"EUDYSIA": poetry published without "the financial assistance of Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council or any agency."

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Real poetry is a gesture that counts (Pierre Reverdy)

OmahaRisinG is a performance poet from Toronto: but more than that, a nomadic poet who breaks with genre and Canadian literary tradition: (a) by disavowing the traditional association of performance poetry with oral poetry only, aligning himself also with a social activism rooted to place, and, more significantly, (b) by freeing his poetics from the state-funded apparatus that is these days the only gateway to mainstream writing & publication. And I might like to throw his name into the Avant group (or post-Avant, as it's been lately retitled), since it's really a temperament & way of getting around by bike & not an elitism that flies off to the next Avant Writing Symposium. A true Avant is dislocation & the most radical activism designed to make everyone feel uncomfortable, one that never keeps still, never stops jabbing at the "donkey festival" that is Canada Council & CanLit, and  makes the more popular academicized versions (of Gary Barwin, Christian Bök, for example) look ridiculously tame. I'll offer the name Clifford Duffy as belonging to same class of the true few radical poetries in this country.

RISING, Omaha
     EUDYSIA

My concern is always with real poetries & real movements. I've recently read OmahaRisinG's EUDYSIA and have had the good fortune to see him read at Artbar in Hamilton, Ontario, a local "arts hub, live music venue, artists' hang-out": a social-cultural outlet for significant otherstream expression. I'm particularly pleased to be a part of. I've also commented here on bill bissett, quintessential gestural and vocal master,and the social justice drama of Melanie Skene & Simon De Abreu (a staged reading with props) told in folklorish conta storia format, two other activist art forms I've met there. As well as on the elegant figure of  poet James Deahl who founded the Artword Artbar reading series and whose 'Poets for Peace' movement, founded twenty-seven years ago, has contributed significantly to a culture of peace and non-violence & a distinctively people's poetry ethos for which the Hamilton area is now known. A place to attract OmahaRisingG & be in good company.

OmahaRisinG

Former literary editor, firefighter, amateur kick boxer and letter carrier, OmahaRisinG comes from a Toronto-based 'people's poetry' and performance poetry tradition: a figure to be associated with a liberatory poetics of peace & social activism. As a "symptomal" reader and viewer (after Louis Althusser), I can't help seeing activist poetry like his as symptomatic of a gap in contemporary Canadian literature—radical poetries must try to fill in— between the mainstream determined to "disallow control over the self" (FYRMM!!!! 1) and total "corporeal dissolution" (1) of the nomadic poet who's always circling in or always intolerably present at the borders, determined to contrast the mainstream's fake cultural life with a  "life-affirming death" (1) of its own. Through the energies of poetry performance comes a sort of Nietzschean call to life in the abyss.The OG bookends of his name suggest a snug asphyxiation, the Kafkaesque "no hide nowhere to rise/dungeonal triple-iron keep" life of unbearable confinement (COCKROACH 13) . Poetry is more than performance. In a hip-hop of  repeating sounds & rhymes, the poet in motion can represent himself as the necessarily disabled & "short/circuited" voice of dissidence that's never just staged. (Even at a reading I've noticed how restless he seems, working  the room, full of the leg-venom from which the poet & his best lyrics come):

my stance is metaphoric
the penultimate euphoric
in this wheelchair where
perambulation is electric
 a future short/circuited
   so severe selfcentric
rejects your trial denial
because I can not walk
with reality determined
 to steal this life's face
thus I must make bold
with a smile take hold
of life-affirming death (1)

Unlike the many self-satisfied mainstream lyricists out there, here's the recalcitrant performer "wreaking face vengeance/poet justice pronounced/for that evitable death" (KOTARO 3) that is the poet's world. Performance in the OmahaRisinG sense is not to be delineated into a superficial opposition of text to public presentation: a boundary that he transgresses by giving audience members a copy of each poem read. The text he offers is an active material record of live history: prequel to the event it must face outside, after the performance, in the living streets. Poetry that's read as a bar code, "red-eye scansion" ( BAR CODE 54) fit to reveal a "disembodied eloquence of lives" (LIFE SPAN 5) and the searing paradoxes of intrapersonal relations. In MAL (14), for example, he asks, "can the jew/catch a break/from the hates/of the likes/of you"? And to the anorexic girl the poet likens a "personal holocaust" (DOMINION 17). Boundaries that separate imagery and the realities of discrimination & self-willed starvation it reflects can't stop shifting or morphing because every familial & social relation is too porous for institutional fixes. It's interesting to consider, as another example of this restless shifting, that self-willed starvation, a few pages later, finds in the poem ENDURA (22) its own double in the image of ritualistic fasting and spiritual bravery of those (presumably the Cathars) who seek to redress earthly injustices through self-induced death:

you voiced the soft dead
always in red, the premise
shift in justice, the promise
blacked by stone enemies

  ballsy testimony upworded
 bewildered autumns to a sky
fazed by a perishing urgency
grasping for your last breath(22)

EUDYSIA, is not just putative title for urban utopia but (as the poet told me in email correspondence)

my neologo. It comprises two prefixes: 'eu' (from the Greek meaning 'good')and 'dys' (from the Greek meaning 'bad'/'badly'). That makes my neologism an oxymoron. Its cognate would be 'eudysic'.

I created 'eudysia' to replace 'postmodern', a term that is many decades beyond its best-before date.

EUDYSIA represents the post 9/11 period. September 11th, 2001is the defining moment of our era. Almost everything of a critical nature flows from it. We live the oxymoron of my neologo. The good (primarily inherent in technological advances) fights with the bad for dominance. And there is more bad than one can imagine: the threat of terrorism, worry about future pandemics,economic meltdowns, global warming, armed conflicts, etcetera (Saturday, August 21, 2010)

The "oxymoron of my neologo" is rather to be understood as a dream artfully mismatched with (or rather negated by) a prevalent culture of video game ontologies (KOTARO 3), 'gamer' names (like KOTARO, O MEGAMAN, KENTRON) attuned to robotic resonances rather than to things & a general picture of crumbling socio-cultural borders where "scuffling dead sand" people (DOMINION 16)— or so the actors & their dramas sometimes seem to me—can't be distinguished from real atomic death (SADAKO) and the despair of Ethiopian mothers who prefer suicide over another empty well (SEMA KEDIR).The murder of Anthony Walker can't be too easily dissociated from "manchester united" popularity either (MAYBE NEVER 43). But it's not a question of opposing names to the tyrannies of signification they oftentimes designate: for names have practically shifted into (culturally traded places with) the places reserved for their own terrible undersides. I believe the poet's purposely chosen a naturally evolving lexicon with the potential to outline an imminent cultural apocalypse.

If I'm fancifully reading titles and maybe even intentions, it's as a way of validating a more general truth about the way a neologo-title can disclose interesting pathways to cultural critique, perhaps along the lines of Naomi Klein's No Logo and the politics of branding it unearths.The title is the self-gutting name of all names and the mark of the impetus, still visibly present in our culture & subject to radical critique, to attribute personal, societal & ecological murders to the tyranny of signifiers. OmahaRisinG gives in performance & in language the terrible disconnects of this EUDYSIA-post 9/11 reality and for that alone his work is revolutionary & a pure poetry performance.

son of sam used to
    listen to that dog
     you talk to god
   sometimes saying

  then go out without
 waiting for an answer
grab a pepperoni pizza

          between bites
          you chew fact
            then sicken

               leaders
           may reverse
          but in the end
           they all say
          the same thing
              (ITE 36)

Poetry seeks to play on the difference between the title's self-canceling senses as earthly utopia (of the social-activist poet) and the reality of language appropriated by the Metropolis nightmare in which we live. I believe his EUDYSIA primarily works as both a self-emptying of language through speech & performance and critique of the tyranny of brand society in general. It's what makes the poetry a performance and moves it restlessly forward at the same time, and perhaps what makes the poet himself try to arise out of the "parisian crypt" (CID 69 32) that is his stage name. OmahaRisinG has clearly (& artfully) let the name of the poem (in almost every single case) sink into the many incongruities of life and writing always already there: and the result's a "bite-fevered perception" of what he sees and the more grotesque "distortion/creation/behind arachnoid language" that results (TICK TALK 60), perhaps a parody of a false communitarian world wide web community. Perhaps he's given a perfect illustration of Rancière's idea of the "intolerable image" in art: the obscenity that a rampant society of spectacle easily glosses over & passes for media & that poetry can convey through a slamming robotics-language:
    

 re memory branch
        memoir brain
          membrane

          skin hides
        distortion/creation
 behind arachnoid language
derma-disjoint communication

   bite-fevered perception
     immementos events
      dysremembered
        dismembered
         remembered
         unreversible

         irreversible
        spasmic clock
     thiefs wrinkled time
 leaving mutant replicants
continuators of remembrance (60)

The essential thing is then to underscore (or bold & capitalize) the poem as a false naming: specter of life & language collapsing altogether into a post 911 world of hyperreal epics and a rap-elegy reduced to a few staccato wisdom-hits. If not EUDYSIA, since the title's there been uncovered as a personal neologo artfully misaligned with the fact of "terrorism, pandemics, meltdowns" and rampant ecocide, then what: ARREX (7), legendary name for the city of Nimrod, or HOME itself (20), the place of a son's return to the absent Mother, where "he needed her to be around/to show him a life amidst death" (21), or perhaps the more exotic-sounding VERSA, ITALIA (35), a place of death too "where rat trenches/drag bodies into drowning pools"? Where is the poet-performer to turn? And a poet's restless search goes on, almost interminably, for all the unaffiliated heroes like O MEGAMAN, PYTHAGORAS or LENIN to fill in the void, names referring as much to historical personages as failed life-histories. Looking for utopia in the digital dystopia of today is a gesture as self-refuting as trying to key the name (of the poem, poet) to any one referent. As he strongly intimates in TRADE (70), poetry is the search for the absent parent:
   

knowing and distant
  unblinking and insensate
cadillac slinks mute tolerance
soft parade of skinny leather
  near-winter incongruous
   advertises windshields
     stiletto heels totter
       leggy expanses
  framed by car metal
eye-level glory silhouettes
  a neon-infected eatery

 window lowers invitation
 behind tinted moral void
  entered without words
  tires dispatch asphalt
  to urgent irrelevance
 straight-ahead silence
commandeers the interior
seals its unspoken contract

industrial-side-street familiarity
 comforts a midnight vacuum
 early fog jitters jaded glass
 dishing streetlight diffusion
 bucket-seat reality repeats
 beneath a voiceless zipper
 she kisses this month's rent
  works the new economy
  makes the rough tough

  father may never arrive

The poet's boldly exercised an anti-arts funding option (in my view) that's really the only way for it to act out its radical "eudysic" role. EUDYSIA,as a neologo for an impossible utopia, must also mean a rupture with the mainstream proprietors of any sense of good literature & with the means (primarily through the apparatus of state-funded art) of excluding Fringe styles. A system that strikes at the heart of Artbar and poetry performance must be radically dissociated from the text itself (as it certainly is here). And OmahaRisinG's text is  political in the way its condemns false spiritual-ideological underpinnings of authority (as in JUDICIUM DEI 36-37), the antidote to which is a Zarathustrian desire to "will my condition/to a perpetuity that can/respect/reflect a range meant/to encompass all degrees/latitudes and longitudes/of intersect" (DESIDERATE 39). In a world of "dyslocution" (after DYSLOCUTE 48), of language-reality "mischronicity" and the "spiritus noctis" (CITY BLUE 51) of postmodern life, there can be no place for the likes of Canada Council: the "dirty balm" of literacy by bureaucracy.

EUDYSIA is poetry published without "the financial assistance of Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council or any agency." But only secondarily. It's first and foremost the outline of the means of dislocating any poetics that relies on the supremacy of names (even EUDYSIA): for the titles in OmahaRisinG's text, and the poetries they call forth, whether read or performed, have been selected for their power to reveal the disastrous aversion of language alone to sacred places, meaningful personal relations & true people-based, participatory arts milieu. It's perhaps ultimately a case of language having to be (re-)absorbed into performance, the restless Homeric impulse to tell the story of struggle and defeat: as the poet affirms in ITE, a poem whose title translates literally into the imperative to "go out without/ waiting for an answer" (36).