New Voices "Young poets read at the Durant Library"
Produced and MC'd by Oleg Kagan
Technical Director and Photographer: Ro "Mr. D" Gendrett
Readings by: Peter Zaretskiy, Grace Kim, Jessica Rainboldt and Oleg Kagan.

It was a success! We had a good, receptive audience and some delightful poetry. Thanks to all who were involved.

By request, below are 7 of the 8 poems I read at "New Voices". I'm not ready to release one of them from the infamous green notebook, yet, so you'll have to wait. You can click on the poem you want to read, or just scroll down and get lost in them. All the way at the bottom are some pics from the reading, click on them and they'll open...because they love you. Check everything out! Enjoy!!

"New Voices" poems or, Le Menu:
- What is This?
- Artist in Love (I paaint)
- Should be Thoughts...
- Untitled
- Eat This Poem! (Bitch)
- Joining
- To Pable Neruda
- Pictures

This is one of the very first poems I wrote. It was written sitting in Mr. Dwyer's soporific classroom. He was very nice...But his voice and method...zzzzzz...

What is This?

A room, like a square.  
Seats, in symmetrical rows.  
The clock, moving around a frowning face of numbers.  
Two people on opposite side of the room equal a couple.  
X's, Y's and pies float around the room, never quite landing anywhere.  
A roomful of confused people staring blankly at a 6-sided polygon,  
and with the six-sided polygon in mind,  
I listen to a monochrome voice blabbing about parametric circles...  
and I fall asleep.  

A nice romantic poem. Also an early one.

Artist In Love (I paint)

I paint a winter afternoon for You,
with tender snowflakes falling from the sky,
I see Us on a carriage riding through,
and turn back from the picture with a smile.

I paint the autumn leaves, the season's dying,
looking into Your eyes gives Me that summer day,
when winters comes around the sky's are crying,
it only takes Your hand to wipe the tears away.

I paint a dreary eve, the winds are blowing,
such a picture only comes without You by My side,
in Your smile the hopeful morning showing,
Your every breath pushing cold dreary eve's aside.

I paint a picture of the two of Us together,
riding on Our carriage into the clouds above,
embracing, kissing, as Our Love becomes forever,
into heaven-I take the portrait of Our Love.

06-20-01

During one of my very expensive classes at UCLA, I learned that originality only became an issue in the 18th century. Before that, poets would borrow from the bible religiously and other poets/writers shamelessly. In any case, the originality was in how the ideas were put together. So in that vain comes this poem, which is a combination of two different pieces. This arrangement is mine.

Should be Thoughts from a Bus Ride on a Rainy Day 

The glass rattling,
The rain slipping, 
Still we shift,
still seeking, 
                     seeking.

l.1-2 These two lines are from Mina Loy�s Italian Pictures, Costa Magic l. 33-34
l. 3-5 are a fragment of a Native American poem that I once read and is here resurrected from memory..

This poem is one of the so-called "tension" pieces. It should be read with speed, precision and tension. Especially the c's at the end. I really don't know exactly what this poem is about, but I know it has a dark undercurrent. I do have a few guesses...In any case:

Untitled

There's a bomb in our genes
and we all blow savage
candidly we're all average
"two heads are better then one..."
nah, it's all just cabbage
let us all eat our salad
be rabid, wrangled, habits, I can't stand it
the rabbits ravage candled carrots
maggots tethered angles,
bandaged,
managed to mangle matter with
new-fangled fatter stand-ins
in tandem with seldom sparked Seconds
recorded redcards, river rapid decca records
overloaded toe-to-toe tech sports
deck wars...like a poker tournament.
we're learning it, burning skull caps
turnings raps, clap trapped messengers
to snap back tactics, tacked crack actions
...laugh tracks using Rufus* syllables
clinical ritual visuals,
spiritual nuptial visitor physicals billing you
for x-ray hillbilly victuals. pork rinds, 
grinding bare residuals
in a universal lair of chemical catalyst criminals
critical cuticle crux cutting, crutch. fuck
...either I'm stuttering or the gun is stuck...

*Rufus is my brother's nickname.

"Eat This Poem! (Bitch)" has gathered some fame as of late. The story behind it is this: I was going to join a poetry workshop, and I was thinking about what kind of poems they write at those workshops. Well, one morning I woke up (it was about 9 o'clock), sat down at my desk and wrote out this puppy...I'd say it's a reactionary piece that moved into a breaking-out. Before this, I had never written a poem quite like this. I suppose it'd be the first "tension" poem. BREAK OUT!!

Eat This Poem! (Bitch)

I am writing long lines just to please you.
Really, I can write anything and it would be fine.
But it seems to me, that the way to your poetic heart is through graces of sure-fire imagery.
That's okay, I am just beginning to know who I am-
So even though this is for you; it�s actually me writing, factually, in actuality:

I am just barely out;
A peek-a-boo finger puppet in purple morning, red dawn fire, like a rose opening
To allow me, a black babies head birthed from a white mother taking in the scene
Before making a splash (One has to test the waters). I've gotten enough 
Compliments, they love to open my eyes to the vain whisperings of lawn sprinklers
In the middle of the clean street, in the middle of the middle track house. 
I'm the baby with the horn, the unicorn with a phallus where my third eye used to be.
There's a sky painted in my nursery; it's so sublime to me.

There are many skies I've missed;
Instead I've read that asshole Kant, who's mostly dead dead wrong;
After all, all man doesn't hold his cock with the same hand when he pees.
There are many skies I've missed, painted and not
Yet shining and dying with the crack aching thunder in a shitstorm of oxymoronic splendor.
Let me take you on a short trip to my mailbox (I said short, didn't I?)
Don't look so surprised that you�ve got mail; Golden tickets are here for everyone!
I�m not finished yet, so shut the fuck up; silence is golden, remember?

Oh silent night, Oh holy night
Of holy blissful martyrs giving me the finger and diving in with the dolphin club.
As Frost said coldly, A boy's will starts with into his own. 
Baby, there are no dark trees in California and I don't own much to begin with.
So let's stop with the philosophy and be do-it boys like we promised. 

Well now, I can do it all night if I have to.
I would do anything for love (omnia vincit amor) is on my wall,
But I won't do that.
Lube the skin of three glossy little boys, the holy trinity of a female Humbert 2x.
I'm just starting out, so why not pop off royally and M.J. the button.
Maybe I'll be in court with this poem someday telling a critic,
I was a glossy little boy then, Reminiscing, asking, "Is it so wrong to love myself?"
Imploring, Begging, Saying, "Is it so wrong to love my friends: To love 
The little girls beside me, who could've had me?"

There it is with open-handed gestures you've been ushered in,
To the confessions of a dangerous mind with bi-polar trigger happy synapses
Searching for targets. Be careful about not liking this poem
You could be next, to have your head blown. So turn to
The person sitting next to you and show that fucker my voice:
A new true-blue jew with a few screws loose-
So he chooses to fuse animal crackers to form an edible zoo.

Ain't that the truth.

Fuck, I've lost my voice again. No my real voice.
Mic check, one, two.
Damn, I lost the mic! 

11/2005

Despite the title, it's really a poem of seperation. You won't get this picture from reading the poem, but for me, it started with cellular reproduction. This has little to do with the poem, but "Mulberry" is a great word.

Joining

Me and you are going to the same place. The rodeo
as a couple tied together, so we four legs walk-on
since we are one in this bullshit-knock-off to zero.

What would Adam name us?*1 Seeing two people on four ballerina
toes, prancing, a lead-in to the tango and waltz fashions.
We are here together dancing on an elephants back. Pulling his finger.

A magic carpet is useless, we must see the world kaleidoscope
through mulberry eyes, with the blue-streaked dandelions
throwing sidelong glances, at the dancing gnomes in pink capris. Dying to pee.

Fie on the prophets, I'll never be you again.
So Adam seeing the split calls acorns*2 and tells them not to come.
I'm sorry, there will be no growth. You�ll never b me.

12-04-2005

*1 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VIII, l.351-352
*2 From little acorns, mighty oaks may grow - David Icke

I ended the reading with this poem because it's a contrast from the last few in that it isn't a "tension" poem. "To Pablo Neruda" came from a collection I wrote called "Answers" in which I respond to poets and poems that have inspired me. Ever since I got the book, Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair I've been a fan of Neruda's work. If you like poetry, or need a great love poem to give to a girl, definetly check Pablo Neruda out. If you speak Spanish, all of the above times two; in Spanish his poems are double the pleasure. The refrain in this poem is from a poem by Neruda called "Tonight I can write..." (or en espanol, "Puedo Escrito").

To Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write for example "Your lines are steps
to the sun during the day and the moon at night."

What you cultivated exists as infinite petals.

And I love you like a man, a poet, a connection
because I wrote poetry in my arithmetic notebook, too.

And can, for example write in different styles like you
about tomatoes or el cuerpo de mujer,

and can float with the night air
into windows with you into dim lights, and love.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines,
because once, you could explain things and now,

Like Matthew Arnold did with Byron, I carve into a rock,
"Neruda is dead" as if I just heard the news.

Everytime I read La Cancion Desesperada,
I despair knowing you do not exist to line pages.

To feel that I have lost you, though I never had you;
I hold your pages in my arms like limbs,

And the binding of your books like a vertebrae.
I hold the meaning of your words like the ellipses of a dying friend.

Si, Puedo escribir. Pero no esta aqui,
I can write the saddest lines because you are not here.

I understand that I could do nothing, now
to have kept you in this world against your still heart.

That there are no lines after death: I
find that that is the saddest line I can write.

01 June 2004

Here are some pictures from "New Voices" (all pics open in new window):
- Oleg with the flyer, before the show. (I like to refer to myself in third person sometimes.)
- Oleg Opening the show.
- Peter reading.
- Grace reading.
- Jessica reading.
- Oleg reading.
- Oleg, Grace, Jessica, Peter. All the poets together.
- Getting advice from Jacques Foti. Who liked the show.

That's all...That's it! You don't gotta go home, but you can't stay here!

Contact

email: [email protected]