Dancing Bear
San Jose, CA
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Dancing Bear lives in the San Francisco bay area. His poems, art interviews, reviews and photographs have been published in many journals, including New York Quarterly, Zuzu's Petals Quarterly, Slipstream, Rio Grande Review, Pearl, Poetry Motel and Nerve Cowboy. He is Editor-In-Chief of the on-line magazine Disquieting Muses (disquietingmuses.com) and the 1999 winner of the Mindfire Chapbook Contest for his manuscript Blue Hand, later this year a chapbook Atlas(Red Fruit Press) will be released. Dancing Bear is the host of a weekly poetry show "Out of Our Minds" for public supported KKUP 91.5 FM in Cupertino, CA.
Mitakuye oyasin (All my relations),
Dancing Bear |
• What do you do for a living?
A living? Do you mean how do I pay the rent? To pay the rent I go to a building and run reports on how much millions and billions of dollars other businesses are making. The company I work for pays me just enough so that I have to come back every day and do it again. • Who are your favorite artists?
Favorite artists? Damn, that list is long and keeps growing. I'll try and break it into loose categories.Music: Beethoven, Coltrane, Soul Coughing, Cracker, Joni Mitchell, Shubert, David Bryne, Cesaria Evora, Peter Gabriel, Siouxie and the Banshees, Rochmaninoff, Jim Morrison, Brubeck, Zepplin, Hendrix, Trent Reznor, Miles Davis, Mike Ness… the list is endless and growing.
Visuals: Edward Hopper, Dali, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, Monet, Escher, Mucha, Parrish, Breathed, Alda-Tadema, Mangelsen, Van Gogh, Renoir, whatever catches my eye.
Words: (not a complete list by any means) James Wright, Lorca, Merwin, Jarrell, Ignatow, Poe, Lydia Davis, Neruda, John Logan, Kerouac, Plath, Dolittle, Celan, Corman, Darwish, Gluck, Spires, McNeilley, Shihab-Nye, Kathleen Lynch, CJ Sage, Nick Flynn, Tony Gloegger and I find new ones every day. • What influences you to write about/how you do?
My environment is my largest influence. Other things that influence me are my dyslexic ear - things that aren't really said or sung the way I hear them. My wild imagination that comes up with peculiar scenarios and situations. • Where do you see the underground writing scene in 25 years?
What we know as underground (really alternative) will be further institutionalized. Remember when rock n' roll was for rebels? Now they have a rock n' roll hall of fame. The establishment likes to control everything and eventually will reach out and embrace whatever is the alternative. Bukowski is being taught in Colleges and University. How 'bout another coffee table book of underground artists, or another sleazoid publisher trying to make a buck on his "anthology" of underground.
What's underground, anyway? If we were truly underground, we wouldn't be on the Web. We'd be hiding in obscurity, passing notes along to the next shadow. "Hey man, I wrote this, go ahead and use it if you can." Underground doesn't mean anything. Anger? Edge? Dysfunction? There is anger, edge and dysfunction all over the place. That's not underground, that's the norm. Proletarianism? Do you know where your favorite "underground" artist works during the day? You might be surprised. The image of the writer sitting down with Marx and Che to plan out the next revolution? Come on, you couldn't get enough of following to block the entrance of the local shopping mall. Hiding in our hills are white supremacists, fanatical planned-parenthood bombers and paranoid militiamen, not thinkers, revolutionaries and poets.
I had a chance to meet a dissident Chinese poet who ran an underground magazine. When he lived in China, he was routinely arrested. One time he was rousted out of bed at 2am by the police, he had all his notebooks and writings confiscated and not returned, he sat in a jail and wonder if the next guy through the door was going to interrogate him again, shoot him or let him go. Now that's the real underground. And in twenty-five years, if there are still regimes oppressing the basic human rights and dignities of the people who live under it, then the underground will be much as you see it today. In twenty-five years, in this country, underground may really be UNDERGROUND -- people with spray cans writing words on the underbelly of a metropolis.
If Bush gets enough extremists in the Supreme Court, knocks out a few of our freedoms to appease his religious buddies and backers, then yup, you may see a true underground here too. • from cait - as editor-in-chief of the magnificent Disquieting Muses and as the underground scene claims “poetic license” do you find it difficult to determine if a contributor has created a new word in their piece or do you sometimes wonder if that word is misspelled, and as Host of FM 91.5, KKUP's "Out of Our Minds”, do you have guests that really are!?
Hey, I'll check to see if it's a new word, just because I owe it to the artist to present their work in the best possible light. We all invent new words, but as an editor, I need to make sure it's not a typo. The language is the medium we work in. The underground scene may lay claim to making new words, but poets and writers have been doing it since the medium began.As to the other half of the question: Sure, that happens, and when it does, I just roll with it. |
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