Check out this sweet video poem Laura Burgher and I made! We made it special for the TK Art of the City Street Fest (8/1/15). It was in a neat exhibit called Poems for the Street Corner, curated by Ted Hiebert and Kat Seidemann. The video poem is addressed to a combination of things: Detroit, dreams, the corner of 3rd Ave. & Prefontaine PL, Street Corner the franchise, and prostitution. Click on the poems for the street corner link to see the other cool videos that were in the exhibit.
This collage is titled Q is for Queer Underwater Dino Party. I made it for Laura Burgher for her birthday. I cut out images from various children’s books I found at Goodwill. I like the ballerina cow the best.
THIS FRIDAY, I am reading from the beginnings of my thesis. This performance will be a combo of “Born Again” Christians, genitalia jokes, and Bettie Page with the help of my friend and collaborator, Andrew Carson. Other people that are AMAZING will be there too. Gallery 1412 in Capitol Hill, 8:00pm-10:00pm. Check it out!
I thought I’d share with y’all my most recent publications in Clamor Literary and Arts Journal. Clamor is University of Washington Bothell’s on-campus literary and arts journal. The 2015 issue came out last month, and some other members of my cohort have some work in there as well. My work includes one time i drank two beers, aconcrete poem that I wrote on a sad day in January, immensely hungover. The other, Famine, is a black out poem that I wrote last September that is a part of the William Carlos Williams erasure project. I wonder if I’ll work on that again one day! Clamor also published a third poem of mine, just your standard narrative poem, on their online edition. It is called A Poem for My Mother. I wrote this in my last semester of undergrad while I was working on a chapbook of poems about my family. Here is the link
UPDATE (6/15/15): This piece is forthcoming in the online edition of the 2015 Best American Experimental Writing Anthology. I will post links when it comes out! 🙂
I suppose I am on a role with making things for pleasure this weekend! 🙂
Today, I was wandering around down town instead of heading home from a friend’s house and decided to check out the Seattle Public Library. If you haven’t been, it’s pretty amazing, so you should definitely go the next time you’re in town. I found my way to the art section and picked up a book called Prints & Drawings – A Pictorial History by Gottefried Lindemann. As the title reveals, it goes through the history of graphic art from the late Middle Ages to America in the Twentieth Century. I had such a positive response to the prints in the book that I ended up becoming a member of the library to check it out (and steal the prints for my own work! 🙂 ). While flipping through the book at home, I came across the print I used for my piece above, For Mercy. It is a German print from the Dürer Period which I believe is named after Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) from the Renaissance Period. As you can see from the piece, the print is by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (1484-1530) and is called Profile Portrait of a (Bernese) Woman.
Now, a little backstory for the found text:
Prior to grad school, I had been working with the text The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams – Volume II 1939-1962 and making blackout poems with various pages of the book. (Blackout poems are when you take an existing text, whether it be a newspaper or page in a book or page in a magazine etc., choose words from the text in the order they appear on the page, and then blackout everything else. Here is a link to Austin Kleon’s archive of blackout poems for examples. http://austinkleon.com/category/newspaper-blackout-poems/ ) I can post some of the ones I have made later. When I came upon the Deutsch portrait, I decided to flip through WCW’s book and make a blackout poem inspired by the picture. After making one version, I realized it would be WAY cooler to make a collage instead, and used an exacto-knife to cut out the words and letters from the page. For reference, I used page 75 which included the end of the poem The Rose, and the full poems Rumba! Rumba! and A Plea For Mercy.
I hope you guys like it. Let me know what you think of it in the comment section. 🙂
Made this little doodad today. I took the picture last Summer when my brother and I went backpacking in Castle Rock (Northern California). A friend met up with us at our camp and we make a Coors Light Beer-amid. (A pyramid made out of beers for all of you who don’t have fun with your alcoholic beverages). I bought the tiny frame at a Goodwill a few months back. Today, I fit the picture to the frame and pasted the words on there with computer paper and an Elmer’s glue stick. The hidden meaning behind the collage? Coors Light tastes like piss. 🙂
I have not created anything worthy of BLOG in the past couple of weeks. Here is something interesting instead!
While researching for a presentation I am giving with some of my peers on Kathy Acker’s novel, My Mother: Demonology, a Novel, I have come across a technique of writing (and art making) used by William S. Burroughs POST Naked Lunch. It is called The Cut Up Method:
“The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections. 1 2 3 4…Now rearrange the sections. Place section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different… In any case you find that it says something…quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem.” -William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind
Here is a link to a PDF of The Third Mind by Burroughs:
Click to access William-S.-Burroughs-and-Brion-Gysin-The-Third-Mind-complete.pdf
The youtube video above is a short film made in 1966 called The Cut Ups by Burroughs and Antony Balch that demonstrates this method visually. Don’t worry. I can only get through 5 minutes of it before wanting to shout NO! GOODBYE! and shutting it off. However, it is a prime example of how art/writing can be more about the editing than anything else.
I have already been using techniques similar to this method in my work, but I have only employed them in my poetry/collages. Taking large chunks of prose and reworking it sounds so TEDIOUS! But I am interested in how that process might be different or similar to collaging.
Kathy Acker’s work is a prime example of the use of The Cut Up Method outside of Burrough’s work, but in a more figurative manner. She weaves narratives from texts ranging from the well known, such as Huckleberry Finn and Don Quixote, to the lesser known like The Story of the Eye by George Bataille, and pairs them with autobiographical texts, such as diary entries. As I have only read My Mother: Demonology, A Novel, I cannot give my opinion as to whether her use of the technique is rendered usefully. It does make for an interesting read. Especially if you like feminism and erotica (verging on pornography).
When I have a chance, I would like to use the Cut Up Method, so look out for some work to come! Hopefully I can post something of my own up soon.
Blind Eyes Could Blaze Like Meteors is a collage and cento poem. See below for the works I used for the cento. The poem carries the length of both images, starting with ‘Blind Eyes Could Blaze Like Marries and ending with ‘How soon succeeding eyes begin.’
FYI: A cento poem is a poem that takes lines from other pieces of work to make a new work of its own. To see an example, other than my own, look up Wolf Cento by Simone Muench
The two images I used are ‘Pastoral’ by Leonora Carrington and ‘Jupiter und Io’ by Antonio Allegri. This content of the poem takes place in a mead or field at dusk, so I used ‘Pastoral’ to reflect the setting and time of day. Also, the colors of the image are very dark and diluted so this helps dramatize the disparity of the poem. ‘Jupiter und Io’ depicts Jupiter (a Greek God) as a dark cloud caressing the nymph, Io. I researched this painting online and discovered that Io is one of Jupiter’s many loves who has been seduced by him. Since the speaker of my poem has come across a woman who is desperate for his love, I felt that the voices of the characters in my poem reflect the intent of the characters in the painting.
Lines of poem taken from the following poems:
Do Not Go Gentle into that Goodnight by Dylan Thomas
La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats
Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens
To See A World… by William Blake
The Song of Wandering Aengus by W.B. Yeats
Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith
Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Colleridge
An Anundrel Tomb by Philip Larkin
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
Stop all the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone by W.H. Auden
Adlestrop by Edward Thomas
Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
Tracy Jane Gregory 