Roman J Leyva Interview

Here is the second in my series of interviews with artists who use words, sound and images. I asked Roman J Leyva, AKA Plague Mother, how these forms interact in his creative process, what experiences have recently inspired him and if he would share a few lines.

"I've always found myself particularly vulnerable to words and visual art. They tend to create emotion within me. My choices and explorations in music, on the other hand, is more often a reflection of my emotions. So, oftentimes if I am writing or working on music, I am meditating on words and images that inspire something in me.

I have to say, the past year was a very tumultuous one, personally. I dealt with a great deal of loss and frustration. As my works are often outlets for negativity more so than positivity, this showed through, I'm sure.

'I've got glass in my foot. How'd it get there in my cement shoes?'"


Thanks so much Roman J!

Shooting Children

Driving dawn is wider did I remembered

what in my headgrasp died

up against skull clanging

waking waking waking dry.

Sunrise spread out over Cleveland like a Mother.

Here is a song – builds a well – welling chest – Here.

Here is this life

this life never so close so sweet

so close to the end of America.

O’ shell America.

Bridges coming down.

Water sitting empty.

And sudden March heat

exposes how dirty the air

dirty the air how dirty the air has become.

And never new again, not even in sudden spring.

Shame on us shame in our lungs shame the dirty air.

O’ Sweet Earth MAA – men are shooting children on your shaved body.

Florida – France – Afghanistan

Sweet Earth MAA – men are shooting children on your shaved body. 

TOM ORANGE YAAA

I recently asked questions to several of my fellows who both write and play music. I asked them to relate how words, music and visual art interact in their creative processes, and I asked them what recent experiences have most recently stoked the desire inside them to flare out into art. Finally, I asked them to share some lines.

Here are the answers from TOM ORANGE - wild musician and poet.

"Music has been central to me for most of my life. Words came later, and visual art later still. And most often I've experienced the mutual reinforcement of these interests through friends and colleagues in my/our various creative endeavors. For example, when I started writing poetry seriously, not only were most of my poet friends big music fans like me, but it seemed they knew a lot more about visual art than I did, so I felt I had some catching up to do in this area.

Specific interactions within creative processes themselves are a little trickier to pin down. I've never been that interested in, say, writing a poem about or inspired by a painting. A lot of my poetry, though, uses other writing as a starting point. I've never been terribly good at 'inspiration' to fill a blank page with language 'inside' me. I can't quite explain it, but some poems and poets, when I encounter them, trigger in me an immediate need to pick up pen and paper and literally start using their words in my own way: I start with their words and rearrange them, modify them and add to them in a kind of improvisation. If the process sustains itself long enough, I can end up with a chapbook's worth of poems.

For a while in my writing I was trying to do the kinds of things I was hearing in the music I was discovering and obsessing about at the time. But since giving up writing and focusing most of my creative energies on music, I've found I can now do some of the things I was hearing in the music myself. So language now seems very oblique, indirect and mediated. And more than a little beside the point.

I should also add that I've never been that interested in realistic representations of the world through art: I want art that makes new worlds and new things that we've never experienced before. Clark Coolidge, the poet I wrote my dissertation about, says it best: 'I want everything to come together. / And then I want it to all go away, / leaving behind one thing that was never / in the pile to begin with. / The world is not enough. I want something / else to appear.'

I am continually inspired and quite frequently blown away by the creative talents of my friends in the local experimental music scene here. When I was more active in poetry, I'd go to readings occasionally that were so good I felt I could throw away my pens and paper, quit writing poetry and be completely fine with it knowing that someone else was doing work that good. Likewise with the music scene today. As I often tell folks, I know I've seen a good set when what I'm hearing and seeing makes me want to start, like, five new bands, or otherwise gives me ideas for stuff I can try myself. And then there are also those occasional shows that, again, make me think I should just sell my gear and live happily knowing that such music exists courtesy of someone else!

Here's an excerpt from a 21-part serial poem, written through the kind of process described above:
http://dusie.org/orange.html

: t o m o r a n g e :

dusie.org

first source the seed then sunk, a safe built taste to trunk or heave, pressed against and folded in turns, a table widened out of flat draft sought first, joining traces in filament burst, troughed particular, engines a dust"

Thanks so much, Tom! Soon, more thoughts from Mitchell Ribis, Jose Luna, Roman J Leyva and more!

 

APRIL 3, 2012 READING WITH MATTHEA HARVEY AND S.E. SMITH

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center is hosting the reading this Tuesday April 4th at 7:30 in Student Center 313/315 on the CSU campus. Smith is the author of new CSUPC book I Live in a Hut and the founder of OH NO magazine. Harvey was the judge who selected Smith's book for the CSUPC 2011 First Book Prize. She is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007). As well as being a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper and BOMB, she teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence University.

Matthea Harvey is also the author of The Little General and the Giant Snowflake (Tin House Books, 2009), illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel. Just yesterday, this book caught my eye. I'm interning at the CSUPC, and we've been so busy processing manuscripts and mailing out books, but I was startled by this children's book that was ordered to have at the upcoming reading. It's very strange and very intelligent. The book playfully explores the conflict between realism and imagination employing lemmings and various kinds of snowflakes.

S.E. Smith's I Live in a Hut also uses play to cut to the core. The words prance and strike. The cover illustration is itself a poem - a mysterious round void overwhelms yellow woods, giving the impression that while you are looking into your life and smiling, something something something is standing just in front of you, waiting to gobble you up. She writes of "Vertical Lakes" and "Enormous Sleeping Women" who reappear in the book as mountains and move.  


This event is free and open to the public. For more information, email csupc.mgr@gmail.com.

RIVERMOON DOORSONG

RIVERMOON DOORSONG

Suddenly to the left of me – oh look out – out blind violets rise up violence

no violence only sound riding up like roses and horses and wind,

and small rain down can rain.

You wore a mask – but no – it was a cat.

And I clutched at you your lovely skullface and I held your blood forever.

Mmm death is just a door –

do the door – door jam to the depth of the door– ain’t nobody here

but us moonstone blood bools

oh drool into my mouth baby I needed it,

I needed us chickens –

You are an opal, so flip the door, flip the switch on, baby

on tiger, river on, push the atavista in your eyes

blackbirds rain down in gauzy gauzy peacefire rain –

oh take back the fins and radial feather switch chemical history

ignite the black night

switch out the violet gauzy

play my eggs with a bow my love

I look at your mouth your mouth is a bow love

Your mouth is a naught, holy nothing

Let’s take all the death out

out of rabies, out of firearms, I suck the death out,

out of the doorjam, the keyhole, the lightswitch

switch your tail, the urban tale of firearms and gasoline

I take back the night, take back the nighthorses,

take death on my tongue as a tablet and birth out a

mushroom of lilies and orchids even flowers growing

and even flowing growers growing

in nitrogen night

air I suck

the death out of daybreak alarms

strike a cheek red  robinredbreast

robinredbreast I love you

I love fire

escape I love

on beds of rice and wine and your kisses make wine

of me rosy

mulch pulp and gauzy fire out of me

I needed to,

not two, but one moon

dropped from

you my love

my lover my liver

with a healthy dense breathing liver

and kidneys riding in the back like

wings and heart above stomach where it belongs

we may never see cardinals in Cleveland but

(winter nerves me make us)

Pigeons sleeping like tender ladies,

And gulls in some parking lots

and red-tailed hawks

live here

my friend said red-tailed

hawks are the owls of Day

I love you

Scrawled over it All

New Release!~!

At the annual Wassail party in Dover last week, TuscoEmbassy released their Christmas Tape 2011. Dead Peasant Insurance offered up a track, "Giving Up the Goat", for the compilation, which features work from many strange and wondrous artists such as  Collapsed Arc, Dr Quin, Leslie Keffer, Outer Space and Tusco Terror.

New Releases~!~~!~!~!~~!~!

***ASR082 Shadows "A Death in the Family" | c40 edition of 100, 2011

The third installment in Shadows' Dark Knight themed cassette series is a robust collection of noise electronics, rumbling loops and vocal oddities recorded over the course of 2011. "A Death in the Family" showcases Wyatt Howland (Skin Graft) and David Russell's (Collapsed Arc) finely tuned ability to create bleak yet colorful sounds. This forty minute killer contains aggressive contributions from Roman J (Plague Mother) and harmonic vocal layers from Amanda Howland (Dead Peasant Insurance) all masterfully mixed by Russell on to pro-dubbed cassettes. Cover art by Mike Mignola. Co-released with Atavistic Transformations.

***OhighO Vol. 2 Compilation www.sludgesicle.web.com, 2011

DPI has two songs on this low-fi Sludgesicle compilation along with Fascist Insect, Gomorrahzer, Interstates, Drogheda and about 108 dozen more Ohio bands of all weirdo genres.