Dairy Poetry contains a small collection of poetry books written between the late 1970s and the turn of the millennium, although most of them belong to the 1980s. Daily poetry for daily consumption, such as any dairy. Have been published, in English and bilingual editions, The Shire-in Poems, Exiles, Damnations & other emetics, Barcelona Blues, Written in the attic & other scattered Poems, American Poems, She-They & other love poems and the Dead flies' haikus. Most of them composed along the eighties. Chronologically they were composed, from bottom to top, as follows.

dead flies' haikus

Dairy Poetry 8 ISBN  126 pages

   The dead flies' haikus are nothing else than an essay, a little playful test, but with a marked nihilistic and punk character. No, punk is not dead. Flies, with their morbid stinky appetite, come to tell us that there is no future, and if, finally, there is, it will not last for long, until summer's end as much, a fly's life ending.

   This exercise takes from haikus a little bit of the pattern, a lot of the briefness, some of the observation of nature and the seasonal incorporation already in the same theme: flies are for the summer, perhaps with some exceptions. There are maverick flies. However, these haikus try to take the spirit and not only the look of surprise, a bit of the Japanese aware.

   And since there is no extreme without its opposite, ying without yang, white without black and hate without love, the dead flies' haikus are complemented with a rare exercise in the poetics of haiku, some love haikus, which are usually left out of its most common subjects.

she-they & another love poems

Dairy Poetry 7 ISBN 9798646833984  224 pages 

Chlordiazepoxide is a benzodiazepine derivative that is used as an anxiolytic. According to the seventies' psychedelic poster that announced one of the commercialized versions, it restored the psycho-affective balance. A kind of Doctor Love served in pills that, in addition, created dependency and mental confusion, just like love. Here are some pills with the suggestive title She-They.

 She-They collects several works with a common theme: love, a strange and fragile feeling that is quite well expressed on paper and over time, the first verses are as early as the beginning of the eighties. The title plays with the phonetic and conceptual similarities, with the associations of ideas; in English the sound vaguely recalls the Hebrew expression Shaddai, one of the names of God who, in this case, should be feminine, as a tribute to their divine condition, although I prefer to think on another feminine condition, that is, disagreement and rebellion as starring Lilith, Adam's first wife.

american poems 

Dairy Poetry 2 ISBN 9781095015391   48 pages

The American Poems were written between September 12, 1988 and October 4 of the same year. They were generated along a journey throughout the United States, although most of them talk about the island of Hawaii, ancient places, myths and looks, using some Polynesian terms that are detailed at the end of the text. The city of San Francisco and New York have their respective holes in a perspective probably more sour than sweet. San Francisco was, moreover, a kind of Mecca, on Columbus Avenue, where still stands Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookshop, City Lights Books, where Howl, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, was first published.

written in the attic & scattered poems

Dairy Poetry 6 ISBN 9798639218279 172 pages

The work presented on these pages includes writings created from the early 1980s to almost the turn of the millennium, with motivations and inspirations so different as they can be approached over two decades. Scattered Poems includes a selection that covers those twenty years of sensations and experiences stored in some corner of the brain, also scattered. Most of them are still under the direct influence of 1950s American beatnik poetry, the one that Allen Ginsberg described as spontaneous bop prosody, or that Jack Kerouac defined as "a kind of new-old zen Lunacy poetry, writing whatever comes into your head as it comes".

barcelona blues 

Dairy Poetry 1 ISBN 9781094815589   84 pages

Barcelona Blues was written practically at a stretch, between December 14 and 17, 1981, on dark winter days. The last two poems are somewhat later, from the beginning of 1982 although they follow perfectly the line of the rest, a manifesto against everything in which only some luminous lines appear. From the distance, they had been sleeping in a drawer for almost forty years, they are still disgusting, which, in the punk line they were written, was already what was intended, a revulsion for mind and soul. They drink from varied sources, from the cursed French poets, William Blake, or the American beatnik generation, recovering characters from the disturbed mind of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe and the murderers, hashish smokers, of the Persian Ismaili Hassan Ibn Sabbah. Edited in English and also bilingual.

damnations & other emetics (second edition)

Dairy Poetry 3 ISBN 9798633408096 100 pages

Damnation & other emetics starts with a feeling that is born in the stomach, is forged and ascends through the esophagus and larynx to be expelled through the mouth. A literary vomit with a certain naive content, and even ingenuous, despite the threatening, vengeful and catastrophic discourse, but punk character, in which it expresses itself.

As in Barcelona Blues, they are practically contemporary, drinks from the sources of the American beatnik poetics, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, the unconnected logic of William S. Burroughs' The Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express). Share with this the thesis that humanity is nothing else than a virus infecting the planet and also shares the thesis that the virus spreads and transmits through language. Consequently, and as the British writer Brion Gysin elaborated with Burroughs, the solution, or the only way to prevent contagion, was to make it incomprehensible. Gysin used the techniques he called cut-up and fold-in, cutting or folding the texts to reconstruct them randomly and masking them. Damnation & other emetics does not reach that extreme despite the ideological discourse raised in a rather cryptic way. Burroughs dedicates Cities of the Red Night, 1981, to Gysin with the recognition that he "painted this book before it was written".

The vertebration of poems-images, of an iconic poetry, is also typical of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, with his dark constructions but endowed with a certain magical and tender conception of existence that does not detract from the last sentence he pronounced before dying, 'when death no longer had dominion': "I've had 18 straight whiskeys, I think that's the record!"

All this discourse is exposed more crudely and literally in the last piece, here called 126. The number does not follow any other criterion than the reference in the archives, but here it is particularly useful to express the nonsense of narrative discontinuity. As in Ezra Pound's Cantos it contents many literary references of any kind along the unstoppable cadence of words and absurdly interconnected concepts. Added to all of this is the deliberate anarchy in the use of punctuation and / or capitalization, it is part of the acceptance of Burroughs' thesis that language is a virus that can only be destroyed by altering the environment where it spreads, that is, the text. In a similar way, years before, Dadaist Samuel Rosenstock, better known as Tristan Tzara, formulated the techniques that inspired Gysin and Burroughs, to which he added the methodological proposal of automatic writing and the flow of the unconsciousness, which he defined as creative acts away from the will of the author.

This second edition adds some poems that were left out in the first version of the Damnations, particularly the so-called 126, a dense and absurd plea against everything, closer to the Dadaist manifestos than to the most elementary sense of reason. Edited in English and also bilingual.

exiles 

Dairy Poetry 5 ISBN 9798631360334  136 pages

The plural of Exiles refers to two kinds of distancing, although they can happen simultaneously. An exile forced in time and distance, it is a physical exile, a forced and involuntary banishment. The other is an inner exile, belongs to the mind nooks trying to protect itself from the first kind of exile keeping, closed, locked, sheltered, all those memories that must endure, those concepts that should be eternal and barely savored. It is a conceptual, intellectual exile as well as sad, built with abandonment and loss, although always with a distant but clear horizon: the coming back, which, as Ulysses himself knew, is not always as desired or expected as it was once. Disappointment and emptiness remain. The texts are, as in The Shire-in Poems, very early, loaded with a naivety opposed to that of the, also early, Damnations & other emetics. Exiles is charged with a marked influence from the first American poets: Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and even Edgar Allan Poe, readings from those days of the first essays on paper. Edited in English.

the shire-in poems

Dairy Poetry 4 ISBN 9781096002864  62 pages

In 1979 my parents bought a house in Granyena, a small town sixty kilometers away from Barcelona. Today has just over one hundred neighbors. It enjoyed an admirable color changing landscape on each season; the intense green of the wheat and barley fields at the end of spring until they become dried in summertime, turning into a very wide variety of ochres.

I arrived loaded with reading and painting utensils: an old easel, a no less ancient box to store tubes and brushes. I arranged them by the window, near the noon light and next to a small table where I left the books. For dressing I brought a small battery-powered tape player and some writing paper. The result was this compilation, unpublished until today, The Shire-in Poems, now edited just in English.

About the author

J.L. Nicolas, Barcelona, 1960

When he was a kid, he enjoyed playing with a green plastic shovel in the sand of the beach. Until one day he burned his skin with the sun. Since then he hates the sand, he hates the sea, he hates the sun and he hates the beach. He wanted to be hippie, but he was fired for eating the flowers. He wanted to be punk but, he was fired for his nasty vision of future. He didn't conclude most of the studies he started and remained some more than the statutory time in the military service due to his exemplary behaviour. A literature teacher would guide appropriately his career, approving the subject under the unwavering promise that he would never in life devote himself to anything that had the slightest relation to the letters. Today he is journalist, writer and editor. Avid reader has read and reviewed on many occasions Andy Capp and Calvin & Hobbes strips, particularly those of the first. His contradiction sense is stronger than him, rootless looking for his roots he stares upwards, atheist thanks to God and, convinced nihilist, he succeeded as a washed-up loser. Today he is happy, he already made up his kitchen.