David Spicer and Alex Salinas again take on time and place

Marianne Moore: “Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.”

Shortly to be released, in tandem, are David Spicer’s American Maniac and Alex Z. Salinas’ DREAMT, or The Lingering Phantoms of Equinox.

For Hekate, all roads (unfortunately for you) lead back to Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The author was arrested in 1849 for reading politically sensitive documents in public, sentenced by the Tzar initially to death, then to ten years of Siberian hard labor and upon his return (an altered man), entered what is recognized to be his mature cycle of writing. One of the initial works, Notes From Underground, was originally intended as a critical response to Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to be Done, a thinly disguised socialist manifesto (which Lenin loved) referencing a certain type of ‘underground man.’ Dostoyevsky had a big bone to pick with ideologies that forced-people-to-be-happy. The author could not bring himself to address the book’s thesis point by point as it became clear the chasm between Chernyshevsky and himself could only be crossed by creating the famous rambling narrative of his brilliant, crude and obsessive protagonist, and only through those ravings could the complexities and contradictions of his time be communicated.

I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man, was the underground man’s opening pronouncement. Dostoyevsky explored, without necessarily explaining, what the guy meant. And explaining what he meant necessitated drawing from the many nuances, contradictions and splitting present in his native Russia, as well as with respect to European influences at the time. His character’s angst, emphatic, heavy handed, repetitive, and intentionally rude, was not necessarily Dosoyevky’s angst and couldn’t be taken at face value. David Spicer is running in the same relay that Dostoyevsky started, followed by many, passing the baton onward to the likes of Whitman and Ginsburg. Remember Howl?

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,

Spicer, similarly, has his own agenda, his own underground man, describing himself and America in howling rhythms.

Mr. Ego weeps for me, as pitiful as castrated America.

Mr. Ego begs for the love of God.

He wants to collapse in a garden of descendants.

His poetry, intensely personal, places the reader as voyeur, or at least in the first row at the Paramount, who ends up getting spit on or beaten down, left with with what feels like broken teeth. The poet likes movies (I fly like a condor for days, from movie to movie) and women, one after another, deified, and then, not so much regret as memory framed (I miss that fifteen grand and I’m not delicious anymore). Spicer’s irony is blood thirsty. He is willing to be possessed by everything American, to thrash back and forth on the bed and vomit pea soup so he can write about it. His spirituality is not phony. He opens the poem, My Guns are Named Jesus:

Before I slide between the sheets each night,

I kneel and pray to my guns,

all 342 dozing in the safe.

I call them Jesus.

With DREAMT, or The Lingering Phantoms of Equinox, Alex Salinas, of a slightly younger generation, is running just as fast, but barefoot and within a different ancestral arena. He receives his baton from Murakami’s cat or Jack London’s dog, invokes and converses with poetic forerunners and grandmothers driving Buicks. He too is possessed by muses and finds himself thrust into the arduous role of shaman.. In this spoiler from the ethereal Bucket, he receives a vision:

I dreamt I took a sip of concentrated poets’

Hemoglobin off the creviced collarbone of

A decorated oracle who twisted princes’

Beards into intricate Boy Scouts pretzels.

The woman didn’t play, spoke dronely the

Grotesque prophecies implanted in her by

Pregnant drifting tempest clouds. She

Warned me of a golden chalice with three

Jade stones arranged in an upended triangle,

Or a mouthless mien, which is to say a

Vessel possessing stone-cold Medusa vibes.

The two poets shoot off globs of split Americans and split America, like the underground man, defining who they are, who we are, our death lusts, cups of coffee, shitty pettiness, TV personalities, and recreating our nobles. The eddy currents and avalanches of emotional fault lines shift within both as they do within people in general.

Hekate Publishing is thrilled to be in the stadium watching the both of them run.

“In poems I try to convey how it feels living here and now in a country that has lost its way and may yet end up on the trash heap of history as so many empires have. It’s that dark vision that haunts the poems. I know many people who feel the same way. “We are fucked, Charlie,” a neighbor told me and he didn’t have to explain to me what he meant. In the meantime, the lilacs have blossomed, the children are chasing each other and laughing in the school playground and I’m going for a nice long walk in the woods.”

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