Ep 45 - Jacob S. Friedman

Find more of Jacob's work at his website and see more from his publishing company, Static Publishing, on IG @staticpublishing. — Jacob S. Friedman is a writer, philosopher, mathematician, and the author of Shorts, An Interesting Book, and My Typewriter Hates the Government But I Don’t, among others. His first two works, collections of poems, employed a method of immersion in the natural world. Shorts, written while hitch-hiking around America and sheltering in the woods, and An Interesting Book, composed in solitary moments traveling by motorcycle, over the course of sixteen months, through jungle and countryside of South-East Asia from the Eastern end of the Himalaya’s southward into the Mekong Delta region. Allowing his travels and the events therein to organically evolve intended themes and subject matter, and each to transmit a unique spirit of the local people and lifestyle into the works composed there, his poems mark real events in the life of the author and intend to elucidate a system of thought and make known something of the ineffable.

Additionally, Jacob has shows an interest in knowledge specifically as its transmitted through the written form. As part of his method, Jacob continues to explore new, and sometimes rare and unusual sections of literary, philosophical, religious, and scientific thought. From contemporary philosophy and mathematical proofs, to romantic poetry, Sanskrit Sutras and Medieval mysticism, Cuneiform tablets, and biblical commentary. Written texts which contain something worth preserving, for him, possess a significant value and a mysterious element not yet fully known to him.

In Jacob S. Friedman’s poetic works, minimalism is functionally employed to a variety of ends. Primarily, minimalism is able, simultaneously, to demonstrate a mastery of the art, while serving to elevate the concept above words, and to accentuate feelings of serenity and liberation through the visually manifest forms of simplicity and perfection. Minimalism is further employed for its ability to reach a contemporary audience accustomed to internet age quips and shares. As well as to startle, into appreciation, a public who have rarely had any moving experience with a poem. Writing for such a public, an effect in which the reader has been fooled into comprehending the piece through sheer simplicity and sincerity, or a kind of carefully tailored direct approach, is necessary to revive what has become, in the minds of the average consumer, a dead art form.

The works written of Jacob S. Friedman do just that, giving form to a distinctly contemporary experience of the poet and the world, while constructing a rigorously developed representation of the Sacred in Nature.

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