Jesse Glass:
selected poems


Jesse Glass: Apocalyptic Beast (inverted)


Jesse Glass – Selected Poems
read by the author July 2005 in Tokyo

Glass Edition. Duration: 36.00

---

01. Alchemical Lion 02. The Skull is A SEED (For Robert Lax) 03. They 04. Against the Agony of Matter 05. Go Ha Ha Ha 06. In Ears of Crusted Flint (Anti-War) 07. A Crow With Scissor Wings 08. After Gilgamesh 09. Ashurbanipal 10. Giant 11. Mina Loy 12. In the Cold 13. Swedenborg's Airplane (A Hymn) (1745) 14. To Leibnitz from Japan 15. The Lime-Tree Bower, My Revision 16. A Good Cure for Wounds 17. Heliotrope 18. How to Recover Stolen Goods 19. Swallow Wort 20. To Prevent the Worst Kind of Paper From Blotting 21. Words To Be Spoken While Making Divinatory Wands

---

The intruders in the White House and on Capitol Hill, in the Military and Industrial Complex, in the Entertainment Business, in the TV and Movie Studios, in the News Networks and in the Legislation have all dirtied and all but suffocated the American language. For me it has long been almost impossible to listen to any American dialect of the English language. It has even spilled over into British, Australian and New Zealand English too – but it is still easier for me to listen to English dialects that are very obviously not American in any way.

Perhaps one of the most serious crimes the American power criminals have committed – second only to their relentless killing of human beings all over the planet, from the forced extinction of the Indians to the far-reaching kidnappings of the Africans during the Slavery, to their unforgivable blasts in Japan to the merciless genocide in Vietnam to the Death-for-Oil program in Iraq - is the dilution and pollution of their own mother tongue, in a kind of inward self affliction of darkness and death and linguistic destruction. The bigger the lies, the nastier the speakers, the dirtier the language.

In a longer perspective, the U.S. power criminals of today and yesterday will be counted alongside the fat ass politicians of the Third Reich; all Children of Darkness, wretched spirits thriving on ill deeds.

American citizens must pull themselves together and either leave the country or exorcise the demons that have permeated their land and taken over the means of power. They must round up the demons of power like the Fugs symbolically did in the 1960s outside the Pentagon, chanting: “Out, demons, out!”

OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT! OUT, DEMONS, OUT!

One person that has done what it takes is Jesse Glass. Not only has he left the Danger Powerhouse of the Demons of the Earth and moved to Japan, but he also exercises a cleansing act of the language, by sketching and writing and reading his poems, which, in their way, reclaim the capacity and beauty of a language long tarnished by idiots and war mongers of the American Establishment; bird brains of history with seriously ill rebirths ahead. Jesse Glass and his likes provide a remedy for a language shoved into the gutter of human sewage.

This CD with Jesse Glass reading, screaming and chanting and arguing his poetry sailed through the air and came down through the room in a motion of lingual shamanism, half a world wide.

When Jesse asked me whether I was interested in partaking in some kind of interview situation on the subject of new music, I told him:

“I think the only way to do an interview like that would be to avoid the subject (perhaps just keep in the header) and then discuss interesting matters like cycling, rocks, glaciers, walking in the mountains, jotting down dreams etcetera.”

I have the same brute rock desert and glacier feeling for Jesse’s writings. The fascination that I feel for his works does not stop at his words or the hazardous glimpses of select mind that they convey. Instead, his poems are stepping-stones for me into a slapstick sobriety beyond human custody of spirit. He restores me right down the trajectory of automatic responses, pulling me back into position to utilize this wondrous outlook just before thought, just before the imminent precipitation of morphemes, in a clearer and more distinct way, even, than the sound poetry of, say, Jaap Blonk or Francois Dufrene.

Jesse’s words have me realize I got to take one life at a time and take on the Bardo of This Life.

Even though I can’t hear it from where I am positioned in time and space, the ocean heaves, the magnetosphere clicks and sparkles, and the rhythmic motions of fleshy lovemaking syncopates across the globe.
From where I’m positioned in mind, however, not even Dr. Theo Nieuwenhuizen at Amsterdam University – whom I met at a Quantum Theory conference at Vaxjo University in Sweden in June 2005 – can pull any real serious scares with neither the wave function of the particle nor indeed the particle function of the wave, and it strikes me how much the situation in the Vaxjo hotel lobby with those theoretical physicists off duty resembled the atmosphere of the Dylan song Went To See The Gypsy from the album New Morning (1970), as Dylan recalls a time when he went downstairs to meet Elvis in that little Minnesota town.

At this instance, the computer humming here in my bedroom/study and Björk howling in the next room about a recurrent dream (Heirloom from Vespertine), after I’ve returned to my comfortable Scandinavian fox hole at the end of a busy day of criminal investigations, letting the Nishiki racing bike rest in the other bedroom (which my son, now 21, left for the Eastern Seaboard of America) for the night, I sense this Jesse Japanese influx of reordered, restored American lingo, in guises of rocking and rolling thought, crackling at me like shortwave static bouncing off of atmospheric inversion layers, spreading the word for sure, Pacific Ocean or not, the Russian land mass or not!

The first thing that strikes me when I start listening to the Selected Poems CD is the growling hoarseness of Jesse’s voice, not unlike that of Ferlinghetti, concerning intonation too.

The opening poem is Alchemical Lion.

On the Surrealists Website I find a posting by I’m not sure whom, saying:

Glass:

And the continuation of the poem ensures us that Jesse indeed is taking into poetic reasoning our nearest star, which nurtures and kills, strokes and cuts, in a lovingly venomous lick! Praise be! Get lost before you get found – before you get funds!

Jesse’s wordscraping articulation gathers sand and gravel and pours it onto your breakfast table. Here! His poetry is like crumbs of bread in your eyes as you return from a shift at the steelworks; everything as you left it in the morning; crumbs also on your table, around the cup with dried up coffee – the homecoming so silent; just the afternoon birds in the hedge and voices of playing children on the wind; your body heavy with gravity; a gravity which always seems to be on… and thoughts on the Bardo of This Life flicker behind your eyelids.

The Skull is A SEED (For Robert Lax) is a poem that – for me – conjures up the open spaces of Lapland; the almost indecent closeness of the ground right in front of you, at your feet (the trickling brook from the glacier on high), immediately contrasted with – or completed with – the far gaze across the valley as you lift your head; the distant rumble of a waterfall five kilometers away… and you absorb it in just one breath, your gaze soaring at 300 000 kilometers a second.
Glass’ repetitive, hypnotic reading casts an incantation across these wastelands, across this barren plateau of rocks and brooks and breathless views, like was the poem good medicine – and maybe it is, maybe it soothes my vulnerability which I nonetheless share with all beings, them aware or not…

The shaman concentration, the healing focus of this Glass reading reflects earlier impressions, of fiddler Malcolm Goldstein of Vermont and his from CENTER of RAINBOW, SOUNDING, and the inscription on the vinyl cover, citing an old Eskimo event:

And in this frame of mind, like a dancer on the mountain slopes, Jesse Glass moves in a balancing act of words, in a Highland gigue descent:

Yes, and Jesse Glass, by virtue of the rhythm and pendulum motion of this poem reminds me of none other than… Dylan Thomas:

In They Jesse Glass recites, sings, chants and talk-sings, syncopating around the perimeter of existence with a quirky smile hinted in the corner of his mouth, eyes opening wide, starring madly – a jester, a goblin, a fearless truthteller out of Japanese delicacy and thousands of years of Zen…
Jesse Glass is no more a singer than Shel Silverstein, and yet this roughness of the medium explains and contours the content better than would a Jussi Björling or a Titta Ruffo; rock deserts in bleak sunlight; the bare necessities exposed.

In Against the Agony of Matter Jesse Glass reasons in garlands of rough-spoken verses, the bear-growling (beer-growling?) gravel-harp of his vocal chords slightly out of tune, as words are poured like splintered rock from a stone crusher onto a score of delicate thought forms; starshine across the mudflows of lonely nocturnalities:

The last poem I’ll mention out of all these poems on the CD is Swedenborg’s Airplane (A Hymn) (1745). For one thing, Swedenborg was Swedish like me, and I’ve always had this feeling of closeness to him, abridging time like I always do, even once having fallen in love with Maria Ivogün in her early twenties, in 1911, her voice rising in time-abandoning contradictions in the pale light of the laser-box…

This poem could well be set to music. I can hear Incredible Stringband perform it well, in staircase glissandi up and down through troubadour ages. It’s a Jesse Glass folk-rock hit, meandering, about old Mr. Swedenborg and all his heavenly dominions!