Parallax Poetry Salon #2 - David Salzmann Herz

Join our poetry Salon and Open Mic

About David Herz:

Hello. My names are David Salzmann Herz. I was born in Boston 70 years ago when McCarthy was getting his comeuppance. I lived with my family somewhere in Massachusetts before moving to Belo Horizonte, Brazil , as part of the Department of the Interior’s Punto Quatro program where my father was instrumental in mapping the geology and training a generation of Brazilian geologists.

I began writing aged ten at the American school of Sao Paolo which had scorpions in the sandbox. I won a turtle for my prose. Then we lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland before moving to Athens, Ga. Where I met the poet Colman Barks and other luminaries. I moved to Chicago and studied briefly under Del Close at Second City and David Mamet who was then directing the Goodman Theater. As well as Richard McKeon at the University of Chicago who taught Susan Sontag among others. Then I returned home and drove a car from Selma, Alabama to Warminster Pennsylvania, possibly damaging the transmission while accelerating against the snow and ice. The next three years in a bankrupt New York City were richness incarnate. I worked at the Oh Ho So restaurant in SoHo and as a busboy served Harry Belafonte, one of the reasons God created humans, a glass of water. I had Alice Notley, poetess supreme, for a teacher and read my prose work at the Saint Marks in the Bowery Poetry Project. Those were wild times, buildings burning, trash uncollected, rapes a’plenty, and great generosity from compassionate lawyers, doctors and dentists for the impoverished lot we were. You could easily meet people such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, John Giorno, Ted Berrigan, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Fred Sherry, Nam June Paik, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Bernstein, Tony Towle, Bill Berkson, Eileen Myles, Ted Greenwald, John Cale, Lydia Lunch, Alan Vega, and avoid others such as Valerie Solanas. And then just as I was about to join a rock and roll band I moved to Paris. It’s been 45 years. Odd jobs subtitling movies and Sipa Photopress Agency photographs. Doing journalism for English language papers, interviewing the B- 52’s, Peter Brook, Zouc, Herbert Achternbusch, Paul Lederman, Boris Bergman and then working for Bull and Alcatel two fine French corporations employing hundreds of thousands who equally vanished into the capitalist sunset. Thanks to a flutist friend in Ircam I got to meet Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez but I don’t think they remember me. I did a translation for Sophie Calle before she became Sophie Calle. Also some work for the Royal family of Afghanistan. Back when there was one. At Paris VIII University still in the Bois de Vincennes with the whores whom we did not try to lead to culture I got to attend classes by Lyotard & Deleuze and the Miller Brothers, Lacan’s son in laws? Noam Chosmky spoke. I thought to become a consultant in a moment of delusion and ended up teaching for the last 24 years: Polytechnique, SciencesPo, ENST, INT, Supelec, Ecole Centrale, ENPC, ENSTA, Paris V, ICP, ESIEE, ECE, Ecole du Louvre. Before that I was a technical translator, a field I am happy to report that has been almost entirely taken over by machines, bless their soulless bodies. I also got married and my wife and I had two children. But we hadn’t really grown up much to the needless suffering of the children and so that marriage went painfully bust...Then I married again and we had a daughter. She’s on the phone right now, de rigueur for all 16 year olds. I am a loving observer of the human experiment of which I am inextricably a part, how so ever much I would like to be apart. As we advance, not necessarily progress, into the numbing, memory erasing age of AI, already sinking its canines deep into our pranic jugulars, lose ourselves in our beloved electronic devices, we must look to our hands, our analog writing devices such as pencils and pens and give them a try. Along with all the rest.