Jennifer Cartright

Michael Cartright

Lives in the Ozark Highlands of Southwest Missouri. He has devoted forty years to the study of poetry and music. He once described his poems as frames of film, momentary photographs. The odd rhythms and beats in the poems are driven by his interest in jazz music. American language, as it is spoken by the natives, is a feature of his poems with a focus on the accuracy of the frames clicking by.

I have had the pleasure of observing Michael’s work as a poet for 30 years. On our second date, he brought an old beat up doctor’s bag full of his journals and typed poems. He handed me the bag and said, “This is me, I hope you like it.” It took me three days, but I read every word. I didn’t just like it, I loved it.

Michael never does anything halfway, if he loves something he will exhaustively research it and become a foremost authority on the subject. If you don’t believe me just ask him any question about Lew Welch or Robert Pollard, he is an encyclopedia on the subjects he loves. He believes that poetry is a special art form because it is a totally different experience to read a poem and to hear a poem performed by the author. That is why it was so important to him for us to put this reading together. He wants the audience to experience poetry in both forms. He is an amazing performer with a beautiful voice and I know you are going to love his reading style.

RECORDED CONVERSATION AT A PARTY (NOT MINE)

or

LIFE CYCLE NOTES

necktie

barbed wire

a taller hat

anything

to norm the strange

we reside

in another dimension

you can see it

driving over flat land

that humming distance

or the moment after

rock splits pond water

we walk into it

disappear

only to reappear

on paper / in books

DON'T UNTO OTHERS

always doing for others

with conditions

how many points

was anyone looking

at my offering

actually

a transaction

traveling through life

convinced the cash-in

will contain a key

promised

that was never

promised

yes

it takes

special glasses

to see that

Jennifer Cartright

Today's poet is one of the founding members of auxarczen

Dave Ashmore / dasho

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Bides his time as a multi-dimensional, multi-media artist & poet living in Southwestern Missouri. He has an obsessive habit of sync-cruising endless backroads with his buddy Steve, dreams in 24 frames per second & hears a full cast of strange voices in perfect harmony.

He thinks it's all for the birds.

---

Where do I even begin to explain Dave? I guess the best way to start is to say I will never be able to explain Dave or his art, but I adore both. Dave lives on a higher plane of consciousness than most of us. He is a true artist, able to filter his surroundings through his artistic lens and has tackled most art forms and is outstanding at them all. He is a painter, poet, playwright, collage artist, filmmaker, actor and so much more. I met him in the fall of 1984 during the rehearsals for a college play and was blown away by his voice and stage presence. In the spring of 1985, he knocked on Michael’s door and said, “I hear you write poetry.” That sentence started a collaboration that continues today. In the summer of 2019, after 25 years of being separated by life, Michael knocked on his door and said, “Let’s get back to work.” and auxarczen was born.

Since August, we have been working diligently to get auxarczen off the ground, enjoying every minute of our work together. We have vowed to never let life get in the way of creating together ever again. I know without a doubt you will be just as impressed with his voice and his presence as I was those 36 years ago.

ROARING INTO 20

Wanting more than

was ever needed

not what was sought out

but how it was

actually achieved

some Howard Hawks

TCM another & again

your favorite

loneliest holy hole

checked into

from out of time

you win some

to suffer losing

As it waltzes in

to noir parties

you can go

into wild wool

& shootin' irons

into wilding

a little too close to home

again

home again

jiggity jog

insulting whistle

to get to whale

songs billowed up

from deepest

dark

harpoon & chain

Then home again

you say

But when & where

this party roaming

over edges

thru

liminal spaces

cemetery graces

tattered flowers

flung to winds

of so-called timeline

So where?

do you

do we

To when?

Nevermore

forever again?

again & again

indeed...indeed

Whatever boats you

O'er the river again

Where no postcard left to endure it

Beyond ending

No endearing friendship left

To test, to taste

Beyond water of life

Nor take another aging step

Nor breathe it in

Forsooth

& for free

As once again

To the next

As all things go away

.

Jennifer Cartright

Day 2 introductions

John Macker (Santa Fe, New Mexico)

John grew up in Colorado and studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He has published 10 full-length books of poetry, 2 audio recordings and several broadsides and chapbooks over 30 years. His most recent are Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, (a 2019 Arizona/New Mexico Book Awards finalist), Gorge Songs (with Denver woodblock artist Leon Loughridge), Blood in the Mix (with El Paso poet Lawrence Welsh) and part three of his “Badlands” trilogy, Disassembled Badlands published by Colorado’s Turkey Buzzard Press, 2014. His books were featured in the Colorado State Historical Society exhibit, Mile High and Underground, featuring 30 years of Denver art and poetics. In the mid 1990’s he edited the award-winning HARP Arts Journal in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. He has received 2 Pushcart Prize nominations and in 2006 won Mad Blood magazine’s first annual literary prize. That same year he edited the Desert Shovel Review. He has received the James Ryan Morris Memorial (Tombstone) Award for poetry and a Colorado Council on the Arts grant. In 2019, won a Fischer Poetry Prize finalist award, sponsored by the Telluride Institute. His recent prose and essays on poets and poetics have appeared in Albuquerque’s Malpais Review (where he was contributing editor), Cultural Weekly, as it ought to be magazine, Miriam’s Well, Mad Swirl, Manzano Mountain Review and Lummox Journal. For the last 24 years, he has lived in Northern New Mexico.

Thirty years ago I met John Macker through letters. I had just begun dating the poet who is now my husband and one of our favorite ways to spend an afternoon was to get into his VW bus listen, to some great music and drive to his mom’s house to pick up his mail. I know that doesn't sound like a great date, but we were starving artists. Our excitement would peak when a Macker letter would arrive. We would sit in his mom’s driveway and he would read me John’s latest missive. I fell in love with John’s writing and the way he mentored Michael. John is a great poet in every way, not just in the poems he puts to the page, but in the true passion he has for the medium, the mystic and the history of this cherished art form. John is steeped in the lore of poetry and not afraid to share it with other poets. John has made Michael a better poet and I am certain that Michael is not the only poet he has mentored. It is our great honor to have him reading at our first auxarczen reading.

America the Beautiful, the Black Hole and the Painted Desert

Thank you, blustery day

the badlands colors are interpenetrating

like an ancient clown grave

or layers of memory of a happy

childhood where nothing decays

everything remains, stubbornly inert

but ever-changing.

The wind alone, disputatious,

a howling nihilist samurai high

over the rez or a

breezy Joni Mitchell song.

The katzenjammer kid

inappropriately gropes the flag

a public display of impotent patriotism

or the women of Standing Rock.

In Spain, 1937, Americans washed up on the

shore of their own lost cause and once

General Miles said of Geronimo:

“he had the clearest, the sharpest dark eye.”

It took years for America’s hair to turn white

as if it had just seen a ghost in the mirror.

A Phoenix teenager paints her fingernails

the colors of the next performance

art revolution. A no regrets coyote

trots along the mesa edge where the

old time psychedelic is still as

much deity as it is sunset.

Thank you observatory earth

for the first glimpse of the “monster

in Virgo”, its black eye, its red tulip mouth

looks out at us across the arduous

light years and sees only blue.

###

Copyright 2019 John Macker