Allen Shadow's Blog, page 2

Poems Published in Top Zines

Recently, a number of my poems have appeared or are forthcoming in highly respected literary magazines, including Twyckenham Notes, the I-70 Review, the Broadkill Review, and the White Hall Review.

My poem “Pale Pink Taxi Garage, Croton,” went live today on the website of White Hall Review. The poems in Twyckenham Notes, Lansing and Sitting on a Guardrail in the Shadows of Early Morning are published on their website and include audio renditions. My poem The Road from Millerton appeared in the November/December 2019 issue of the Broadkill Review. The work In the Tire Shop is scheduled to appear in a print issue of I-70 Review.

Meanwhile, my short story Gran Fury is set to appear in October in the online magazine Juked.

The story behind Gran Fury is interesting. The title, as some may have guessed, is taken from the Plymouth model manufactured in the 70s and 80s. To me the name was always evocative, and I took to noticing how beat the surviving cars seemed to be—a kind of irony on wheels. The vehicle first came to star in a poem of mine by the same name. Years later, I had the idea of how the poem itself could be repurposed in prose as the opening of a short story. The rest of the piece practically wrote itself. Since then, I’ve used at least two other poems as the basis for short stories. It’s nice when your work keeps on giving.

Tire Shop and Sitting on a Guardrail were both inspired by the same subject: an Hispanic man I observed, yes, sitting on a guardrail, waiting for the tire shop he worked in to open. He and his situation (as I imagined it) held my attention for months, as I passed him daily around ten-to-eight in the morning. He was always sitting idly holding a brown lunch bag. I had been in that tire shop and had also observed some the workers returning home after their shifts, their cloths almost completely blackened. I knew how hard the work was and how cold the drafty garage was in winter. I imagined that he might have been from a Central American country, come to the states to work and send money home to his family. So, fairly or not, I fictionalized a character based on him. I know there are some who would criticize me for making assumptions. But this is what writers do. They observe life and make up stories based on those observations.

“Raceless,” newly released TV Pilot

I just launched my new TV pilot, “Raceless.”

Here’s a brief synopsis:

Jimbo Dempsey was “too” white. In the year 2265, that was not good. In fact, it was much worse. If your DNA was more than 65 percent white or black — you’d be exterminated. Two centuries earlier a totalitarian government — the Administration — had come into power, predicated on establishing a “raceless society,” one that would “eliminate conflict among humankind — no matter the cost.”

In “Raceless,” resisters become fugitives living on a new Underground Railroad.

If you’d like to read the script, click the title: “Raceless.”

Winner in Great American Song Contest

Just learned I am one of four songwriters who won an Outstanding Achievement Award in Songwriting (Country Music Category) in the 21st Great American Song Contest, for my song “Is It Love Yet.” Last year I was selected as a finalist for this award. I recorded the song in Nashville in the late Eighties. Trisha Yearwood sang the demo; it was signed to PolyGram (later bought by Universal). It was later released as a single by indie artist JoAnne Redding.

You can listen to Trisha singing “Is It Love Yet?” here:

https://allenshadow.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/is-it-love-yet-copy.mp3

I haven’t written much about my Nashville years on this blog, so thought I’d mention that I also had songs published by other major companies, including SONY, Tom Collins Music, Shedd House and Tillis Tunes.

The 21st Great American Song Contest received more than 1,800 submissions from 40 countries. Here is a list of this year’s contest judges.

Robert Frank–Poet with a Camera–Passes

Robert Frank, the master photographer who taught us to see photography and America anew, died on Monday in Inverness, Nova Scotia. He was 94.

Below, I reprise a former post on the this artistic giant:

The other day The New York Times covered the announcement of a treasure trove of images from the work of Robert Frank, one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. The National Gallery of Art has released a comprehensive archive of Frank’s work, including contact sheets and work prints, much of it never before seen by the public. It all comes in advance of Frank’s 90th birthday, in November.

As The Times says in it’s Lens Blog:

The cover image for the U.S. edition of The Americans, Robert Frank’s epochal book, spoke volumes about the state of the nation in the mid-1950s. The tightly-cropped photo shows passengers in the windows of a New Orleans trolley assuming their place in the social order of the Jim Crow South — progressing from a black woman in the rear to white children and adults up front (slide 4).

The contact sheet that contained the image showed that Mr. Frank had photographed the city from multiple perspectives, but he ultimately selected the frame that most dramatically and symbolically captured New Orleans’ racial hierarchy. Learning this photo’s backstory would be impossible without the ability to view Mr. Frank’s contact sheet. Now, such important archival material, typically reserved for scholars and curators, is just a click away.

Born in 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland, Frank took pictures in Europe and South America during his early career, but it wasn’t until he crisscrossed the seductive roads of America that Frank felt he was finally making art with his lens. With his U.S. travels in the mid-1950s, his work reached a new level, and 83 of his road images were arranged into the book The Americans.

It’s no surprised that Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to the first U.S. edition of The Americans. The 1959 edition raised eyebrows in the media for its brute black and white candor. But The Americans, like Kerouac’s own masterwork, On the Road, opened the door to the loneness of the country’s heart and spirit and, together, they inspired a generation of artists, musicians and thinkers.

It’s interesting how foreign image makers like Frank, Mechelangelo Antonioni (Zabriskie Point, 1970), Louis Malle (Atlantic City, 1980) are able to capture the essence of the land better than most native auteurs. In fact, with the stir made by The Americans, Frank was compared to America’s original outsider observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 book Democracy in America helped to define the young nation’s unique character (Is it what America brings to you or what you bring to her?).

I believe a great artist is a conduit for “place.” His subject somehow finds him, speaks through him. The artist ultimately “sees” through time as the French photographer Eugène Atget once described it. I believe such artists also see through other dimensions, some of which elude us, some of which speak through intersections of light and shadow, artifact and art, quietude and cacophony, moment and mystery.

It’s hard to describe The Americans. Language could illuminate it, could degrade it. Perhaps it’s like the stuff of dreams, the magic of which begins to disappear upon transfer to the conscious mind. So much spills from the bucket on its ascent from that deep, dark well.

I was surprised and pleased when I discovered Frank himself had linked the worlds of photography and poetry in his description of his work:

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

Moon Landing 50 Years On

A decade ago, on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing (July 20, 1969), I wrote the following:

How strange it is that the venerable Walter Cronkite, who defined that very moment, should pass right now (he died July 17, 2009). It’s as if he and Neil Armstrong will somehow launch into eternity together, in a fitting orbit.

I was in a second-rate hotel in Eureka, California the day the Apollo 11 crew landed. I was with my own merry band of pranksters (my first wife, Carol, my sister, Alice, and friends) on a cross country trip in my 1948 Cadillac hearse. As we descended into the hotel lobby, Cronkite’s voice crackled from a TV, saying something like, “What a great county…I just don’t understand these hippies…” The TV was a table model that sat on a broken Sylvania console. Behind these proceedings, in a large picture window, a broken Native American shuffled along the street in the hot California sun. What an ironic scene. Could have been out of an Antonioni film.

To be fair, Cronkite, who had already helped turn the tide against the Vietnam War with his groundbreaking television coverage, eventually came to look upon the the so-called hippie movement more kindly.

My poem ‘Ghost Plaza’ in Gallery Show

Emerge Gallery’s “Art & Words” Exhibit — a combination of art and poetry inspired by one another — opened last night in Saugerties, NY. My poem “Ghost Plaza,” inspired by artist Ellen Martin’s photograph “Abandoned #98 Plywood and Pleats,” appears in the exhibit. Both are shown below.

[image error]

GHOST PLAZA

By Allen Shadow

Blanked and shadowed

once curtained and live

the cratered parking lot

the power lines to nowhere

the mismatched plywood for eyes

yet can see, smell the luxe drapes

dripping sad theater where once

little ladies with purses sat for hours

beneath bulbous dryers, unaware

of the traffic and teen terrors beyond

Are there still stray coins perhaps

amid the slaughtered floor tiles

ones that might tell tales of transactions

good and bad and heated, when there

was once the throbbing of life?

The show will culminate in a poetry reading on Sunday, April 28, from 2 to 5 p.m. Emerge Gallery is located at 228 Main Street, Saugerties. The show is curated by poet, artist and gallery owner Robert Langdon.

Finalist in American Song Contest

I was selected as a finalist in the 20th Great American Song Contest, for my song “Is It Love Yet?”. I recorded the song in Nashville in the late Eighties. Trisha Yearwood sang the demo; it was signed to PolyGram (later bought by Universal). It was later released as a single by indie artist JoAnne Redding.

You can listen to Trisha singing “Is It Love Yet?” here:

https://allenshadow.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/is-it-love-yet-copy.mp3

I haven’t written much about my Nashville years on this blog, so thought I’d mention that I also had songs published to other major companies, including SONY, Tom Collins Music, Shedd House and Tillis Tunes.

The 20th Great American Song Contest received more than 2,000 submissions from 44 countries.

‘The Devon’ Published

Following is my most-recently published poem. It appeared in the literary magazine Waymark.

[image error]

The Devon

The cup dropped from

the machine and teetered

till the syrup and

the seltzer mixed

and the cowboys

came around the bend

again and again

rifles erect

Indians on the run

My chin on my knees

skinny arms lashed

eyes ever wide

two Saturday matinee features

broken only by coming attractions

that would have to be seen

the war movies the dramas

the beach blanket bingos

I emerged from the slanted foyer

to the blinding afternoon

unsure who I was

knowing only

I wouldn’t always have to return

to the kasha-scented Bronx building

I would live in California someday

in the wild fake sunlight

I would I would

Filed under: lifestyle, literature, New York City, poetry, Uncategorized, writing [image error]

‘The Dream’: Poem Meets Painting

As part of Emerge Gallery’s upcoming “Art & Words: Ekphrasis” exhibit — a combination of art and poetry inspired by one another — I penned the poem “Dream,” which was inspired by Loel Barr’s painting “Leaving Kansas.”

THE DREAM

The dream that

comes in the barn

in the night

with Marie

and travels the road

when no one else

is admiring the purple heaven

thinking how someday

someday it might

part for us

might take us

yes just like that

everywhere and nowhere

all at once

the dream

the dream that is Kansas

[image error]

I will read the poem at a preview of the show, slated this Saturday, May 22, at 2 p.m. at the Saugerties Library, at 91 Washington Ave. The show, which opens May 6 at 6 p.m. at Emerge Gallery, 228 Main St., Saugerties, N.Y., will run through May 29. A special reading will be held at the gallery on Saturday, May 20, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Filed under: art, lifestyle, literature, media, painting, poetry, Uncategorized, writing Tagged: allen shadow, art, Art & Words: Ekphrasis, artists, loel barr, painters, painting.emerge gallery, poetry, poets, Saugerties, Saugerties library

‘Poet in the City’: the Lost Gem

The following is from Mat Danks’ Excavation Tape Project, which attempts to unearth previously undiscovered musical gems:

Excavation Tapes #267: ‘Poet in the City’ by Allen Shadow

Wow, this is dark. And very cool. Listen here.

It’s a creeping, haunting yomp over some brilliantly bleak, industrial clangy instrumentation. Perhaps, like a gothic take on John Cooper Clarke with some pretty obvious touchpoints of Nick Cave and Tom Waits.

It’s from a 2002 album called ‘King Kong Serende’ and a bit of digging into Allen Shadow (see his blog here) suggests he’s a bit of a renaissance man. His Twitter bio states: “Novelist Allen Shadow (aka Allen Kovler) is also a music artist, poet, journalist & PR pro (APR) who blogs on writing, music and politics.” Which is what we like here on the Excavation Tapes.

If this project is all about unearthing really interesting and brilliant material lost in the banal mainstream crossfire, then we’ve got ourselves a gem here.

–Mat Danks

Filed under: Allen Shadow's Songs, indie music artist, lifestyle, music, New York City, news, poetry, Uncategorized, writing Tagged: allen shadow, America, indie music, media, music, music business, new york, news, poetry, writing, youtube