F O R M A N D E X P R E S S I O N - Blog

The Tears of Hate Arcane, a poem by Jack Hirschman

5/28/2019

THE ‘TEARS OF HATE’ ARCANE
In Memory of Roddie Edmonds
and Heather Heyer
1.
My tears last night
seeing my brothers
and sisters in GI Jews
were not only theirs
shed 73 years ago
outside liberated nazi
concentration camps,

—my uncles Boro,
Meyer and Nathan,
my cousins Sonny
and Seymour among
the liberators—, were
tears of sorrow and of
joy and, as the soldier

rabbi said, “tears of
hate” as well, after
beholding the pits
of masses of bones,
eye-socketless spaces,
the ovens with still
smoldering skeletons.

My brothers and sisters,
500,000 of Jewish origin
who’d fought as GI Joes
finally (if they’d had any
doubts before) understood
what the war was all about,
what they were fighting and…
2.
You’d be closing down
the doors of your mind
if you didn’t recognize
those nazis marching in
Charlottesville, Virginia
shouting, “Jews will not
replace us”, already are

envisioning those ovens
and mass pits here in the
U.S.A., and those “tears
of hate” on my part contain
the urgent warning that the
arrogant thug President,
like any nazi, has neither

doctrine nor principle, only
lies, domination by division
and violence and, if allowed
to continue nourishing his
bigotted base, what Sinclair
Lewis meant when he wrote
It Can’t Happen Here

not only will happen but
has happened, so get off
the numbskulls you’ve
been warming your asses on,
brothers and sisters. In this
war, as Roddie Edmonds,
Protestant from Oklahoma,

who captained GI Joes
imprisoned in a nazi camp
near the end of the war--
when the nazi commander
demanded that all the Jews
in the company line up the
next morning—had the whole

company line up and said,
“We’re all Jews!” Because
in this war, if you think
anything different, and that
includes the color of your
skin, you can be certain
Nazism’s winning.

In the collection of Letterform Archive, San Francisco, CA
Jack Hirschman reading the poem

Jeu de Marseilles, Game of Marseilles

5/23/2019

Jeu de Marseilles, Game of Marseilles, is a one-of-a-kind book that was inspired by David Annwn’s poem of the same name and a video interpretation of the poem by film-maker Howard Munson. In his notes on the poem, Annwn writes about the creation of the Surrealist’s pack of Tarot cards by Max Ernst, Andre Masson, and others who were known by the Nazi’s as “undesirables.” While waiting for a chance to leave for the US as the Nazi’s drew near, they created the now infamous Surrealist deck of Tarot cards. Annwn writes, “the images of these cards fired my imagination. The poem celebrates the creation of these works in the face of encroaching danger.” It is a timely poem….a reminder and warning, perhaps, of the rise of white nationalism in the world today.
The poem and paintings are created on a translucent Mylar. The show-thru of images and writing is an attempt to capture the movement, over-lapping, and layering created by Munson in his video.

18 pages, 12 x 17 inches
Howard Munson's video

ELVIS CHRIST, the poetry and Hand Lettering of a San Francisco Mad Man

11/29/2018

Street poet, street artist, graffiti poet are all terms that describe Elvis Christ. His words, cynical quips and poetic phrases, were written with felt markers on masking tape that he stuck to the sidewalk. San Francisco designer and calligrapher Thomas Ingmire followed Elvis Christ‘s sidewalk graffiti, taking over 500 photographs. In this booklet he recreates a number of the images, using his own hand to make accurate representations of Christ’s unique hand lettering and decoration style.

7 x 9.5 inches 40 page booklet

Calligraphy and poetry in collaboration

10/23/2018

Works in preparation for 2018 exhibition at the Jewett Gallery, San Francisco Public Library
Changing Places in the Fire by Li-Young Lee

Section of 35 foot long scroll inspired by Li-Young Lee poem, Changing places in the Fire

Changing Places in the Fire by Li-Young Lee
1
What’s The Word! she cries
from her purchase on the iron
finial of the front gate to my heart.

The radio in the kitchen
is stuck in the year I was born.
The capitals of the world are burning.
And this sparrow with a woman’s face
roars in the burdened air — air crowded with voices,
but no word, mobbed with talking, but no word,
teeming with speech, but no word —
this woman with the body of a bird
is shrieking fierce
buzzed volts
in the swarming babble, What’s The Word!

This evening
is the year of my birth.
The country has just gained its independence.
Social unrest grows rampant as the economy declines.
Under a corrupt government of the army and the rich come
years of mass poverty, decades of starving children
and racially-fueled mayhem. Word is

armed squads raping women by the hundreds. Word is
beheadings, public lynchings, and riots. Word is
burning, looting, curfews, and shoot-to-kill orders.
And word is more deadly days lie ahead.

Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, the forecast calls
for more misery, more poverty, more starvation,
more families fleeing their homes,
more refugees streaming toward every border.

(this is part of the poem's first section. The entire poem can be read or
listened to on the Poetry Foundation website.
www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/142890/changing-places-in-the-fire

Double page spread form book version of Changing Places in the Fire 15 x 22 inches, 44 pages

Calligraphy and poetry in collaboration

10/23/2018

Works in preparation for 2018 exhibition at the Jewett Gallery, San Francisco Public Library
Marbles, Sections 1 and 2, Sections 3 and 4, by Allen Fisher

Sketch inspired by Marbles 15 x 11 inches

Book page form Marbles (version 1 15 x 11 inches

MARBLES by Allen Fisher
marbles sections 1-2
development development literature is growth outward talk

   develops
is growth literature inward talk words express

   things

use language to think thought outward talk

     language is talk outward taut

outward talk of things words express the relations

of things

after Grote

  marbles sections 3-4

   4
shades of development development growth inward talk words together

language is talk meaning

taught

thought relation thought order of words

development development

language is talk fraught through

Book page detail from Marbles (version 1)

Calligraphy and poetry in collaboration

8/7/2018

Works in preparation for 2018 exhibition at the Jewett Gallery, San Francisco Public Library

Nocturne (Lasciare Sonare)
Sharp shard of another day,
another post dawn, another wreckage
of dew and dew drop, the whole shellacked as if glass were
on the inside of everything,
   even the air between sky and eye,
the entire world waiting to crack along its fractures,
falling the way the soul falls into its own dispersal.
   How, we ask,
can so much break all at once?
Somewhere a fire burns like a star
along the edge of what we cannot know,
and yet still we rise like the flame of a bent candle
into the empty cathedral of our routine.
Long day,
longer night,
   the old cul-de-sac of sorrow and silence.
We circle around our loss like a shell on a grant of sand.
What if just once we were not erased by our own absence?
   O lost pilgrim,
what if your journey begins with this word?
What if a song written for you long ago can only now be heard?

Suppose someone whispers your name in her nightly prayer?
And suppose inside every prayer is another prayer,
within every word another word,
an infinite ladder of letters always climbing back into each other,
and suppose within every song is another song,
inside each note another note
a second sound, a secret sound,
   and suppose that within all signs are more signs
and inside each line a line of lines, a furrow of lines, a field of lines?

I believe we draw and are drawn into the ink of our unlived lives.
I believe we are echo and trace,
both string and bow.
Listen:
   when the light lays down its knives,
and darkness, the weariest maestro,
   picks up its baton,
you will know the music the dead left you has begun.

Off in the distance,
beyond the choir of cricket-thrum and wind-whir,
beyond the triage of traffic slog and the dark drone of device,
there is nothing but the past,
   asleep on its black pillow
and you,
   but keep listening
the little bell of the self is ready to ring.

Dean Rader

Calligraphy and poetry in collaboration

8/9/2017

Works in preparation for 2018 exhibition at the Jewett Gallery, San Francisco Public Library

Many walls
The sky remains outside, framed between
windows whose hinges no longer turn.
Four palm trees upset the alignment
for a picture. No beach, this, I've
thought about stepping out. To be in
the outer walls, white as pain, is to
be still, outside. A pacemaker keeps
his heart to the beat. The greatest threat
to the new railway tracks cutting through
the pastures of Nagchu, where once
my nomadic mother's fathers's side
spent summer months, is change in the weak
permafrost. And so the tracks are cooled
with heat exchangers. Most nights I place
my ear to his chest, I memorize its
unspoken code. I wait for it to melt for me.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Calligraphy and poetry in collaboration

1/2/2017

Works in preparation for 2018 exhibition at the Jewel Gallery, San Francisco Public Library

Synovial Things: For Steve Coleman

how to scan camouflage orchestrations as
happiest lines heard in foreground middleground
background relationships with praise for
underlying structures of spontaneous shades
we know very little just notes and accents
and well-measured tempests
he looked into this world outside of music he wooed
by singing I Hear People in angular momentum

how to span plasma, gas, liquid and solid so poems
will lend their wings alter the flow the propulsion
that drives and how things drift in milder shades
with that smooth air to reveal its novel tonal qualia
so the Phoebus Choir will practise things
that he’s never heard before

Robert Sheppard

Calligraphy and poetry in collaboration

10/31/2016

Works in preparation for 2018 exhibition at the Jewel Gallery, San Francisco Public Library

Vatic Scrip: Live Ink
song for Thomas Ingmire
In a Tall Tale
I am His Sybil
I am an Ink inlet

I Tell of live Ink
His Ink vial
lit as if live
Til Ink is vital

son son
son son déjà sonné

Christine Kennedy

Calligraphy and poetry in collaboration

9/12/2016

Works in preparation for 2018 exhibition at the Jewel Gallery, San Francisco Public Library

Cedar Tress on a Hill at Dusk
Fins of pure venom
trespass this sky
and knock it like a funny-bone
into painful laughter

and the sway of precious demons
rock the sea anemone.

These trees
drenched with weight
and viridian,
these collapsed tissues
of silhouettes,
close hard around my heart.

Geraldine Monk