Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Monday, August 31, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
from Casual Encounters, ch. 1 Lust
I too have come to seek the hasty discretion of mirrors. I am and who is there. In content’s dream everything is repulsive and lovable. Muscle spasms brushed against regret. Admit the body is a ribbon, an ocean rolled into darkness. Admit the constant hatred of intimacy. It pushes straight through to savage interior. Originate as appetite, a neutral pornography, a monstrous arbitrary semblance discreetly reaches. They are all my screaming dolls, in what grimaces of disgust they wallow. Speak only of their servitude. Bodies split with visitors, orifices of ghosts. We deserve everything inflicted on us. There is no fragility. Flesh demands disgust and brutality.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
bostonian productivity
well gentlemen, i for one am sitting in a sweaty corner in the living room, jealous of a rendevous i had wanted to attend. hope you freaks had a cute time together, remeniscing and poeting and finding some river with a bank wide enough for a congregation of goons.
as compensation for my immobility i had, at the very least, looked forward to some undoubtedly depraved collaboration sprawled across bar napkins and punctuated with little drops of Jameson's...
i'll be sharpening all my knives in preparation for whatever glorious beef inches a bloody trail out of the closet...
as compensation for my immobility i had, at the very least, looked forward to some undoubtedly depraved collaboration sprawled across bar napkins and punctuated with little drops of Jameson's...
i'll be sharpening all my knives in preparation for whatever glorious beef inches a bloody trail out of the closet...
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
from The Frenzy
Never would you have considered me crazed, passing you by in the road newspaper in hand, kicking a stone from side to side along the sidewalk. And yet there I was finally out of my mind, free of it all. Surely you are not to blame. There was nothing about me that would have given it light. My dirty blond hair neatly disheveled, parodied my deliberate jaw line. A three-week beard shaven neatly along my neck overlooked by a pair of thin wire-framed glasses. Masked the simpleton gauged by my sorted blue eyes. Anyone would have trusted me, extending my hand in a gentle embrace of solidarity and goodwill, even you. But when I look into your eyes, I do not see you anymore. I see the flesh that clothes your body, the various forms it takes, and how it can be shaken from you. Your eyes glazed over with trepidation and woe, finding a charismatic glimmer in my tone that would convince you kindly of my intentions. And you would not be mistaken most of the time. However, I have had very little occasion to abuse intention. In fact, there has been little need until about one month ago.
A. I wrote about the bloodstream—a transformative state. It arrives amid swarms of desperation. Discern a character, an artificial waking, like falling in love with a puddle, dripping, raining down. Shake her head like a dog, with others at the meat. Elbows and wrists flex with primal questions. That was her thinking. She will not be identical.
B. The dismantled dead are either triumphant or compromised. I stole from them their trajectory of experience. The pleasure in feeling the split is the act of getting here at all. But how she sketched the wolves from memory translation under treatment. The photographs were blurry from thrashing. Beg for family. Beg for life. Beg for unknown. Days are stripped of color.
C. I became fascinated by the desire for love, that it bore such indiscriminate trust. We all wish to be admired, to be adored. We all wish for someone to hold in the night. This is our forever dream. But as you sleep, as your brain splashes through waves of iridescent, strangulated memory I stand over you, you’re body-impeded dreams, and my fingertips serrated chewed flesh. And this is your forever dream. You wish for the opening out, the walking through it, time syncopated with fiction. Sketch distant from villainy. In this room where I kept her—blank for the camera. In retrospect we are a collision of line, tracks in January beneath the permanent silence of action.
D. Supposedly daisies, each garment folded precisely to location. Supposedly strawberry jam, two scoops of sugar, television from eight to ten. Supposedly at the limits of cruelty, absorb compassion, startling rigidity. Another sealed and catalogued the tended animals. Now almost worn away, the grizzly is serene.
A. I wrote about the bloodstream—a transformative state. It arrives amid swarms of desperation. Discern a character, an artificial waking, like falling in love with a puddle, dripping, raining down. Shake her head like a dog, with others at the meat. Elbows and wrists flex with primal questions. That was her thinking. She will not be identical.
B. The dismantled dead are either triumphant or compromised. I stole from them their trajectory of experience. The pleasure in feeling the split is the act of getting here at all. But how she sketched the wolves from memory translation under treatment. The photographs were blurry from thrashing. Beg for family. Beg for life. Beg for unknown. Days are stripped of color.
C. I became fascinated by the desire for love, that it bore such indiscriminate trust. We all wish to be admired, to be adored. We all wish for someone to hold in the night. This is our forever dream. But as you sleep, as your brain splashes through waves of iridescent, strangulated memory I stand over you, you’re body-impeded dreams, and my fingertips serrated chewed flesh. And this is your forever dream. You wish for the opening out, the walking through it, time syncopated with fiction. Sketch distant from villainy. In this room where I kept her—blank for the camera. In retrospect we are a collision of line, tracks in January beneath the permanent silence of action.
D. Supposedly daisies, each garment folded precisely to location. Supposedly strawberry jam, two scoops of sugar, television from eight to ten. Supposedly at the limits of cruelty, absorb compassion, startling rigidity. Another sealed and catalogued the tended animals. Now almost worn away, the grizzly is serene.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
FROM the Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other
"Immediately, one and the other is one facing the other. It is myself for the other. The essence of the reasonable being in man designates not only the advent in things of a psychism in the form of knowledge, in the form of consciousness rejecting contradiction, that would encompass the other things under concepts, disalienating them within the identity of the universal: it also designates the ability of the individual, who initially appears to exist relatively to the extension of the concept--the species man, to posit himself as the only one of his kind, and thus as absolutely different from all the others, but, in that difference, and without reconstituting the logical concept from which the I disengaged itself, to be non-in-different to the other. Non-in-difference, or original sociality-goodness; peace, or the wish for peace, benediction; 'shalom' --the initial event of meeting. Difference--a non-in-difference in which the other--though absolutely other, 'more other,' so to speak, than are the individuals with respect to one another within the 'same species' from which the I has freed itself--in which the other 'regards' me, not in order to 'perceive' me, but in 'concerning me,' in 'mattering to me as someone for whom I am answerable.' The other, who--in this sense--'regards' me, is the face."--Emmanuel Levinas
Saturday, July 04, 2009
THE PROTAGONIST
CHAPTER ONE
One night Jack Brady was seated on the mattress in his second floor apartment. A stack of rejection letters huddled on the nightstand under constant scrutiny of a nearby candle. He lifted a bladder of boxed wine to his lips, carelessly spilling red lines down his chin. Then placed it beside a stack of overdue library books and stared out into the darkness.
This was an important night in Jack Brady’s life because he decided, after much consideration, not to end his life. He planned on chasing a bottle of prescription pills with several liters of wine. Fall asleep and let shadows suffuse.
At the last moment he changed his mind. Dashed the handful of tiny spheres across the floor and turned on the radio. Trilling violins sent tremors over his flesh. Massaged them into his shoulders and thighs and stretched his arms. Reached for the wine and mouthed the spout of the bladder once more before resting it on the stained sheets.
Brady climbed from bed and stood with his bare feet on the cold hardwood floor. Legs stiffened contracting fever. An anxious sweat devised his face. Right hand flattened against the grain of the beige wall feeling the drum of a headboard next door vibrate his fingers before letting his arm drop to his side. Walked to the bathroom and cupped his hands underneath the faucet for a stream of water. Splashed his unshaven face and turned on the light. His eyes dragged down his cheeks by racks of flesh. He rested his hands upon the sink and inspected himself closely, peering up into his nostrils, sniffing and blowing, jiggled his index fingers inside his ears and then brushed his teeth voraciously, spitting gobs of toothpaste and blood into the rusted drain.
Removed a lone towel from the rack and wiped his mouth. A spider ruled an unwavering line, divided his face vertically in the mirror. He sighed gently against the line watching the pendulum sway in certain circles from side to side, the spider delegating an invisible crag before pedaling upward toward the ceiling.
Brady walked over to his only window and raked his eyes over the infectious animation below. Wrestled open the window and propped it up with his radio. Voices in the street broke like glass against dance clubs and late night jazz dives. Bodies shifting in shadows bore no explanation for their footsteps. They treaded laughter and applause irrecoverably into action. Flickering lights jabbed through darkness.
While the night bawled into the past, Jack Brady’s life was going nowhere. He made a meek living writing and creating greeting cards, distributing them for sale at various shops in the area. His specialty was staining 4 x 6 sheets of poster board with wet tea bags. He’d let them dry onto the board, the string threaded out beyond the border of the paper. The manner in which they rested on the page reminded him of message bottles romantically rushed ashore. Beside them he composed short verse, mostly lines stolen from published writers, hoping that someday someone would purchase one of his greeting cards inevitably awarding him triumph and success after his many grueling years of pedaling baubles to the masses. But this prostitution was wearing thin his patience. He wanted nothing more than to be a successful writer, but as each day passed he became more and more convinced of its intangibility.
What little money he had slipped quickly through his fingers on paper and supplies. He tried gambling on dogs like some of his idols, but quickly abandoned it after several losses. He also tried gainful employment at a number of positions: hotel clerk, waiter, janitor, department store assistant, but each one seemed to drag the soul from his very fingertips leaving him stifled, aggressive, and resentful of a day poorly wasted on false kindness and a pathetic paycheck. Though impoverishment was a lifestyle he had no ambition of surviving, his will to pursue the distinguished road of his predecessors became so pervasive that his reality allowed little else entrance.
Brady had been on rinse and repeat for about eight months. The alarm went off to the same three DJ’s squandering their wilted ethics over the best call-in sound effects contest: honk, gobble, and moo. He opened his eyes, interrupted from dreams of his ex-girlfriend, the sex they rarely had, her manikin body, unresponsive and resistant. Shower and dress and leave, splinter morning with irresolute mobility, spend money on something, anything at all, anything to gauge contribution, then return home and wait by the window until it was dark enough to drink wine without guilt, read and sleep and begin again.
There was nothing spectacular about him or his life and this, he felt, was the reason for his rejection. After his girlfriend left him, he had acquired enough rejection slips to wallpaper one wall in his apartment, which is exactly what he did. From small presses to large publishing houses he decorated his apartment with unoriginal lines from various editors who found his work unappealing or, while occasionally “exciting and emotional,” unsuitable at this time. Most of his excitement came from examining his body in the mirror each morning and debating whether or not shaving his chest and pubic hair would inspire great literature and opportunity.
Tonight, however, was different. Tonight and every day after this night would be forever changed by his actions. He realized that by killing himself he would deprive the world their god given right to the great American novel. And while he had no qualms about pushing daisies after the fact, he had not yet accomplished this feat.
What he needed was a female lead. Someone to share protagonist adventures, the mystery and eroticism of a fond love affair. He needed a story so compelling, so honest in its right it would be irrefutable to the critical eye. Brady paced the floor for several minutes, gnawing at the flesh around his fingernails, feeling the anticipation rise from his bowels to an inspired glaze over his eyes. Always told that to write a truly brilliant novel, one must write from experience. To write a tragic love affair one must have a tragic love affair. To write a murder, one must commit a murder.
Walked out from the bathroom beside his mattress and dropped to the floor. He began exercising voraciously, doing pushup after pushup, followed by a succession of crunches. He could feel his muscles resisting under tear and strain but continued forcing his body to exceed its expectations. To accomplish his goal of becoming a great American novelist he would have to experience horrible things, take actions he never thought possible.
Brady stood and walked over to the window. A group of girls dressed in dramatic club attire pirouetted through the smog and stench of hotdog vendors and alcohol ignited streets. A man in a hooded sweatshirt walked a dog at a hurried pace as if he were expected. Hundreds of others carried along fracturing the night to pieces with laughter and idiocy, heartbreak and lust.
One night Jack Brady was seated on the mattress in his second floor apartment. A stack of rejection letters huddled on the nightstand under constant scrutiny of a nearby candle. He lifted a bladder of boxed wine to his lips, carelessly spilling red lines down his chin. Then placed it beside a stack of overdue library books and stared out into the darkness.
This was an important night in Jack Brady’s life because he decided, after much consideration, not to end his life. He planned on chasing a bottle of prescription pills with several liters of wine. Fall asleep and let shadows suffuse.
At the last moment he changed his mind. Dashed the handful of tiny spheres across the floor and turned on the radio. Trilling violins sent tremors over his flesh. Massaged them into his shoulders and thighs and stretched his arms. Reached for the wine and mouthed the spout of the bladder once more before resting it on the stained sheets.
Brady climbed from bed and stood with his bare feet on the cold hardwood floor. Legs stiffened contracting fever. An anxious sweat devised his face. Right hand flattened against the grain of the beige wall feeling the drum of a headboard next door vibrate his fingers before letting his arm drop to his side. Walked to the bathroom and cupped his hands underneath the faucet for a stream of water. Splashed his unshaven face and turned on the light. His eyes dragged down his cheeks by racks of flesh. He rested his hands upon the sink and inspected himself closely, peering up into his nostrils, sniffing and blowing, jiggled his index fingers inside his ears and then brushed his teeth voraciously, spitting gobs of toothpaste and blood into the rusted drain.
Removed a lone towel from the rack and wiped his mouth. A spider ruled an unwavering line, divided his face vertically in the mirror. He sighed gently against the line watching the pendulum sway in certain circles from side to side, the spider delegating an invisible crag before pedaling upward toward the ceiling.
Brady walked over to his only window and raked his eyes over the infectious animation below. Wrestled open the window and propped it up with his radio. Voices in the street broke like glass against dance clubs and late night jazz dives. Bodies shifting in shadows bore no explanation for their footsteps. They treaded laughter and applause irrecoverably into action. Flickering lights jabbed through darkness.
While the night bawled into the past, Jack Brady’s life was going nowhere. He made a meek living writing and creating greeting cards, distributing them for sale at various shops in the area. His specialty was staining 4 x 6 sheets of poster board with wet tea bags. He’d let them dry onto the board, the string threaded out beyond the border of the paper. The manner in which they rested on the page reminded him of message bottles romantically rushed ashore. Beside them he composed short verse, mostly lines stolen from published writers, hoping that someday someone would purchase one of his greeting cards inevitably awarding him triumph and success after his many grueling years of pedaling baubles to the masses. But this prostitution was wearing thin his patience. He wanted nothing more than to be a successful writer, but as each day passed he became more and more convinced of its intangibility.
What little money he had slipped quickly through his fingers on paper and supplies. He tried gambling on dogs like some of his idols, but quickly abandoned it after several losses. He also tried gainful employment at a number of positions: hotel clerk, waiter, janitor, department store assistant, but each one seemed to drag the soul from his very fingertips leaving him stifled, aggressive, and resentful of a day poorly wasted on false kindness and a pathetic paycheck. Though impoverishment was a lifestyle he had no ambition of surviving, his will to pursue the distinguished road of his predecessors became so pervasive that his reality allowed little else entrance.
Brady had been on rinse and repeat for about eight months. The alarm went off to the same three DJ’s squandering their wilted ethics over the best call-in sound effects contest: honk, gobble, and moo. He opened his eyes, interrupted from dreams of his ex-girlfriend, the sex they rarely had, her manikin body, unresponsive and resistant. Shower and dress and leave, splinter morning with irresolute mobility, spend money on something, anything at all, anything to gauge contribution, then return home and wait by the window until it was dark enough to drink wine without guilt, read and sleep and begin again.
There was nothing spectacular about him or his life and this, he felt, was the reason for his rejection. After his girlfriend left him, he had acquired enough rejection slips to wallpaper one wall in his apartment, which is exactly what he did. From small presses to large publishing houses he decorated his apartment with unoriginal lines from various editors who found his work unappealing or, while occasionally “exciting and emotional,” unsuitable at this time. Most of his excitement came from examining his body in the mirror each morning and debating whether or not shaving his chest and pubic hair would inspire great literature and opportunity.
Tonight, however, was different. Tonight and every day after this night would be forever changed by his actions. He realized that by killing himself he would deprive the world their god given right to the great American novel. And while he had no qualms about pushing daisies after the fact, he had not yet accomplished this feat.
What he needed was a female lead. Someone to share protagonist adventures, the mystery and eroticism of a fond love affair. He needed a story so compelling, so honest in its right it would be irrefutable to the critical eye. Brady paced the floor for several minutes, gnawing at the flesh around his fingernails, feeling the anticipation rise from his bowels to an inspired glaze over his eyes. Always told that to write a truly brilliant novel, one must write from experience. To write a tragic love affair one must have a tragic love affair. To write a murder, one must commit a murder.
Walked out from the bathroom beside his mattress and dropped to the floor. He began exercising voraciously, doing pushup after pushup, followed by a succession of crunches. He could feel his muscles resisting under tear and strain but continued forcing his body to exceed its expectations. To accomplish his goal of becoming a great American novelist he would have to experience horrible things, take actions he never thought possible.
Brady stood and walked over to the window. A group of girls dressed in dramatic club attire pirouetted through the smog and stench of hotdog vendors and alcohol ignited streets. A man in a hooded sweatshirt walked a dog at a hurried pace as if he were expected. Hundreds of others carried along fracturing the night to pieces with laughter and idiocy, heartbreak and lust.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Maurice Blanchot from The Gaze of Orpheus translation by Lydia Davis
"Remaining is not accessible to the one who dies. The deceased, we say, is no longer of this world, he has left it behind him, but what is left behind is precisely this cadaver, which is not of this world either--even though it is here--which is, rather, behind the world, something the living person (and not the deceased) has left behind him and which now affirms, on the basis of this, the possibility of a world behind, a return backwards, an indefinite survival, indeterminate, indifferent, about which we only know that human reality, when it comes to an end, reconstitutes its presence and proximity."
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
some thoughts on "HERE" by DL, AH, HG,DB,TW, and SMH
...the writing in HERE is concerned with boundaries (as perhaps all writing is?)...HERE is framed and inhabited by poems searching out questions of identity... "who am I?" or " who are we?"...the horizon of this work existing as the possibility for difference and agency...the poems acting as kinds of technologies for metamorphosis...machines for constructing the temporary nourishment needed for transformation...or more to my thinking...lacanian psychoanalytic linguistic instruments for transformations...these poems are the search for identities in self- and co-construction...identities in relation...identities in transformation...the possibility of the being-in-language as an gestural agent of liberty...but also...part of the action of this writing is also necessarily about the pain of transformation...the poems themselves harbingers of dark transmissions of personal experience...in these ways i'm reminded of the power of writing to aid memory as well as writing being a psychoanalytic tool for self discovery...Not simply reportage or journal entries of activities HERE is a collaborative poetry manuscript built upon a polyformal and multiplicitous potentiality...the forms utilized range from anaphora, list, lyric, prose, free verse, acrostic, the poetic play, the google search, epistolary, renga, and hybrids and variations of these to perfom a geography of body and of mind...but one in which the boundaries and horizons of the future are being formed...
Here are some of my favorite excerpts..
...From DL's "My Heart's Language"...
...Love isn't easy
It is hard to gain and lose
Our beliefs change
I can't believe that was me
Afraid of time
When she was scared
She was her mother
She was her own being
We just have to dig within our bodies
...From AH's "La, Mariposa, the butterfly woman"...
...i dreamed of a girl whose soft body opened like a cabinet
inside the cavity were embryos shining, daggers on
shelves and bags packed with the first green color of
spring
this was the Skeleton Woman
she stretches from heaven to hell,
we're all here, here, here
...From HG's "Part 1"...
...She (the jumper) is already accepting, moving
on to the next moment in time, society places her back
and dwells like gulls in a stand still cold front unable to
fly out of it and enlisting her among their ever familiar V-
formation.
White Noise: Becoming a transfixion, an escape out of
hell. Rid the conscious mind of the tedious aspects of our
tedious minds.
...From DB's "[Written in an address book]"...
...Stillness except for rocking,
Back and forth
Green, green, green, brown.
Darkened windows
A brick asylum
Darkened trees
Branches intertwined
Leaves cover every bit of light
Missing the escape holes...
...From TW's "[who am i?]"...
...I am a night owl who lives for the stars and
the crazy things that happen at night. I am a friend who
can be trusted until the end. I am on a journey to
discovery of what i want out of life. I am a girl who has
choices. I want to be free....
...From SMH's "Google Search"...
...You can't
remember a time when your thoughts of purpose did not
include others. It is kind of a relief to feel sure of yourself
You realize that we are all here for each other
and searching for a purpose. Suddenly a wave of
exhaustion comes over you. You turn off the computer,
walk back to your room, and crawl into bed, soft and
warm.
...lastly here is the RENGA from HERE in its entirety...
Slick as a motherfucking architectural major
Building buildings off of my irises
I sometimes crave Newport's, but my
Mother and father completely disagree
I'm scared they might disown me
Let's pretend
This ended hopeful
My mom won't let me watch scary movies
She says their innapropriate
Just like church
I wish that black crows on their wires visited me oftener
And more than I would like, I find myself singing "wrong
way"
She winces at my smoker-alto voice
The overall theme and structure of the poems in this work remind and encourage a reading of the order of the lepidoptera (moths/butterflies) as examples of the ways in which horizons and boundaries shift after metamorphosis...the ritualistic passage from one stage to another carries within itself the solidification of new social bonds and boundaries...to the caterpillar the personal relation to the boundaries of the world is one of gravity and nourishment...while through the ritual metamorphosis the moth/butterfly becomes relative to new amazing and dangerous stimuli, the winds sway, the vastness of travel, the settling on a flower, the availability and dangers of greater accesses of flight...HERE as a book exists as a series of texts reinforcing a collective experience of relational ritual...the ritual of transformation...as i read through the texts i view the diffracted angles of a shattered chrysalis...the poems of HERE are the pieces of a passed through space...it is an architecture for passing through, for passing time...but one marked with a horizon that is about to be different...an architecture with internal folds and excesses left as marks of the vast machinery of socio/biological (mis)understandings and frustrations that contribute to the shifting boundaries of an identity in...about....and beyond...transformation...
...i want to thank Tim Armentrout for sending this book to me...HERE is a testament to the powers of the imagination...the power to create your own path...the power to understand the paths of others...the power to continue to become...
Monday, May 25, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
From Facebook (my apologies)
(from Charles Bernstein)- Thanks to Univ. of Calif. Press, PEPC Library is able to make available this key Robin Blaser essay on Olson and Whitehead. I tried to get the html as close to the book as possible, but let me know if you see any errors. Robin Blaser -- The Violets
Source: writing.upenn.edu
fromThe Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaserr, ed. Miriam Nichols Univeristy of California Press, 2006. PEPC Digitial Publication of one essay from the book.
Source: writing.upenn.edu
fromThe Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaserr, ed. Miriam Nichols Univeristy of California Press, 2006. PEPC Digitial Publication of one essay from the book.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Friday, May 08, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
:::::::I HEART ANSELM HOLLO::::::::
LISTEN TO ANSELM
"those who rule the symbols rule us"--william burroughs
"if i surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out. but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed to jump over the boundary."--ludwig wittgenstein
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
:: fromfiftyfarmsreviewed ::
Home Video Review of Books (scroll down)
ellectrique press
-----------------------
and if you want to read some of silliman & co. briefly meander around (but not actually into) RecollecTed//CaGeD click here blah, blah
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
SPICER on TEDDY BALLGAME
[after listening to spicer's vancouver lectures for the umpteenth time today i found myself chuckling outloud at one of spicer's baseball analogies...and like usual...i mostly agree with him...but for the sake of spring...with baseball season having just begun...i'll recount the analogy here...] excerpted from lecture 3 part 2 june 17 1965
questioner: ...if you know what you want why is it wrong...this is what i can't quite follow?...
spicer: ...well on account of the fact that i ain't myself only...i'm a member of a team and uh...like ted williams always knew what he wanted and the red sox never did win the pennant...(pause)...i'm sorry but let's face it...
questioner: lay off ted williams that's all...
spicer: he gave that marvelous finger...uh...i was there in boston when he was giving it...it was a marvelous finger...but if you get any hits in front of him or behind him...he still stayed at the plate and uh took it very easy and you know he'd take a base on balls if he wanted a base on balls because he felt he clnd't get a hit and uh it wldn't matter if the red sox had a one run deficit and it was the ninth inning or anything else he wld still take the base on balls and that kind of thing...and he was a goddamn lousy team player...uh which is nice...but i don't really think that it wrks uh if you wanna win pennants and i think that i do and my poetry does...
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Where the Light Is, Part 1
"Oscillating and how": Elizabeth Guthrie’s Yellow and Red: A Poetic Play
(Black Lodge Press, 2oo8)
A Review by Andy Peterson
Pre-faces: Stages, and Codas of no after-thought. Of thought itself, as in: august and autumnal humming, warming orchestras with audience noise – a bright fit of laughter here, a dry cough there, mouths around popcorn going munch-munch – of definable objects and indefinable gestures, of being within feeling, to which only the imagination holds; without her, imagination, really, where would we be?
The cozy theater of the mind that stages the world, as in: "All the world’s a..."
we, who trust this, settle in to that familiar soft command, the conductor’s tap-tap-tap upon the stand, and we begin...
Poet Elizabeth Guthrie’s chapbook, Yellow and Red: A Poetic Play, released with elegant and loving craft by Black Lodge Press, 2008, creates a dreamy real-state site of hybrid-ditty, a calmly surreal series of performances/stagings/happenings, a confirmation that art becomes life becomes art becomes life becomes art. Difficult to summate such a uniquely inventive work, so to quote the text, in its most approximate descriptions of Self: a ""Lyric Touching Realic", or "The surface of reflection as precursory indication of the actual."
Y&R moves through four organic stages of constructions, represented by the elements of the four seasons ("an experience of phenomenon"), the abstractions of the titular colors become speaking characters alongside the inanimate – instruments, "Empty Paper Cup", and the centrifugal stage construction of an autumnal dandelion – and the animate – Conductor Ren Juffalo and Concertmaster Barry Alitzer, whose dialogues and movements explore the mysteries of moments – that is, the Eternal Moment– in change, the constant creativity of life, with the image-nation of ethereal word play.
Guthrie draws upon such happily varied avant-garde philosophies of performance artists and poets like Andre Breton, John Cage, Meredith Monk, Yoko Ono, and Gertrude Stein, who one could argue pioneered the form. The poetic play: more than just a narrative drama set in verse; a postmodern hybrid akin to the prose poem, which raises the stakes of relationships between language, page, and stage: a tuned stand-in for the physical world.
Y&R puts these elements in motion, elevates language from the page and into space, like music, and like feedback, reflects and inflects of change there occur. The finale, like all great art, asks us for our own answers to its tantalizing questions as we leave the theatre, marveling at compressions, voices in wires, constructions and reflections, and alerting us to possibilities of the lyric in everyday life, "oscillating(,) and how."
. . .
To order, visit our friends at Black Lodge Press
blacklodgepress.org
blacklodgepress.blogspot.com
Monday, March 23, 2009
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