jojo Lazar

https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/lucid-lockpicking

We’re only two months into 2025, yet it can sometimes feel like we’ve already been insomniac-style awake, sleep-deprived in a much longer, dark, dystopian, anxious fever dream. If you’ve been feeling soul-wearily agitated, or doom-scrolling the news between jagged sleep bursts at night ~ this record is our ‘dirge wave,’ weirdeval musical offering for you. We wish to assist in profound rest, sacred release, and for you to feel safe and bolstered on The Journey.

I had surreal childhood experiences of night time and consciousness; lucid dreaming, hypnagogic light fractal visuals, and sleepwalking. With this EP I hope to share rituals, soothing/trippy tunes, and lightly intended sleep hypnosis induction/guided talk-downs –for grappling with the vulnerability of falling asleep.

There are some ‘Easter eggs’ from the songs my mother sang to me (check the track notes for “Dancing Shoes” and “Wolfy’s Song.”) We were influenced by The Brothers Grimm fairy tales, Ukulele Ike, Johnny Cash, Faun Fables, and the Victorian absurdist artist Edward Lear, whose poem “The Duck And The Kangaroo” we set to music.

On our prior five RPM challenge albums we’ve oscillated between acoustic, folk instrument compositions as well as making extensive use of synth-orchestra embellishments, and psychedelic, digital pedal libraries. With *Lucid Lockpicking* we have aimed for a natural, ‘in house,’ solely acoustic instruments' sound. We hope you enjoy the album, may you sleep deeply whenever you do, and may you wake rested for your adventures, the continued unfolding of The Great Mystery.

-jojo (March 1, 2025)

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Death and The Poetess chez Art Nest, being our ghoulish selves preparing many new treats! Warming up for RPM Challenge (writing our annual Feb record) and learning oodles of covers to play your outdoor/safe sprummer weddings/soirees, Pantheon willing! (--As our wedding band, Love Letters Tendered.)

>> [The Mini-Interview & collages on IG]

Honored to be a feature collagist w Twin Cities Collage Collective. A mini-blurb-terview I wrote for them 3/12/21.

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{ Hullo, I’m jojo Lazar! I’m an artist-writer and art-enabler in Boston, MA. I’m a lifelong art journal/scrapbook-maker with an MFA in creative writing, and I teach zine-making. I became passionate about experimental cut-up writing techniques in college, and I’ve honed a visual poetry language, “Collage Oracle leaves” the last 8 years through the influence of art comrades Aaron Howard of @OilcanPress, and my longtime art friend @allisonannecollage. Allison has gifted me mail art and magazines all of our lives, and vintage photo albums in 2016. These became a standard collage format in ritual object.

I’ve found that “art discipline projects” as containers can become “parameters (that) set you free.” Borrowing voices via collage is very liberating drag/masque. My experience with TCCC, and joining ‘blackout poetry challenges’ (@blackoutpoetrychallenges) has been warm and encouraging in a strange timeline. Possibilities with collage (poetry) are endless in style and goal, I’m grateful to be a part of The Great Conversation. }

REVIEW >> IfItsTooLoud.com: Friday Freebie: Death and The Poetess - Smelling Salts. by Ken

Thank you Ken/If It's Too Loud... as always for your careful reading/listening and writing! It means so much to this Xennial x Elizabethan creeper!

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https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/smelling-salts

DEATH AND THE POETESS "SMELLING SALTS" (2021)

Your fav Elizabethan creepers are back! Death and The Poetess's 3rd RPM Challenge tips its chapeau to Weezer's Blue album, among other 1990s ghosts and Pumpkins. "Smelling Salts," a Jane Austen-esque title for a time-traveling mixtape full of Emily Dickinson worthy gallows humor (and a song from one of her poems). This record features some Princess Bride jokes alongside the mythology/archaeology-laden tunes you've come to expect from these cryptorian punks that watch too many history documentaries.

This year's contribution to the tomb-triptych of: Necropolis by the Sea (2019), and Red Skeleton (2020) is "The Tomb-builders' Tombs," a love song about Deir el-Medina, Egypt. "Smelling Salts" the single is about social isolation and the character(s) and spirits one's home might now be inhabited by.

Smelling Salts: Implying one has been unconscious/faint, and one is waking to the liminal space of this record as astral time (restorative psychedelic). / Or perhaps 2020 had you in the doldrums, your own personal non-linear oubliette. We welcome you warmly to - now. Have a whiff, slow exhale, peel yourself off your fainting chaise. Do please re-join the cosmic ball with us.

-jojo 2/28/21

https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/smelling-salts

https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/lady-jane-greys-wholesome-ritual

A note from jojo: Why would a 21st Century New Englander be interested in Tudor Humour? Why is a Bu-Jewitch hippy worrying about the martyrs of Tudor monarchs, titling songs tentatively “Rage Against The Counter-Reformation?” I enjoyed a lot of tv/films/books as escapism during the last five years of socio-political dystopia/sexist culture. Now I realize immersing myself in European and British history was a strange convex mirror to study my feelings about the present. What’s to like (besides some fashion/accessories) when it was a truly dark time to be a woman? One would be under profound constraints even as a consort or queen - thanks to The Great Chain of Being (+super-patriarchy). I was/am after some root source for cultural angst, and I chased it in my “difficult women of history,” “unruly Tudor mes-dames” fixation.

After one has exhausted period drama series, movies, and documentaries (and acknowledge that Michael Hirst has had his hooks in you since childhood; Elizabeth 1998 film before The Tudors, Vikings series) ...then books/audiobooks become refuge. I’ve been listening to American Prof. Robert Bucholz’s “A History of England from The Tudors to The Stuarts.” He explains that in studying 1485-1714: “we will be explaining an awful lot about the next two and a half centuries, and indeed about the world in which you and I live…"

“It’s a relevant story because it is in this period that England became a world power and established its American colonies, thus becoming our mother country… The culture of early modern England is our root culture. And many of our laws, institutions, traditions and customs can be traced back to this time and place.”

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It’s not just feeling empathy for the commoners, martyrs, the cast-aside mistresses and wives of Henry VIII. Or hearing ancient gossip even in your dreams from becoming too familiar with the details of the scandals, intrigues and horrors of Tudor court life through the first hand accounts and letters. While one hasn’t been groomed to be a monarch/pawn in a risky will-alteration coup like Lady Jane Grey, being a xennial fed The Cult of Productivity feels relevant. It’s a wild time being pressured into hustling and side-hustling (our art-selves) and constantly producing/sharing as part of post-capitalism au present.

Even if we feel ease and joy in making art we are expected to be a one-person-entrepreneur about it. It would be a tragedy (if but a drop like Lady Jane Grey’s) to forget the personhood and souls run ragged in the process of chasing someone else’s idea of success or purpose. It is often at great peril to oneself. The songs shocked me after recording as they sound so much like they could be an autobiography of shirking this mentality to remember the joys of reading, arting to survive. So, what is LJG’s wholesome ritual? Autodidacticism, perhaps? (Blood Ceremony was taken anyway! And Lady Jane Grey Sabbath was the right vibe, but not quite right.)

It’s a far more macabre than romantic special interest, ultimately. Courtly love games and idle talk was (in part) used in Anne Boleyn’s trial that lead to her execution for Treason. The masque of chivalric love and the ease of the executioner’s block (solution). Our “first great modern society” has left a dark ambivalent thorny rose badge impression in our psyche. A knight can wear your favor, a will can be altered by an apostrophe and ‘s,’ and a pyre can be lit as easily as a love letter burnt.

I enjoyed escapism in the spiritually deeply familiar whilst able to pretend it was far and away, and then arting about it from every angle. Inevitably one finds they are looking in a convex mirror. To see how we got here, to see a karmic predicament you do not envy in the victims and the perpetrators. The macabre is stronger than the romantic/light-hearted in this story, but if you’re goth? That’s romantic to you already. As Walter Alice Sickert says, "The world is ending, let’s die art."

-jojo Lazar

https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/lady-jane-greys-wholesome-ritual

Album Genres: Elizabethan Creepers, Crust Courtier, The Cure +The Tudors = The Royal Remedy, Xennials' 'Food Courtly Love' songs, Screamo Medieval, Heretic Rock by Blasphemous Punks.

PS: Extended bibliography with fav authors/films coming next. Part 2 of the essay inevitable, no doubt.

Here's the artist statement and 2020 biography-blurb I wrote to accompany 8 collage poems (including an Inktober painting of Louise Brooks/poem about bobbed hair vie, and a LiveJournal poetic autobio. duo). With deep gratitude to editor, James Diaz.

http://heroinchic.weebly.com/blog/featured-poet-artist-jojo-lazar

TWO OF MY FAVORITE kid books growing up were "The Jolly Postman (or Other People's Letters)" and "The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery," (a picture book with the equiv' scandalous feel of Clue), and I started writing poetry at eleven. It feels inevitable that several decades later my 'collage oracle leaves' have absorbed the sense of 'found' artifact, voyeurism, empathy - an art-puzzle, overheard partial narrative in a swirl of glamor.

I've made near a (couple) thousand collage poems in the last six years, their increasing high-tincture feel has lead me to describe them as: overhearing seance/spiritualism transcriptions, experiencing crossed telephone wires, a radio playing on station search/scan, love letters from strangers, and snatches of ghosts' conversation from an Edith Wharton novel overheard through a parlour wall.

The work presents as a puzzle-gift, but I hope for the immediacy/transmission of a tarot card spread. Though references and metaphor can be unlocked, I aim for the work to be enjoyed viscerally when still a psychedelic mystery. A padlock beautiful when shut as much as an utterly different treasure once open to the reader's translation.

By this found or drag/masque voice format of Omniscient Acceptable Narrator I am able to be (infinitely) more than I am often read in the flesh. As I'm "only" doing "cut-ups" how much can I be held responsible for extreme libertine hippy things, radical empathy, feminist fencing, mysticism, depression, and satirizing while butchering-quoting others in the dada tradition?

After years of this collage-process my transcription voice has gotten creepier! Yet closer in a soul-sense to what I could call my 'free hand personal narrative' poetry. There's also a tension the closer the typed-up work gets to sounding how I chat naturally with my closest, which we call "poet mouth." Parameters can set you free to be who you have always been. ("Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." - Oscar Wilde) I am inadvertently on the Shakespearean arc from artifice to authenticity with the collage journey I re-realize as I write this. So I will probably divide my upcoming poetry manuscript to reflect that in two parts, "Inapproetry / Collage Oracle Leaves."

These poems are part of a print collection coming out this spring, "I Still Witch: Collage Poetry, Erasure Art, and Nonfiction." The book is a collab' with Oilcan Press and my band's imprint, WIREFOREST. It's a supreme honor to preview the work and share the book news here on Anti-Heroin Chic. Deep gratitude to James.

-jojo Lazar (February 19, 2020) .

jojo Lazar is a Boston based multi-genre vaudevillian artist. She is a multi-instrumentalist in qweirdo art rock band 'Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys,' and has a crypt folk duo, 'Death and the Poetess.' She teaches ukulele, creative writing, and zine-making and holds a BA from Brandeis and an MFA in poetry from Lesley University. Her paintings and poetry have been published in A Bad Penny Review, Connotation Press, Zen Monster, For Sale, Delirious Hem, Faggot Dinosaur, her own zines and others'. (jojoLazar.com)

http://jojolazar.tumblr.com/bio

on FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/363926541054809/

https://dougholder.blogspot.com/2019/01/feb-12-2019-7pm-newton-free-library.html

http://newtonfreelibrarypoetryseries.blogspot.com

Series Coordinator: Doug Holder. Newton Free Library Poetry Series 2019 starts! The evening includes featured readers: NAUSHEEN EUSUF DAVID MILLER JOJO LAZAR

...followed by Open mic, one poem per person. Please arrive early to sign up.

FEB 12, 2019, 7pm

NAUSHEEN EUSUF--- was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently a PhD candidate in English at Boston University, she holds a BA from Wellesley College, an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and an MA in English from the University of Georgia. Her poetry has appeared in The American Scholar, Southwest Review, Salmagundi

DAVID MILLER---David P. Miller’s chapbook, The Afterimages, was published by Červená Barva Press. His collection, Sprawled Asleep, will be published by Nixes Mate Books in the fall of 2019. His poems have recently appeared in Meat for Tea, riverbabble, Nixes Mate Review, Naugatuck River Review, HedgeApple, Gravel, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Peacock Journal, and What Rough Beast, among others.

Doug Holder was kind enough to feature me/my collages in The Sunday Poet: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-sunday-poet-jojo-lazar.html