The fog of opium. Fiction writer and critic Steve Tomasula interviews the real Jirí Cêch about experimental poetry. Um. Sort of.

9 MP3 Songs
SPOKEN WORD: Comedy, SPOKEN WORD: Poetry



Details:
Poetry doesn't suck! But this guy does! Blood, that is. Welcome to the third CD in The Jirí Chronicles, a book without boundaries, starring Jirí Cêch, an incredibly handsome, opium-addicted, vampire, real estate developer, emigrant from Czechoslovakia, now living in New York City where he writes poetry while sitting on the toilet. This time, it's award-winning novelist and literary critic, Steve Tomasula interviewing Jirí about the finer points of writing experimental poetry, with usual digressive commentary on politics, women, toilets, and...squirrels. A must-have CD for collectors of the ever-expanding Jirí Chronicles!

What the critics have to say:

"Some poets become mythic figures only after they die. Emily Dickinson, for example, who didn't exist at all during her lifetime, and the interest of whose poetry derives in part from her radical awareness of that fact. Others live only as mythic figures: Jiri ­Cech is such a poet...." - H.L. Hix, National Book Award Finalist and winner of the T.S. Eliot Award

"One certainty from Cech's installation is that his work is conceptually engaging without being dry or didactic; it is hilarious and a welcome addition." - Oz McGuire, critic for REVIEW arts magazine

"Artist Jiri­ Cech, a self-proclaimed businessman and vampire from Czechoslovakia, filled a small room with his capitalist-inspired limited edition T-shirts, postcards, CDs, art therapy sketches and autographed underwear, each one a mimicry of the unspoken rule that art should not be understood primarily as a marketable commodity. Cech thrives on barraging the viewer with anti-traditional objects, purposely offensive commentary and ruthless political satire, providing a not-so-subtle reminder of the harsher side of our contemporary dialogue."- Robin Trafton, art critic for The Kansas City Star

"What distinguishes Cech's poetry is his idiosyncratic use of the English language, reminiscent of zen koans and British privet mazes in which everyone is naked. Getting lost is half the fun!" - Antonia Ruiz, literary critic

"Never before has a poet confessed so much - or had so much to confess! Jiri ­Cech's brutal self-examination is a breath of fresh air after a slow-burning chemical fire. A remarkable achievement!" - Prague Independent News

ABOUT JIRI CECH:
Jiri­ was born in Czechslovakia, where once Bohemia flourished. From the age of 13 he carried on an incestuous affair with his sister who became pregnant, presumably with his child. The child was born with half a heart and lived only long enough to be christened Jiri­'s name. Still a teenager, Jiri Cech fled Soviet occupation in 1968, along with thousand of other Czechoslovakians, and survived as a refugee in Switzerland by exchanging sex for food, beer and paper on which to write poetry.

Jiri­ arrived in the United States in 1971 where he is now a successful businessman, specializing in new construction and real estate development (i.e., suburban sprawl). Although he is an unrepentant capitalist, he is particularly annoyed by conservatives, believing they represent the decline of the American idea[l] of misbehaving in privacy without some sort of KGB-type breathing down your pants. He enjoys his patriotic right to practice vampirism between consenting adults and, therefore, lives in New York City, a hotbed of bloodsucking.

Jiri's poetry has appeared in prominent literary journals such as Pleiades and The Melic Review, and has been adapted to video, death metal and hip-hop. His first collection, Whither: Poems of Exile, won the Mennstrausse Poetry Award. His second book, Comes Life, chronicles events from September 11, 2001, to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through poetic voices ranging from God and the Adversary, to the widowed and deserted, to soldiers, politicians and nameless casualties of combat. Poems are excavated from the bloody Old Testament and reshaped to reflect the sometimes brutal, sometimes sumptuous emotions of people affected by current events.
"Cech's vision of war and its consequences are unrelenting and unrepentant. COMES LIFE is a raw, haunting chronicle sure to become a poetic landmark of our time." - Paul van Ossel, critic
Jiri­'s art therapy drawings have become an explosive sensation in the art world, and his product line is worn by celebrities and white-collar criminals. Stories in which Jiri­ appears as a primary or peripheral character will be published in The Jiri­ Chronicles & Other Fictions, by Debra Di Blasi (publisher: FC2 Books, June 2007).
You can find out more about Jiri Cech at related websites: http://home.earthlink.net/jiricech
http://home.earthlink.net/ten-minute-muse
http://jaded_ibis_productions.typepad.com
http://home.earthlink.net/umlaut

ABOUT STEVE TOMASULA: Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels The Book of Portraiture (FC2); IN & OZ (Ministry of Whimsy Press); and VAS: An Opera in Flatland, an acclaimed novel of the biotech revolution that has recently been re-released in paper by The University of Chicago Press.
Incorporating narrative forms of all kindsâfrom comic books, travelogues, journalism or code to Hong Kong action movies or science reportsâTomasulaâs writing has been called a âreinvention of the novel,â combining an âattention to society in the tradition of Orwell, attention to language in the tradition of Beckett, and the humor of a Coover or Pynchon.â His writing often crosses visual, as well as written genres, drawing on science and the arts to take up themes of how we represent what we think we know, and how these representations shape our lives. His short fiction has been published widely, and most recently in McSweeneyâs, The Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, and The Iowa Review where he received the Iowa Prize for the most distinguished work published in any genre.
Recent essays on body art, literature and culture can be found in Data Made Flesh (Routledge), Musing the Mosaic (SUNY), Leonardo (M.I.T.), and numerous magazines both here and in Europe. He holds a doctorate in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a professor in University of Notre Dame's writing program.