Review for Travel By Haiku in Write Now Philly

A review of Travel By Haiku by Madison Betts, just in time for summer

Published in Write Now Philly:

“The artful entwining of anecdotes with poetry created by the six collaborators brings attention to the effect of connection. Whether through the connected lines of poetry, the bonds between Deerfield and his friends, the ties to those they meet on the road, or the immersion in nature, connection is felt throughout the book. It is exactly the energy needed in 2021 and in the coming years.”

Read more here: https://writenowphilly.com/road-tripping-from-home/

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Monday, July 15 – Disrupt The Daydream

 

HEY BROOKLYN!

Join me next Monday, July 15th at The Bohemian Grove for Disrupt The Daydream. I’ll be sharing some spoken word along with performances by Samantha Riott, Mr. Truelove, OPTO S, KA, and Holy Hell.

a noise/poetry showcase presented by crass lips records. Let’s open some minds and conjure some higher frequencies.

[rsvp & more info].

POETS FOR PEACE, TOUR NO. 8: DAY 2 – RECAP

POETS FOR PEACE

Tour no. 8

Day 2 – Blacksburg, VA: recap

on the road with Marian McLaughlin (@marianmclaughlin) and Erin White (@movedtomove)

Morning ceremonies at the James River in Richmond. Reflecting on all the generations present at the reading the previous evening. Everyone from Erin’s parents and her father’s bandmates to the youthful presence of a 6 month old, wailing along to the Appalachian chords of his father playing the banjo.

We offer several marigolds to the James. A decree of peace to meet these tidal waters’ flow. Spring warmth at our shoulders. The future ahead of us.

The drive to Blacksburg is long, but gorgeous. Blue mountains. Green gables. Magenta redbud blossoms. Gradients of ecology expressing ecstasy. Virginia is for lovers.

The Hahn Horticultural Garden offers a backdrop of tulips and crocus. Coy pond trickling by. Lights and magic as the sun begins to fall behind the horizon line. There’s a report from the front lines of a movement stewarding the land in opposition to the Mountain Valley Pipeline. We hear the statistics of climate change. There are natural made scents passed around to go along with the poems. Poems about personal experience and bouts of sadness. About maintaining the sovereignty of the body. About a love so passionate it makes all the woes of modern society go away. The birds singing to the sun’s retreat. Collaborations between poets and nature.

At a certain point, the midsummer night’s dream is awaking. Marian McLaughlin providing the chorus. This is the type of place where magic is upon the eve. We like sprites glow purple and pink, as the moon rises above to light the scene.

New Chapters About Yosemite Falls

 

https://www.patreon.com/marshalljameskavanaugh

One challenge I find myself encountering while I attempt to write these chapters about Marshall Deerfield’s first trek into Yosemite National Park is balancing layered poetic soliloquies declaring existential intangibilities with descriptions of the necessary action to take this wild-eyed protagonist through such sheer expansiveness of wilderness. The steps he takes to climb each boulder are in essence just as important as the infinite sound of his destination, the peak of a three thousand foot tall waterfall. The poetry of Yosemite is endless, and yet I’m trying to be a modern beatnik or zen lunatic as I write it and really capture its essence with as few words as possible narrowing in on the uncertain truths that make it such an unparalleled natural wonder.

I just uploaded two chapters that I think do a good job at taking on this balance between action and setting. Below is an excerpt from one of the chapters. You can read the rest of it by subscribing at the link above. Any support is greatly appreciated while I continue to trek deeper into this novel. For small amounts a month you’ll be able to preview it as I work on it, as well as read my other published works. Please take a look and thanks!

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It’s a sound I hear long before I have completed the trek, a dull roar that replaces the sound of the raindrops giving stillness to the mind with all its immense power of movement so that I am lured closer by the way it cuts away at the air with all that potential.

A group of Japanese tourists stand at its base holding up binoculars to admire its grace and some of them pose for photographs while laughing wildly along to all its ripples. The falls sleek like a needle sewing two faces of rock into one and scattering a cloud of perspiration while the work is done. The tops of those peaks lost to the fog so that the illusion is set that maybe their heights are infinite and that waterfall comes straight from an overturned chalice of mother’s milk exposed to us temperate heathens.

There’s a bench perfectly placed and I have a seat while I try to take in the entire scene, a totally awesome one, tourists dancing by in red and yellow rain jackets like little swans, giggling when some increase in volume causes the whole waterfall to pause and then rupture sending a splash of condensation out into the crowds looking into it. Something strange about the experience even calls for the clown within to do something truly foolish and go swimming beneath that endless power as if a thousand foot drop of water wouldn’t be enough to paralyze even the most graceful of swimmers, but then again maybe that’s the point. This waterfall’s song is so much more than that of its smaller siblings, with each breath of renewed force it causes paralysis freezing the nerves and subduing the mind from thinking. A powerful nothing as big as anything could possibly be.

Poets For Peace in Taos

POETS FOR PEACE
Tour no. 4
Day 4 – Taos: recap
on the road with Julia Daye and Anthony Carson

[Read the article in Taos News here.]

To return to the high desert. A community we’ve all grown in. Surrounded by our peers of peace. The night is full of ceremony.

Rose petals made love to are passed around and everyone is instructed to hold them throughout the night channeling peace into those red rosy petals to be buried in the earth later like a seed. Then Alexandra Grajeda shared the prayers of her ancestors to help us to be present for the exchange.

Her words come out slow and graceful. The audience relaxes brought into a space of community.

The Poets For Peace have already shared various emotions in their previous events. Punk rage. The inner clown. This night the tears begin to flow.

As I read essays on my experiences at Standing Rock, I can feel chills stir in the audience and those chills then run up my spine stirring me until I am uncontrollably weeping at each sentence, reliving the experiences as I read them.

Julia and Anthony feel this too. We are all on extra edge. The power of the night causing us to pay special attention to the spells we cast.

At the end of the evening we sit in a circle and everyone exchanges their thoughts and prayers. Hearing the diversity of voices, seeing the diversity of faces, I can’t help but think of an image of Peace that was common when I was a kid. All the people of the world holding hands while dancing around the circumference of the planet.

We sit and exchange.
Everyone listens.
Again I am weeping.
Hearing so much purity of heart.
Hearing the talents of this wild place.
The room feels cathartic.
We are all in this together.
Finding our way.

Poets For Peace in Boulder

POETS FOR PEACE
Tour no. 4
Day 3 – Boulder: recap
on the road with Julia Daye and Anthony Carson

The night in Boulder ends at a pizza place. The table filled with poets old and new. Poets For Pizza. It’s the history of the town that puts this in context. Here we are, the Allen Ginsberg’s, Jack Kerouac’s, Neal Cassidy’s of our generation hovering around our slices of pizza like coffee mugs, discussing the politics of the day.

I look around at my peers and am in awe of the power of these individuals around me. Journeyers and dreamers. Wordsmiths and musicians. Voicing the concerns of the oppressed. Creating a more intersectional reality. Serving their community inwards and outwards.

Earlier there was a poetry reading at Innisfree Poetry Bookstore & Cafe, one of the only poetry-specific bookstores in the country. Full of beatnik and meta-beatnik flare, as well as so many other incredibly powerful voices.

The reading begins with the words of Jona Fine. Taking us back to the shooting at a night club in Orlando last year. The outcry of the LGBTQ+ community. The fear that beckons at our door again. The strength of those who have been through it before, coming together and raising each other up to face another day.

Matt Clifford follows. Honoring the inner clown. Espousing through satire, 2nd amendment laws and the way government polices us all. His truths that we all die, most of us relatively soon, are met with bursts of laughter. Jaws dropping. Turning over this bleak reality. And yet the joy inside a moment so fleeting.

More and more students and vagabonds begin marching in. Fellow peaceniks and curious townsfolk. Carrying signs and songs of the rêvelution. The room swells for the Poets For Peace.

It creates the space for two clowns and the voice of the mother earth to take to the microphone and shed applause and laughter on the atmosphere. The room evolving from poetry to vaudeville. The clowns laughing so hard, they’re not sure if others laugh with them, at them, or maybe are all silent, their own laughter being so loud it serves to seem like it’s everyone’s. The voice of the mother earth giving soothing, healing vibes with her groundedness.

A round robin of poetry from each one of them. Haikus that sing. Prayers to Mother Earth. Songs of enlightenment.

The one clown with a guitar makes faces that cause some clowns in the audience to burst out laughing. He says, “Oh, you like that? You like my face?” and continues with more eccentricity in his expressions and voice acting.

The voice of the mother earth blows wind into the two clowns’ fires. She speaks eloquently and passionately about the plague of toxic masculinity on her surface. On her terrestial body. It causes the clowns to settle down with their horseplay and focus on how they too are a part of the problem, but can also be part of the solution.

The other clown reads of the Hayukka. The Sacred Clowns of Lakota legend. He talks of direct action and nonviolent protest. Something of a skit like The Three Stooges that took place at Standing Rock, involving clowns in a canoe and police following along the shore in a professional golf cart.

The night almost lasts too long. But it’s just perfect. Short enough to be a dream. Long enough to leave everyone feeling complete.

To finish it off, one of the clowns pulls out a kaleidoscope and shares his psychedelic visions with the peaceniks who have amassed around him. One of them drops it and it shatters into a million pieces. Confetti for the breeze to take away into the infinite star dust above. When the clown picks it up and looks back through this kaleidoscope monacle, the vision is even more twisted and satisfying.

Everything in rainbows and ecstatic multi-colored light.

Poets For Peace – on tour

POETS FOR PEACE
tour in August through the Southwest

Tomorrow, I will embark on the road again with Poets For Peace. It’s been nice to have the break to write for myself and catch up on other areas in my life, but with the increased aggression mounting in the Pacific from the United States war machine, I find myself drawn back into the endless peace walk I began with several other poets on the East Coast earlier this year.

This time I will be joined by wordsmiths Julia Daye and Anthony Carson both currently residing in Taos, NM. Last year, though sometimes it feels like much longer ago, we were on the road up to North Dakota in a caravan to Standing Rock. I think I can speak for all of us when I say our experiences there greatly changed our lives. It was there that we saw what America’s war machine looks like when it is turned against its own people. But it was also there that we discovered a great Peace manifesting in the people’s collective prayers, sharing traditions far older than this Western imperialism.

I’m excited to share the road with these great fellow Earth Protectors again. To share some light with our surrounding communities. To create dialogues of hope and progress. To channel peace and love. With this fire in our hearts we shall overcome.

Dates are below! Hope to see you out at one of our shows!

Poets For Peace Tour with Julia Daye and Anthony Carson

• 8/22 LIVE on 93.5FM KNCE
• 8/23 at Seventh Circle Music Collective in Denver, CO
• 8/24 at Innisfree Poetry Bookstore & Cafe in Boulder, CO
• 8/25 at Ennui Gallery in Taos, NM

Poetry Tour down to New Orleans

Hey all, I’m currently in the process of booking my next poetry tour in April. I could really use all of your help filling these dates. You can reach me at afreedombooks@gmail.com if you’d like to host me in any of these locations or know someone who would. Thanks! And hope to see you out at some of these readings!

APRIL:
8 – enter Baltimore, MD

9 – PerVerse Reading Series at LitMore with Cliff Lynn
3326 Keswick Rd, Baltimore, Maryland 21211

10 – TBA in Baltimore, MD
11 – TBA in Washington DC
12 – rest day in Washington DC
13 Charlottesville, VA
14 Richmond, VA
15 Durham, NC
16-17 Asheville, NC
18 – TBA in Athens, GA
19 Athens, GA
20-21 Atlanta, GA
22-23 Alabama? maybe Birmingham or Mobile
24 – arrive in New Orleans, LA
25 – TBA in New Orleans, LA

26 – Reading at Arts House, New Orleans, LA
more details TBA soon.

28 – leave New Orleans, LA

Donate to the dream and hire me to write poetry for you!

Hey friends, tomorrow I embark on a cross-country jaunt out to California with a fine crew of fellow wanderers. We’ll be doing poetry readings on our way out, as well as some farming and adventuring, so you’ll be sure to see my advances through this wild country spread across various social media outlets over the next few months, and I look forward to sharing it with you.

If you’re looking for a way to support my poetic antics, I’ve devised a plan to engage a broader span of people with my services as a DREAM POET FOR HIRE. Basically, this website Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/marshalljameskavanaugh) functions much like a kickstarter or indiegogo campaign, only instead of a one time donation for an upcoming project, you would become one of my “patrons”, donating every time I post new content. To keep things interactive I will be fulfilling special commissions for anyone who would like to be a benefactor of mine, and as the community grows so will the quality and mediums of the work. You will not only be helping me continue to create, but directly guiding where things go.

The best part is I will continue to post most of my digital poetry for free to the public. The Patreon account will exist like a paid subscription for those who feel especially moved by my work and want to give something back. A lot of people have expressed gratitude to me over the last two years that I’ve focused my poetry online, for brightening their day or simply making their heart warm with a breath of fresh air with each post. If you’ve shared that sentiment, this is your chance to help me expand even further, and as a result receive some personalized dream poems. The campaign is set up so you can choose how much you donate per poem, and what is the maximum amount that you want to donate each month. I’d say a typical good donation per poem would be $1-5, and as more people donate the collective pot will grow, allowing me to expand what mediums I work in and how much time I spend on each piece. It is a dream to make a living as a writer, and I think this is a potential route for fulfilling that, but right now the goal is more about having fun and the ability to grow as an artist. All donations received will really go a long way in helping me pay for travel expenses, book production, and other literary expansions.

I’m really excited to start this project and begin working for you all! Anything (even just a thumbs up as support) would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions or would like more information! Also please like and share this post with anyone you think would be interested, to help spread it. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to continue writing this grand fiction that I live and keeping you all in the loop! Looking forward to seeing some of you on the road. To everyone else, thank you, and keep up the good vibes!

Take care,
Ma Ja Ka.

Poetry Tour, end of September 2014

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So, I’ve started planning the first leg of my road trip out to California with Willow Zef and Andrew Galati. This is the Northern Exposure where we go from city to city until we finally reach the plains to roam and graze until our bellies are so full of poetry the zen lunacy reaches a new plateau of humbleness. Give me a shout if you live in one of these areas along the below map and would like to set up a poetry reading for us, host us, or just point out to us something that we have to see! Also if we’re coming through your town, definitely come out to one of the performances.

This is my first time driving cross-country going west (I’ve spent most of my life driving around the east and midwest) and it hopefully won’t be the last. Excited to see you all and to find that American Dream going Further! Here are the dates and places we will be passing through:

9/21 Depart Philadelphia heading for Pittsburgh, PA
9/21-9/23 Hang in Pittsburgh and perform at the Autumnal Equinox Festival at the Bandi Shaum Community Garden
9/24 Columbus, Ohio
9/25 Oxford, Ohio or Cincinnati, Ohio
9/26-9/28 Indianapolis, IN to Chicago, IL
9/29 Milwaukee, WI
9/30 Minneapolis, MN or St. Paul, MN
10/1-10/3 camping in North Dakota
10-4-? ranching in Montana.

I’ll update the list as the tour solidifies.