Steve Abhaya Brooks – Books & Art

September 12, 2010

Books & Art:

Filed under: Contents — Steve Abhaya @ 4:04 pm


If you would like an overview of what’s on this site, click on 66 Covers to your right. Otherwise, scroll down to see a list of what’s here, or if you are looking for something specific, enter the name into the search box to your right, wait a couple of seconds and scan down past the covers page, until it appears. Keep scrolling on this page if you want to wander through the site. Click on the next page and keep wandering. The posts are listed alphabetically. 

For Nothing – A One Man Show, a full-length video, click on:  http://mcooki.es/216521/

Nothing is a talk that comes from doing my first two shows, Keep Talking, in ’75, and The Blood & Turnips Poetry Festival, first performed in ’82. Nothing was recorded in Seattle in ’03.  My son, Jaxon Brooks, made this possible through his diligent effort and the facilities of his wonderful website, MilkandCookies.com, which I recommend for its insightful and often hilarious content.
Artwork is by the author, except for the cover of The Exquisite Poet and The Blood & Turnips Poetry Festival by Alexandra Benjamin, the cover to The Zen of Housepainting by Chris Blum, and the paintings that accompany The Lonely Lion by Christine Schibly. The cover photo for Fearless in Lucknow was taken by Michael Schiesser. The artwork for Let’s Spend Some Time Together is by Gregory Vose.

Steveabhaya.com now contains these complete posts:

101 Ways to Avoid Reading Self-Help Books, 11 pages, suggestions, 1996

A Conversation Among Raindrops, 55 pages, prose poems of awareness, 1993

A Prisoner’s Cave in Heaven, 378 pages, prose combined with the poetry of Alone, 2007

All Fall Down, 55 pages, poetry, 2009 (also 62 pages, open text)

Too Much Beauty, 117 pages, poetry, 2007

Altered Egos, 171 pages, prose, invented satiric biographies of the famous, infamous, and legendary, 2007

American Heretic, college humor magazine, 1963.

Art Work, paintings and drawings, 1990 to the present

Being Itself, 78 pages, prose poems of awareness in being, 1993-2008

Big Head Theatre, 202 satirical drawings, 2001

Borderwalker, 55 pages, parable of loss and redemption, 1989

Café Faces, 60 drawings of café patrons, done at various times

Café Life, 117 pages, Life in the Owl and Monkey Café, SF, 1991

Dear Nadja, 179 pages, autobiography that parallels the fiction of Borderwalker, 1982

Death, 39 pages, poetry, 2000

Elegy of a Young Poet, 17 pages, surrealist transliterations, 1976

Eternal Ruse, 44 pages, poetry, 1985

Fall Awake, 56 pages, drama, 2010

Fearless in Lucknow, 53 pages, prose, in ’92 with Papaji, 1994

Fierce Tranquility, 101 pages, a journal of inner discovery, 1989

Fleshy Blue Boat, 55 pages, poetry, light, early poems, 1972

Half Past Kissing Time, 104 pages, novella, sequel to SWIMMING, 1989

I Am, 48 pages, poetry, 2009

I Became a Florist to Run for the Roses, 25 pages, humor, 2001

I Spilled Coffee on the Buddha, 58 pages, imaginative poems and art, 1991

I Write Poetry, poetry, 2005-2004

I’m Alive, 29 pages, drama, Seattle Playwrights Festival (Honorable Mention) 1990

Invisible Lion, 137 pages, autobiographical prose, starting over, 1985

Joni, 45 pages, biographical prose, 2002

Let’s Spend Some Time Together, drama, Intersection Theatre, 1972

Matisse in LA, 36 poems, 2002

Minnie the Mermaid, 20 pages, fictional prose, short story, 1990

Mother, 608 pages, prose, taking care of an elder parent, 2004

Music Night, 13 pages, abstract art and poetry, in the Honey Bear Bakery Café, Seattle. ’95

Never Mind Gertrude Stein, 200 drawings with aphorisms, 1982

Nothing – A One Man Show, text for video, 2004

On Board the Victoria Clipper, 6 pages, 16 poems, 2010

Ordinary Ecstasy, 157 pages, journalese, The Osho International Meditation Center, Pune, India, 1991-1992

Pardon My French, Illustrations of French Colloquialisms, 1995

Philip Blanc in San Francisco, 6 pp, light surreal poems, drawings, Panjandrum Press, 1972

Poet in America, 390 pages, prose poetry, 1975-85

Prepare to Dance, 32 pages, love poetry, 1993

Regina, 52 pages, biographical prose, 2002

San Francisco Snapshots, 68 pages, short poems, written on the street, 1974

Savage Amusement, a poet’s life in San Francisco, 212 pages, journal prose, 1975

Singing Down the Drain, musical, 2011

Spike’s Eye View, 80 Cartoons for children and others, 2000

Square Roots, 48 paintings, art, 200

SWIMMING, 145 pages, coming of age fictionalized autobiography, 1989

The Blood & Turnips Poetry Festival Anthology, 42 pages, satirical poetry with art, several venues, 1978-88

The Boy Who Named Himself, 8 pages, fable, The Carlton Hotel, Lucknow, India, 1992

The Cartoon Kid, 76 cartoons, 2000

The Chair Outside the Door, 26 poems, 2010

The Cock Poems by Georgio Vesta, 17 pp, poetry, Love Lights Magazine, 1974

The Dancer in the Heart, 89 pages, poetry, 6 paintings, Philos Press, 2001

The Exquisite Poet, 51 pages, poetry, 2008

The Lonely Lion & All the Animals from A to Z, 26 pages, children’s stories and art, 2001

The Lost Poems of Jesus, 45 pages, poetry, 1993, Talking Raven Magazine, ’94

The Ocean in a Bottle, 26 pages, excerpt from Five on the Western Edge, Momo’s Press, ’75

The Queen of the Rhumba, 50 pages, poetry in the city, 1980

The Roomless Room, 30 pages, poetry, after a heart attack, 2002

The True Story of Zenman, 98 drawings with captions, 2001

The Zen of Housepainting, 11 pages, prose, from City Miner Magazine, 1982

Walking in Asheville, 95 pages, poems and photographs, 2011

Walking in Ellensburg, 42 pages, poetry on the streets of Ellensburg, Washingon, 2008

Zenwords, 141 pages, prose, redefining words in Zenthink, 1999-2008


September 25, 2008

Fearless in Lucknow

Filed under: Book,Non-fiction — Steve Abhaya @ 1:42 pm

Fearless in Lucknow is the story of an intimate meeting with an esteemed guru, in the least personal reality one can imagine.

“In the first day I spent with Papaji, listening, I saw something I’d never seen before. I saw a man, not only speaking to others about the truth of their inherent nature, I saw being speaking to being, not merely someone speaking about being to others. I saw a man speaking to the people in the big, open room of a suburban house, in a large urban city, on the other side of the world, sometimes speaking as one person to another, and I saw a new thing I hadn’t seen before, I saw love pouring out toward itself, and I heard the clearest, simplest, most direct comprehension of what is beyond understanding, what is beyond the traditional forms of religion and philosophy.” 

Download here:

Fearless in Lucknow


October 31, 2008

Too Much Beauty

Filed under: Book,Poetry — Steve Abhaya @ 11:42 pm

Too Much Beauty has gone through several permutations. It began as poems written over a year from 6/06 to 6/07. During that year, 600 poems became six books, then two, including the selected poems, called Alone, and the complete prose version, A Prisoner’s Cave in Heaven. Then Alone became Alone in Too Much Beauty, then simply Too Much Beauty. “Alone” finally felt stark and incomplete.

I wrote and lived as a poet of the heart for many years. I’ve written several books of love poems, but this one chronicles a transformation. I was a hungry romantic, and desire was my meat and mead, but there’s always been a stubborn awareness of the reality behind and beyond the romance of my life. I was a romantic of my own life, and I was a romantic of life itself. This book began in that same temper but with an awareness of the reality that saw through the romantic, to the core.

For twenty years, after letting go of my addiction to alcohol, I shed other addictions, and the last to go was the addiction to desire. This book chronicles the lifting of that obsession. I imagine most people reading this will say, “What’s the problem? What is life without desire? Why would I even want to read about someone breaking the addiction to desire? Isn’t that like breaking the addiction to breathing?” This is not about breathing, but I can imagine someone overly concerned with taking the next breath, unable to breathe freely, without first catering to their concern. This is about the addiction to something that colors the reality, the way all addictions gradually take away more than they give.

For anyone whose life is dependent on living in a romantic reality, I can only say that letting go of romance leaves one’s reality intact. Reality has been a deeper pull on my spirit than any romantic sense I’ve ever had. In the East, the attachment to desire is spoken of as the great Satan of consciousness. Westerners have nodded sympathetically at those Zen saints who seem to have gone a bridge too far for the rest of us. I was pulled by these two inclinations, to live in the brightly colored world of romantic attachment and to want to know the clearest reality for myself.

After an extraordinary time in India, almost by accident, I became even more determined to let go of the attachments of the mind. This has not been easy, especially for one whose mind is rich and fertile. I used to say that when you have a brain that won’t quit, it’s exhausting.  I have a mind that won’t quit, but I know how to quit the mind. But, as I say, the romance of reality takes nothing away from reality, and romance has become less appealing to me, as a way of life, and more appealing as a way of play.

I made the break. I was in a loose relationship with a woman, and we talked about these things, freely and openly, laughing about being in a non-relationship, where the love that remains is more important than the love that attaches to the other. We never became lovers, but I couldn’t shake the desire to be lovers with her. It became obvious that my convictions were at odds with my attachment to desire. Awareness was clouded by consciousness, which was still affected by old habits of thought and feeling. Desire was running the show, when the show was about living beyond attachments.

These poems, the story of Too Much Beauty, is not the story of living alone, it is the story of recognizing desire, moving beyond desire, living beyond desire, and finally living free of desire. There is an arc in this letting go. The early poems are a mix of joyful passion and calm consideration, of mind and feeling and heart living in the open reality of contemplation and serene awareness. Then there is a darker  period of loss and emptiness that contradicts the joyful emptiness of Being Itself. Slowly, the passion beneath passionate behavior emerges, not the same as being passionate, the way any articulate poet can be, but living in the essence of passion.

In living dispassionately, I sought not the end of passion, but the revelation of the roots of passion, where passion doesn’t come and go, and doesn’t rise and fall on the occasion of its object. That had been my goal and my expectation all along, even when I didn’t believe it, even when I was living in the passion of my poetic nature. I have let go of my passionate profession, and I have found the reality of my being. This being does not come and go. It is not dependent on another. My reality is identical to itself. I don’t have to match my words to a passionate profession, or vice versa. I am what I am, and it is good.

After these poems were written, I still had to make a break from the woman of the poems, not because of anything she did or didn’t do, but because I had kept her close in my romantic mind. She had been a loving supporter of my work, and she obliged me by cutting the last imaginary ties to any romance with her. My mind of thoughts and feelings is remarkably slow, compared to my poet self, i.e., the self of awareness. Finally, there’s no difference between them. It’s now been years since I felt the obsession lift. I know from my time letting go of alcohol, and the years after, living in the freedom of non-attachment, that this freedom is real.

Steve Abhaya

Too Much Beauty Contents

Too Much Beauty

October 29, 2011

Singing Down the Drain

Filed under: Drama,Fiction — Steve Abhaya @ 8:10 pm

Singing Down the Drain is a musical with two players, an aging couple who may or may not know who the other is. They have just met or they have known each other for fifty years. The only thing they can remember with any consistency is the lyrics to the music of their lives, and that becomes an effective means of communication, and fun, between them.

 

Download here:

Singing Down the Drain

Walking in Asheville

Filed under: Uncategorized — Steve Abhaya @ 7:19 pm

Walking in Asheville is poems and photographs, composed in Asheville, North Carolina, in the summer of 2011. It bears a resemblance to San Francisco Snapshots and Walking in Ellensburg, also availiable on this site.

Download here:

Walking in Asheville: with photos

Walking in Asheville: Text Only

 

 

 

February 13, 2011

Poet in America

Filed under: Book,Non-fiction,Poetry — Steve Abhaya @ 4:13 pm


Poet in America is a compilation of three books of journalese, written over a ten year period, from ’75 to ’85, including Savage Amusement, Dear Nadja, and Invisible Lion. These books chronicle the life of a poet from age 33 to 43, before, during, and after booze played its role in his life. The story, moreover, is the chronicle of his consciousness of himself as a poet and as someone living a poet’s life, in one of the most beautiful and welcoming cities in the world.

There are two versions here. The unpunctuated version is harder to read. It was a experiment. I seem always to want to reinvent form, but the punctuated original is easier to read.

 

 

 

Download here:

Poet in America original

Poet in America

 

December 21, 2010

The Chair Outside the Door

Filed under: Book,Poetry,Uncategorized — Steve Abhaya @ 10:55 am

The Chair Outside the Door is a book of 26 poems, originally written as sonnets to Rilke, after his “Sonnets to Orpheus.”

download here:

The Chair Outside the Door

November 11, 2010

I Write Poetry

Filed under: Poetry — Steve Abhaya @ 11:33 pm
I Write Poetry is taken from four books written between ‘02 and ‘04, Victrola, The Essential Occupation, The Greening, and The Open Door that Oceans Are.
These poems were written after my first stents were put in, before and after my mother died, and after I had discovered the first truly bohemian coffeehouse in Seattle, after living there for fifteen years.
Victrola was a café where I finally felt at home, not in the sense of being welcome among decent people but being among other poet/artists. That was a common experience for me in San Francisco, but in Seattle, my life as a poet/artist felt somewhat isolated, even while finding sympathetic others in a sympathetic city, but not finding a gathering place of such people.
At the same time, I grappled with my romantic attachment to relationships and my practice of non-attachment in the awareness of spirit. In other words, was I going to continue to look for a lover or was I going to live in a monastery of my own making? The answer is neither. The answer is, “I write poetry”, but I was less clear about that at the time. These poems are more clear than I was, as is often the case.
I heard a man say, “Poets are lucky, because they have the opportunity, at the moment of creation, to turn and look and see the source. The problem is, they fall in love with the thing created, and they follow it into the world.” There is no problem here; both are true and both are worth doing, as a human being living in the consciousness of being itself.
It’s difficult, sometimes, to recognize the reality of both directions without losing sight of one or the other, but it’s not impossible, and it is a great challenge with great reward. These poems speak to the challenge and the reward of both ways the eyes are capable of seeing. There is a danger in the attachment to either way of seeing, and being a poet works for me as the way of no way.
Romanticism and Spirituality are both attachments of the mind, and poetry has been the path of freedom for me. Luckily for me, poetry works to dissolve thought and feeling, even as it forms awareness into consciousness. The more personal I become, the less personal I discover I am, and poetry is the expression of the highly personal and the least personal in the same language.
Download here:
Write Poetry Contents
I Write Poetry

September 27, 2010

Matisse in LA

Filed under: Book,Poetry — Steve Abhaya @ 8:21 pm

Matisse in LA is a small book of poems, written months after I had a real scare, from my first myocardial infarction. I was happy to be alive and suddenly conscious,in my body, of my morality. I said I was 18 until I was 60, when that happened. I was someone who embraced the presence of death, but my body hadn’t gotten the message, until then. It was a kind of awakening that produced these poems, which I had slighted until recently.

Download here:

Matisse in LA

September 12, 2010

On Board the Victoria Clipper

Filed under: Uncategorized — Steve Abhaya @ 3:32 pm

On Board the Victoria Clipper is a collection of impressions written aboard the Victoria Clipper from Seattle to Victoria, BC.

Download here:

On Board the Victoria Clipper

September 9, 2010

Nothing

Filed under: Uncategorized — Steve Abhaya @ 10:54 pm

Here is the text to the video: Nothing – A One Man Show.

Download here:

Nothing

July 28, 2010

The Ocean in a Bottle

Filed under: Uncategorized — Steve Abhaya @ 8:28 pm

“The Ocean in a Bottle” is a small collection of poems that was my part of the poetry anthology “Five on the Western Edge,” from Momo’s Press (Stephen Vincent), published in ’77. Included in the anthology were myself (as Steve Brooks) Stephen Vincent, Hilton Obenzinger, Beau Beausoleil, and Larry Felson. It was Stephen’s idea that we, a diverse group of male poets, writing in the Seventies, would get together for a year before publication, talk, hash out, and mull over our various ways of living as writers in relationship with others and the world. It was a noble idea, but there wasn’t much open talk among us, as there might have been if Dr. Phil were present, but he wasn’t. Stephen wanted to call the book, “Five Disturbed Men,” but that was roundly rejected. Later, in my poetry satire, “The Blood and Turnips Poetry Festival”, I parodied that idea as “Five Disturbed Men on the Brink of Disaster.” I’ve reconnected with the others on facebook, but we are all as terse as ever in our non-confessional maleness. Poetry may be, as Stéphane Mallarmé, I think, once said, a way of saying what one has difficulty feeling, but open discourse is another matter, altogether.

Download here:
The Ocean in a Bottle
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