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Conversations;
concerning the meaning life
& the merits of all things literary.
-joey da’rrell cloudy
Why do we publish
the magazine? Nobody ever ask us this questions but surly the question must exist in the minds of our fellow artiest. Most
Americans do nearly everything for the money. There is no money in publishing poetry. If we were interested in publishing
for the money, we would be publishing romance novels. The women who purchase and read romance novels make up over eighty percent,
you heard me right the first time, over 80% of the literature purchased in america, if you will allow this rather generous
definition of the word literature. The remainder of the literary pie is divvied up by science fiction, fantasy, detective
stories, and somewhere near, if not at the bottom of the dogg pile is poetry.
For the first year
of the magazine I was working on a moving truck humping those gigantic pieces of furniture the Nuevo rich love so fucking
much, come rain or shine; hot or cold; upstairs or down stairs. It was a shitty backbreaking, knee shattering merciless job
for slave wages. Jolee and I were evicted from our tilted little apartment on Matilda almost two years ago, a few weeks before
thanksgiving. We put our all of our combined belongings into a 9x10 storage being careful to place the computer, art supplies
and books near the door for easy access. We do have priorities after all. The may have absolutely nothing to do with how you
would have done things but then who the fuck are you?
We then bought combat
boots at the Army Navy store just off I-75 Central Expressway in Richardson and bummed around for almost a year. The coldest
night of my life was sleeping on the floor of our old apartment with no heater that first week after we had put everything
in storage but were still squatting in our old apartment. I kept humping furniture and Jolee worked on the magazine. She taught
herself how to build the DL5 tripod website. I picked up side jobs for us doing art and antique restoration, custom framing
and design work. If you could be so kind as to indulge me this brief aside. Allow me to make this one broad generalization
for the record. Individually and as a semi-autamative collective both decorators and their inbreed, ignorant assed equally
fat headed first cousins, interior designers are the most despicable class of sub-humans I have ever had the misfortune of
working with, a virulent pox on all of their houses. Lets stop pretending that these women are even working or that these
are even real careers, these are nothing more than the feeble attempts of kept women to justify their miserable, meaningless
existences. They rarely decorate any home other than their own but they do get to dodge paying taxes with their tax ID numbers
because they are wink, interior designers and professional decorators.
By the end of the
year, we were crashing most nights on the floor of my little brothers one room apartment. Later, we camped on the floor a
few blocks away of a fellow struggling young hustler/writer. We were there for about six months and she never even asked us
for rent because she knew we were some broke ass poets and in her own fucked up way she loved us like family. Otherwise, I
would have had to have either; moved to the Southside and crashed in one of the spare rooms at my grandmothers. While Jolee
would have had to have moved in with her mother, if you knew her mother you wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Therefore, technically
we were homeless but not really because we have family and friends. I hate staples in books and magazines I think they make
an otherwise charming book or magazine look tacky. The silicone glue we use has a rather odiferous bouquet. We have the kind
of friends that will let us take over their computers and turn their living room floors into stinking poetry covered messes.
(it was the glue that stank not the poetry) When we were at the point where we were printing the magazine, that meant walking
about a mile to my publishers apartment and feeding the aging inkjet printer the pages one at a time. You are praying all
the while that it will make it through a copy of the magazine without hanging so you wont be forced to abort another print
run. On a good day, we could get a half a dozen usable copies of the magazine printed. We did not have very many good days.
It took us four volumes of printing the magazine this way, yes an entire year, before we figured out it would be cheaper to
just print one copy on the inkjet printer and then take the uncut pages to Office Maxx and let them print out the bulk of
the magazine on their nice new LaserJet printers. We may be as dense as lead sometimes but, we never missed a quarter.
Granted, my friends
and family may be nothing but junkie whores, coke fiends and dope slanging crack heads to you, but at least I know where I
stand with them. They are consistent in a traitorous, bile-choked world. Even though that means they are consistently fucking
up, at least I can count on them in that respect. When you stop to think about it objectively for a moment they are not so
different from you or I. For what is ambition, but a socially acceptable form of desire, to desire is to lust, to lust is
to obsess, and genius is nothing more than the fruit of obsession. I am not a junkie or a drunk and I do not deal anymore
but I do not make any moral judgments against those who are slaves to their desires. I do not need to make others feel small
in order to inflate my own impotent ego and pump up my sagging self esteem.
I have, what is referred
to in polite company as, a healthy self-image. I know who I am. I know what I am now. But, I have not forgotten what I was
before. Most importantly, I know why I am here. Once you understand yourself at that level the rest of the world just sort
of falls inline. You are unaffected by the rising tide of idiocy in all of its iterations. I know what I am capable of for
I possess all of the memories of my former selves even though I have evolved into something quite different and I have enjoyed
the evolution. I still do not like people. That is my nature, but I do love a few individuals fiercely. That is the only way
I am capable of loving, fiercely. I despise those who refuse to commit to anything or anyone. I have nothing but contempt
for those whose lives are a series of half measures because they refuse to take any real risk. The Sufis say that one is guided
either by what they love or by what they fear. That which I love guides me. I have failed at most things in life spectacularly.
I can expect no less from success. Better a great failure than a mediocre success.
So, back to our initial
question of why do we do this, publish the magazine? Do we not have enough on our plates just writing our own poems, plays
and novels? Would our energies not be put to better use if we spent all this time we put into the magazine dedicated to publishing
the works of others into say getting our own selves degrees in English? Is that not just what the world needs, more MFAs?
Would that not go a long ways towards making us better writers? Is it not the american way to say fuck you, fuck everybody
I am going to get mine and I do not give a damned if you get yours? Perhaps this is our little treasonous act.
We fiercely love
literature and a we love the only way we know how, a hand full of great unknown writers whose work we feel would never see
print in the more mainstream publications. We are well aware of the fact that the majority of the great writers through out
history have been drunken deviants or junky assholes and the more talented the artiest the bigger sons a bitches they were.
We find ourselves now surrounded by the greatest talents of our time.
Sunday, August 06, 2006 12:41 PM
edited for tripod 8/25/06 2:26:13 PM
Just What You Needed,
Another Whining Needle Dick Dilettante
by Joey Da'rrell Cloudy
The poetry published in 21st Century America is not the poetry of the people, by the people or for the people. Walt Whitman is a skeletal memory and Allen Ginsberg is soon to be forgotten wind blown ash. The writing in the
dominant arts, literary and cultural magazines continues to be written by and representative of the 10%ers. A daisy-chain
of effeminate pseudo-intellectual drivel, by and for English majors and the occasional literary snob. The stories they tell
are not about the lives of our people, or how we endure mind numbing labor of wage slaves or the struggle of honest hard working
peoples to survive in a society of bigoted hypocrites. These, creatures that control the vast majority of money and power
in this country believe that they are the gurus of art and culture. However, they do not understand the struggles of their
compatriots they only understand fear of poverty and honest work. These are the types of people that will rain onto the sidewalks
when the stock market crashes and we will scrape their grisly remains from the streets without surprise surviving another
day. This is what we do best, persevere celebrating our own incomprehensible survival. While we work for our bread and plant
our roses, we believe in the American dream, even in the face of the overwhelming evidence that it is a lie. Still, we keep
treading water hoping against hope that some how some day our labors will be rewarded. Moreover, even if we die in poverty
and obscurity in the most wretched of conditions, we die knowing that we have not just existed like Kobe cattle, but we have tasted deeply all the sweet misery that is real life. Our fat doughboy
entitled enemy grow soft and complacent, they are confused by our tenacity, testicular fortitude and truly indomitable spirit.
We are not afraid because we have lived well this, is our revenge. While our children grow strong in the glass shadows of
skyscrapers inhaling the psychedelic air, colored with incalculable particulates of industrial pollutants. It is the children
who grow to understand that to live is to fight those who would be our oppressors on every front. Our talent is not in killing
people but in our Black Kali dance that destroys the insidious ideas of the gilded classes. This is a game of my poets can
beat up your poets in open literary combat as long as your professors not rigging the fight. We hear a kind of music when
there is an intelligent exchange of ideas between groups of innovative talented individuals or when a schizophrenic genius
is talking to himself. Poetry is not in the form. Just because the words rhyme does not mean it is poetry. Conversely just
because the words do not rhyme does not mean it is not poetry. The great poesy minds find their own rhythms in the chaos of
syllables that is our shared language. Occasionally, we recognize the pattern as a kind of music we call it poetry. There
is no defining formula that isolates what it is we call a poem, but when you hear the great poem, you will recognize its magnificence.
What we want you the writers, artist and readers of this magazine to understand, more than anything, is that this is your
magazine. Death List Five was founded because we saw a gigantic disparity in the literary scene. This absolute disconnect
between the academic ejaculations of so called wordsmiths sprayed all over every other literary magazine that exist. Not just
in Dallas, but all over America, where ever poems are published. We the publishers and editorial staff simply took the
initiative in order to provide a space for the hardcore motherfuckers out there banging out great poems and creating awesome
art, who will never get published because they are not part of the university press system. Or because they address subject
matters that are just too controversial for the conventional rags, who take corporate cock biter dollars and are afraid of
losing their precious funding if they offend the excuse me, right people. You know who they are and they know who
they are, those suckers of “Satans pecker...Come on suck it. All it cost is your dignity.”
—Bill Hicks. Therefore,
keep on doing what you do best and do not worry about writing any of that politically correct Pap smear the literati is passing
off as poetry in those other rags. We know what rags are really for. We here at Death List Five are here for you “the
voice of the lunatic fringe” Remember, Submit but never surrender.
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