Kickstart the love, my friends. A soulful, funkalicious project

Send your love now! To

Fanny Franklin Soul-Oo Record!

Okay, I'll back up.  First.  That's Mark Cross on keyboards.  He "wailed all through the first year of his life." A natural-born musician.

The line is from my poem "The Rebirth Live" -- my contribution to the anthology, Say It Outloud: Poems About James Brown.

What's happening? Mark is collaborating with soulful, funky temptress Fanny Franklin on getting a CD out there, there!, so you can download the love.

Love costs, my friends, sadly, these days. The project is on Kickstarter, however, so, really, all the love will cost you is a minimum of, say, $1.  Say, $5.  Say, $30.  More if you have more. 

But really love doesn't cost so much as work. Love works. It does. So if you don't have money, send love. Here's a thought, you could send both.  Okay, I'll shut up. I'll end this with another line from the poem.

"God is in the funk the beat the blues."

Believe. Believe it.

Fanny Franklin Soul-Oo Record!

For more info about Say It Outloud, go to James Brown.

While the soup heats: Ed Go, the G train, essay on my poems

Go's pocket. O Smêagol!

Soup? French lentils pink, and thin as orphan about to eat.  They cook down quickly. I saute garlic; spices; add vegetables.  Cauliflower disintegrates into a million microscopic "ettes" so the soup seems creamy.

Chard, kale, beet greens. Carrots and their tops or carrot tops and their bottoms. Sweet potatoes. Add a sliced apple to offset the pleasant bitterness of greens.  So that's what's reheating on the stove. 

As for Ed Go, co-editor of Other Rooms Press, well, he introduced me to the "G" train a few years ago so I could get to an Other Rooms reading.  His instructions on problems inherent in the "G" (many) included cell phone #s, escape routes, promises to catch up with me in the hereafter if I didn't make it. I made it.

Since then my ease with the G has stunned citizens of Queens and Brooklyn and saved me last night when an F train from Manhattan turned into an M. I made it.

Ed Go wrote an essay, "Heaven, Hell & Middle Earth," about three poems in The Future Is Happy: "Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina in Heaven" "The Rebirth Live" and "hAve You Been Married, the Sister asK" (the latter published in Other Rooms).

A poet himself, Go schools the reader on new ways into a poem along routes of transformation, transcendence, sufferings, company. For example:

'. . . for music is that perfect blend of form and substance, and in “The Rebirth Live” it comes in the form of a “compact miracle disk” (27) that reminds the I of the poem of birth, and rebirth, not an interpretation but an experience—a miraculous one that transcends interpretation.'

Take a look at Heaven, Hell & Middle Earth.