The advantage of the incomprehensible is that
it never loses its freshness. — Paul Valéry
My Dear Readers:
NeverEnding Story contributor,
Michael Dylan Welch, invites you to read his two new poetry collections. One is a free ebook,
Eyeball Kick, (Bones, June 2020), a collection of 43 sometimes surreal "hydrogen jukebox" poems, and the other is a microchapbook,
Star Wheel, (Origami Poems Project, 2020), that features 28 haiku and senryu inspired by the names of crochet patterns.
Selected Poems from Eyeball Kick:
hydrogen jukebox
the pizza place
on speed dial
hydrogen jukebox
a noodle escapes
from each of our spoons
hydrogen jukebox
the cottage cheese
of memory
hydrogen jukebox
anarchy
in the OK corral
hydrogen jukebox
the scythe of lies
you tell me in moonlight
hydrogen jukebox
latter-day rain
dashing the steeple
hydrogen jukebox
it’s the end of the word
as we know it
Selected Haiku and Senryu from Star Wheel:
late-morning quiet --
a dusting of pollen
on the wedding table
Texas diner --
the tip jar
filled with pesos
Happy Reading
Chen-ou
Note: The following is a relevant excerpt from "Wherever They Will," a forward to Eyeball Kick:
Each short poem in this collection presents a disjunction in the manner of what Allen Ginsberg conceptualized in the phrase “hydrogen jukebox”—originally from Howl, and later an opera by Ginsberg and Philip Glass. It’s a deliberate compression of two disparate and unexpected elements—low and high, common and uncommon—in this case to the point of surrealism, designed to produce what Ginsberg called an “eyeball kick,” or a double-take. It may well relate to Basho’s aesthetic ideal of kogo kizoku, or “awakening to the high, returning to the low.”
