKE A DEEP BREATH is a pause in the gloom  and a chance to regain our strength and resilience to  all carry on.

TAKE A DEEP BREATH is a step backwards in time when poetry and music were used  and appreciated as tools for contemplation, meditation and reflection on the most crucial factor in our lives.  Now that we are being confronted and overwhelmed with multiple catastrophes,  is the time to return to using  poetry for what it is designed for: 

Reflection, Meditation, Contemplation
Self-Healing and Recovery

We will survive.

‘liv’s fit now’: the negative side to weight loss


My daughter writes about body awareness and society.

The Science of Irrealism


“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”

Franz Kafka

We quest for meaningful truths about our existence and what we bring to bear upon our environments. Mathematics, science and technology enable our mechanical ability to crunch big numbers, calculate near infinite possibilities and deliver probabilistic results.

To be able to knowledgeably predict the multitude of buying behaviors of literally millions of customers using Amazon is an impressive computational accomplishment, in the service of consumer capitalism.
Or to be able to use peoples’ most personal and intimate preferences and tastes as unstructured data, to be sold onto those who would better manipulate our preferences for profit.

Profit motivates the interests of those who control data to use it in order to steadily limit the range of free (unpredictable)choices to achieve more predictable decisions. The more predictable the judgements of choice, the better the profit in meeting those wants. The freer the will, the wider the spectrum of discernment between what is needed and what is merely desired. Not ideal customer relations if your goal is for the customer to buy exactly what you tell them to buy and have already prepared them to buy.

But the truth is that we are all free to make choices, even when there isn’t much to choose from.

We are still free to deviate from the predictable norm and exercise our wider, human judgement in our choices. But to do so successfully is to break down the predisposed contexts to our decision making. We would need to embrace the fact of Uncertainty, unpredictability and see beyond the unreliable predilections of Causality. We must, so to speak, break our causal chains as they have been manipulated in advance by pragmatic and diabolic conventions.

To live outside of predetermined contexts, to break out of the “real world” into the actual world, where we really exist necessitates first the understanding of context in the service of truth. To understand the dichotomy between perception and interpretation we should adopt a new vocabulary: The study of interpretation is called Hermeneutics, which is the scrutiny of language mainly text, in the context of interpretation.

However, language is not limited to text.  Much of human history (of consciousness), has been devoted to poring  over sacred and heretical texts; but  there is also the language of dreams and music which are open to both reading and expression.

Then there is of course, the language of the image. The useful lie of representation, predating photography by some 30,000 years.

In so far as hermeneutics is the study of text and its interpretations, Irrealism examines the language of images by posing  that no one account or one representation of a reality can accurately account for that reality apart from that one possible narrative.   But there are millions of narratives, millions of representations of any event or occurrence in reality.   There exists a vast multiplicity of perspectives and vantage points of which no one of which can be designated the sole  “true” representation.   Namely because the quantum diversity of perspectives is fundamental to that singular truth.   This is one of infinite possible worlds but the only truth that can be found in this assertion is within the context of an infinite number of real possibilities.

Thus we each  stand on a ledge overlooking the infinite, the universe waiting for us to take a step in whichever direction we choose.

Irrealism casts light on this distinction.  There is no one reality or real event, but a multitude of infinite possibilities, some more probable than others in terms of  predictive outcome.  But to understand this and sustain it visavis perception requires first a relinquishment of the notion of one sole truth or truthful perspective.  The truth is not found in once account, one representation; nor it it found in accumulating and theoretically distilling all possible accounts and perspectives.  Instead, the monotheistic idea of one truth needs to be exchanged for the greater truth of infinite diversity in limitless combinations.   

Irrealism is a type of existentialist literary artform for which the means are continually and absurdly rebelling against the ends that we have predetermined for them. The whole causal relationship between means and ends is brought into question and we gain the insight of restraining from linking events, so as not to fill in gaps with significance.

If we can easily detach significance from coincidental events and understand their own phenomenal existence without added meaning, then equally we can detach significance from events that just happen to follow each other in time. By freeing events and objects from the phenomenal artifice of a causal chain of meaning, we gain an irreal insight into the true nature of events and objects as they exist.

Like existentialism, Irrealism has presented itself as both a philosophical argument and a work of art in which the philosophical principles are demonstrated by the fictional subjective experience of a protagonist. For examp0le,  In THE MALTESE FALCON, Dashiel Hammet’s existential detective, Sam Spade is a free man as he is free from the compulsive and lethal greed of the antagonists.   At the end of the film and novel, Sam chooses the virtue of duty over love .

By proving the reality of an existential choice as a empathetic human choice, the fiction delivers a more visceral universal understanding of the underlying principle.  

Some lies reveal deeper truths. 

Breaking attachment to one true account or representation permits the “irreality” of circumstance to become our context.   This is akin to wavicle theory in which light is not reduced to one structural account but rather we adapt our contexts to fit the data.  Sometimes light behaves like and can be measured as particles and sometimes it cannot.  It can only be measured within the context of waves. So is light either a particle or a wave?  Well neither, nor both.  The truth is that light exists outside of our realm of contexts.  It is not unreal to describe light as a particles, but it isn’t solely true either.   Nor is the fact that light consists of waves soley true.  This quantum perception  version Schrodinger’s Cat does not dwell on the mortality of the cat but rather on our ability to perceive beyond  uncertainty.

The awkward term “wavicle” is a contrivance of vocabulary: there is no such object as a wavicle.  All there is,  is a misleading  name to make it easier for us to measure and understand the phenomenal nature of light, not its physicality.     In this light, so to speak, Irrealism addresses the false  dichotomy of physicality vs the phenomenal.  Yes, the universe is a physical one and objects and events have gravitas and yes, the universe is merely comprised of what we perceive and subject to the limits of our own perception.  The universe is neither singularly physical nor singularly  phenomenal; nor is it both.  As both interpretations hold weight in their individual contexts, neither are false but again neither by itself is true.  The perception is not one of unreality (or falsehood or fantasy) but of irreality, reality is not above what we perceive and experience, but behind it.

So it  is with irrealism.  The philosophical premise of Irrealism is that both the physicality of objects and events is one context, whereas their phenomenal content, our perception occupies a separate but parallel context.  Objects and events exist in both worlds’ the physical and the phenomenal.

Irrealism demonstrates the irreality of events and objects by demonstrating existence as neither/or.   An irreality demonstrates objects and events outside of their contextual rules.    Viscerally this can be expressed in Art & Music  and cognitively,  in philosophy and poetry.

In philosophy, the belief that phenomenalism and physicalism are alternative “world-versions”, both useful in some circumstances, but neither capable of fully capturing the other.

Irrealist art and literature features an estrangement from our generally accepted sense of reality.  Which explains the often welcome sense of discomfort or unease that often accompanies taking in an irrealist perspective.  SF and Horror are good examples of that unease and rumbling anxiety as entertaining.

An example of this would be Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, in which the salesman Gregor Samsa’s plans for supporting his family and rising up in rank by hard work and determination are suddenly thrown topsy-turvy by his sudden and inexplicable transformation into a man-sized insect. Such fiction is said to emphasize the fact that human consciousness, being finite in nature, can never make complete sense of, or successfully order, a universe that is infinite in its aspects and possibilities. 

Irrealism is the Impossible and the Unexplainable laid as foundation for an art form that can directly communicate, by feeling rather than articulation, the uncertainties inherent in human existence  and the irreconcilability between human aspiration and human reality.

This suspension of the temporal extrapolation of causality requires a vantage point outside of the law of causality, (that every phenomenon and corresponding qulia has a predetermining cause).  

The balls falls down because you threw it up because of therule: what goes up must come down. This fundamental layman’s interpretation of Newtonian laws of motion  of course derives from a specific time frame that is  pre space travel.  To travel back to this context and suggest that this law may not always apply universally and that there are contexts such as weightlessness for which the causal relation does not exist,  is an example of irrealism.    

To suggest to Newton that what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down is to express an unreality to Issaic based on the context of his understanding.  Moreover as Newton’s laws of motion are universally adopted as convention, to assert this truth too loudly will get you locked up in a mental asylum.

Those of us living Newton’s Impossibility know that whether or not the ball falls down is completely dependent on the existing context.  To suggest a state of weightlessness to Newton’s context is an irrealism.  It is false within the given context but true in  a greater but remoter context.   What we call ‘real’ appears to be exterior to us and perception-independent when in fact, it is neither.  Irrealism exposes the mythic unreality underlying our virtual fixed world, the world we  manifest with our minds by responding to certain stimuli in our environment.  These stimuli and their interpretation  sketch  the internal map of our presumed outer world experience.

It is because of this  out of context impossibilities that Irrealism is considered to be dream-like in nature, which is a justifiable description so long as we remember that the Irreal representation does not relate  a particular  dream that we might have had but instead evokes aspects of the dream-state within the work. Irrealist  objects occupy our dreams as props for symbolic meanings much as one reads the symbolism within a medieval painting or a   film wherein every object captured is there for a meaningful reason.  

 To understand that reality exists both outside of and inside of perception,( not in one or the other soley nor both together),  is to glimpse the tapestry of infinite possibility divorced from the coincidences of causality.   Quoting the American  philosopher Nelson Goodman “as much as we might try to order our world with a certain set of norms and goals (which we refer to as the real world), the paradox of a finite consciousness in an infinite universe creates a zone of irreality.  The Irreal  is that which lies beyond [or behind], the real”) that offsets, opposes, or threatens the real world of the human subject.

Irrealist art highlights this irreality, and our fascination with it, by combining the unease we feel from a world that doesn’t conform to our desires; with the narrative quality of a dream state wherein safe and familiar realities are being constantly undermined.  

 “We are not speaking in terms of multiple possible alternatives to a single actual world but of multiple actual worlds.] Goodman makes no assertions regarding “the way the world is” and that there is no primary world version i.e. “no true version compatible with all true versions.” nor world-versions” of the world”.  Instead he describes worlds as “made by making such versions”. As Goodman says, “Not only motion, … but even reality is relative.”

Irrealist art shows us this.

A successful irreal work of art, music  or literature confronts its audience  with a perception that cannot simply be translated as merely a fantasy, speculative  or as a symbolist work. . Thus cut off from the familiar context of what is possible and ultimately explainable, impossible, one is left alone in the company of the absurd.  It is thus communicates directly, “by feeling rather than articulation, the uncertainties inherent in human existence or, to put it another way… the irreconcilability between human aspiration and human reality.” 

The artist Tristan Tondino writes, “Realism is an Irrealism. Reality is plurality – we partially create it, and we must open our universes and our perceptions to all possible versions of it.     

Irrealism is a vaccine for living with the truth of uncertainty

© Igor Goldkind 2020. (all augmenting quotes are attributed to Nelson Goodman)

Thanks to Franco-Gallic Irrealist artist Frederic Iriarte [Frederic@iriarte.info] for the loan of his work. All images are © Frederic Iriarte and cannot be reproduced without his permission.

Thanks to Franco-Gallic Irrealist artist Frederic Iriarte [Frederic@iriarte.info] for the loan of his work. All images are © Frederic Iriarte and cannot be reproduced without his permission.

In & Out


This where I am at this moment in time.
At peace both inner and outer.
My hand polishes the glass I hold,
Until there is no longer an inner nor an outer.
Only what is left in between.

Death in My Garden


Death is in my garden again,
Whispering to my flowers as he pulls away the weeds.
Plotting and potting each stem as it grows
Making certain that the roots are shaken of clinging regrets and life’s debris.
Only to cut my life short more easily.

Does death have a sweetheart? I wonder.
A beautiful woman who he woos and waters with my love?
He gathers my blossoms into a beautiful bouquet
Of lost souls and freshly cut lives.
To gift to the one who holds him closest.

She presses his dead heart to her breast with one hand
The bouquet that surmises my life with the other.
She holds his weight against her body.
Until death sighs and buries his head between her breasts
So she is certain that he will return to his labours in the morrow.

How to Speak to a Distant Star


Thank you so much for your light
I came here especially to see it and I was not disappointed!
Your shimmering light so beautiful
That it penetrates deep inside my darkest well.
Filling the emptiness of the dark  with your long journeyed light.

You remind me that I am part of your beauty
That we are all beautiful when bathing in your light.
And that your talent for night
Opens our hearts and our minds 
To the Beauty that would hold us closer to her breast.

Nourish us with Your love 
So that we may flourish and
Become as beautiful as 
You have always been 
And always will be.

Go Fuck Yourself!


Go Fuck Yourself, you pathetic failure.
Leave the arts to the poets, the dancers and the painters
Go get yourself a real job, a real vocation.
Fuck off and leave those of us who fight for our culture alone.
Fuck off and stop leeching the creative spirits of the secular martyrs who have sacrificed their lives on the holy altar of Art, Truth and Freedom.
Go Fuck Yourselves!
And each other in your sleazy stinking orgy of self-gratifying bigotry and weeping pustule aesthetics.

Go Fuck Yourself in the Ass With Your Own Extended Nose
Go let yourself get fucked in the ass by all the bogus arts nonprofits that pocket tax money to further their own finances while cheating artists and reviewers out of their livings.

Go write yourself a grant.

Write up your mission statement in day-glow gold-gilded writing.
Put on your ‘supporter-of-the-arts’ makeup
Keep counting the coins in your bookseller’s till
While prescribing the rules that determines who is in and who is other.

Go Fuck Yourself and try reading a book for a change.
Go read Whitman, Bukowski, Anais Nin and Henry Miller on art.
Let William Burroughs into your dreams.
Go get yourself a self education.
In the meantime, shut up, sit down and just listen:
You are the enemy of art, the enemy of poetry, the enemy of life.
And we’re coming for you.
Because all you are is in the way.