Inspiration Practice: Recent Episodes
Derek Denckla
Dialogues exploring how artists & writers relate to rituals and the spiritual — connecting to inspiration & maintain a creative practice. Hosted by Derek Denckla, poet, professor of creative writing at L.A. Film School, and fellow seeker of inspiration practices. Listen to our "sister" podcast— Praxinoscope— that details our experimental performance platform launched in 2022.
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:
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“The Secret History of Weeds” Resistance and rhizomes in Frieze
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“A Dangerous Ornamental” Foraging for weeds and filing for UI (or) weeds and capitalism for Coffee House Press Writers Project
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“Double Dutch” Lynne Hershman Leeson’s doubles from avatars to antibodies in Frieze
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“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.
On Friday, May 21, I spoke with poet, professor and friend, Stuart Dischell, whom I met in a most romantic setting although we were not romantically involved: Mojácar, Spain at La Fundación Valparaiso, an artist's residency where we were both engaged in our separate writing projects. In that time, we came together for meals, heated philosophical discussions, and field trips with our fellow artists to desert beaches, beer bars, desolate Valencia's Roman ruins, and the red rock fortress of Alhambra in Granada.
In this episode, I read his poem, "Good Hope Road", the same as the title of his volume of poetry of that name. And, here is the poem that I asked Stuart to read:
For the Anniversary of My Death
BY W. S. MERWIN
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
W. S. Merwin, “For the Anniversary of My Death” from The Second Four Books of Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.
BIOGRAPHY
Stuart Dischell was born in Atlantic City, NJ. He is the author of Good Hope Road, a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues, Dig Safe, Backwards Days and Children With Enemies (2017) and the pamphlets Animate Earth and Touch Monkey (2013) and the chapbook Standing on Z (2017). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and anthologies including Essential Poems, Hammer and Blaze, Pushcart Prize, and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems. He is a recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. (Photo Credit: Cyril Caine, Looking for Mr. Dischell, a forthcoming film about his life and work by another artist whom we met at the same residency).
Greetings! In this Meditative Poetry Reading (first of many-to-come!), I read a poem and then investigate its sounds, meanings, impact and structure. Today, I explore the poem, "The Vault," by Andrés Cerpa (reprinted below in its entirety). This poem recently appeared in my Email In-Box (just when I needed it most, as is so often the case...) as Poem-of-the-Day for May 18, 2021 from Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets, of which I am soon to be a proud member. I sincerely hope you enjoy this poem and my musing upon it. End music is an excerpt from "Blue and Sentimental" played the late great jazz-blues pianist, Oscar Peterson. Thank you for listening. Best Regards, Derek! The Vault Andrés Cerpa Little wave in thought. Blank architecture that holds me. This is a little psalm in the moon- struck snow. Thank you, for I haven’t been patient as promised. Thank you, for the desperate Hopper-esque light. There is so little to hold, I said as I held it. Each bloom of strength that entered my hands. Copyright © 2021 by Andrés Cerpa. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 18, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets. About This Poem “I wrote this poem on my typewriter when the apartment was empty. It's a small reminder to love the world more.” —Andres Cerpa Andrés Cerpa is the author of The Vault ( Alice James Books, 2021).
In this first interview for the Podcast, Host Derek Denckla has invited his sometime collaborator and longtime friend, ecological artist Tatfoo Tan to join him for a talk about exploring spiritual practice integrated with arts practice.
Malaysian-born Tattfoo Tan collaborates with the public on issues relating to ecology, sustainability, and healthy living. His work is project-based, ephemeral, experiential, educational, and, more often than not, a lot of fun for the participants. He writes of himself that he is living a #contemplative life, following the path of #mystic and exploring #spirituality through the lens of an #artist.
I am so honored and excited to have had the opportunity to delve deep and wide in this hour or so dialogue with Tattfoo about what gets him out of bed in the morning and what keeps him coming back to the process of producing such a vast variety of creative projects.
You can find out more about Tattfoo Tan through his website http://tattfoo.com or find him on Instagram @tattfoo
Books that we discussed that might interest listeners are as follows: Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman, Daniel; I Am That, Nisargadatta Maharaj; The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley; The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs, William S. among other references small and large.
I asked Tattfoo to share a poem in honor of May's Poetry Month, which is reproduced below.
"A Blessing"
From eternal echoes pg. 50
John O’Donohue
Blessed be the longing that brought you here and that quickens your soul with wonder.
May you have the courage to befriend your eternal longing.
May you enjoy the critical and creative and creative companionship of the
question”who am I?” and may it brighten your longing.
May a secret Providence guide your thought and shelter your feeling.
May your mind inhabit your life with the same sureness
with which your body belongs to the world.
May the sense of something absent enlarge your life.
May your soul be as free as the ever-new waves of the sea.
May you succumb to the danger of growth.
May you live in the neighborhood of wonder.
May you belong to love with the wildness of Dance.
May you know that you are ever embraced in the kind circle of God
In this fourth installment of examining a Meditation from the daily reader, Answers in the Heart, Host Derek Denckla explores the steps needed to move towards personal growth and change: Awareness, Acceptance and Action.
In this third installment of the first week of this newly-launched podcast, Host Derek Denckla reads and discusses a passage from a daily meditation reader, Answers in the Heart, sharing his own Inspiration Practice before interviewing renowned poets about theirs for May’s Poetry Month. I hope you get some practice ideas here today!
This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Host Derek Denckla reads from daily meditation reader, Answers in the Heart, for May 9th and discusses how we can seek comfort in idle time, which has never been more present in our minds since enduring the solitude of the last year during the COVID quarantines.
This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
In this episode, Derek Denckla reads the May 8th entry from a daily meditations reader, Answers in the Heart, and discusses the implications of the passage as it touches upon the practice of affirmations and self-love. He explores how we frequently hear discomfort expressed about the practices of self-love and self-affirmation and some related beliefs that those who engage in these practices are self-indulgent versus healthy. He then compared how the Developed world, ironically organized around individualism, inclines towards Romantic Love of the Other as the height of personal growth, even when it borders on unhealthy obsession. The stark contrast between the preference for Romantic Love over self-love in an individualistic culture is profoundly upside-down and may reflect the weakness of the individual as the measure of all things versus a divine power as the creator of all things.
This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app