Cpskgospel

I had been looking for a new writing
project for a number of years. I’d tired of the
epistemologically driven, dense, philosophically
oriented poetics I had been working in for decades. The
work entitled Syllogism in this issue may be seen as a
relapse or more likely a farewell and an attempt to
answer a request to codify my thinking on the subject
and be done with it.



I wanted to create a new work that did not sacrifice any
of the intelligence or vitality of language of High
Modernism as expressed in Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Tolson,
Olson, Zukofsky, Dorn etc.



As chance would have it our upcoming issue of FlashPoint
at that time was to be devoted to the work of David
Jones, a High Modernist engraver/artist and poet whom I
had long admired. Not only that, but the David Jones
Society was arriving from the UK to hold their annual
conference in Washington DC which included a film by
Derek Shiel as well as an exposition of Jones material
recently bequeathed to Georgetown University.



One of FlashPoint’s editors, Brad Haas, has long been a
member of the Jones Society and helped curate the show
at Georgetown as well as supply some of his own Jones
holdings. He then went on to host the David Jones
conference the next year at the University at which he
teaches.



Finally, it was determined that FlashPoint would publish
the papers delivered at the Jones conferences by the
Jones Society members. This happy alignment required
that I re-read Jones body of work.





The Dago in Me



As I was listening to a recording of one of Jones most
dramatic poems, The Fatigue, I was struck by how much I
was drawn to the voice of the personae of the poem. The
voice is that of a Roman principalis to which Jones
attributes the rank of sergeant. In the first part of
the work, the sergeant is dressing down his men for
failing to keep an alert vigilia or night watch.
Then the poem shifts to a dazzling metaphysics of
religion mixing ancient Roman and Greek myth,
pre-Christian and proto-Christian British worship and
myth, and Christian myth.



I had read aloud this very literate and highly annotated
poem to friends on a number of occasions and marveled at
their easy grasp of its subject matter despite the
poem’s obscure vocabulary and syntax. In no way was the
poem dumbed down for a least common denominator reader.
Just the opposite. The reader felt him or her self
raised up having had a new and rewarding experience as
well as discovering something about their own capacity
and understanding.  There had never been any
grousing about the poem being too ‘difficult’ or
‘obscure’.



I attempted to write my own piece in Jones’
principalis’s voice and within an hour had my first
monologue. The process was so enjoyable and
intellectually rewarding that I persisted, eventually
writing 88 monologues for performance. I have since
added five
more which appear in this issue including a 36
page monologue by Joseph
Barsabbas, the so-called 14th apostle according to
Simon Kananaios. Barsabbas is the drug cooker for Jesus
and the disciples, using henbane, dattura and Syriacan
rue to produce the mass hallucinations, false deaths,
madness etc. that we encounter in the Synoptic Gospels
and John. According to Simon Kananaios, the mad document
called the Book of Revelation was written entirely under
the influence of hallucinogens by an aged and drug
addled junkie, the apostle John Zebedee also known as
John of Patmos.



The Gospel According to Simon Kananaios like Jones’
piece is set in First Century Judea at the time of
Christ. The core setting is Passover/Easter week. The
first 88 monologues have been published by Country
Valley Press with an explanatory introduction. But what
I would like to communicate here is the relatively brief
and stormy performance history of the monologues.





Pieces for Actors



The Canaanite Gospel is best grasped and appreciated
when performed.  Wayne Pounds, a scholar at Tokyo
University, has described the monologues as depositions.
Each monologue is in the voice of one of the characters
usually recognizable from the Synoptic Gospels, John,
the Gnostic Gospels, Josephus, Tacitus etc.



Events communicated in the Canaanite Gospel tend toward
a more historically realistic appraisal of events that
are related in earlier texts such as the Synoptic
Gospels.



That the monologues gain from performance is
indisputable.  As the poet/actor Magus Magnus
points out, the theater goer will be surprised at how
much of even the most difficult texts, performed at
headlong speed, she or he can understand. Not that the
monologues need to be performed at headlong speed, but
that they too are imbued with that kind of
theatricality.



So, after failing to interest any local actors, I set
out to perform them myself. My first choice was an open
mike with about twenty people in attendance.  You
could only read/perform one page so I took the hilarious
set piece, Lazaraus, reduced it down to 8 point type to
fit on one page and performed it.









The audience loved it. They howled with laughter and my
timing was bouyed by their enthusiasm.  The
wrinkly, schoolmarm running the reading was ‘shocked’ by
the profanity, but what could she do? The audience had
come alive after several gruesome, snoozer poems met
with polite applause or near dead silence. I asked her
if I could be in the reading series as a featured reader
but she told me she was looking for “more established’
readers who had published.



I told her I had been a fixture around Washington for
over 40 years, had published two books and was currently
an editor with FlashPoint which I encouraged her to look
at. Still no. I could see the radical dramatic volume,
the howls of laughter and novelty of the piece itself
had rattled her. Poetry was meant to be precious and
whispered not bawdy and profane like Chaucer, Jarry,
Moliere, Joyce or, well, Shakespeare. 



So I set up my own one man show in full costume, “Simon
Kananaios Live at the Kensington Row Bookshop for one
night only”. I got 18 or 20 people to show up and it was
a wild success. In the immediate aftermath, I got
offered a DVD deal from Adelphi Records and a publisher
present said he was going to “make me famous,” like I
hadn’t heard that before.










But then things began to dry up. I did a performance of
a few monologues at the Writer’s Center in conjunction
with visiting California poets David Meltzer and Michael
Rothenberg. This time there was some shock among the
audience at the brash novelty and raw profanity of the
monos but also a good deal of positive feedback. 
But when I asked for a venue of my own, I was again
turned down.



I did a couple of more open mikes but the time
constraints didn’t allow me to prepare the listener for
what they were about to hear. I kept falling back on my
stock piece, Lazarus or time permitting Martha. 
The audience remained enthusiastic though the
gatekeepers/moderators were less thrilled especially
with the profanity, the blasphemy and the raucous
atmosphere so alien to today’s poo-etry.



I began to sense that the complaints about the profanity
and blasphemy were just canards, an easy excuse for
denying me performance time and space so that the
asslickers and little quid pro quo pricks could snooze
poetry right out of existence.



No doubt, at some level, some audience members but
primarily the people hosting the events found the
monologues novel and therefore deeply disturbing and as
a result a threat to their authority. I was told that
the ownership of these various donated spaces could
withdraw their support if they got wind of the
monologues being performed there. And there were plenty
of self-censoring neo-liberals out there whining for a
quieter more ‘reasonable’ poo-etry.







Sissy Land



The composer Charles Ives was once attending a concert
of serial music. A fellow in front of him was fidgeting
and murmuring to his friend during the recital,
obviously intimidated by the music. So Ives leaned
forward and told the guy, “Don’t be such a sissy.”



At my performances a pattern was forming. The people in
control of the poetry and music venues and even some
comedy venues were censorial sissies. This type of
material was not new. Authors have been taking shots at
religion ever since they began to coexist. Rabelais was
certainly a fire source for my monologues. Stand up
comics delivered their profanity laced monologues every
night all across this piece of shit country and it was
accepted as the norm. As I write this the play
‘Motherfucker with a Hat’ is playing to rave reviews
here in DC with Mike Daisey’s ‘Fucking, Fucking, Fucking
Ayn Rand’ on its way. Is it the ethnic slurs? Don’t
these folks have HBO? Besides, Canaanite Gospel’s ethnic
slurs are often edifying such as ‘kittim’ or ‘kitt’
which appears throughout the monologues and loosely
means ‘those pale assholes from the West who are making
our lives such a fucking misery’. Apparently with
national venues you can thrive on the merits of the work
alone. But at the local level, the gated communities of
the souls, a few sissies can effectively censor a new
work.



I was getting constant advice to ‘dumb it down’. But for
who? When left to my own devices the audiences in
general were fine with it. Actually many loved it. And
those that weren’t? Well, what the fuck is wrong with a
little literary debate?



I was told dump the Shakespeare, Chaucer, Rabelais,
James Joyce etc. influence. That shit’s so old it’s too
easy. That’s why you don’t hear it anywhere.  Dump
the cockney, the profanity and the slurs. Dump the blend
of syntax and vocab. All the above just confuses the
moderators and besides they’re worried that the people
who own the venues, the people making the cheesecake or
selling the $8.00 beers, will not find the monologues
amenable to peddling their wares.







End running the
censors



I circumvented the sissies with a second one man show at
Kensington Row Book Shop. To warm up, I did another one
page open mike. This time I performed Safiya
which also was received very enthusiastically,
especially by the women in the audience.



My original publisher had backed out, but Mark Kuniya of
Country Valley Press had agreed to come on board. But
the book wasn’t ready yet. And Adelphi Records wanted me
to put together an act with me as the sole performer
off-book on perhaps 7 or 8 monologues, a daunting task
for someone who can’t remember his five digit zip code
and  was denied venues all over town in which to
perfect his act.



Again, about 18 to 20 people showed. Once again, a
wildly enthusiastic response.  Of particular
interest to me was the response of Al who is married to
the proprietor of the bookshop, Eli. Al, a dutiful 
husband, helps Eli set up and take down the chairs for
the poetry readings and lecture series her bookstore
hosts. By his own admission Al, as down to earth as they
come, dreads these events because he finds the poets so
damn boring. He usually leaves to huff down a few cigs
and comes back when the reading appears to be ending.



However, for the monologues he stayed the entire time,
through the dramatic ones as well as the comic. Al is
among that majority of people that think poetry is not
relevant, is intellectually tendentious, boring, effete
and sissified. And I can’t say he’s wrong. It’s folks
like Al or Gene Rosenthal at Adelphi Records that would
rather spend the day spaying rabid dogs than go to a
poetry reading, yet whoop and holler at the monologues.
This gives me the greatest charge and confirms one of my
main reasons for writing them — TO REACH A LARGER
AUDIENCE.







In a coffee bar in Annapolis before about 60 people, the
kid behind the espresso machine loved my performance.
The nuns at tables in the back, not so much. But many
people came up to me afterward curious about the nature
and obvious novelty of the work,  now a hallmark of
any Parcelli performance.





In for a Punany



An Andy Shalal Busboys and Poets opened in
Hyattsville. I had performed some of my older material
at Derrick Brown’s Tuesday Night open mikes at the
DC  Busboys at 14th and V. Though heavily spoken
word/hip hop oriented, I was able to pull off some
fairly complex passages from my earlier Tale of the
Tribe and ‘The Gilded Age of Far-Reaching
Ruin’ to thunderous if not bewildered applause.



Now I was at Love the Poet’s open mike venue at the new
Hyattsville Busboys in full costume, the first performer
ever, with Derrick Brown and Gene Rosenthal in the
house. I was taking acting lessons from a local
Shakesperean actor and was off book on Lazarus
which I performed, if I do say so myself, quite well, to
a sold out audience (yes folks @, $5.00 a ticket — for
poetry) of 150 people.



I’d belt out “Don’t Talk to me ma likes that ya fuckin’
lushy.”

Or “Son, we’s about ta come ta blows. I ain’t no
spelunking scabie what can be chased about by your fine
tone.” 



Brown was standing in the back howling his approval. But
in the front three or four rows of tables – 
nothing.



Line:  “So’s the boys down the pub ask, (pan
audience right) If he’s resurrect, (pan audience left)
Where the fuck is he?”  Nothing. An oil painting.



Turns out that Michelle Antoinette Nelson aka Love the
Poet’s dad who is a fine jazz guitarist is also a deacon
in his church in Baltimore. His trio was performing
after me and half the congregation had come down to hear
them. Them Baptists were not amused by my New Testament
re-write. And Love couldn’t let it go. She kept
commenting on it as though “What the fuck is going on in
this white boy’s brain.” And she’s a Punany poet. How
utterly  radical and transgressive my monologues
must be if poetry about one woman eating another woman’s
pussy before a Baptist congregation is de rigueur by
comparison not to mention the other carryings on at such
performances.



I did get a short lived MC gig of my own out of that
performance of Lazarus at Busboys, but for a seniors 55
and older night. And though the crowd was large
apparently seniors don’t spend enough on booze and food
and the house was cash and tip light. So I got the axe.
But not before having the opportunity to perform my
beloved Vernacchio Porcellus monologue for the
first time publicly.








Next stop, the bars.



 Gene Rosenthal suggested I try a biker bar outside
of Annapolis, MD. It was primarily a music venue but if
I did mostly comic monologues, I might not get stabbed.
But when I looked up their ad it read, “No profanity.”
Mind you the online ad had a picture of a row of
Harley’s in front of the bar. So I called and said, “Is
it true that you do not allow performers to use
profanity during a performance.” Voice on the line, “If
you use profanity, you will be physically removed from
the stage.” I said, “Are you kidding? How about cunt or
cocksucker? How about blasphemy and ethnic slurs like
dumb, born again redneck asshole? Do you swing with berk
or motherfucker?” Click. 



So I just went down to the Bossa Bistro in Adams Morgan
for a couple of beers and open mike night. They use an
open mike round robin where you perform in turn. Again,
mostly spoken word.  Performed three monologues and
the response from the audience was very positive.



So a few weeks later I went back in full costume. There
were different moderators but they were two chaps that
had performed the last time I was there. For my second
monologue, I did Gesmas, the Bad Thief, balls
out.









 Literally? You be the judge. At one point Gesmas
(see online performance at bookstore venue) spits at his
Roman executioners as a kind of  anti-benediction
and a pretty good size loogey hit the floor in front of
a customer’s table.



I stopped to apologize, but the kids at the table were
really into it and pleaded for me to just go on. 
But somebody, probably the owner, had had enough of the
profanity, slurs or blasphemy, or perhaps all of the
above.  To heighten the irony, one of the
moderators that night was Shahid Buttar, executive
director, who leads the Bill of Rights Defense Committee
and the People’s Campaign for the Constitution, standing
by while my First Amendment Rights were violated and I
was blocked from the stage. Oh, how I savor that
moment. 



I hasten to add that it was the other moderator, Damian,
who actively prevented me from performing, not Mr.
Buttar. I find Mr. Buttar to be a hail and good fellow.
Just too easily cowed.



Imagine just how revolutionary and radical these
monologues must be to be shunned by the supposed bible
belt, Harley riding right, the neo-liberal left and the
radical far left. I’m definitely onto something.



Then there’s the nuclear free zone, highly progressive,
utterly sissified Takoma Park venues. Takoma Park
Library reading series: “Now way. We have to consider
the children.”  Tell them they can’t come to this.
“No. Others might find it offensive too.”



Capitol City Cheesecake? I couldn’t do Lazarus because
it wouldn’t clean up for the two children in the
audience or that was the canard. So I did Barabbas,
slightly bowdlerized. But emotionally it was too much
for the dainty moderator who complained about my
harmless stage dagger and told a ridiculous story about
someone committing suicide on stage. Look buddy. If
you’re threatened by the work, that’s reason for me to
embrace it. Like Ives said, “Don’t be such a sissy.”
Sissy.



Gene Rosenthal , who’s as gutsy and loyal as they come
and who wields a mean cane, booed the moderator for
censoring one of his ‘signed ‘talents’. The moderator
came rushing down the aisle to hush Gene. A shoving
match ensued between the older free speech beats and
hippies and the new sanitized neo-liberal sissy class
who run the arts in Washington.

 

Rod Smith at Bridge Street. “We only do experimental.”
Yeah, a cliquish little sleep fest of dull, dreary lang
poos. Almost cost me a friend who got utterly bored at a
reading there that I, too, fell asleep at. No, we don’t
want to wake up that cult.



John Berndt at the Red Room in Baltimore. “No. We’re
looking for experimental music,” though their page says
performance. I almost lost a friend there too who was so
utterly bored and intellectually insulted by a subpar
lecture that he threatened never to speak to me again.
And there was no music. No performance. Just a very
dull, fucking lecture?

 

Most venues simply didn’t respond. A few said the
material was “not for them” or they found it downright
offensive. This included a few bars. Other venues like
the Bloombars do not allow profanity. No profanity at
all! And you can be fined for using it. Yikes
Leopold!! 



A
Unitarian church backed out when it got wind of
the material.



Jordan Davis, he of the Johnny Carson poetry parody and
now poetry editor at the Nation, at first refused to
answer a simple email query about possible venues. Then
he tersely said he wasn’t involved in that scene
anymore. So I submitted 3 monologues to the Nation with
a self-addressed stamp envelope and never heard from
them again. He didn’t even have the decency to send a
form rejection. Damn, Jordan. I thought we were friends.



Other friends tried to book me in New York. But nothing.
I sent out comp copies of the 88 monologues figuring
maybe someone we had published over the years would
suggest a joint performance. Again silence. Most didn’t
even acknowledge receiving the book, a matter of a ten
word email.



Naive me thought that poets around the country who
shared common cause would invite me to read either
before their classes or in conjunction with a reading
series they sponsored. Nah. Is it now a matter of
bourgeois channels? I’ve often made it crystal clear I
can pay my own way and neither need nor expect payment
for any performance. And my audiences don’t fall asleep.



Red Emma’s, a Marxist collective in Baltimore, failed to
answer several email requests and applications to
perform. Nothing. Like I didn’t exist. I’ll wager it’s
because their performance space is in the basement of a
church, though they do have events in their bookstore
too. At least, that’s my understanding. But who the fuck
really knows. And I know these people from Johns
Hopkins. Red Sissies?



Lucky you’re dead, Lenny, or you’d have to fucking start
all over again with the motherfucking profanity thing.
Only this time, the police wouldn’t be necessary. We
have the new neo-liberal sissy class policing us.



Then I get a call from a folk singer named Phil Fox.
He’s seen my act including a couple of private parties
and the near riot at the Capitol City CheeseFoot.



“I got a venue for you. Show up at Jerry’s Music on
Friday evening in full costume. No problem. I’ll give
you 20 minutes. Longer if the crowd is small.”



I go. I perform. It goes pretty well. Maybe 40 people
but the venue can easily accommodate twice that. Jerry,
the owner of the venue, loves me. He comes and
personally thanks me and asks me to come
back.  



Wednesday I get a call from Phil. He just wants to make
sure I’m coming.  “I’ll be there,” I say. Finally,
a steady gig to hone my craft, go off book and maybe
crush this DVD thing for Adelphi which has very high
performance standards.



Thursday the phone rings, “You’re out,” Jerry says. “The
owner wants to have some of his advanced guitar students
perform there and some of them are only 14. Either you
drop the profanity or you’re out.”



“Then I’m out,” I say, knowing full well that there
isn’t a word in any those monologues with the exception
of ‘berk’ that those guitar students aren’t using
everyday to describe each other’s nasty bits.



And being a glutton for punishment the dreary list goes
on.



I can only assume from my experience that I have reached
an entirely new level of taboo literature with these
monologues. I have shocked if not the nation, certainly
the Nation’s Capital, and I have been marginalized for
it, denied venues at every turn.



We have truly reached the era of the Sissy Literati in
the whimper of their discontent, where the likelihood of
Chaucer, Joyce, William Burroughs, Swift, Henry Miller,
Jarry, Rabelais etc. being published today is as remote
as pig rectum giving way to real calamari at the $4.95
all you can eat buffet in Jessup.



You will say I appear to relish my outsider status. But
what else do I have when I have no venue in which to
perform.