Inspiration Practice Derek Denckla

In this episode, I speak with friend, mentor, colleague and poet, Hiram Sims, an unstoppable force who brings poetry to all the diverse corners of Los Angeles --- and the World.  The episode was recorded live at Sims's latest, greatest bricks-and-mortar enterprise --- The Sims Library of Poetry! Soon, I predict that this town will come to be known as: "Sims City."

Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, Sims is a poet, essayist and Creative Writing Professor teaching with The Community Literature Initiative. He graduated from University of Southern California and received a B.A. in English: Creative Writing, and a Masters of Professional Writing in Poetry. 

In addition to teaching essay writing, creative writing, and literature, He has published three collections of poetry, including Poems of a Young, Troubled Mind (2007), Write or Die: An Anthology of Poetry from the Urban Poet's Workshop (2008), and PHOTOETRY: Poetry and Photography from South Central (2013), and his creative writing textbook, These Pages Speak (2015). He is the co-founder of World Stage Press, and founder of The Sims Library of Poetry, boasting the largest (and still-growing) collection of poetry in Los Angeles.  Disclosure: I am a proud 44 Campaign Supporter of this new, bold endeavor --- launched during the pandemic when we all needed poetry more than ever!

 A special note of gratitude for our original theme music composed and performed by Cato (Gilmour) @cato_gilmour and Creative Soundscapes.

"Inspiration Practice" was produced by Taller Alturas (Media) by Host-Producer-Editor Derek Denckla. Follow us: @inspiration_practice 

We also send our brightest light and our deepest gratitude to all those lovely beings who have either inspired us to create this work or given us the space, the time, or the love to practice, practice, practice.   (c) 2021.

"Noises are sounds that have not yet been intellectualized."  -- John Cage Producer-Host Derek Denckla spoke with Cato in the kitchen of his home studio, an industrial loft located in downtown Los Angeles.  Recording artist, film & television composer and remixer Cato got started by tweaking modular synthesizers, inspired by artists as diverse as Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle, and by classical composers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg, while writing and producing electronic music ranging from experimental to pop.  

Cato soon found himself scoring prime-time national television and documentary films in his native country of Norway, before relocating to LA in pursuit of bigger musical challenges.   As an artist, he releases as Cato / Cato Gilmour, schwarzmodul, Circadian Delays, Eccotonic and onecarreratwo, with remixes and collaborations including T.Rex, The Who and Robot Koch.  Cato’s work is heard in productions like "How To Get Away With Murder”, “Need For Speed", “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”, “Dexter” and countless others.  

Cato was chosen as the only one to reimagine the original “Blade Runner” score by Vangelis for "Blade Runner 2049”, for the entire marketing campaign, in competition with several major artists.   As a film composer Cato has written music and scores for several feature films including "Stone" (Robert De Niro), “Smokin' Aces" (Ryan Reynolds) and “Mini’s First Time” (Alec Baldwin), and has scored numerous documentaries (incl. "The Kennedy Detail” for 3-time Oscar™ nominee Vince DiPersio). 

Some works cited as influences by Cato in the Episode: "Alpha Centauri" by Tangerine Dream  "Circle 21" by Circadian Delays, Foam and Sand, and Robert Koch "The Cinema Show" by Genesis  The Who - "Won't Get Fooled Again" (Cato Remix) (NFS Most Wanted 2012 Soundtrack) Cato playing his "Stradivarius" the Electronic Music Studios (EMS) Synthesizer Cato playing his favorite module Dewanatron Swarmatron See examples of visual art glitches: Glitch Feminism - Legacy Russell and Kyle F. Williams  

A special note of gratitude for our original theme music composed and performed by Cato and Creative Soundscapes. 

"Inspiration Practice" was produced by Taller Alturas Media with contributions from Host-Producer Derek Denckla and Audio Editor Neyat Yohannes. 

We also send our light and our gratitude to all those lovely beings who have either inspired us to create or given us the space, the time, or the love to practice, practice, practice.  (c) 2021.

Host Derek Denckla spoke with Impresario Mathew Timmons at the tail-end of August, after Matt had recently produced, "We Made It," an event celebrating the 15th Anniversary of his LA-based imprint, Insert Blanc Press, and as we were swinging into the September start of the Art Season (with its renewed post-COVID flurry of publications, openings and fresh performances).  

In our conversation, we grappled with the sometimes painfully incompatible and sharply conflicting motives of those who make art and those who consume it.  And, how artists might find ways to reconcile themselves to continue to create work with integrity.

Matt read the work of an author that inspired him, Harold Abramowitz, whose book, Colloquy at the Abyss, he has recently published on his imprint, Insert Blanc Press:


"It was one, or it was the other. That much, and violence. If you were a prince. That was the way the picture wanted to go. To put up its fists and fight. But we were broken for the way we spoke in mediation, as if your emotions were better than anyone else's. It was in the way we looked at time. It told us, told us all sorts of things. I was walking, I was eating food from the palm of my hand, and then I wondered what the point was. Troubling times, it is the force, full of the violence that calls us names. I'm a junior laying in my casket and that was before you believed in me. What I would then say to you is about the state of my heart." - Abramowitz



Bio:  Mathew Timmons is the author of Love Prose, a recent chapbook from eohippus labs. He is the author of the books Terrifying Photo (Wonder 2015), Joyful Noise (Jaded Ibis 2012), The New Poetics (Les Figues 2010) and CREDIT (Blanc Press 2009) among other editions and ephemera. He is the Editor and Publisher of Insert Blanc Press and the Director of General Projects gallery in Los Angeles, CA.

Look for his forthcoming video edition of Love Prose, vintage editions of Parrot and other re-releases of early chapbooks from Insert Blanc Press.


 “My biggest problem would be that I want to do all of the things.” - Timmons



A special note of gratitude for our original theme music composed and performed by Cato and Creative Soundscapes.

Inspiration Practice was produced by Taller Alturas with contributions from Derek Denckla and Neyat Yohannes. Sending out a glowing beam of gratitude to all those lovely beings who have either inspired us or given us space, time or love to practice, practice, practice.  (c) 2021.

On July 23, 2021, I had an hour+ dialogue with Elena Karina Byrne over Zoom about her artistic process.  She will release her fourth book If This Makes You Nervous with Omnidawn in October 2021 and a separate chapbook entitled No, Don’t with What Books Press in 2020. She has also just completed a book of published, “interrupted” essays: Voyeur Hour: Poetry, Art, Film, & Desire. As part of her interdisciplinary work, she is writing screenplays and short stories while enrolled in Antioch University Santa Barbara's MFA program in Writing & Contemporary Media.

Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena is a freelance lecturer, editor, Poetry Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club. In 2018 she completed her three years as one of the final judges for the Kate & Kingsley Tufts Awards in Poetry. In 2019, Elena was one of only three poets selected to be a guest lecturer for the Georgia Poetry Circuit at 10 colleges and universities

A Pushcart Prize recipient, her publications include the Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, BOMB, diode, The Kyoto Journal, Persea Books anthology, The Eloquent Poem, Poetry International, LARB, Blackbird, Narrative, Entropy, Adroit Journal, and New American Writing, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

Elena read two poems during the program: "Praise to the End" by Theodore Roethke and "Pastoral" by Forrest Gander.

A special note of gratitude for our original theme music was composed and performed by Cato and Creative Soundscapes.  

Jennifer Kabat’s essays have been included in Best American Essays, Granta, Frieze, BOMB, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Review of Books, and the White Review. She’s been awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural upstate New York, teaches at the New School, and serves on her volunteer fire department. 

She was recently awarded a Silvers Foundation Grant and is currently working on a memoir on time and socialist uprisings. That memoir is actually part of 3 short novella-length essays on which she is working now.  She is a dear old friend as well, whom I have known since I was 18 years old.  Some of her recent works, if you wish to read more are as follows:

- “The Secret History of Weeds” Resistance and rhizomes in Frieze
- “A Dangerous Ornamental” Foraging for weeds and filing for UI (or) weeds and capitalism for Coffee House Press Writers Project
- “Double Dutch” Lynne Hershman Leeson’s doubles from avatars to antibodies in Frieze
- “The White Deer” excerpted by Chris Kraus in An/Other Magazine

During our dialogue, Jennifer read an excerpt from The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson and I have reprinted the quoted passage below.

"I hadn’t then decided how to become that other thing, which here I will call for the sake of brevity a poet, but indecision did nothing to lessen my vehemence about it. I had not learned the ordinary, workaday devotions; I sought a mystic portal. I was practising versions of an intensity I supposed necessary to my ambition, an earnest desire that had found in Walter Pater a little ledge of language to perch upon for a while: ‘to burn always with a hard gemlike flame,’ as he said, in his conclusion to The Renaissance, ‘a clear perpetual outline at the core of everything mutable.’ I thought I’d find the gem in sex, this being an available mythology for the seeking and sensual girl. But mostly the fleshy tempests, which I had taken to be at the heart of my research, amounted to ornate flickerings.  I began to suspect that, after all, such tempests were the grid, extending outwards in a metric repetition of the beauty problem that would permit only the most asinine deviations from the assigned roles in the drama. Next, reactively, I thought I’d found the gem in solitude. The word itself had a gorgeous, monkish allure. But what I called solitude lacked neutrality; it too was guarded by the stout wall of personality that I had no way of dismantling. Both sex and solitude fizzled with aphoristic recklessness. The strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of myself, as Pater referred to it, would continue. There was no one position that could reveal to me the seemingly occult passage to the desired metamorphosis; I had not yet discovered the innate monstrosity of pronouns, nor the freeing boredom of repetition,  and what did I impatiently burn for?..."

Our original theme music was composed by Cato and Creative Soundscapes.

Photo credit for Jennifer Kabat goes to Marco Breuer and she is wearing a sweater knit by artist Ellen Lesperance as part of her project Congratulations and Celebrations. Contact her via Instagram @jenkabat

John S. Hall is a poet/spoken word artist, ukulelist and singer-songwriter. He has released numerous albums, including nine albums with various incarnations of his band King Missile -numbering one to four.  He was a poet first and a rocker second. John is the author of a collection of poetry, Jesus Was Way Cool, and a self-help parody, Daily Negations, both from Soft Skull Press.  He has cultivated a deep and wide connection to NYC's spoken word poetry scene, performing at such seminal venues as Speakeasy, ABC No Rio, Nuyorican Poets Cafe and others.  

He recently wrote to me, "if I have an oeuvre of anti-inspirational texts, the Daily Negations would be at the center of that oeuvre, not an aside from it. " To me, Hall's work recalls Ancient Roman stoic, Seneca, whose biography is entitled Dying Every Day. You will know Hall by his porkpie hat -- his signature visual talisman.  You can watch John read his Daily Negations, daily, on Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/jshkingmissile/ or posted on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_s_hall/

Hall shared with us a poem by A.R. Ammons that he has found inspirational since taking a poetry workshop with that writer years ago.

Poetics

by A. R. Ammons

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiralling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper -- though
that, too -- but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

A.R. Ammons (1971)

Our original theme music was composed by Cato and Creative Soundscapes.