orium

Volte-Face, Cut-Ups (Notebooks 2009-2011)

2011-12-12T20:51:00.013+01:00

The edges of language run, now

All one can do is want for love:

In this place where we were to be:

So little of us has to do with politics —

As if from afar — I sidle round,

New asylum of sense: skin

A casual to condone our clever. Where

Promises are the start of us.

In the rush of language:

This cautious play of shadows,

The exploration of that holiday

The practice of observation built on

A heart hiked through the throat.

like a stocking: accommodate

no code, no guide for

[ ]

but I wish that turning out: could thread

again I sidle round: that

overkill and symbolic.

the words take us, their sexy fictions.

Then the complex sentences, conflicts —

[ ]

of heat and care —

damp breath and exhilaration.

collateral and velocity.

my hand touched your —

[ ]

to lead with the heart:

anticipated:

[ ]

And the rush of —

in the I want:

[ ]

the rough —

lead with the head:

reckless between:

the body but I won’t: purposefully

the bulk of my time is this: is hope.

The muscle memory of what

I am what you describe as

[ ]

thickenings of light —

Privacy belonged everywhere to possibility —

My hair an aurora borealis in the photo, like

and too much the taste of ghost, our

the saner —

[ ]

set a collision course.

[ ]

was not —

in front of you, and perception.

Your breaking point, or my breaking point

in the ultimatum of movement: and in it fixed:

[ ]

as if intimacy.

the choice to make a chipper tone.

historical take and reunion. Pushing back

[ ]

we can’t go on like this innuendo:

[ ]

A dozen reasons and undecided interlude, or

[ ]

four flushed cheeks —

[ ]

where there were others, I stand.

[ ]

the opportunity to touch and get on:

[ ]

Come into this and face me —

Outside there are human hearts,

[ ]

in place of it, sweetened it,

[ ]

Like so, we justified the culture of it.

That summer of walks —

off the sentence, our voices repeat

[ ]

a whole economy of movement.

[ ]

we talk ourselves in:

pressing into, and/or —

[ ]

The gist skimmed off memory

because words. You said a question

[ ]

I draw in each peace offering,

[ ]

You can’t write joy until

[ ]

so full of my own arms.

[ ]

the body you feed it to.

I’ll walk my sister’s dogs this afternoon, climb

[ ]

and in the evening scene:

reasons why/why not —

[ ]

bears nonsensical detail.

of truth, and I shrank back from that.

[ ]

a highest hill.

[ ]

It bears down hard in the breaks.

Too shy the outline of what might.

[ ]

in that lust for you:

a list of every time we —

[ ]

I’ll make love to quilts and stained

[ ]

glass in the evening.

[ ]

in the way it drew our gravities

and the taste of now —

[ ]

Where you are not, a calm grows.

[ ]

in: and drawn:

we undo the soft of it; I believe

[ ]

we might chance —

[ ]

so in: we rushed.

[ ]

even polished and blackened as we are:

[ ]

a piston of years, but for the fait accompli —

[ ]

Supernova

2011-10-28T03:47:00.008+01:00

This is a quick note to highlight Supernova (www.supernovapoetry.net) — a "growing collection of poetry and multimedia archive [that] is part of a larger artistic/interdisciplinary platform set to investigate, create and share experiences of urban life, our perception of changes, differences, causes and consequences of destructive pasts, traumas and turmoils."

This is an incredible, multilingual/international project — launched in tandem with a hard-copy anthology 11 9 Web Streaming Poetry (Supernova Editions; Belgrade 2010) edited by Tzveta Sofronieva:

Selections from my long-poem Transference were published in both the hard-copy and online collections (including Serbian translations); and the Audio/Visual Archive published as part of the online collection includes a recording of another poet reading Transference.

A huge thank you to Tzveta Sofronieva, Manja Ristic and Ana Seferovic for this project!

Check Out the Re-Vamp of "Archive of the Now"...

2011-03-07T06:14:00.002+01:00

...including the page on my writing!

www.archiveofthenow.com

Phonemes

2010-11-11T22:33:00.005+01:00

Any of the distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another.

+ Oxford English Dictionary

/u/

This accrual of difference is mutual: each debut of air and tongue: a pursuit of balance. We eschew the brute appraisal. Caper and care, exclusive and imbued with our own slow boundaries. Quick limbs protruding: we bank domestic and denuded. What little there is to misconstrue, but for the arc of breath. Pre-empted conclusion, its sound and sweet parcel of time, wanted, blued.

/e/

We risk its spasm-jeté: love: its get tectonic and gravity-bent. And its touch unravels each promise-net. And we sweat the space of it: each silence pet, bled. Our liberties hold bygones closer than their threat, so we feel hope to beget hope: measure our bodies against the pleasure of each pressure: break and test its electricity ‘til no violence is left.

/aI/

A pack of hearts, blighted: un-mendable: is a series of sleights no trapdoor, mirror or other organ can right: baiting reason, their selves trans-mute each site. A mind of lust and sell-by dates: a pack of hearts does not know bright but to see it through: what’s left of its why: gone grace: to side!

* This piece is the first stage of a current collaboration with NYC-based composer Joseph Di Ponio.

Exchange Values

2010-10-02T05:41:00.015+01:00

Exchange Value #1; 17 September 2010

[the moment where

the evidence is]

this catapult stress entry-point as stitch, as flutter

heartbeat and fingerprinting fiasco

as handle

as conductor

as pivot

as machine

as line

as such I brackets the length of corridor, a

written conversation

transcribed —

— for spatialisation

to braid interloper sun into silhouettes, a graphic language or

bid for some share of these

[neon geometries] the joint design loosening

I attends the grace instruction

action/beforemath facing down the document aftermath

to trace any intersection of mark, mobility

or passable other

however fragile letting flutter-flutter

to give [record] to take

Exchange Value #2; 24 September 2010

[...] You see me there [...]

[...] It’s that abstract [...]

+ Rachel Zolf, ‘Poem 35 – Learning machines’

I say [...] and we assess our difference:

stiffen with divisions and the prompt

to concede the stereotype: now we are ticks

and ticks of boxes: now not: we are awkward

humor turned currency: ransom: or code

for the labels we shy: in this classroom

owning each projection troubles it.

It(‘)s ease. It(‘)s lack of exchange.

EXCHANGE VALUE #3; 01 October 2010

+ With thanks to Emma Cocker and Anonymous

What gaps in a language worried by love —

or like

zones of conversation.

I body their truth and causal

exchanges of naïveté —

the swagger-hip, swagger-hip.

Censorship is a technique of remembrance.

Scratchings on wood brittle

our felt betweens.

This is a strategy.

And, a heap of negotiation, I kiss you.

The absence of text is a question of position.

A slick of sweat behind my knees:

unstable truths and ethical possession.

Cost is the backbone of each speech-act.

Social assemblage.

You exit left, vanished, a relationship

neither to history nor without it.

Object action object

I am against a chair and still in it.

Ragged edges and gloss.

Repeat, repeat

I am at a loss for what’s left to describe.

The draft goes like caution and

the marks are doors

where the language stuck us. I push

this heart through what’s left.

Read Rachel Zolf's response poems at The Tolerance Project blog: thetoleranceproject.blogspot.com

Kai Fierle-Hedrick & Rachel Zolf In Residence at the DEPARTMENT OF MICRO-POETICS

2010-09-20T02:30:00.010+01:00

Rachel Zolf and I are currently in residence at the DEPARTMENT OF MICRO-POETICS as part of the AC Institute's exhibition "Exchange Value"; I will be writing on-site at the institute in Chelsea on Fridays September 17th, September 24th and October 1st — while Rachel will be participating remotely from Brooklyn.

Rachel Zolf and Kai Fierle-Hedrick will collaborate – via an on-site/off-site residency at the AC Institute – to write a sequence of poems responding to the exhibition EXCHANGE VALUE. Fierle-Hedrick will write on-site at the gallery, and at the end of each session will forward an ekphrastic poem to Zolf.

Responding via The Tolerance Project – a collaborative MFA in Creative Writing rooted in an online archive of “poetic DNA” traces donated by 86 writers, artists and thinkers – Zolf will identify a set of search terms in Fierle-Hedrick’s poem and use these to generate a new response from within The Tolerance Project’s archive.

Zolf’s poetic permutation will then serve as the starting point for Fierle-Hedrick’s next session in the gallery, and so on. The residency explores a variety of exchanges – ekphrastic, dialogic, technological – in addition to embodying some of the challenges and creative loopholes of distance collaboration.

Further information about the residency is available here:
verysmallkitchen.com/2010/09/14/department-of-micro-poetics-kai-fierle-hedrick-and-rachel-zolf-in-residence

Each week's poems will be published on the Tolerance Project's blog here:
thetoleranceproject.blogspot.com

EXCHANGE VALUE, an exhibition curated by the Department of Micro Poetics

2010-09-05T19:26:00.006+01:00

For anyone in or around NYC — starting this Thursday I'll have a piece in the exhibition EXCHANGE VALUE, co-curated by the Department of Micro Poetics and the AC Insitute.

Later this month poet Rachel Zolf and I will also be collaborating on an on-site/off-site artist residency at the AC Institute, which will respond to the exhibition and tap into Zolf's on-going MFA experiment The Tolerance Project.

EXCHANGE VALUE: www.artcurrents.org/gallery/micropoetics.html

Department of Micro Poetics: verysmallkitchen.com/2010/09/05/the-department-of-micro-poetics-jill-magi-in-residence

OPENING: Thursday September 9th, 6-8pm

AC Institute

547 West 27th Street, 6th Floor

#610 & South Alcove

New York, NY 10001

Gallery Hours: Wed, Fri & Sat 1-6pm; Thurs 1-8pm.

Signals 6

2010-06-11T03:15:00.002+01:00

I've got new poems up in Signals 6!

The issue also features work by Amy De'Ath, Sarah Kelly, D. S. Marriott, and Timothy Thornton. Plus Michael Kindellan reviews Sara Crangle's Wild Ascending Lisp, and Peter Manson reviews Keston Sutherland's Stress Position.

I am in LOVE with this video...

2010-06-07T04:00:00.000+01:00

Cynthia & Alexis

2010-05-20T04:22:00.003+01:00

Check out the new Free Arts NYC video I made with my niece Aria Wetzler (camerawork) and brother-in-law Peter Wetzler (score)...

The start of something new...

2010-03-17T02:45:00.012+01:00

The child has, at the very least, the right to prove the craziness of his or her idea.
+ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

Exercise 1
Folding the memory of a public school over and stepping into compromise: in this dull of winter their small, fraught bodies taunt the reach of an ethic.

No consolation, the flexibility of a classroom: my patience gem: their laughter fits.

When asked for a poster child, all I can say is he's come far. But advertisements want for product. For a boy to be a revolution.

Exercise 2
Subjectivity as effort, a gesture rather than a right. What bravery in abdicating an I versus sticking it out.

Facing my runner down in the stairwell, both of our eyeballs and scruff stilled on a step brokering consequence. Her safety trumps dialogue, and the aftertaste of authority indentures my idealism. To not be untouched by human problem. That sincerity might constitute a critique. Whoever controls the language controls the outcomes.

Speech as projection [...] as a transitional technology. I not as an endpoint, but as a progression of place-markers.

Exercise 3
In East Harlem I ain’t no Mexican! Reigning in the revolt of a snow day, a ring of children is re-grouped and given the chance to explain themselves.

That language takes place outside of me, the individual [...] and that this is writing too.

In East Harlem a girl speaks Spanish, proud, and the circuit of her gracias and my de nada quotes some understanding.

Exercise 4
How my voice stalls his punch. Eye to eye with this child, I experience power. Acknowledge the stress of pandemic blue, disparate blue, all the resources in absentia blue.

I lov you I lov you I lov you

The suspicion that how we approach children exposes each social despot who backs us on verge of crusade. Flashback to that 80s film in which a power-suit weighs her babe on a grocer's scale (read: melon-like and cheerful).

Exercise 5
It’s the girl with the yellow hair that’s so rare in the Bronx that they id as difference.

Each one peculiarizes power, shimmies up into it and acts (it) out.

Meaning the subject is what we do.

Exercise 6
To frame listening as intervention, a strong relationship to power. We sift significations daily, meet rights and wrongs, milk and bone.

These days I think often of that semiotics professor who described her toddler, his naive estrangement from the system of sitcoms, as proof no language is natural.

So we tightrope between safe spaces, engender limits. We make over this place: each of us a tone, a syntax. Language now predicated on the use-value of a classroom, we fight hard for a participatory grammar.

Exercise 7
Ethics become gravity, the constitution of a question mark.

I trade the propulsion of ideas for this mess, this silence, this waiting as applied pressure. Each day I am invited to act, to reason why and suspect there is nothing that has not been said before.

To embrace this with language.

Exercise 8
Out of dusk make an antsy, a container of sense.

Buck compliance, but grow a vessel for it.

Offer decompression, compassion. Draft a policy for this.

Exercise 9
Be the casing, spent. A pair of trembling limbs, kitsch and giving.

Wield the curtain like a wall.

I would breed this small community a consistent safety, the sustainability of presence.

Exercise 10
Each session as benchmark, cast-off, what future will come.

This is a history moment!

Or an invitation into clout, to account for the opportunity of impact.

Exercise 11
My classroom today is conceptual and sunned.

Each kid loosing the abstractions of paint and cardboard, all ears as we notice a foreign calendar, the orange expanse that is Russia. Parcel the emotions like so, to create a gate for care. A procedure for trust.

There are points where habit and change intersect. We kind their release. Budge, and revolve again.

Happy Women's Day

2010-03-09T01:13:00.001+01:00

Ron Silliman just posted a fantastic list of "Women Who Blog About Poetry & Poetics" (including links, just click on a blogger's name):

http://sillimanslinks.blogspot.com

Rachel's Zolf's "The Tolerance Project" Has Launched!

2009-09-09T04:17:00.002+01:00

http://thetoleranceproject.blogspot.com/

Who I Work With

2009-09-04T20:38:00.000+01:00

Where I Work

2009-04-01T16:47:00.001+01:00

Scraps

2009-03-06T06:02:00.003+01:00

We get our first moral ideas
About the world — about justice and power,
Gender and the order of things — from somewhere.

+ Robert Hass, “The World As Will and Representation”

#1
the potent warmth that walks the edges of misunderstanding:
where it’s true for a moment, whatever it is, the moment
you say it: and then the impossibility of permanent care: embracing
each other like the plump cells of a Pomello, grown for it and bound
to split: panting a little, I give in the presence of him: blunt:
as a left hand hits the pajama at my thigh, and crosses under

#2
a tug on my heart-line arrives as a face: invasion: experience
magnified by its limits: take the way these people move together:
and this man again who could always induce the most base
commitment, securing me despite fidelity: there is no quality control
to this, no quaint instant to blame: no lack of hesitation, but for
a scent, the absent pressure of sand: and again the contest: moot

#3
conceding the risk involved in this public square does not account
for the fact that the man's hunting knife: the one with the serrated edge:
sits a gentle stretch away: each impulse we act on unravels with time:
I sympathize with Republicans because I genuinely want to understand
the state we’re in: I am willing: even as he speaks the word love, smitten
with the deviance of it all: he speaks and speaks, and I am “out there”

This Just Made My Day...

2008-07-09T03:56:00.000+01:00

Spelling ( ) Bound — TAKE TWO

2008-07-01T04:53:00.010+01:00

I've just received new pics, so here's a second announcement:

Spelling ( ) Bound (Ellectrique Press 2008) — a poetic collaboration between Cara Benson, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, and Kathrin Schaeppi — is now available in a limited, first edition. To purchase please see the press website: www.ellectriquepress.com.

Montreal, Communiqué

2008-06-06T02:13:00.001+01:00

It was love, after all,
that everybody was talking about
and nobody gave a shit for.

— John Ashbery, “Come On, Dear”

Of course it was raining and of course we were in a train
station in a scene so unlike these salted streets which are,
in turn, so unlike the heat that steamed the midsummer
I tend to associate with romance; that man bought
a basket of cadmium-coloured cherries off a grocer's
stoop. Here it is the coldest month of the year and fires
are raging in Australia. "Stay and fight," asserts the CBC,
"or get the hell out." But it was raining and drops struck us
like deep insomnia; even my eyes were wet. I quoted something
on red-lights and soaked pavement, a favorite trope,
and you were inscrutable or I was inscrutable. You see,
it’s vexing, this image of you: your spastic cleanliness,
sweet aphasia, motion: and addles me. Similarly, I found
myself quite perturbed at how morning bled into noon and after
hours of trekking foreign lanes respite was a pub, a crossed
leg and a pint. The topic was Iraq; our voices spiked and
eyes flared. Audibly, we were no locals. When dusk strikes
some say the world is drained of light; it speeds through
each and every perforation we've punched in our days
and this, dear reader, is a paper doily, cut through and through.
Months ago, you quote: "what poetry makes nothing happen?"
In the station, you let your bike fall to the platform; we stood
still; the p.a. system announced a departure. For every action
a butterfly flaps its wings. "Even in England," the radio reports,
"they feel the chill." Prohibition breeds popularity, but does this
fetch space or frequency? I digress. The clouds flush.
The payoff? I am missing you not as a Greek might his half-
hermaphrodite, but how a woman misses the era of a man,
what silhouette he brings the air and his split
second so different from her own. Art is revolution. So what.
I went dizzy with light, ditched the migrant eye. "To live,"
I declared that night, "with the grace of Titian's end: hooked,
and pushing blind." The gesture made, the work position-
less. Precocious as all hell. Monsieur, I would kiss you now.

Montreal, 2003

Necessetics / Sous Rature

2008-05-26T16:39:00.003+01:00

Cara Benson's site (Aristotelian bastardization, a Derrida slum, and anon sense) is up at www.necessetics.com and includes her new journal Sous Rature, forthcoming summer 2008. By way of an introduction, a call for work...

Sous Rature seeks work of erasure, inadequacy, and otherwise. Poems, prose, cross. Also, images and art. This is a necessary endeavor.

You are invited to submit work. Send text and/or images that are "inadequate yet necessary."

Contact Cara Benson cbenson67[at]yahoo[dot]com. Send as attachment. Put Sous Rature in the subject line. *JULY 18 DEADLINE*

Enjoy!

Spelling ( ) Bound

2008-05-24T20:30:00.005+01:00

Spelling ( ) Bound (Ellectrique Press 2008), a poetic collaboration between Cara Benson, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, and Kathrin Schaeppi is now available in a limited, first edition. To purchase please see the press website: www.ellectriquepress.com.

Recent Work by Donna Fierle: 4th-30th April 2008

2008-03-30T22:27:00.004+01:00

Including String Theories, a collaboration with poet Kai Fierle-Hedrick.

BUFFALO BIG PRINT GALLERY
78 Allen Street; Buffalo, NY 14202

T: 716 884 1777
W: www.buffalobigprint.com

Opening reception: Saturday 12th April, 4-7pm

Reality Check

2008-03-29T02:23:00.000+01:00

Touché to Teaching

2008-03-29T01:42:00.007+01:00

Untitled

2008-02-14T05:01:00.001+01:00

words retain memories of their past
+ Daniel Willis, 'The Work of Architecture in the Age of Efficient Production'

When I address love these days there is blood
in it how the mind unbolts the sweeping in
of big questions to fertilize conversation how
we lean on a blue cast of light to seize high
rises still hours before I sought the pitch of
laughter that would best state I miss you and
you're not a need but thespian as my father's
cookware the blunt hue of a Qing coral glaze.

Thursday 6th March Openned

2008-02-09T12:18:00.000+01:00

A New Use for London Transport

2008-02-01T04:40:00.002+01:00

Chorographies

2008-01-26T18:52:00.001+01:00

I've just finished a collaborative wee chap for Dusie.org with Cara Benson and Kathrin Schaeppi and am in that funny phase of writing myself out of the project (all words seem stuck to the old subject and I'm working on prying them loose again). So since this has me producing mostly crap, here's some old poems from a sequence called Chorographies to fill the interim:

Tokyo, Blossoms

As if what she had been was dumb-
founding, an effect or affect: a body
flourishing over the years somehow
growing out of control: one rampant husk.

I was fifteen years old the first time
I aimed a high-power fluorescent light
at a cherry tree, the spike of it boring
through the membrane of silence: that was that

room then: two people spying the pose
of branches. He thought she was older,
sitting so on her heels and rapturous.
The blossoms: pink and white ruffles

of petals against the sky, stiffening, furling
and unfurling the black around them: breathy
whorls of sound. They spoke Japanese this way,
with rose-coloured tongues, she baiting his shock;

and the effect fading now, a side-
show performer gone ducking the light, pin-
pricked and whispering as one would if
a fluttering mouth began to close.

Spring 2003

Osaka, An Æsthetic

if only to ask
from what was I willed
whoever is seen is
sweet with need
sit by me a while and ask
am I less am I
more or how wear

(with blood and light, less symmetry)
this effeminate desire

Autumn 2002

Roma, Terra Firma

He brings me to his studio this last afternoon
and now down
through the bowels of San Clemente, each floor deeper
yielding us to an other state of religion: dank and rich

and both of us here, padding through the dark.
If one thinks of them, there are marble, gold, chipped
mosaic above our heads: an earth over us, extant:
the river below. The city today: late spring: cuttlefish

prepared in ink at a nearby trattoria:
my watching him water his wine. Serenity
in the air, a breath; between us a flood of pale
table and cloth. There is sun; we walk in it, through

uneven stone streets. A construction site: past
this: the pulse of traffic around the Colosseum:
each motion terrene: our bodies enter the scene: small
textures fracturing the thrum of late afternoon:

this gut line: shedding time.
One hand lifts through the whitening studio, touches
an ink drawing where it dries, pinned; another plunges
(five fingers puncturing a dirt floor) blind as a root.

Spring 2003

Seasonal Sketch Culled from an Old Notebook

2007-12-16T21:50:00.000+01:00

Solus

Flecks of cotton flood the street, tango mid-air in that braked
underwater step. So the precision of winter days gives way
to spring, a slackness ushered in on the solstice without
ado or this present quickening of snow into dense
rain, its urgent thunder cloning furor and rate.
It was once proposed I fasten a small piece of sheet
metal to my windowsill, that I facilitate a duet between
Miles Davis and some similar precipitation turned music;
and I had no words then to make plain to that person
how it is only on the most vague nights that I rummage and ache
for braced rhythms, or the sound of one thing falling into another.

April 2003

Tonic

2007-12-10T17:04:00.000+01:00

Sensuality has been known to overcome the most rational of buildings.

met in soft stasis: what overwhelming: the catch
of two trajectories in a conference hall laced a plush
space: vectors darning cautious air: like muslin or
some other gapped, gone erotic weave: how I could but come
slow: through the detours of walk and conversation: en route
at such a skittish pace: I ached each hour to have you in

Selections from TRANSFERENCE (a new project)

2007-11-09T02:15:00.000+01:00

Fig 1: Pride

Fig 2: Caution Can Trump Desire

Fig 3: Pitter_Patter

ALL PRINTS BY WILLIAM CONTINO

A border is: status: chaste rank: too much the double-cross: as warp and weft mutes me: my two-timing nationalities: a commotion: make for local.

___

As: pitter patter: the first degree of ism emerges as us and them: all we need is a little genocide: and this from a boy on a double-decker: the all bets are off zone: catch me if you can zone: take that zone: push and pull zone: this bus route that was targeted a week after 07/07: or how later: a man states in an East Village cafe: everywhere else in the world it's ok to be racist, just not in this country.

___

All events predict one's understanding of the self: all meetings of minds stipulate territories: we target in others what we fear from ourselves: home in on the presumption of dominance.

___

Ick: this blood pump prattles: predicts its fall: fucks sovereignty for the tsk of an old love: gropes his violent streak: what naiveté it cannot help: but take on for all the want in it that aerates its distrust.

___

Graffiti: what look like propellers: stencils on asphalt in Washington Square Park: pigeon strut charts alternate orientations: the ready engagement specific to this culture I do esteem: jazz quartets act infidels from all angles: strollers advance, side by side: I wish for a busy body: West 4th Street is a red herring: the fountain sounds fresh catechism: fact, fact jumps the fence.

___

Check the home-made cliché: what buffers one's inner bigot: for it will not x-ray well and it will not fit into an X ml bottle or under the seat in front of you: culture an albatross: the summer I flew the four-seater I dreamt: evolved: I'd adopted the yoke as prosthesis.

___

To tether a brighter ID: darned mackerel sky: a waffling gut: one vulnerable sympathy: but frothy beer and a dud car bomb re-root us: the notorious update: thwacked by heart, I phrase facing forward.

___

Clout me, slake me: both foreign and proverbial structures, fragmenting, expose the concatenation of corners: the body erodes between forces: expectant: there can be no such thing as: — : to make a language of it: to bring it: forth: where corruption thrives.

___

Or kiss, duck: procure an implement: a vantage point from which to interrogate such bonds: I enact inanimate objects: like a glass of Kir I am besotted: chastise the air for giving itself to everyone: as I would each time: I'm swayed by a hunch into sic-ing my dog of a heart after home.

Pomme & Kelly

2007-11-04T02:18:00.002+01:00

What's In the Works

2007-07-30T23:02:00.000+01:00

This afternoon my uncle Will Contino (also an artist) and I started tossing around ideas for a project exploring translation/transference/works of art as on-going processes, dialogues, etc. Above is the first test, Will's painting of my poem 'Aubade 4': 'Aubade 4, Take 2'.

Poem

2007-06-26T23:55:00.002+01:00

You'd better calm down, you're nervous

your speech that familiar but
a few more deliveries and I'll be
why not just make up and make do
and if I could shutter like the Pepsi truck, if
we'll always have Paris
or condescend to touch
roll over, roll over —
for love is the big fat joke I'm in on
this balancing act scans as stasis
and my throat poised on empty

Five Unearthed

2007-06-05T16:13:00.001+01:00

Aubade 1 [Dover — Calais; 15 June 2006]

(see right)

Aubade 2 [Dover — Calais; 15 June 2006]

crinolined surface awash a cloudy
scar conforms its motorised
plane to agitate a tank or continent
as we steer south so doze

Aubade 3 [Den Haag; 16 June 2006]

bleary to do with dawn REM contortions
eject me formal and without the speech
to mimic social ease as in too few hours
catapult apartment blocks into frank view
and there is no moment but this frame
and the rev to inhabit it claim
the status of a clipped view as outside
the report of one woman's heel spurs
movement clocks the complete awake

Aubade 4 [Amsterdam; 17 June 2006]

so claptrap is the sweet intrusion of trees
into the street-scape applauding gallery-goers
or a low-rider bicycle askew since
this you see is a town for aesthetics
crowds mighty with part-time
jaunts if taken say when

Aubade 5 [Calais — Dover; 18 June 2006]

like weathered we recoup
our bowed bodies crouched over engine
growl in a shared logic of what is left behind
what is blunt exquisite cast-off progressed
who travels has desire for others, each
exception kin or coast of stone prior
now returned by the flat shimmy
of waves intersected four days past
so we take to the peace-cum-lack
and sink ensued into the wait
a northern trajectory how I would cart this
leisure momentous onward home

Andrea Brady: Tracking Wildfire

2007-05-22T22:56:00.000+01:00

A few months back UK-based poet Andrea Brady published a stunning writing project called Tracking Wildfire on art collective Dispatx's website. Read it here:

http://www.dispatx.com/show/item.php?item=2062

Information on — and recordings of work by — Brady and other experimental poets can also be found in the Archive of the Now.

(I'm working up to writing at greater length about Tracking Wildfire, so this post will likely be edited in the near future.)

*photo sourced from poem, credited to Kate Fagan

Blue Forest

2007-05-22T22:33:00.000+01:00

Image: Tree House Office (linked from www.blueforest.com)

The year I was six I think I watched The Swiss Family Robinson about a million times; I was obsessed with their tree-house. So you can just imagine my excitement when I came across the architects Blue Forest.

From their website: BlueForest is an ethical company. We believe in promoting local industry and are keen to make a positive contribution to the communities in which we work. For every tree house we sell, BlueForest is proud to support a child in Kenya through school for one year, in association with the Arabuko-Sokoke Schools and Eco-tourism Scheme (ASSETS).

Now I just need to scrounge together £100,000...

Planet Earth Playscapes

2007-05-22T22:23:00.000+01:00

Image: Orphanage playground in Chengdu, China (from PEP's website)

Planet Earth Playscapes ALSO design playgrounds for a living! 'Multisensory' ones, and some, like the above, are literally grown (they're made of plants and trees). The company also involves local communities and local talents in all phases of design and construction... so each playground really reflects the children and families that will use it.

Creative Use of Public Space

2007-05-22T06:39:00.001+01:00

Concert sauvage dans le métro !

Uploaded by lapapsprod

This video makes me SO happy — thank you Cathy Wagner!

Cliostraat: Word City (Firenze, Italy 2005)

2007-05-22T02:39:00.000+01:00

In 2005 when I worked at the London-based consultancy General Public Agency I came across this Italian architecture firm... but somehow I missed Word City until now. I can only imagine it would have been stunning live! A bit about Cliostraat from their website:

Cliostraat is a design group based in Torino, Italy. Since its birth, in 1991, Cliostraat intentionally aims to join multiple skills and different disciplinary approaches [...] to work across the indefinite boundaries of architecture, art and design. Cliostraat operates on the edge of contemporary urban territories, as part of a world-wide network of collaborations, experimenting different expressive forms with the purpose to enrich the procedures and techniques of the professional architectural practice.

You can check out www.cliostraat.com for more... I suggest taking a look at their wonky public volleyball court in Play or Rewind, or the hammocks of Slacklines!

* both images from Cliostraat's website

Snug & Outdoor

2007-05-22T01:47:00.000+01:00

Image (from www.snugandoutdoor.co.uk): Daubeney School, Hackney

This company designs playgrounds for a living! How much fun is that???

Snug & Outdoor is headed up by sister and brother Hattie and Tim Coppard, and in addition to designing playgrounds also takes public art commissions (turns out they designed the clock tower at the entrance to Hackney Central station... in my old London neighborhood!) and create special features for primary, secondary, special and nursery schools (think fountains, school gates, mosaics, etc). They also work with children and adults, schools, architects, contractors, engineers, dancers, lighting designers... even poets!

Neighbourhood, room, neighbour, guest?

2007-05-21T18:24:00.000+01:00

Image: the front page of Oda Projesi's website

On its website the Istanbul-based artist collective Oda Projesi (Özge Açıkkol, Güneş Savaş and Seçil Yersel) describes itself as

experimenting with alternative ways of using and producing space, by either creating “the collective game” or trying to find it in the already existent daily life. In addition to the production of space, there is the production of an other language, or rather, a set of new languages. This is all intentional: an intention to be present in a neighborhood and in a city, and to be aware of the fact that all of us are “neighbors”.

If educational theory about different learning styles and game-playing is to be believed, Oda Projesi is doing all the right things to foster new communities. In Teaching, training & learning Ian Reece and Stephen Walker write about how games are one of the best methods of inspiring extrinsic motivation to engage new ideas. Moreover, in my own experience teaching I find again and again that project-based learning more consistently allow participants to process information according to personal learning style (everyone's learning style being unique).

The collective's 2005 project Neighbourhood, room, neighbour, guest?, which I came across in the Tate Modern bookstore before I left London, networks questions and responses emailed between 154 people living different locations, languages and experiences. The book is a more sophisticated take on the alternative structures of early 90s 'choose your own adventure' novels —in which I, alas, always managed to die by decision #3. More positively, Neighbourhood, room, neighbour, guest? documents considerate and engaging dialogues about community, self, migration, and so on that unfold via 8 questions initially posed by the artists (listed in order at the beginning of the book, along with tree diagrammes mapping communications between participants). Follow-up questions forwarded on by each new participant kept the dialogue moving.

Within the book X—'s page (including his/her bio, response, follow-up question) is networked up by references to P—'s page (the person who posed the question X— is responding to)... and by references to the pages of D—, Q— & M—, where the reader can find responses to X—'s follow-up question. When the book's in front of you, I promise it's actually pretty simple to navigate. And there's even blank pages at the end for the reader to respond to some of the questions Neighbourhood, room, neighbour, guest? poses. For example, Projesi's second line of questioning (yes, not a little reminiscent of Mr. Rogers) is: What is a neighbour? What kind of a neighbour are you? Below this text it's indicated that responses can be found on pages 105 and 183.

Page 105 introduces us to Gul Erden, a Turkish man whose bio tells us he relocated to Stockholm at age 22 and thinks "words take on new meaning when one goes abroad. I'm learning, for example, what the words exile, homesickness, Europe, emigre, native, foreign, civilisation, culture, Eastern, and Western mean from scratch". Gul answers the 'neighbour' questions like so:

Neighbour means a door right next to you, waiting to be knocked upon. And what you see when the door opens is your surprise. If you knock on my door one day, I can't tell you what you'll see, not because I don't want to, but because I don't know, and even if I did I wouldn't tell you [...] It's up to you to evaluate the surprise.

I like the element of surprise that Gul latches on to. Community, personal contact should always involve some sort of surprise, no? Delight in the unpredictable. Otherwise I think we risk the boredom (and veiled threat) of homogeny. Gul's questions aim to open up further consideration of the unknown:

What would be a surprise for you?
Which surprises would you consider to be positive?

To add my own two cents to the dialogue, I'll DEFINITELY be pleasantly surprised if I manage to live in one place for longer than 4 consecutive years (my current record) and any surprise that makes me see the world with new eyes is — in my book — a positive (e.g., the new POV seeded by travel, a stiff argument, a student's poem, deja vu, desire).

Ironically, the same year Neighbourhood, room, neighbour, guest? was published Oda Projesi was evicted due to increasing gentrification in the neighbourhood where its studio/gallery/residence was located... so now the group claims for itself a "a mobile status and continues to raise questions by using different mediums and different spaces like a local radio station, a book, postcards, newspapers or giving form to different meeting points." And is best reached at odaprojesi.org.

Neighbourhood, room, neighbour, guest? can be purchased from www.revolver-books.de.

Poetic Economy

2007-05-21T05:26:00.000+01:00

Last August 2006 my childhood friend Jake flew over to London from nyc for a visit, on the condition that we would fit in a few days in Paris. Which we did. A lovely trip — we saw Soutine's meat paintings at the L'Orangerie, and somehow all the routes I wanted to walk with Jake intersected the highlights of gourmet Paris (which he, being a culinary fiend, spotted in seconds). Thus we ended up with a ridiculous collection of chocolates, sausages, cheese and kitchenware (at least I managed to talk Jake out of buying the enormous cleaver). But the loveliest moment of all occurred in a fois gras shop. Jake was chatting away to the manager (who slipped us incredible tastes of fois gras with small cups of beautiful, white wine) and somehow fanagled him into trading me a jar of fois for the below poem!

Untitled

~ for Alex (in honor of Jake's return to Paris)

This slim delicacy, an aide memoire.
A taste, brief or lisped, tenders
that stimulus which convinces the later vin
of its own sweet depth, introductory, belonging
to Île St. Louis as I too have belonged:
by means of a caught hush, sense or home.
The site, a bite of unpasteurised bliss.

ps

2007-05-21T03:05:00.000+01:00

As per the hints in my last post, yes I recently packed up my life in London and have again become a 'permanent' resident in the states after 8 long years away...

Expect some posts on culture shock!

A return to blogging...

2007-05-20T22:37:00.000+01:00

When I announced my then pending trans-Atlantic move back to the states, my soon to be ex-boss Rakhee at the East-Side Educational Trust forwarded me a link to the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a nyc-based organisation that's developed via the "belief that the power of imagination is central to the practice of democracy, and that the work of governing must engage the dreams and visions of citizens." Sounds pretty cool, eh?

From what I can tell after browsing the website, CUP does all sorts of stuff — from running workshops in nyc schools, to partnering on projects with local community organisations, to organising exhibitions... right up my alley! So I'm hoping, as it seems more and more likely I'll end up in nyc this autumn, that I'll one day have the chance to make some work with them.

On a similar note, over a bottle of Campofiorin this past Wednesday evening I had an intriguing conversation about "artist educators" with two of my mother's friends D1 & D2 (both marine biologists working primarily in research). I hadn't seen one in about eight years (since I last lived in the states!) so we were doing the big catch-up, and I went into my usual rant about how I'd never seen anything re-work classroom hierarchies more quickly than a creative workshop and there must be something to be learned from that.

What we ended up focusing on in our conversation was how artists and project-based work generally transform classrooms into 'open' spaces... a matter of approach I think (and likely to do with being free of the pressures of curriculum, policy, etc). Educational theorist Paulo Freire observes in Pedagogy of Freedom that "what is really essential [...] is that both the teacher and the student know that open, curious questioning, whether in speaking or listening, is what grounds them mutually — not a simple passive pretense at dialogue" (81). So I'm thinking the sort of working spaces produced by artist-educators are characterised by genuine dialogue, genuine because the end of the discussion is unpredicatble. Workshops are all about the creative process (guided by set challenges) and the artist-educator is embarking on the same experiment as the students. D1 and D2 described working in research very similarly — the sense of experimentation and not knowing as being liberating.

And intimidating for people who function on immediate, quantifiable results (test scores, simple rankings); who aren't at ease with the unknown, thinking outside the box. But shouldn't education always be about chasing the unknown, innovative thinking?

Two rediscovered poems

2007-05-20T22:26:00.000+01:00

for Joel on his birthday

Born, you found
tonight's velocity, your pivot, length
& spin on age sans naught.
And tonight there is no orbit
save yours, each lax stasis
& offbeat guest, their moves made
sole for you. But natch.

Ellipsis

for S—

those children circled the campsite : spastic satellites : or
promises molting distance like love : and the gall of
their careless trajectories proved glee breeds in even minor
risks : the slip of personal space : advance : as gift : how one
comes to bank one's launch : blanks caution for the sake
of gravity : an essential force : the zing of this resonating
in the base tension that threads known hearts : their gathered
still-conversant pulse : meaning close-up : our hushed and
freckled profiles have morphed timbre : words : pale and red :
to candid cheek : charted a longing that : in you : I took
for hope : a warm-slung sown elliptical growth

(written September 2006 / rewritten June 2007)

Annotation

2006-12-06T01:46:00.000+01:00

"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them."

— George Orwell, quoted in article the title of which escapes me

Similarly, there is some ugliness that exponentially seems to transcend itself. Like the colour puce, or the green skirt I bought on Broadway Market this summer that reminded me of my Uncle's old bathroom wallpaper. Or the violent gesture of self-defense that means rescue. Whether this turn equals beauty, or a brute movement from alienation to exchange, it's an astonishing reversal.

A Poetic of Enquiry?

2006-12-06T01:26:00.000+01:00

After attending the Pressure to Experiment conference held at Southampton University in September and the Contemporary Experimental Women's Poetry Festival in Cambridge in October I have become more and more interested in how one might construct a poetics of uncertainty, of listening [as much as production]. In whether writing according to an uncertain and 'open' ear might function as a sort of creative ethic. This seems, to me, to speak to:

1.) The SCALE on which we use language — i.e., public statement vs. intimate conversation — and how these different modes of communication are often phrased as incompatible. How does a single gesture of resistance relate to a riot? How do the flakes of skin with which we litter our homes contribute to the meaning of a landfill? What do personal ads say about manifestos?

2.) The way people engage with and voice UNCERTAINTY, in public and in private. Do we find being uncertain intolerable or liberating, and why? Can uncertainty formulate an ethical stance?

Alternately, a few other questions:

* can a poetic be constructed as flexible and mobile?
* could there be such thing as a poetic of enquiry?
* how might documentary practices be used to develop a writing process that includes both decision-making and position-taking, and a opening out of the end-product via collaboration with other participants in the project?
* why don't we consider [and document?] writing processes as integral parts of the works they produce?
* what is the permanent value of a question?

Can we learn through laughter?

2006-06-02T12:08:00.000+01:00

Just a curiosity, after feeling alienated by the absorption of a recent poetry reading. I think it was Baudelaire who wrote something along the lines of "laughter is what we do when we don't know what to do"? I'm reaching for an essay I read once, years ago, so this is definite paraphrase — but I wonder if it figures laughter as a coping mechanism or as a lighter way to process what confuses us? Either way, there's definitely great relief and community in a good belly-ache.

Conclusion: The Essential Gesture

2006-05-31T17:41:00.000+01:00

*from a 2003 essay by Kai Fierle-Hedrick, 'Outside the Lines: On Art Historical Discourse, Ideology, & the Space of the Avant-Garde'

Certainly, the definition of a prototypical avant-garde artwork or artist is a problematic pursuit; even the persistent incorporative gestures of art history have been unable to fashion a convincing ideological identity for the avant-garde, as evidenced by the present debate. Thus I would suggest that it is not, in fact, ideology that characterises the avant-garde, but rather the space with which it — its artists and artworks — is so preoccupied. In discussing this space, its location, its metaphorical manifestations, and the impulse that drives artists to produce from its depths, I have sought to offer an alternative reading of this particular artistic movement — and perhaps more key, a reading that allows for contemporary and evolving manifestations.

As this essay draws to a close, I would take one last chance to underscore Leslie Graves' distinction between art that is merely challenging and art that is avant-garde (noting that the term 'avant-garde' should be distanced from assumptions of value). The difference between these two art practices is that the former issues its challenge from within a narrative domain — in the case of art, that of art history — and the latter is identified by its physical or symbolic gesture of emigration from such domains into the alternative spaces of production that constituted the avant-garde. In executing this emigration, the avant-garde artist acknowledges that there is existence outside of the ideologies of historical narratives and, in producing art from peripheral spaces, exposes the perilous and arbitrary nature of said narratives. Thus the avant-garde is revealed not as ideology, but as a timeless gesture; the avant-garde artist's challenge is not valued according to his failure or success in achieving an ideological end, rather — as the narrative of art history, and the narratives of other fields with which art history has become enmeshed, are constantly being reconstituted to normalise new subversive practices — the avant-garde is valued for its resistence to a temporally specific effort to assimilate subversion into the expanding ideology of art history. This refusal ultimately relies on the rivalry of ideology for its articulation; to preserve the avant-garde, the artist cannot collapse the distinction between the domain of art and his own alternative site of production. He must reaffirm the totalising significance of the art world in order to refuse it, if only for a moment. To be avant-garde, then, is to acknowledge the contemporary potential for both a way of life and an art production that — while they cannot help but originate within manufactured narratives — might still choose to emigrate outside of them and, in so doing, embrace the spontaneity, the evolution, the self-criticism, and the inevitable idiosyncrasies that result from the repudiation of discursive uniformity and narrative norms. This gesture, now more than ever at the start of a century whose praxes have already proven themselves far too intricate for the accommodations of ideology, is not only still valuable — it is vital.

Re Wochenklausur & Open Bracket

2006-05-31T16:58:00.000+01:00

Politics, social programming, aid organisations [essentially, what I'm trying to get at are the established spaces which host social change and activism] are all bound to a particular practical logic; clear-cut, product-oriented, call it the logic of capitalism, budgets, pleasing the constituency, or whatnot — it's governs.

What interests me about collectives WochenKlausur [Austria] and Open Bracket [UK] is how they re-site effect-driven political behaviour — i.e., activist intervention — and locate it within a more flexible, giving space of creative practice. What I appreciate about creative practitioners is their frequent willingness to engage ambiguity, how production can become taking one's time in a way otherwise typically denied, the emphasis on means/process... and inescapably the EDUCATION of one's self. So I believe a key freedom is accomplished by the above locational shift, an invitation to experiment and listen which might ultimately develop dialogic — non-bureaucratic — solutions to social ills.

Small changes travel like cracks, forge networks powerful both for their personal investments and their invested persons; but these must be nurtured with open ears, through pedagogical engagement.

———

"The artist group WochenKlausur has been conducting social interventions since 1993. The concept of intervention, whose usage in art has undergone an inflationary trend in recent years, is often used for any form of change. In contrast, WochenKlausur, at the invitation of art institutions, develops and realizes proposals - small-scale but very concrete - for improving sociopolitical deficits. In the context of many twentieth-century artists who understood how to actively take part in the shaping of society, WochenKlausur sees art as an opportunity for achieving long-term improvements in human coexistence. Artists' competence in finding creative solutions, traditionally utilized in shaping materials, can just as well be applied in all areas of society: in ecology, education and city planning. There are problems everywhere that cannot be solved using conventional approaches and are thus suitable subjects for artistic projects. Theoretically, there is no difference between artists who do their best to paint pictures and those who do their best to solve social problems with clearly fixed boundaries. The individually selected task, like the painter's self-defined objective, must only be precisely articulated. Interventionist art can only be effective when the problem to be solved is clearly stated."

See the collective's website — www.wochenklausur.at — for more info.

———

EFFECTIVENESS MUST NOT BE UNDERSTOOD OPPOSITIONALLY RE DIALOGUE.

———

Open Bracket [artist/writer/activist Ceri Buck] writes:

WRITING & PEDAGOGY & ACTIVISM
In the practice I’m in the process of developing, my role fluctuates between that of artist, activist and pedagogue. For me, art without activism feels unreal, activism without creativity is easily contained by the authorities, and art and activism without pedagogy neglects a curiosity about and communication with the ‘other’. Practical projects come out of a dialogue with a contemporary political moment, which manifests itself locally and networks globally. We want to find out how text-making and text-receiving can transform social relations and organising strategies, (and vice versa); and how, by working with new technologies, and emerging artist / activist initiatives, we can continue to investigate the notion of community through collaborative literacy. What are the links between the poetic experiment and the social experiment?

———

A CONCERN WITH SHOW/TELL? INVITATION/PRESCRIPTION? AN APPRECIATION OF BALANCE AS PART AND PARCEL OF REARRANGING INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL BOUNDARIES?

Note on Othering

2006-05-31T16:02:00.000+01:00

If one disengages one's humanity from another's, in that extremity one is capable of any atrocity.

———

An excerpt from Pantoume, which contains collages by poet/artist Marianne Morris (like the one to the right), and will hopefully be put out as an art book by Bad Press:

The challenge becomes with what language can we convey such personal violence, with what words bear its experience, spawn a communal speech towards its eradication. This is neither to laud resorting to the bleak alienation of confession, nor to draw on the amputation of abstraction, but rather is a bid to somehow forestall the loss of what is daily and abrupt to the static endurance of an aesthetic. How to root acknowledgment, faculty, accountability and action, without hunting some twin pain in the Other — in the case of the text, the reader, that person whose heart and agency it works to engage. How to source empathy [not conflation] in light of the fact that we as general publics still do not know how to engage with our closed doors, behind which 1 in 3 women around the world are or will be affected by domestic violence in their life-time. Among 16-43 year old women in Europe this violence is the leading cause of death, is not inclusive of those acts staged, civic, on our streets. Still we re-phrase, cloak ourselves in autonomy, back-roomed, capitulate to a corral of private expression that by default rebuffs its norm, our usual suffering.

———

Cooperative practices — collaboration, site-specific endeavors, etc — cannot function without engagement, constant dialogue; this is their in-built, semi-utopic political & social thrust. Because lateral communication confounds hierarchy?

Hackney / London, UK

2006-05-31T15:49:00.000+01:00

in speaking, one is already in an act of listening — [...] through hearing ourself speak we gauge ourselves, an echoing back and forth that enables a kind of emotional grounding, bringing into relief an awareness of who we are at this moment

+ Brandon LaBelle, 'Private Call — Public Speech'

go me and my panicked niceties this merlot
lacks the sharp to counter a plush cascade
of sincerity my own networks blood abounds in speech
spirals sees the telephone cord linking this flat
with child services and gives way to a block of bitter
chocolate eases the hold what physical distress
this pause advertising brute helplessness
in the midst of its tobaccoed camouflage O to alleviate
a dearth of talk and can they fingerprint skin?
she calls him a cunt at least thrice
a week and he's eleven so where the line

a fit of flesh has become our voice
but behind closed doors they remain neighbors
as in France riots time the turmoil of film-stock

no immediate action can be made available like
revisiting how six months sans media a Jodie Foster flick
brought me to my knees I cannot watch this was
never so effective as moot talk how the scent
of lilies feints my cigarette conjures the image of that bit
of bloodstained white skirt a previous child's the event torn
out for even then they banked on gaps

Welcome home.

2006-05-31T14:02:00.000+01:00

Orium.org began as a portfolio of the work I produced during a five-year span of collaborating with architects, filmmakers, poets, students, critics, visual artists, community groups, and musicians in Montreal [Canada], Cambridge [UK], and London.

Specifically, I intended the website to express my interest in exploring locational/community-engaged, interdisciplinary & collaborative art practices. Practices that emphasise PROCESS as being equal in importance to PRODUCT.

Now, in conjunction with www. orium.org, I'd like to start this blog as a research tool for exploring the above intersections — as an open notebook of websites, practitioners, works, notes, criticism, etc — and start to map out this cooperative creativity.

All contributions welcome...