Exploring the Deep Soul of Man

Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey

by Mark Winborn

(Fisher King Press, September 1, 2011)

"All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours." --James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

Trying to define the blues takes you away from the blues.

Mark Winborn acknowledges this dilemma in the introduction to Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey, and then successfully explores the origins, scope, function, themes, performers, healing and imaginal nature of the blues experience. Setting the stage, he quotes from the Reverend Emmett Dickinson’s 1930 recorded sermon “Is There Harm in Singing the Blues?”

There’s so-called preachers all over this land

Are talking about the man or woman who sings the blues

You don’t know the meaning of the blues

The blues is only an outward voice to that inward feeling

Dickinson imagines the blues began with Adam singing “I didn’t know my burden was so hard.” Bluesmen, whom Winborn sees somewhat in the role of shamans, invite the audience to listen, participate, and be potentially changed—or even healed—by the sounds, symbols and ancient themes that flow out of the words and music of a performance.

The performer’s emotions usually arise out of his burden. When the bluesman’s sorrow and depression rise up from the void and hit the air, Winborn suggests that the singer and the listener shift out of ordinary consciousness into a “perceiving consciousness” of inner knowing outside the everyday realm of logic and the five senses.

In exploring this shift into “blues consciousness,” Winborn draws on Erich Neumann’s theory of unitary reality of the knowledge that the ego-complex can process and the felt knowledge of intuition and feelings that it cannot process. We cannot logically and directly categorize, analyze and describe the nature of the information flowing from performer to listener and back again during a performance any more than we can describe the blues itself.

Fortunately, we don’t have to apply ordinary consciousness to the task. The bluesman and his performance serve as an intermediary between the deep source of knowledge about the foundations of life and ourselves. “The themes associated with the blues,” writes Winborn, “are the building blocks of human experience: love, sex, work, travel, gambling, abandonment, loss of autonomy, addiction, adultery, relationship, trust, jealousy, joy, betrayal, and death.”

Author Ursula Le Guin has said that fantasy and mythic stories speak to us “unconscious to unconscious.” In his 1967 inquiry into the nature of man, Man in Search of Himself, physicist Jean E. Charon writes that inasmuch as the material in the unconscious is in archetypal form, works of art communicate it via an innate knowledge shared by artist and viewer in a language which “awakes unconscious resonances in each of us.” Winborn’s “Archetypal Manifestations of the Blues” and “Blues Play: Performers and Performance” chapters strike a similar chord.

From Deep Blues, readers new to the blues learn where the blues came from, how and why they became important, and the characteristics of both the poetry and the music. Readers familiar with the blues may feel an on-going déjà vu that takes them back to every B. B. King, Ma Rainey and Muddy Waters song they ever heard. Winborn supplements his insights with a rich selection of blues lyrics from a variety of artists.

“The blues is about maintaining a close relationship to one’s emotional life; becoming more intimately acquainted with one’s emotions and embracing what is painful, but also embracing what is ultimately enriching and meaningful,” Winborn writes in the book’s conclusion. His insights come not only from well-focused research and his work as a Jungian psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, but from a lifetime of listening to the blues.  Without taking us away from the blues, Deep Blues illuminates the scope, depth and source of the “outward voice to that inward feeling.”

Reviewed by Malcolm R. Campbell, author of the contemporary fantasy Sarabande.

The Magic of an Irish Story

Bogmeadow's Wish

by Terry Kay

(Mercer University Press, March 30, 2011)

Georgia author Terry Kay’s eleventh novel is a charming story, an Irish story about love and death and pubs and sacred landscapes and the kind of magic that will draw away your workaday world cares the way the sun draws away the mist from summer fields soon after the break of day.

“At the moment of his death,” Bogmeadow’s Wish begins, “Michael Finn Coghlan’s life slipped quietly out of his body, like the gentle release of a small, cool fish into dark waters.” To read Terry Kay is to become accustomed to such imagery.

In his author’s note, Kay (To Dance with the White Dog, Valley of Light) says that this “light romance” with “the kind of exaggerated spirit one expects of the Irish” is filled with something he’s never written about before: magic.

In terms of storytelling and a craftsman’s love of language, this novel is classic Terry Kay. But the magic is new and it begins with purported struggle back in the old country between Michael Finn Coghlan and a leprechaun named Bogmeadow who—when captured by Coghlan—granted a wish that could be handed down through the generations until it was used.

Coghlan left Ireland years ago for reasons he won’t clarify. Throughout his lifetime, he was known for his stories about his homeland—Ah, let me tell you about Finn McCool and Sally Cavanaugh over a pint at Dugan’s Tavern. . .This brings to mind the tale about Patrick the Believer—yet when given a fine chance to return to Ireland for a visit, he refused, angering his perplexed wife.

Finn never went back to Ireland or used Bogmeadow’s wish, though speaking of them made fine stories. A Kay's story unfolds, Finn’s grandson Cooper Finn Coghlan of Atlanta is following his grandfather’s wish: taking his ashes back to Ireland. “Let my ashes blow in the wind. You'll know the place when you come to it. I'll be there, telling you.” Jealous that they’re not going with him, Cooper’s close friends map out his itinerary to ensure he sees the sights worth seeing and insist that he call home with frequent reports about every pint, every glorious vista and the ongoing status of the ashes.

Cooper travels, waits to hear his grandfather say “this the place” and meets people along the way who have stories to tell, who wish to do him harm, and who hope to kiss him, and everywhere he goes is seemingly tangled with a magic of sorts as though hidden-away hands are pulling strings and arranging his fate. The spitting image of his grandfather, Cooper loves the old stories and he can tell them well. But since he’s basically a logical man, he’s hard-pressed to account for the prospective magic that’s turning his trip to Ireland into the kind of story old Michael Finn Coghlan would tell from his favorite chair in his favorite pub.

The story sings. You’ll hear the toe-tapping music of flutes and fiddles and the lilt of Irish voices in Kay’s words. He discovered the story waiting for him within his imagination while traveling between Dublin and Waterford and Cork. In Bogmeadow’s Wish, you'll find the towns and the people are just as real as Kay discovered in his own experience. And what’s more, you cannot help but follow young Cooper’s trip through a land where, as his grandfather once said, “nothing happened because it happened” without considering the why of things.

Such notions bring to mind the story of a man named Cooper Finn Coghlan who traveled from Atlanta to Dublin with a box of ashes to scatter and discovered with the help of an expedient teller of tales named Sandy McAfee and beautiful young woman named Kathleen O'Reilly everything he needed to know to put his life back together if he could only resist lapsing back into logic and practicality and running away home.

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Reviewed by  Malcolm R. Campbell,  author of "Sarabande,"  a contemporary fantasy adventure

Beautiful, Deeply Moving Worlds

Soul Stories: Safari to Mara & Aria of the Horned Toad 
by Elizabeth Clark-Stern 
(Genoa House June 21, 2011)

Like the mentors and magical helpers who guide seekers through unknown worlds, author Elizabeth Clark-Stern captures readers in her well-woven net of spell-binding words and hauls us on board a book of dreams.

In “Soul Stories” we discover two novellas about two young girls—each with an absent mother and a strong father—who must find within themselves the wisdom and courage to understand the harsh realities of the adult world. Each girl has a wonderful guide. In “Safari to Mara,” Mara rides a zebra named Lo Lo into her future. In “Aria of the Horned Toad,” Beatrice rides a toad named Custard into her present.

In the heat of the African plains, Mara finds solace in the land that cradles the Masai. In the heat of central Texas, Beatrice finds solace in a river of dreams that flows unseen through the streets of Austin. Mara feels abandoned. Beatrice feels unwanted. Their souls cry out to be filled with love in Africa where going on safari might mean watching cruel nature take its course and in Austin where coming home at dusk might mean staring at a mother’s empty chair at the dinner table.

In “Safari to Mara,” Clark-Stern immerses readers in a dazzling landscape of predators and prey where life and death manifest as an infinite dance. It’s a lot for Mara to absorb and comprehend. In “Aria of the Horned Toad,” she serves readers a thirst-quenching eye-opener of well-shaken reality and make-believe. It’s a difficult puzzle for Beatrice to put together.

In her Masai world, Mara is on the cusp of womanhood where she is expected to prepare for marriage. She has other ideas. She seeks a future wide enough for larger dreams. In her Austin neighborhood, circumstances force Beatrice to shoulder adult-level responsibilities before she is done being a child. She is willing to do what’s required of her, though she seeks a here-and-now where children can be loved and safe.

These extraordinary stories are for dreamers and for those who want to become dreamers. They speak to the pure child in us. They can be read to children on dark and stormy nights and spun into tall tales around summer campfires where the dark forest around us encourages us to believe the veil between reality and dream is thin veil.

Wherever they are read, told and re-told, the disparate yet similar stories in “Soul Stories” are a joy to the ear that hears the spell-binding words and to the mind’s eye that sees Clark-Stern’s beautiful, deeply moving worlds.
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Reviewed by 
Malcolm R. Campbell, 
author of "Sarabande," 
a contemporary fantasy adventure

“For Lovers of Our Language”: A Review of Bradley Lastname’s Insane in the Quatrain

(the Press of the 3rd Mind, Chicago, Illinois, 2011, ISBN: 1103001157)

I was first introduced to Bradley Lastname through his role as publisher of the early books of Patrick Porter and Robert Pomerhn through Press of the 3rd Mind, books they each sent me for review. This was early in the new millennium, when I was doing a lot of poetry writing, mail art, and corresponding with fertile-field poets like Ric Carfagna, Mark Sonnefeld, Joseph Verilli, and Vernon Frazer.

I first experienced Bradley’s writing when I was asked to review the first volume of Letterhead (Highest Hurdle Press, 2007), which was in part a tribute to Harvey Goldner, a mentor of Pomerhn’s. Lastname and his co-editors also produced a second volume of Letterhead, in which some of my own work appeared.

Before starting Press of the 3rd Mind in 1985, Lastname published 25 issues of the acclaimed BILE Dadazine dating from 1978 to 1984.

In addition to publishing over ten books of poetry and prose, he is a painter, sculptor, and collagist and to me, one of the champions of the necessity of poetry, and art, to any sensemaking the modern world is ultimately able to make.

Insane in the Quatrain is a 188-page celebration of all of the ingredients that make poetry the (albeit undervalued) powerful vehicle for socio-cultural-politic commentary and encapsulation that it is. Lastname is the master of wordplay, turning, corkscrewing, and cascading phrases and lyrical structures to produce a mixture of laugh-out-loud, thought-provoking, and at times shocking pieces of poetry.

As one would expect, there is plenty of surrealism, Dadaism, and corollary representations here, as well as a general gamut-running of language poetry styles, but what I like best about Insane in the Quatrain is how substantial it is in content as well as form, which is far from the case with many other language poets, who use the devices and mechanisms of the sub-genre as ends in and of themselves, which, to me, simply doesn’t satisfy.

Take for instance, a very short poem, “Pre- and Post-Sartori” (p. 26):

“Before enlightenment, Los Angeles smells like stale urine.
After enlightenment, stale urine smells like Los Angeles.”

It’s all the off-brand wisdom of Kerouac and the Beats with a healthy dose of humor.

That’s progress.

Although it may not to be to everyone’s tastes, I have always enjoyed poetry with plenty of cultural references, and Insane in the Quatrain offers them in abundance, from Shakespeare to Kierkegaard, Nabokov to Warhol, Richard Dadd to Brother Theodore, Godard to Geller, Artaud to Rimbaud, and Louis Althusser to Aleister Crowley. If an author and the resultant body of work is the sum of his or her experiences of observation, inspiration, and illumination, then such references are the mile-markers and landmarks that the fellow travel can visit for a glimpse behind the curtain and a first-hand dose of the referent.

It should be noted that, enjoyably, and rightly, there is plenty in the way of self-reference as well, be it by name or titles of other Lastname works.

Again, as a purely personal preference, I also enjoyed the many New World Order–type references sewn quietly throughout the poems. I’ll leave it to the (mis?)informed reader to find these little nuggets of what-might-really-be-at-work-here insertion.

“The Torso who Ordered Orzo” (22), “The Fall of the House of Gusher” (64), and “The Tournament” (110) are three examples of longer prose-poems that provide highlights of the collection.

My favorite piece in Insane in the Quatrain is also one of the last: “Quotations from Badly Steamed Lard” [an anagram of Bradley Lastname]. These are the types of one-liner sutra meditations in madness and wonder that will adorn the subway trains and abandoned brick tenements should the NWO raise the silk-spun specters of Crowley, Althusser, Dadd, and Artaud to populate the stages and lecture halls of the Party’s new places.

So go out and get yourself a copy of the latest from Lastname. It might just be one of those prescient kinds of books that are often mistaken for mere non-sense in their time.

“Another Piece of the Paranormal Puzzle”

A review of Rosemary Ellen Guiley and Philip J. Imbrogno’s
The Vengeful Djinn: Unveiling the Hidden Agenda of Genies
(2011, Llewellyn Worldwide, www.llewellyn.com; ISBN: 978-0-7387-2171-2)

by Joey Madia

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. — Socrates

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.—Hamlet, Act I, sc. v

The Vengeful Djinn, by two scientifically minded experts in the fields of the paranormal and supernatural, is an important contribution to the ongoing pursuit of answers about the Unknown, an often attacked but nevertheless serious undertaking that attracts controversy and derision from both within its ranks and without.

Guiley and Imbrogno cover a large swath of study and territory in the book’s 260 pages, which include two appendices, a bibliography, and an index. They begin with a detailed and yet well-explained tutorial on quantum physical aspects of alternate realities and the idea of the multiverse, including “string theory,” setting up with science the plausibility of the djinn dwelling in a parallel plane to ours, which allows them to interact with us without being seen.

“Vive LeRoi: A powerful kick at the American way of life.”

The Chronicles of a Wandering Soul: Book 1

il piccolo editions presents

The Chronicles of a Wandering Soul
Book 1 - LeRoi
by Mel Mathews
ISBN 9781926715339, 204 pp, 2010


“An introspective allegory about the search for prosperity of the soul . . .”
—Midwest Book Review

“Mel Mathews’ place in the ranks of fine contemporary writers is assured.”
In The Chronicles of a Wandering Soul series, the wandering, questing central figure of Malcolm Clay has become a new literary icon. With thoughtful ruminations, keen humor, informative explorations of themes from religion to traits of visited countries, and so many clever double entendres, Mel Mathews’ place in the ranks of fine contemporary writers is assured.

—Grady Harp, goodreads, Amazon.com Top10 Reviewer

“Vive LeRoi: A powerful kick at the American way of life.”

LeRoi is ostensibly a novel, and not overtly psychological, but it lays bare the psychic plight of a middle-aged man looking for meaning. It is a powerful kick at the American way of life—ambition, success, money and power—but it is redemptive in the narrator’s search for internal Eros and an outer relationship he can trust himself to believe in.
—Daryl Sharp, author and publisher, Inner City Books

Gathering and Reassembling Our Pasts

by Grady Harp

A review of Leah Shelleda's After the Jug Was Broken

Some books of poetry provide solace for personal cum universal bruises while provided sustenance for minds eager to revisit the mythology of the past, seeking a path to understanding the present. They are few these days, when most poets are bent of sharing autobiographical moments that may or may not connect with the audience depending on sectors or gender or philosophies or other circumstances. Leah Shelleda happily offers us a collection of brilliantly composed poems that fall into the realm of universal connection that a knowledge of mythology and other foreign ports have provided her.

Shelleda divides her collection into four parts: Mythos (utterly extraordinary sensitive works recalling mythological and real people in a manner that stirs the imagination); Empeiria/Experience; Topos/Place (exotic ports of pleasure and the unknown); Pneuma/Spirit. If her quarto suggests philosophical bent, then the reader has successfully entered her world. Poetry of this caliber doesn't just roll off the pen: these poems represent a mind's activity that is at all times exploring the aspects of living we too often ignore. As the opening to her invitation to her four part journey she offers the following poem: