Captain's Log
Inhere lie the chronicles of the landship Rieka, and her ongoing mission to journey Furtherer than any poet has gone before.
It’s official. The transfer is complete, the torch has been passed. I’ve just assumed command of the landship Rieka, and her continuing mission to seek out and discover new communities and cultures, to bring poetry and art to a level it has never reached before, as an international Poetry Ambassador for Peace.
In her continuing adventures Rieka, meaning “power of creation” and “power of the wolf,” will set out to establish global poetry networks, connecting like minds and great thinkers from around this planet and beyond.
19 August 2024
Having spent days sorting out all the payments and paperwork needed to be on the road, driving her into the maintenance bay, the last and final step before becoming fully street legal, was a moment of highest anxiety… the last thing I needed at this point was for her to fail inspection. Nearly an hour they spent going point by point, as my heart paced back and forth.
Finally cleared, papers in order, it was time to open up the throttle and hit the road, to take her for a test run… and there’d be poets in Manchester tonight.
Navigating the labyrinth of back streets, we finally came upon The Alibi, a corner bar in a poor working class part of town… always the best venues cos they’re real and down in the dirt, places where posers dare not venture… and parking down the street, we had an hour to settle in before the rush began.
Just then, I peer out the window to notice a grey car with
New Jersey plates come around the corner, and the hoarse voice of Alex Ragsdale
– think Kurt Cobain meets Neal Cassady and you’ll get a good picture in your
head – can be heard saying, “That must be the bus. Now I know what we’re doing
for the next twenty minutes.”
I call out to them and invite them over. As they park, it’s time to show them what Rieka can do. Opening up the stage door I lower the lift – The Lift Stage it’s called, the former wheel chair lift built into the starboard side of the bus. Complete with a matching red sofa chair, the stage is now set as I inaugurate the built-in theatre with a poem and the comradery that then ensues from there.
Giving the grand tour, I show off the custom built interior and Captain’s Cabin, fully insulated and finished with floor to ceiling wood work, complete with three beds (a full bed on a loft platform and a set of bunk beds that double as a couch), a shower, counter and cabinets, with more than plenty of space for storage and of course the centerpiece, a fireproofed brick corner with a wood burning stove.
When opportunity comes calling, you must remember to say yes. The power of yes is all that is needed to achieve your dreams… and help will come your way, as long as you stay receptive to it – that is with all things in life – the universe responds and will bring good things your way, if you let it.
Now though it was time to set up and get the show started, it was going to be a long night, one of many, and I was fortunate enough just to be a witness. With my bed parked outside and cheap beer inside, it was going to be a long night indeed, as we unrolled our stories at the bar.
If you’ve never been to a Poetry Renaissance show, they’re loud and raunchy, a rowdy crew, a mix of poets and comedians that make up this bohemian working class stew, complete with whips and dildos and every type of vulgarity you can imagine. It’s not for the faint of heart or those easily offended, yet at the same time the level of pure, raw talent in the room was groundbreaking and some of the funniest stuff I’ve seen in a long time.
When asked if “wild” was a proper way to describe his shows, Damian told me that his goal was to become the Jerry Springer of poetry… and his group of pranksters would seem more than eager to make that vision a reality.
20 August 2024
What happened last night? At some point I staggered back to the bus. It was sometime after midnight, at least six hours before they finally put it to bed and now it’s all a blur.
Now, it’s morning and I’m parked on some random street corner with no one else around. Coffee wasn’t going to find itself, so it was time to get my own show rolling.
After taking care of the essentials, I knew there was a free day ahead of me, so with an offer on the table I set about tracking down what I’d need for an oil change and a spot to hold up while the New Jersey crew slept off their own hangovers from the bacchanal the night before.
The more I hang out with these guys the more impressed I’m becoming with what they’re creating. There’s the debaucherous parts that the morality police will undoubtedly take issue with, yet what they’re doing goes far beyond the first glance. There’s a depth and breath and a purpose full of intent to build something that’ll break the boundaries, while at the same time not losing themselves.
Later we all met up at a 50’s café, where getting towards dinner time they were all sitting down for breakfast. Here I got a chance to talk with Jerimiah, another young poet and event organizer from Manchester, whose helping to promote Poetry Renaissance in New Hampshire.
He suggested that since we have the bus, he knew a spot not so far away where we could watch the sunset by the river. So, we piled in about a dozen bodies and rode the cacophony down to the railroad crossing that stretched over the Merrimack River.
Spending the waning moments of sunset by the river bank, it was now time to load back up, tonight’s event was already starting and another night of spoken word and comedy was upon us.
Heading into downtown Manchester we gathered again at the Keys bar for a night of stand-up comedy led by a full bearded giant of a transvestite in a cowboy hat.
During the night Damian and I found a moment to talk about
the purpose behind the movement he was building – to build poetry networks
everywhere, to connect the average person to the power of their own voice,
while being a part of something much larger.
As herding cats and poets is a nearly impossible task, the night devolved into a grand debate over where everyone was going to sleep that night.
As it turned out, they were heading to Laconia, more than an hour away for the promise of beds and a shower, but first we needed to gather back at The Alibi for libations and a jam session that ended with us singing Show Me the Way to Go Home in a cappella.
21 August 2024
Having woken up, once more parked on the street corner, it was time to beat the meter maids. Coffee would have to wait, for once the engine starts miles we’d need to cross before a rest stop would find us.
Arriving in Portsmouth early, the trick was finding overnight parking. Downtowns are usually restrictive, especially with such a large vehicle to park, yet I wanted to be close enough to be able to walk back after tonight’s grand finale at The Press Room, where Myles Burr was launching his new album, “Voyeuristic Sun.
Meanwhile, more shenanigans were going on in Manchester as a contingent of cats led by Liam Burdett, a kick ass comedian, clad in a black leather jacket and as punk as it gets, were back at The Alibi stirring up trouble with locals, while planning to “finish the story” to “pay tribute” at Kerouac’s grave in Lowell that night…
Operation Kero-whack was a go, as Damian and Alex coordinated over Instagram, like dispatchers from the depot. “10-4 good buddy, that’s a Roger,” and “Everything’s going according to plan,” as the whole thing eventually fell apart due to being drunk and disorderly in the bar they were at, with the whole road crew having to return to Manchester to sort out whatever was going on there.
22 August 2024
I’m pleased to say that our inaugural mission, to tear it up with the poets of the New Jersey Poetry Renaissance was a complete success with no casualties (that we know of) to report.
30 August 2024
Heading out today for our second adventure and first medium distance road trip, to Connecticut for the National & International Beat Poetry Festival, where I’ll be inducted as the new US National Beat Poet Laureate.
Setting out early, I wanted to leave extra time for any unforeseen circumstances, as this would be my first distance test. About forty minutes in, this proved to be a necessary precaution, as suddenly a warning light and alarm went off.
As it turns out, if the engine temperature goes over 200 degrees caution lights start flashing. With a vehicle this size and a diesel on top of it, there are so many idiosyncrasies and maintenance checks I need to stay on top of, and I’m just at the beginning of the learning curve.
With six miles still to g before my exit, and no good option for pulling over, I let up on the gas… when going uphill the power drops significantly and you have to give it a little more to keep up enough speed, but that also causes the engine temperature to rise… once I started heading down hill though the engine started to cool and the alarms shut off. yet I’d still need to get to a safe place to stop and look under the hood.
Having turned off onto Route 20, I found a gas station to pull into, yet once there could find neither the problem nor the solution, so the best I could do in the situation was let the engine cool for half an hour and take a more rural route, staying off the highway for a while.
While there, I fortuned on a prize, a beautiful 1965 hardcover edition of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea… officially now the first book for the new Poetry Library I’m building for the bus.
As more poets arrive, the tours begin, showing off the bus and all her potential, as I serenade Leann and PW Covington (the incoming New Mexico Beat Poet Laureate) with a Grateful Dead song from The Lift Stage…
Poets converging, we sat down to eat, drink and carouse before the festival officially launched with a reading at the Collinsville Town Hall from the former Beat Laureates… which in style nearly ended in a brawl. 😊
31 August 2024
The day I’ve been waiting for is finally here. Having settled in at the festival headquarters, an estate in the Connecticut countryside, I woke up early to do some filming and to prepare for a long day ahead.
The new Poetry Bus, a center of attraction, I’d be giving tours and a Green Room for poets who needed to take a break from all the hubbub going on throughout the day.
Easing into the celebrations, we started with an open mic for the first two hours, so that the room – or backyard – would be warm from when Debbie (Tuson-Kilday) would introduce the new laureate selection.
She began by telling of the selection process where a committee had weeded through hundreds of nominations to come up with a list of 70 potential laurates for this year, out of which only a dozen were chosen. That was the moment it truly sank in how special this honor really was.
Readings went on throughout the day and night, and just when we thought we’d put it to bed, reinforcements arrived, when Damian Rucci and Alexander Ragsdale showed up at 9:30, keeping the revelries going for another four hours, until they finally crashed in the bus for the night, as I went staggering off to bed.
01 September 2024
Another early morning struck me, as coffee was sitting so far away, yet if I don’t start during the calm before the storm, I’ll just get swept up in all the chaos.
In the interim, I was able to get Alex to take a look at the bus again to see what was going on with the exhaust system, the likeliest culprit for the mysterious warning light. Turns out that this bus is one of the first ones installed with a filtration system to reduce diesel emissions. What that means is that I have both an exhaust filter and a cleaning procedure called Regeneration that I must do regularly, a process by which the engine heat is used to burn off any carbon built up in the exhaust system.
Theoretically having the solution, and a plan to follow through, I felt better heading into the third day of readings, as the poets gathered made their final plans and last farewells and to be continueds, before spreading back out into the thousand directions.
As the heat of day was breaking, I finished repacking the bus and hit the road myself, watching my gauges as predicably they followed pattern I saw before once the temperature went above 200, as I regulated my driving to compensate, making it back by nightfall without further incident.
03 September 2024
What a day. Having returned from the Beat Poetry Festival in Connecticut, it was jump head first into my first event, hosting as the new US National Beat Poet Laureate.
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What better way to kick off my term than to go to Lowell, Massachusetts, where Beat Poetry, specifically Jack Kerouac, was born and raised.
With the bus, I always need to account for inevitable obstacles and everything taking twice as long as I plan. The first limbo stick I had to pass under was a low bridge heading down Gorham Street on the way to the cemetery that only had a 12 foot clearance. Conservatively, I measured the height at 11 foot 4 inches, so 11 and a half to be safe, which gave me a six inch margin of safety, yet I took that nice and slow just in case.
Having cleared that, it was now a question of how to get inside the graveyard. The main gate likewise has a low narrow clearance that I wouldn’t be able to get through, so I had to drive around the perimeter to find a back entrance which barely was wide enough to get through, yet dodging tree-lines I made it to Lincoln and Seventh where Jack was laid to rest.
Having assembled, the poets met up and then got on the bus to take them to the grave site, where in the Beat tradition, started by myself and the poet, George Wallace, last year, we would drink a shot of Jack for Jack.
Sitting around his grave we shared stories and commemorated Kerouac’s legacy, before heading over to The Worthen House where Kerouac (and allegedly Edgar Allen Poe) used to drink.
With the new inducted Beat Poet Laureates and more poets from all over, having joined us from as far away as California, representing nine different states across the country in total, we set the mic afire on this Tuesday night.
The benefit of course of having the bus with me is that it’s now possible to stay all night for events and go right out to the parking lot to sleep, when it’s over. No couch surfing or driving required after a night of poetry and raucous behavior.
Another success and great memories created we poets said our farewells as we planned out our next adventures in this long and winding tale that has only just begun.
I set out 10,000 miles ago and it’s taken everything I had to make it here, to this north-western corner of the world, with all the obstacles to overcome and threads to weave, to create this living memory of all these once in a lifetime moments that come rushing to mind as I write these words, and all the deals to make and promises to keep in order to piece this jig-saw puzzle together, just to get me this far, to the jumping off point, where anything can go any way at any moment, but we precede ourselves.
There’s an accountancy to be had and this is the moment to do it. Before we go forward, we must take a look back, to understand how such an unlikely venture, full of bravado and daring and a whole ton of nothing left to lose came into being.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it,” came blaring out of the headphones, as I’m timing a new poem to music. It was around this moment, when planning out the tour was in full swing. All winter I’d been scavenging and preparing Furtherer for the long drive ahead, sending out a forever list of emails to book shows and set a route and time table that would get us across the country in the longest, most outrageous way possible.
I was featuring at Bards that night and J., a new conspirator, was hosting. I met the Renaissance poets at an open mic up in Portsmouth, NH, at the now defunct Book-Bar, at their monthly Hoot event, and the list was stacked with a bunch of fire breathing hooligans, who were all rough and raw and prophetic, poets of the highest caliber, a whole crew of them up from New Jersey, and all spitting words that I hadn’t heard since my days in Los Angeles – full of import and passion, of substance and consequence, from magenta skies to ashen pits, these words were extreme, breaking boundaries of what’s truly possible. No doubt, I’d have to bring napalm to the microphone to match the energy of the room.
A spark was lit that night. I’d gone there not knowing that this would be a deciding encounter, but the wheels were already spinning, and the clock, like those drip-drip-dripping drips on the rooftop, kept ticking. There was only so much rain left before the whole sky would fall in.
To be clear, this was prior to, but the writing was already on the walls for anyone who wanted to read the warning signs and there was only so much time left before the end, before the fire and ice. If I was going to build an arc, the time was now… and I knew it.
Timing is everything, and there’s never enough time, it’s all consuming the work that has to be put in, in order to be neither too early nor too late, for either can be disastrous, and I hadn’t even begun to learn the lesson of getting what you want yet, and all of what it takes out of you – everything, and where that would take me, for that was only the dust of a dream not so long ago, yet today, I suddenly find myself exactly where I need to be.
27 Aug. 2025: Thinking
back on those early days, the electric rush and slow falling dominoes
that set all this into motion, I must say that returning to the States
had merely been a fall back position, not my intention. Now, however, on
the east coast, recovering from a shoulder injury, I was given a karmic
reward that I never saw coming… the gift of time, a once in a lifetime
opportunity where, for a limited time, a year and a half exactly, I
could have stable housing while on disability. Yet, with one arm out of
commission, I’d work more in those 18 months than I could ever remember.
It
all began when I got invited to a Beat Poetry Festival in Connecticut a
month after landing in the States from Italy. To make a long tangent
short, I was still hosting and producing a radio program, Poetry from
Around the World, for KPFK in Los Angeles, after they got hip to the
trip I took overseas, doing a backpacking poetry tour that stretched
from Istanbul to Marrakesh, over near a year and a half on no money,
couch surfing and staying in anarchist squats around Europe, in an
occasional castle or guest house in the Alps, catching buses, trains and
even a camel across Europe and North Africa, country hopping to stay
ahead of the visa limits, just learning how to live as a vagabond
globetrotting poet, and offered me a program slot – like a foreign
correspondent… for poetry.
So,
I’m still doing this when I get back to the States… and there’s
something that I do… if I know I’m going to be somewhere for any period
of time, I find out what’s happening locally and get involved. As an
artist, we thrive on community and being involved locally is essential
for our own creative development. So, here I am in Haverhill, MA and
what do I find they have – a local television station. Well, there’s no
guessing or asking me twice, and I thunder right through their door to
find out how I can get my hands on some film making equipment, and the
next thing I know I’m showing up to this festival with two professional
cameras and a whole suite of equipment and put together this two-part
program on Beat poetry, featuring their group, the National Beat Poetry
Foundation, for both TV and radio.
Well,
fast forward 9 months and I’m right in the crux of things. I’d been
talking about converting a school bus and using it for a poetry tour
since January and now it was June. I’d even gone down to a bus
dealership, a whole lot filled with used school buses running dirt cheep
at $5K at the start of the year, but now that I had the money saved up
they decided to double the price. This has been the story of finding the
right vehicle for over a decade now. When the vehicle is there I don’t
have the money, when I have the money, the vehicle’s not there, so I’ve
gotten used to walking.
But
everything that has led to this insane journey derives from this, we
never know what’s waiting for us around the corner, or just over the
horizon. What might seem a curse today very often is a blessing
tomorrow, and sometimes it’s just a question of letting what you need
come to you, for the universe responds when you know what you want, even
if you can’t see it clearly in the moment, there’s a cosmic flow of
energy that conspires in your favor when you believe in yourself… and it
was like that, a random search on social media to find the vehicle so
perfect to the thought that’d been running ragged in my head all this
time that it almost didn’t seem real when the picture was staring at me
in the face.
It was at this point
when the stars and furies began to align. I was contemplating a trip to
Louisville, Kentucky, to participate in an Insomniacathon, a 52-hour
poetry, art and music marathon being organized by R.W. and a whole band
of regional poets, who I hadn’t met yet, when I was informed that I was
going to be named the next U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate, a shock and
honor that took me completely by surprise, making the window of
opportunity narrowly precise. I had one year to do something with the
title I’d be given before having to pass to torch to another… for it’s
always only what you make of it. You either use your time, or you lose
your time, there’s no three ways about it.
Now
there was a springboard under my feet and momentum at my back to do
something I dare say important with the chance I’d been given, but it
was all in or nothing and now all these musings of what and how I would
do scrolled through my head these last months took on an immediacy that
needed to be addressed.
“There’s
no way this is possible,” doubt pursued every plan, and talk was cheap.
How many people have talked about doing something like this, yet
inevitably it all turns into hot air. Until I actually had the vehicle,
until there was something physical, material that people could see and
touch, that’s all it was, just talk and big wishes… and that’s where
poetry comes in.
Only through
poetry, through the arts, can we turn fantasy into reality. There must
be some mathematical equation to explain how poetry realigns the cosmos
to work in your favor, that it turns the impossible into something
inevitable. There must be some observable method that untangles the
blues and curves a path through the wilderness of our minds, that gives
imagination the keys to all our hopes and dreams and a reason for us to
keep going when all the rest has fallen to darkness and despair.
Yes,
poetry is the light, and it may sound contrite to those who don’t
practice, but where else do we find the true answers to the problems we
face, if it doesn’t come from those dreamers and poets who dare to
believe?
Certainly, it doesn’t
come from those who turn over even our thoughts and the air we breathe
into a commodity, something that can be farmed for profit.
If
capitalism is the disease, might I offer that poetry is the cure, the
uniting force that gives us common ground and the microphone is where we
tell the story that we can all belong to.
That’s
why tyrants have always feared the poets, for we see through the smoke
screens and lies, to tell the truth of what is and what could be
possible.
These are the thoughts
rummaging through my head as I look upon this new challenge, having
found what appears to be the catalyst, something so big, so outrageous,
that it doesn’t even belong to this century, yet here it is, real as
life, this big red albatross that’s impossible to ignore.
If
I’m going to do this, if I’m going to put everything on the line, if
I’m going to risk a kamikaze nosedive, then I’m going to make it so
spectacular that even my failure would be from the stuff of legends.
Awesome 🏴☠️
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