Poem Published on Mason’s Road, Fairfield University’s Online Journal

Just published yesterday online, my poem “Letter about my last night in Carbondale, Illinois” is now available on Mason’s Road. Please click the link and check it out.

The Woodrow Jefferson Project

 

Lives are born in places like the waiting line of department stores. People waiting for their number to be pulled in the deli line take on a more physical shape and existence when they talk about Sunday’s game and the fact they can’t get enough of a particular sharp cheddar cheese, or when waiting for the first available table at the Olive Garden as they mention the time their young nephew soiled himself at his classmate’s birthday party. When these stories are uncovered, innocent unknown people around us suddenly have third cousins and brothers and stepmothers, and so on—people suddenly appear from nowhere, around us, among us.

The Woodrow Jefferson Project is a voyeuristic experiment in recording these relationships and lives that we create and establish. It asks, “What would happen if I found something from someone, and followed it back to its home? Who would be there?” It begins with a thrift store bible filled with receipts and stationary and funerary documents and someone’s personal paperwork for their life. It is the act of looking up every name on every piece of paper, it is going to the County Courthouse to find every record on this family, it is picking through their garbage (at night) to see who these shadows really belong to. It is a project driven by how uncomfortably close anyone can get to a past through the remnants and wake we leave, and how fictionalized and distant our relations really are, to show how many truths and fictions we can get from any little dealings we have and the complexity of human interaction as a whole.

Burlington Best Thrift/The Holy Bible:
It was (quite possibly) the largest bible I’d ever seen, with a stash of yellowed receipts and bits of legal pad peeking from between the pages, with only one thing penned in—anywhere—in the beginning. Woodrow Jefferson. On a slip of lined paper, his handwritten name had a crippled look to it, which reminded me of my great grandfather.

Maple Ave./The Frame and Print:
I researched the street numbers on each stationary stub; I parked and sat in the woods across from every Jefferson address in the city of Reidsville and Caswell County, to catch a family glimpse. Once I read his obituary, I found the Maple Avenue house, a dumpster partly on Mr. Jefferson’s lawn, and a nearby, gutted street shop. Sifting through the leftovers, I found a print peeling away, finally exposing a person’s shoe, in the corner, underneath.

Caswell County Register of Deeds/The 1866 Archive Bible:
The red, plastic-covered catalogues—held in the vault—had every family member, their related land deeds, marriage certificates, birth and death records. I paid twenty-five cents per page I copied; I stole an antique bible that I found below the nineteen sixty-nine notarized court case testimonies. On scrap pages, Mr. Jefferson matched every relative I uncovered with a scribbled name and phone number as their living testament.

Pentecostal Holiness Church/The Umbrella:
From the pile of business cards in the bible pages, I figured his car was in poor shape; from the appointment cards and optometrist bills, I could tell his eyes were failing him. But the most personal thing, for me, to have discovered was the death record for his infant daughter, who never lived to see a birth certificate. I wonder how these things affected him come Sunday; I mull over if he ever used the communal umbrellas outside his church—the give and take.

Wilkerson Funeral Home/ The Far Out New Testament:
I couldn’t find a timeline for when any of this was happening, or which one came first, his sister’s death or the paperwork he filled out for his own passing. Either way, he had the arrangements laid out as if it were a living room, as if his funeral were like moving furniture into a new home.

Assembly of God Cemetery/The Cemetery Flowers:
The night prior to my cemetery visit, a heavy rain had come through—strong winds tossing over small wreaths and angel statuettes. At the back corner, the roadside corner, of the graveyard was the Jefferson family plot (Woodrow tucked in front of his parents and beside his late wife). Once I studied what I’d come there for, I noticed all of the gravestones were back-splashed with red clay; I noted that bouquets of cemetery flowers doted the lot’s vacant end, no longer belonging to any one person.

A new post of old stuff: Some Photographic Keepsakes from my Art Studies at Elon

 

Curtis Davis, November 2006

Mark Sr., November 2005

Big Will Richardson, 4 July 2007

Self-Portrait, September 2007

Paul, The Vietnam Vet, October 2006

Ireland Wrap-up & Rick’s SURPRISE Return to Galway.

Strange to think I am leaving Galway in a few hours.

The last three months have been_______________. I can’t think of one singular word to fit in there. It’s been a lot. Crazy, tiring, aggravating, enlightening, productive, brilliant, and so on.

If it’s hard proof you want about what I’ve done out here, then I’ll give it to you:

• I think I have come close to finishing my manuscript (I’ve got two more poems and two more months before I am back in the states, so there is still the chance to do that) which is 74 pages. Yeah. A husky poetry book.

• These past three months, alone, I’ve written about 40 new pages of poetry. Not all of it for the manuscript, but a good portion of it.

• I climbed a mountain barefoot on St. Patrick’s day. Done. Winning.

• I’ve made a handful of YouTube videos that I must say–and I might be biased here–are pretty darn alright.

• After this past week of busking (numbers to follow), I’ve gotten eight people to buy poetry dedications. Sweet indeed. Now I have to find the time to write the poems.

• Screenplay writing has commenced, and though the first draft was nice writing–after talking with my collaborator on the project–I have finally figured out the direction the story needs to go in. Exciting.

I am sure there are plenty of other accomplishments that I just can’t remember now, but hell, if these aren’t enough, just thinking, I’ll be walking the pilgrimage trail from Pamplona to Santiago de Compostela–one side of Spain to the other. Take that.

It’s been a good semester. I like it. I have had some guests fly over here to see me. My sister. And Rick.

Rick even flew back to see me, a surprise, before he returned stateside. Here is a little video about his return:

Rick’s Visit to Galway!

Here is a little photo montage of my good friend Richard Kelly Pechous visiting me in Galway, Ireland this past week. I was so happy to have him here. Really. I was. So happy.

Busking: Bringing Poetry to Galway (Part 1)

One of the many projects I am trying to work on while in Galway–the overall goal: to get my poetry out and about–is to busk on Shop Street and get donations for my reading to the public.

Busk? According to Dictionary.com: “Busk–is a verb (used without object) Chiefly British . to entertain by dancing, singing, or reciting on the street or in a public place.”

My form of entertain while busking? Poetry. While here, I haven’t seen one poetry busker, so I figure I got the market cornered.

Besides accepting coins thrown into my hat on the street, I am also offering specific offerings.

So far the pickings have been slim (very much so) and the weather has been wet (except for when Rick Pechous was out here to visit) but here are my current numbers thus far:

• Saturday, March 5: Sunny. 1 Euro 26 Cents.

• Sunday, March 6: Sunny. 2 Euro 14 Cents.

• Monday, March 7: Sunny. 1 Euro 59 Cents.

• Tuesday, March 8: Rain. Canceled.

• Wednesday, March 9: Rain. Canceled.

• Thursday, March 10: Rain. Canceled.

• Friday, March 11: Rain. Canceled.

• Saturday, March 12: A little snow… 60 Cents.

• Sunday, March 13: Sunny enough. 1 Euro 8 Cents.

After all was said and done, I could buy myself almost two Guinness pints. I guess that works.

I hope to get a video up on the blog of me reading in public soon, but I need to figure out a way to get it so you can both see and hear me–the quality of my camera/mic isn’t very good.

This past week–as I said before–I didn’t go out and busk because my peer from grad school, Rick Pechous, was in town and we opted to work on other creative endeavors (three “Biffing with Rick” episodes, a picture montage and a screenplay) so I hope to have them up soon. This coming week, I probably won’t be busking as much or at all because I won’t be able to do to my recent adventures. If you read my last post about me climbing Croagh Patrick, you’ll see I have severely wrecked my feet and I can’t stand on them as of yet which puts a damper on being out on the street. You need good stage presence to make money.

My Tag, A Bathroom Graffiti Tale…

Ahoy all, here is my new graffiti tag which I’ll be putting up all around Galway:

Here is a little stencil and product action.

Here it is on a Sheetrock wall.

The quality looks pretty good, in my opinion. It’s simple, and hopefully people see what it is (it’s a little, cartoonish bonfire). The “bonfire” image is present in a good many of my poems, so with the line of my poem below it, I should be able to drum up some traffic to my BlogSpot site. I’ll check the numbers and update to here when I can.