Spotlight On Writers
Jerome Berglund
@BerglundJerome
- Where do you originate from?
kids playing by the river… Marco Polo
Longfellow Nokomis Messenger, July 2024
I was born and raised in a midwestern suburb of the Twin Cities, crash landing into a rather noxious environment characterized by pronounced inequality, conservatism and violence. From elementary through my time at university out of state class and my place in the dominant caste hierarchy was never far from my mind, being in the lower middle stratum at all times, resented by and uncomfortable with those positioned above and below me equally. Depending on subject and instructor I often excelled academically, but demonstrated a rebellious streak frequently which often landed me in hot water with different authorities. My parents each wore many different hats over the years, my father a humanities major and attorney introduced me to the glories of mythology, literature, elevated language, my mother a registered public health nurse who also spent some important years managing a global market impressed on me appreciations for world literature, slam poetry, fine art, comparative religion, internationalism. Narrative and its ability to transform hearts and minds was always at the forefront of my attraction to the movies, where I held some of my first positions in video stores and cineplexes, later volunteering at local festivals, working on a documentary on indigenous of the region, ultimately following earning my degree joining the ranks of crews on some television programs, independent feature films, and aiding in the post production and visual effects department on some popular commercial pictures of note. My final takeaway from those years out west was that the business was diametrically opposed to the production and distribution of material in a didactic variety of the mode I was interested in creating (with certain exceptions when things might be co-opted and strategically exploited for certain profit by different parties for generally nefarious purposes) and that opportunities (not unlike Kafka’s inaccessible Castle) were exclusively correlated with access to exorbitant caches of funds and preexisting connections to different movers and shakers, ties to the state also representing a significant factor in green-lighting, dissemination, critical assessment. (Studies and research on, fledgling analog and digital delving into film and digital editing, montage theory proved highly germane and helpful for later grasping and applying ideas in and prerequisites of chain and collaborative eastern poetry of juxtaposition and cutting, toriawase and link-shifting.) My different hoi polloi allegiances and moral leanings, when so unusually situated, provided compelling opportunities during this time to assess and scrutinize various halls of power, persons of influence, peddlers of opportunity through a Marxist lens, permitting fascinating access for various sociological case studies with countless enlightening discoveries and inferences resulting, including realities quietly trickling into public knowledge more recently thanks to the #MeToo movement, whistle-blowing leaked by folks like Assange and Snowden, frightening insidious policies darkly implemented on small private islands in the Caribbean… Many of my predilections and fascinations I can further trace back through family lineage and genealogy which always invigorates and energizes my creative practices. On one side of the tree my grandmother was descended from an intriguing Oklahoman branch with a dustbowl, populist mentality which exemplified the depression era collectivist ideals of WWI and includes some native ancestry and folksy sympathies. My grandfather fought fascism in the Air Force during the Second World War, was a mechanic and labor organizer who combatted hate terror in his area, enjoyed jazz music, and was vocally incensed by and spoke adamantly against experiences with segregation of the south, counted Tuskegee airmen among his closest brethren in arms. My grandfather on the other side was an acclaimed storyteller and pianist with Irish roots, and some French stock by way of other Canadian forebears, which inflects and supports my penchant for surrealism and dada, impressionist artworks and new wave auteurship, appreciations for vintages of rosé and malbec. The greatest influence on me personally and my life in general was my maternal grandmother, of Scandinavian origins from cultures known for their windmills and experimental poetry, she was a matriarch of strong faith who taught me my values and lived an existence of selfless kindness and generosity, devoted all her time and energy to her family and community, had a strong continual commitment to compassion and altruism (also impressing upon us the lessons she learned as a waitress which I would apply across my own postings in pink and blue collar occupations), surrounding herself with, nurturing plants and teaching us the value of hard work, responsibility, and sympathy, respect for every human being and living creature. Her commitment to acting thoughtfully with an open mind and a non-discriminating attitude, practicing a strategy not dissimilar to modern Buddhism, aiming toward cultivating ‘the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed, courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other,’ tenets which were transformative toward cementing my world-view and adult behaviors.
- What do you cherish most about the place you call home?
Redd Foxx from a parked car
and now this deafening
Persian pop blares past —
bastard city, I’m struck with
bursting love for
Ribbons, Winter 2023
Minneapolis is a city of vision and aspiration, which embraces pluralism and intersectionality. Its citizens in recent years have stood courageously against unjust systems and institutions, rejecting and condemning atrocity, demanding essential improvements, and envisioning a bold and necessary vision for better tomorrows. I live within walking distance of George Floyd Square and that fabled third precinct where the court of public opinion not so long ago ruled in favor of sweeping reform and radical re-imagining, in a sanctuary municipality which provides refuge to victims of global conflicts, in a state with a climate of dual character whose lax regulatory, housing and labor policies make it an ideal seat for corporate headquarters and sprawling industry, consequently resulting in residents forging strong, intuitive connections to, sympathies with trade unions and the spirit of egalitarianism. Minnesota is the birthplace of Bob Dylan and abode of prolific virtuoso sensation Prince, where Craig Finn spent his formative years and B.F. Skinner began the ambitious treatise Walden II proposing a utopian alternative to modern Hobbesian brutality and squander of talent and resources. This multilingual epicenter (home for some of the largest Somali and Hmong populations in the states, on Dakota land where the Sioux tribes memorably rose up against colonial oppression following deplorable betrayals and abuses of the American government) has been a locus of progressive exploration and valuable self-critique, expressed among other places through the arts (from public works including murals/mosaics to the MSPIFF, in fact they currently have a bid in to become the new seat of the Sundance Film Festival) and literature (connecting to such native sons as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair ‘The Jungle’ Lewis, Ethan and Joel Coen) in numerous innovative and hard-hitting, constructive fashions. I’ve been very fortunate to reside in such a vibrant and energized place, surging with thoughtful awareness, proletarian consciousness, and palpable positive intentions!
- What ignites your creativity?
Iron Range
best
on a given day
Fresh Out Magazine, May 2024
Personally, throughout my life, I’ve always struggled to understand and be understood, whether with family, friends and neighbors, colleagues and supervisors, professors and classmates. Being neurodivergent, on the spectrum uniquely wired, some things come very naturally and effectively to me and others are positively baffling, unusually challenging to conceptualize and implement in the course of routine interaction socially and professionally. From a young age I received the dictates, expectations, assumptions of our western culture with reticence to unqualified disbelief, so many things struck me naturally as highly problematic, seriously absurd, detrimental, and counterproductive. Instinctively I rebelled, at first quite ineffectively. Like the velociraptors of Jurassic Park, the disaffected citizen has few outlets or obvious means to channel their frustrations with the racism of their schoolteachers, the classism of their neighbors, the misogyny of their fathers, the coercions of their supervisors, and must discern appropriate and effective strategies piecemeal through trial and error, applying of scientific methods. Testing the electricity of the fences surrounding us, we will gain a more comprehensive, macro understanding of precise parameters and architecture, deduce integral perspective into available exploits, how we may effect our ultimate escape. Unlearning negative thought and behavioral patterns, locating fallacies and straw men in arguments, encouraging camaraderie and collaboration both locally and globally, these are the things which get me jazzed when it comes to creating. Initially, I pursued accomplishing such objects in the entertainment industry with the goal of screenwriting, quite unrealistically with pitiful naïveté I now realize looking back. A microbudget for a feature film is generally understood to be around 1 million dollars, though some permit a more liberal floor of $250,000. To create even a fly-by-night Ed Wood adjacent indie of the lowest production value imaginable such a trove of capital must be accessible and on hand in ready reserve. But such is still not enough, for even with a final, elegantly cut product of epic star power and sweeping content should you be an independent producer challenging, perceived as a threat to the prevailing establishment, with a property posing incendiary social questions (I think of Hedy Lamarr’s ‘Loves of Three Queens,’ ‘An Open Secret’ by Amy Berg, acquisitions and shuttering of prominent journalist organizations like Gakwer too!) it’s very probable, nay guaranteed to not secure distribution, just as a patent on a groundbreaking, profit-jeopardizing cure or innovation making fossil fuels obsolete would invariably be shelved, its inventor vanished mysteriously. In haiku and related forms one can find similarly the same dialectic tensions which persevere in film and television, the art world generally since the cold war era, between one polarity represented by proletarian socially conscious realism (1984, Rivera’s ‘Man at the Crossroads,’ ‘No’ by Pablo Larraín, Kobayashi Issa) and abstract neutral and apolitical expressionist approaches (embodied in dime store romances, the forgettable action picture, Mark Rothko, conservative strains of the Japanese haiku gatekeepers who espoused nationalism and rejected humanitarian topics and demanded bland, trite renderings depicting purely nature subjects). The godfathers (e.g. Basho’s ‘summer grass’) of senryu and haiku demonstrated time and time again that weighty meanings could be conveyed even while satisfying those most stringent classical definitions and guidelines as to the purist style of employing these forms. The challenge of accomplishing such a tricky feat in three breaths, with seasonality and a cut of some sort, in between eleven and seventeen syllables (better if arranged with line breaks at those traditional, symmetric points) is my daily problem and intriguing task. Like Basquiat’s graffiti-ing and Voltaire’s pamphleteer penchant, if even a tiny butterfly wing worth of flapping can have a positive impact on this universe, taken together we can all shift the paradigms quite considerably. I get as psyched being educated as doing the informing, and strive too to always be modest, patient, and understanding of our personal place on lifelong journeys of increasing our intellect and perception. As Malcolm reminds us sagaciously, ‘Don’t be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.‘ The concept of Rainbow Coalition proposed by Fred Hampton also in my opinion deserves reverence in highest echelon of optimal templates.
- Do you have a favorite word and could you incorporate it into a poetic phrase?
myna bird
absorbing cacophony
piecemeal
Pindar tells the story
as he pleases
D.O.R., March 2024
- What is your pet peeve?
last bastion of vérité
torture porn
Dadakuku, April 2024
Legendary punk rock icons Reagan Youth had a provocative slogan which I think captures the spirit and ambitions of caring writers and artists throughout recorded time, entitled ‘I Hate Hate.‘ Spiritual traditions of every variety throughout the planet, and agnostic ideologies no less vocally, ostensibly are rooted in some principle of ‘loving your neighbor,’ fostering understanding and empathy, walking a mile in others’ moccasins, disproving harmful assumptions and cognitive distortions about different populations and individuals, creeds and philosophies. Empiric analysis, critical thinking, objective research, and active communication can be keys to escaping the confines, it’s no exaggeration to say prisons of these harmful frameworks in which nation-states, civilizations, food and energy systems, power structures are deeply rooted. These models are only permitted to exist through a very conscious bamboozling of the average layman, worker, and resident, profound compromise of electoral systems and judicial oversight, nonexistent checks or balances, supported by a concerted, highly sophisticated manner of hegemonizing the average layman and collective masses, perverting of the captains of industry and elected leadership to preserve and magnify monopolizing and consolidation of resources, encourage conspicuous consumption and destructive unsustainable growth on this devastated planet. The insidious octopus of greed and exploitation stretches across time and space to slowly crush the life out of human and environment both, and the media, news, history books are designed and orchestrated precisely for the purposes of indoctrinating the masses and protecting the powers that be, just as the law expressly protects and safeguards the plunder of expropriated capital and property, accumulated holdings by generations of thieves who begat dynastically those rulers of our modern time. The role of the reformist thinker and critic is to articulate coherently and succinctly, in inclusive language of universal interest without ulterior motive, the lie in those headlines, school textbooks, campaign rhetoric, blockbuster, or procedural plot-line. Dividing and conquering is a key strategy toward controlling the general public and preventing the crucial reforms which could benefit humanity as a whole. Every effort in the media, political, and economic structures is expended to exhaust and pacify the laymen, maintain ignorances and misunderstandings, redirect their energies and reasonable discontent toward groups other than those megawealthy hoarders, parasitic rent extractors and land expropriators, vicious armed force who tyrannize victim nations to install malleable puppets who will facilitate their business interests. Rather than focusing on improving material conditions, understanding inequality as the root of all of society’s ills, and facilitating redistribution of resources and protection of individuals, they would much rather individuals focus their frustration by blaming the victims of warfares and regime changes (immigrants, refugees, freedom fighters suffering imperial aggression), historically underprivileged classes striving to improve their stations after generations of disadvantage (black lives matter), stoking moral panics fueled by religious sexism and prejudice (abortion access, gay marriage) and demonizing bogeyman scapegoat classes (transphobia and persecution, sinophobia, russophobia, islamophobia). These distractions prove essential for politicians and deep state shadowy string-pullers to maintain their control over the thoughts and minds of contemporary citizens, as does the redirecting of attentions and efforts from grassroots organizing and direct action initiative into the completely fraudulent, virtue signalizing performative theater of electoral politics, in which two superficially distinct pawns owned by the same parties vie for a functionally symbolic, token position akin to the pretend figureheads the royal family across the pond serve as by and large. Deception (the ’emperor’s scanty wardrobe’) is the thinker’s wily adversary, a bright ray of truth their arm for slicing through pervasive mendacities; communicating these actualities succinctly to fellow countrymen and proposing alternative ways of thinking and courses of action is the challenge and lofty dream.
- How would you describe the essence of Jerome Berglund?
sheet off
at one corner, I tuck it
in again
Creative Inspirations, July 2024
I’ve recently been enjoying immensely a seminal Roman à clef by American literary legend, civil rights, and social justice paragon Richard Wright (who besides being an acclaimed, unparalleled author of incendiary fiction and memoir also happens to be one of the most significant haikuists to practice in the English language), and chronicling his origins and the experiences informing and driving his novels and poetry find in them the seeds and motives which I believe catalyze and spur every righteous creative I admire, try my darndest to follow in the impressive footsteps of. Like Charles Bukowski and George Orwell, Wright was an eclectic factotum who observed strikingly less represented, important segments of our population, and with his unique perspective and keen insight was uniquely qualified to extrapolate in highly instructive fashion capably, blending critique and agitation in the most advantageous and entertaining manner to unforgettable effect. In my own humble capacities I have observed a holistic sampling of our contemporary economic and sociopolitical landscape from very diverse and wide-ranging perspectives and vantage points (I’ve seen the inside of psyche wards and jail cells, also attended glamorous parties at the playboy mansion, been kettled by a phalanx of police in riot gear, attended video village on Comedy Central sound stages, been seriously injured cleaning vent hoods in restaurant kitchens, once acted as chauffeur for a transpo van holding Minnie Driver, Fred Molina, Paul Adelstein, worked in a factory covered from head to foot in soot regularly using an extinguisher to quell conflagrations, Arnold Schwarzenegger gave the keynote address at my graduation, beside natives from Pine Ridge on horseback I joined in solidarity and meaningful protest against the horrific ecologic transgressions of fossil fuel at the dakota pipeline) and those life-changing, revelatory experiences have provided much sumptuous food for thought and fodder for unpacking. Just as Bukowski does so consequentially in Post Office, Orwell masterfully achieves via Down & Out in London and Paris, I hope with my subversive micropoetry (including a recent activism oriented chapbook from Mōtus Audāx Press), satiric haibun and allegorical flash fictions (harkening admiringly to the New Rising and Proletarian Haiku movements of Japan dedicated to promoting peace and supporting concerns of the disenfranchised, working classes and marginalized populations) can make a small positive difference via outreach and educating, and the many meaningful friendships and collaborations I’ve managed thrillingly with ingenious luminaries local and distant can help creating precious dialogues and opportunities to enhance fellowship and understanding across borders of country and language. Rejecting the status quo and individualistic, linear values, framing of a citizen’s place in society and the prevailing hierarchies, preferencing other forms of reward and objectives is a difficult and personally challenging process, and cognitive dissonance from reevaluating the decency of many normalized concepts and habitualized activities can be very awkward. Similarly, the path toward effective practice can be a lonely and unnerving one necessarily, involving deprivation and lowliness. Yet I believe there is much wisdom in the Hagakure’s teaching that “there are two things that will blemish a retainer, and these are riches and honor. If one but remains in strained circumstances, he will not be marred.” Literature contains many entailed sorts of potential conflict, and the struggle against ourselves, decolonizing our minds and daily activities, banishing misconceptions and transgressions from our personal footprints is my and every modern citizen and culture’s daily goal, easier said than done though that may certainly be.
- Moles - August 31, 2024
- Spotlight On Writers – Jerome Berglund - August 17, 2024
- Roman Noir - May 25, 2024
