International Surrealist B.Z. Niditch

B.Z. NIDITCH is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. 
His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest);  Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others. 


He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts

EXILED FOR JAZZ

The military
exile the thirst
for freedom and jazz
remembering
your twenty first  birthday
in a fervor
of fevered expression
yet you suffer
working on islands
from life's painful images
amid political repression
your language amazes
as you write in silence
from the notes you play
on a a historical scale
survive on riffs.


ONE OF MY ACTORS

One of my actors
in my Original Theater
roller bladed
to his audition
he had tunnel vision
of his lines
with an eidetic memory
so I kept my eye on Adam
he left us
for the Big Apple
since I had no funds
to pay him for his worth
then went to Hollywood
and became a star
but when I needed him
he always came back
to us in roller blades
until he fell off
listening to Coltrane.


IN MANHATTAN 1966

Anti-romantic
Andy Warhol
a passion to the lost,
I'm on a sleeper car
the ex-camera rolls
for we underground Beats
are giving our readings
on street corners,
with a lost Anna Karina photo
when married to Godard
we find at the Chelsea,
I buy a lunch poem
from Frank O'Hara
at the Cedar Bar,
here is
cheap vodka in draws
as time lapses
in my synapses
of taboo tripping,
after Andy demanded
to be electrically shaved
for the boy next door
carrying an imbibed state
for an extra in "Flesh"
needing a prescription
for a drug free America
losing a nude display
of Gordon Parks' sequences
after getting the "Shaft"
on the way meeting Lana
a transvestite
who asked me for a light
and turned herself into
a bulbous yet
nosey chaperon
asking me to do
her laundry
of lace aprons,slips,dresses
of silk, Egyptian cotton,
and chancy things
drifting in the wash
in bathed bleach
of celestial swimsuits
from Esther Williams'
Technicolor sets
swirling shirts and blouses
lifted things from Macy's
from a drawn basket
in shiny scents of lystoil.


NEW YORK CITY 1989

With the romantic
gone
here in the French
underground
once again
playing jazz
to a melody of Mahler
and Rameau
before a French mirror
doubled up
for Mallarme,
the wind
has Paris icicles
for us
in the restaurant
we murder croissants
by the portmanteau movies
of Spanish refugees
seeing bridal angels
of Chagall and Picasso
of our passing.

Two Poems By Small Press Veteran B.Z. Niditch

Here are two poems by B.Z. Niditch, a veteran of the small press era who has published more poems than most poets will ever write. Good poems. He's someone I appeared with many, many times back in the old days before the interwebs killed the small press star. He has just become the first poet besides myself to be published in Zombie Logic Review. I will be publishing more poems from poets I respect soon. Please feel free to send your poems for consideration.

HOW EASY, BUKOWSKI

There are no ultimatums in poetry

unlike love or political affairs.

Maxim by BZ Niditch 

Even living

in a roulette world

when traffic lights

go outside

your tinted rooms, 

the neon sky opens

sprinkling rain

on the window sill

where you sink

to rest your arms,

and a poet's life

has little sun

but dust

by shafts of night

with the scent

of ply wood,

overwhelmed

with words, bills,

in a sea of underground 

abandonment set

for another round

of small talk

and Finnish vodka,

amid unaccounted dead

peeping in a tavern

above a storefront

at Frisco's edge

of the train line,

we cannot lose sight

of being railroaded

by a hermit's fate

when a decade 

is older

than the Redwoods

on empty days

of sleeplessness

as your smashed car

now a body machine

is beaten up by time

in this quickie part

blinding the city's proper

look-outs for the lost,

knowing Mr. Devil

is no gentleman caller

who visits the friendless

with hands full 

of promises

with thorns of roses 

and fortune cookies 

in a numbing secret

hand shake.

You Uncle Walt

Here I am in Whitman

Massachusetts,

really nowhere,

with my bare head

covered in snow kisses

you always humoring me

with your pulsating 

half photo in my mind

on fragrant fields

at cranberry harvest

playing around with words

full of unsettled life,

rounding out

an eye lashed history

under a chimera

and beggar sky

no one can explain

that I your adopted nephew

from a lost city

without a green card

from the underground, 

washed in fires

of the limestone Beats

at fervid awakenings,

we do hear you sing

here Uncle Walt,

in Whitman

all the way to the cities

of down and out angels

where one stops

to read you

blinded in love

on bus stops

and cable cars

covering scarlet letters

from graffiti walls

amid every sex and sect

no longer hidden

from burning bushes

your kind words, Walt

swatting our brows

even in the middle

of nowhere.

B.Z. NIDITCH is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. 

His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including:  Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest);  Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others.

He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.