Death and The Poetess chez Art Nest, being our ghoulish selves preparing many new treats! Warming up for RPM Challenge (writing our annual Feb record) and learning oodles of covers to play your outdoor/safe sprummer weddings/soirees, Pantheon willing! (–As our wedding band, Love Letters Tendered.)

facebook.com/deathpoetess
deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com

ghostselope:
“(Jane Eyre Energy)
”
Surprise! A small ‘Enghostment’ blog/album, and much affection: GhostsElope.tumblr.com
xo, your newly Mme Ghost and Bones

ghostselope:

(Jane Eyre Energy)

Surprise! A small ‘Enghostment’ blog/album, and much affection: GhostsElope.tumblr.com

xo, your newly Mme Ghost and Bones

>> [The Mini-Interview & collages on IG]
Honored to be a feature collagist w Twin Cities Collage Collective. A mini-blurb-terview I wrote for them 3/12/21.
…
{ Hullo, I’m jojo Lazar! I’m an artist-writer and art-enabler in Boston, MA. I’m a lifelong...

>> [The Mini-Interview & collages on IG]

Honored to be a feature collagist w Twin Cities Collage Collective. A mini-blurb-terview I wrote for them 3/12/21.

{ Hullo, I’m jojo Lazar! I’m an artist-writer and art-enabler in Boston, MA. I’m a lifelong art journal/scrapbook-maker with an MFA in creative writing, and I teach zine-making. I became passionate about experimental cut-up writing techniques in college, and I’ve honed a visual poetry language, “Collage Oracle leaves” the last 8 years through the influence of art comrades Aaron Howard of @OilcanPress, and my longtime art friend @allisonannecollage. Allison has gifted me mail art and magazines all of our lives, and vintage photo albums in 2016. These became a standard collage format in ritual object.

I’ve found that “art discipline projects” as containers can become “parameters (that) set you free.” Borrowing voices via collage is very liberating drag/masque. My experience with TCCC, and joining ‘blackout poetry challenges’ (@blackoutpoetrychallenges) has been warm and encouraging in a strange timeline. Possibilities with collage (poetry) are endless in style and goal, I’m grateful to be a part of The Great Conversation. }

Twin Cities Collage Collective: @twincitiescollagecollective
>> [The Mini-Interview & collages on IG]

REVIEW >> IfItsTooLoud.com: Friday Freebie: Death and The Poetess - Smelling Salts. by Ken
Thank you Ken/If It’s Too Loud… as always for your careful reading/listening and writing! It means so much to this Xennial x Elizabethan creeper!
.
Prophetic...

REVIEW >> IfItsTooLoud.com: Friday Freebie: Death and The Poetess - Smelling Salts. by Ken

Thank you Ken/If It’s Too Loud… as always for your careful reading/listening and writing! It means so much to this Xennial x Elizabethan creeper!

.

Prophetic NYE 2020 photo by Edrie Broken Toy.

https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/smelling-salts
DEATH AND THE POETESS
“SMELLING SALTS” (2021)
Your fav Elizabethan creepers are back! Death and The Poetess’s 3rd RPM Challenge tips its chapeau to Weezer’s Blue album, among other 1990s...

https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/smelling-salts

DEATH AND THE POETESS
“SMELLING SALTS” (2021)

Your fav Elizabethan creepers are back! Death and The Poetess’s 3rd RPM Challenge tips its chapeau to Weezer’s Blue album, among other 1990s ghosts and Pumpkins. “Smelling Salts,” a Jane Austen-esque title for a time-traveling mixtape full of Emily Dickinson worthy gallows humor (and a song from one of her poems). This record features some Princess Bride jokes alongside the mythology/archaeology-laden tunes you’ve come to expect from these cryptorian punks that watch too many history documentaries.

This year’s contribution to the tomb-triptych of: Necropolis by the Sea (2019), and Red Skeleton (2020) is “The Tomb-builders’ Tombs,” a love song about Deir el-Medina, Egypt. “Smelling Salts” the single is about social isolation and the character(s) and spirits one’s home might now be inhabited by.

Smelling Salts: Implying one has been unconscious/faint, and one is waking to the liminal space of this record as astral time (restorative psychedelic). / Or perhaps 2020 had you in the doldrums, your own personal non-linear oubliette. We welcome you warmly to - now. Have a whiff, slow exhale, peel yourself off your fainting chaise. Do please re-join the cosmic ball with us.

-jojo
2/28/21

https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/smelling-salts

Death and The Poetess Facebook

acrossthesocialdistances:

“Charm of the walled medieval court“ and “Paradise a lot like staying home“ by jojo Lazar

Charm of the walled medieval court

From old right grapes,
French hipster would.
To fascinating European
masters such art

reached every brink
of revolution. Drew a heart.
King too busy handling
artifacts from Egypt,
soft sand. Another jaunty
about young love on the Nile.

Wealth more concerned?
Their own pleasures’ pleasures.

“He’s just interested in
–crying. To worry/vanity.”
Employed a life model
for his female figures,
and she smiled.

Uses the witchy language
of cellar heart.
A barrel under a bare bulb.

Perhaps another change
between her breasts.
He was behaving distorted
by the refraction.

Recognize as très Brooklyn.
Work until midnight,
create shifting light.

.

Paradise a lot like staying home

High, fitted for electricity,
adored living like a “sav-age.”
He fumed to entertain
guests, at not being “on the spot!”

Foraged-mushrooms-and
without going anywhere
opened his own place at last.

Colonies to worry,
become a playpen in
which he could (not).

Decor not unlike people’s poverty.
Twentysomething’s first apartment
boyish eagerness, as if

at the same time (“whereverness.”)
London and Paris as he would
in his home. Confronted
read like this: spicy tuna
tartare down– George III.

Had suddenly a Sabino
opalescent glass figure
on the risotto and foie gras.
Of England was of course,
coarse. Adore tenderloin,
King Louis XVI, truffle honey.

“I could just as easily get
this nondescript spot
next to Paris or London…
or Sydney or Hong Kong unsigned.”

Chalkboard for ever-changing
–who we loved.

.
Collage words via Great Illustrated Classics, A Tale of Two Cities (adapted for YA), Gauguin’s Writings of a Savage collection, art history texts. Magazines: Food + Wine, Condé Nast Traveler (with new-to-me term of homogenized globalisation travel experience, Whereverness), and cut-up scraps from others.

Album liner notes: LADY JANE GREY’S WHOLESOME RITUAL (by Death and The Poetess)

image
https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/lady-jane-greys-wholesome-ritual

A note from jojo:
Why would a 21st Century New Englander be interested in Tudor Humour? Why is a Bu-Jewitch hippy worrying about the martyrs of Tudor monarchs, titling songs tentatively “Rage Against The Counter-Reformation?” I enjoyed a lot of tv/films/books as escapism during the last five years of socio-political dystopia/sexist culture. Now I realize immersing myself in European and British history was a strange convex mirror to study my feelings about the present. What’s to like (besides some fashion/accessories) when it was a truly dark time to be a woman? One would be under profound constraints even as a consort or queen - thanks to The Great Chain of Being (+super-patriarchy). I was/am after some root source for cultural angst, and I chased it in my “difficult women of history,” “unruly Tudor mes-dames” fixation.

After one has exhausted period drama series, movies, and documentaries (and acknowledge that Michael Hirst has had his hooks in you since childhood; Elizabeth 1998 film before The Tudors, Vikings series) …then books/audiobooks become refuge. I’ve been listening to American Prof. Robert Bucholz’s “A History of England from The Tudors to The Stuarts.” He explains that in studying 1485-1714: “we will be explaining an awful lot about the next two and a half centuries, and indeed about the world in which you and I live…"

“It’s a relevant story because it is in this period that England became a world power and established its American colonies, thus becoming our mother country… The culture of early modern England is our root culture. And many of our laws, institutions, traditions and customs can be traced back to this time and place.”

.

It’s not just feeling empathy for the commoners, martyrs, the cast-aside mistresses and wives of Henry VIII. Or hearing ancient gossip even in your dreams from becoming too familiar with the details of the scandals, intrigues and horrors of Tudor court life through the first hand accounts and letters. While one hasn’t been groomed to be a monarch/pawn in a risky will-alteration coup like Lady Jane Grey, being a xennial fed The Cult of Productivity feels relevant. It’s a wild time being pressured into hustling and side-hustling (our art-selves) and constantly producing/sharing as part of post-capitalism au present.

Even if we feel ease and joy in making art we are expected to be a one-person-entrepreneur about it. It would be a tragedy (if but a drop like Lady Jane Grey’s) to forget the personhood and souls run ragged in the process of chasing someone else’s idea of success or purpose. It is often at great peril to oneself. The songs shocked me after recording as they sound so much like they could be an autobiography of shirking this mentality to remember the joys of reading, arting to survive. So, what is LJG’s wholesome ritual? Autodidacticism, perhaps? (Blood Ceremony was taken anyway! And Lady Jane Grey Sabbath was the right vibe, but not quite right.)

It’s a far more macabre than romantic special interest, ultimately. Courtly love games and idle talk was (in part) used in Anne Boleyn’s trial that lead to her execution for Treason. The masque of chivalric love and the ease of the executioner’s block (solution). Our “first great modern society” has left a dark ambivalent thorny rose badge impression in our psyche. A knight can wear your favor, a will can be altered by an apostrophe and ‘s,’ and a pyre can be lit as easily as a love letter burnt.

I enjoyed escapism in the spiritually deeply familiar whilst able to pretend it was far and away, and then arting about it from every angle. Inevitably one finds they are looking in a convex mirror. To see how we got here, to see a karmic predicament you do not envy in the victims and the perpetrators. The macabre is stronger than the romantic/light-hearted in this story, but if you’re goth? That’s romantic to you already. As Walter Alice Sickert says, “The world is ending, let’s die art.”

-jojo Lazar

https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/lady-jane-greys-wholesome-ritual

Album Genres: Elizabethan Creepers, Crust Courtier, The Cure +The Tudors = The Royal Remedy, Xennials’ ‘Food Courtly Love’ songs, Screamo Medieval, Heretic Rock by Blasphemous Punks.

PS: Extended bibliography with fav authors/films coming next. Part 2 of the essay inevitable, no doubt.

March, 2020
Death and The Poetess record for RPM Challenge

Old header, un-selfie via blackout poetry challenges.
New header, beloved upcoming meta-title ‘I Still Witch.’