David Jewell

Image by Leon Alesi

David Jewell first starting writing poetry in high school, after staying up all night writing protest poems in his journal because his girlfriend was unjustly grounded for a week because he got her home too late. From there, he took writing classes and continued to write. Everyone told him his poems were very depressing, until he was invited to do a poetry reading in a coffee house in Tucson, Arizona in 1980.  The audience realized the poems were actually quite funny, and they laughed and laughed, and his career in performance poetry began.

From there, he was very involved in the poetry and theater scene in Austin, Texas from 1982 until 2019, when he moved to Smithville, Texas. In Austin, he was the opening act for Leon Redbone, Lydia Lunch, and Laurie Anderson. He performed and wrote over 15 multi-media shows with Electronic Planet Ensemble from the years 1998 until 2018 when they did their last show at The Vortex Theater in Austin.  (The audio for some of these shows can be found on youtube and spotify.... The favorites are “In.Car.Nation (a celebration of cool cars)”, “Spaceman, DaDa, Robot”, and “Surfing Ufo”). 

And finally, he wrote the poem called Delusion Angel, which is featured in Richard Linklater’s movie Before Sunrise (which is the first of a trilogy of movies he did with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy)... and then he appeared in Linklater’s movie called Waking Life, in which he discusses cinematography and reality and God with his friend Caveh Zehedi, while they both morph into cumulous clouds. He only has three books available on Amazon: 1. Lizards Again, manic d press, his first book, out of print, but sometimes available second hand. 2. Last word, First word, a book he did in collaboration with his friend with Ric Williams, and another collaboration with Ric Williams called 52 card pickup. The other books by David Jewell on Amazon are not written by this David Jewell, I will say no more about that for now (i.e. yikes! don’t get me started). In Smithville, he looks for chances to perform and publish, and waits for Covid to chill out so life can be more better. This is probably too long... but if you want to stay for a drink he could tell you more, and hear your story too.