PATHS TOWARD REVIVED LITERATURE

WE LIVE IN A WORLD where increasingly everything is fake. Fake images sounds food faces– chain restaurants with fake Taco Bell Olive Garden artificial cuisine, dupe the masses, sell them robot dates, pump the digital AI-generated fake voices shouting hype to keep the money flowing– fake crypto currency money backed by nothing but the promises of megabillionaire tech hustlers whose only purpose in life is to rob you blind.

WHERE do we find the real, the genuine, the authentic?

Well, maybe in art, for a few last waning days when we can glory in the work and words of actual human beings, before a mass of content generated from the Machine drowns everything.

WHEN reading our new feature, “Two Poems by James Lee,” I thought of a 1998 quote by music critic Dave Marsh, in a book of his essays which recently came out: “That kind of culture, existing in isolation from the Ted Koppel world, exists only at the extreme margins today. A hammer dulcimer picker here, a maker of Cornish pasties there, a quilter in a cabin off in some holler or a rancher singing old corridos in some Southwestern arroyo.”

YET if we’re to become grounded, we need to get back to our roots. Culturally, because only culture will save this mad society. Revived culture. I don’t know exactly where poet– or Odist, as he prefers to call himself– James Lee is from. Tennessee, I think. Perhaps from the kind of isolated place Dave Marsh speaks about, where’s he’s been more in touch with our linguistic roots. His poetry has that sound– the kind of word music which could’ve been heard in England by the Bard himself. No, we’re not going back to some archaic, outdated, or impossible past. But there’s no reason why we can’t draw on elements from the past– examples and techniques from a variety of people, places, sources, as culture traditionally has done (see the roots of rock), like drawing clear water from an underground stream.

THE GOAL: Revived writing. Fiction. Essays. Poetry.

We hope you like James Lee’s poetry!

I Think I’ve Found My Place
Within The Swamps Of Belamour
Liquored Honey From The Gods
Brought There By The Mods
Who Escaped The Plastic Pods
Rising High Above All Odds
We All Go Running In The Streets 
Being Chased By Suits And Neats