Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Spectrum by Susan Lewis


birdsong
            or stressed hinge,
                        sigh of angels.

sprinkle of bright hairs
            (notes igniting the curved ear)

sprinkle of raindrops starring light.
            slow fluid seeping,
                        (lost potential)

mineral tint of breath,
mouth fruit waiting for the crush,

throat willing to hold too much,
nerves set to suffer for their pleasure.

            wind whispering orbit,
            wind urging wide relation;

the bodied mind lost
the bodied mind hungry

            (no excuse)

something demand
                        (lost gaze)

in a blink                     or any guise

the germ in the fluid blind as any bud
                                    pointing to its future

(no wrest for the wary).         

            say yes to sequitation,
            say yes to the strange pain—

—moment of sacrifice,
                        font of artifice
                                    (inhibition given over)

                                    give over

_______________

Besides my work as an editor at Madhatters' Review, I'm the author of “How To Be Another” (Cervena Barva Press, forthcoming, 2013), "At Times Your Lines" (Argotist e-Books, 2012), "Some Assembly Required" (Dancing Girl Press, 2011), “Commodity Fetishism,” winner of the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Chapbook Award, & “Animal Husbandry” (Finishing Line Press, 2008). My work has appeared in many many venues, including Berkeley Poetry Review, Boog City,  Cimarron Review, Cross Connect, The Dirty Goat, Eclipse, Fact-Simile, Fast Forward, Fourteen Hills,  Fugue, The Journal, Kitchen Sink, Lilies and Cannonballs Review, Lungfull, Monday Night, The New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter, Other Rooms, The Otherstream Anthology,  Pool, Phoebe, Raritan, Seneca Review, Snow Monkey, So To Speak, Sycamore Review, Verse (online), & Verse Daily. My collaborations with composer Jonathan Golove have been recorded & widely performed & my collaborations with artist Melissa Stern have been exhibited in New York City & Seattle. My website is www.susanlewis.net.

                                  

Saturday, October 27, 2012

AlteredScale.com 2 Launch Reading Featuring Maria Damon



(Click to enlarge.)

Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Dennis has a new poem published in the second issue of AlteredScale.com, currently available free on the Internet. The issue also features a generous selection of various work by University of Minnesota Poetry and Poetics professor Maria Damon. The wild ride of Minneapolis punk rock legends The Magnolias is detailed by critic Steven Sharp. Twin Cities' librettist Ann Millikan, whose work has been performed around the world, is represented by a video of scenes from her opera “Swede Hollow.”

A launch reading by Maria Damon and other Twin Cities artists in the journal will take place at The Book House in Dinkytown at 7:30 on Tuesday, October 30.

AlteredScale.com is a free, Internet, mixed-media arts journal. It contains poetry, visual poetry, film poetry, film, music, fiction, and reviews by artists from Japan to San Francisco to the Twin Cities to New York City to Iceland to England to the Ukraine and so on.

The launch reading will feature Maria Damon. Ann Millikan, singer-songwriter Julia Douglass, poet Mary Kasimor, poet Terrence Folz, poet Jonathan Brannen, and poet Mark Heuring are all slated to appear. More may choose to participate in the coming days.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

what do u think you're doing? by Donna Kuhn





Materials: collage of dance, art, animation and found speech/sound

________________________

 Donna Kuhn appears in AlteredScale.com 2 and contributes regularly to this blog.

Donna Kuhn‘s experimental videos incorporate poetry, dance, visual art and sound. They have been shown at The Electronic Village Galleries (England,) Tether (London), Open Video Conference, (New York),Cinema Feministe Program at Cinema Zavod Udarnik, Maribor, Slovenia, ISEA (Germany) Künstlerhaus k/haus Kino, Vienna, Austria, Vox Feminae 4, Zagreb, Croatia, The Coexist Galleries (London), The Disposable Film Festival, (San Francisco) The New York Independent Film and Video Festival, The Santa Cruz Digital Arts Festival, The Mountain Arts Center and online at DVblog, PostVideo Art, Disturb The Peace TV, Hyperrhiz, City Gallery, ArtFemTV, Moving Poems, Oregon Literary Review and Mad Hatter’s Review, Harvard’s Infinity Show/Visual Poetry, The Gypsy Art Show, Unlikely Stories, Lewis Lacook,Papertiger Media (cd rom) Berta Art. She has created music videos for Muza and Wade Worthington.
http://picassogirl.tumblr.comhttp://donnakuhn.imagekind.comhttp://www.facebook.com/donnakuhnarthttp://donnaskuhn.daportfolio.comhttp://digitalaardvarks.blogspot.comhttp://flickrtab.com/site/1098574599http://www.youtube.com/user/digitalaardvarks

Saturday, October 20, 2012

from "Limited Fork Theory," a webpage, by Forker Gyrle


I took this from the Limited Fork Theory website because it is, simply, one of the best riffs on reconfiguration, virtual and otherwise, I have ever encountered. I've just begun my investigation into the myriad possibilities opened by Forker Gryle, I'll report back when I've learned more—but by then, she'll be somewhere else, I bet.


LIMITED FORK THEORY is also A Theory of Everything

that not only includes, but also appreciates: imagination,
the fruitfulness of dead ends, the possibilities of error,
the usefulness of failure, the beauty of the many configurations
of the box the limited fork comes out of and goes into, forking,
reconfiguring, shaping, foldimg, unfolding, and bifurcating all the way.

                           Many paths to many worlds: one limited fork.

Limited Fork Theory offers meaningful and enjoyable ways to connect anything, everything. Works best with growth and transformative situations. Experiments with connection across scale and boundary.  This site is one of the homes of
a thinking system tool born in a movie theater, a simple and limited tool that can enhance perception, and can enable forms of making less likely to occur without enhanced perception that focsues on what happens in any interactions and connections. The creativity of investigation emerges with a limited fork; new forms can emerge as outcomes of partnerships between investigation, documentation, and a need for ways to express findings that may not conform well to existing forms that themselves are subject to adaptation in interactions (collaborations) with investigation.   Warning: not afraid of paradigm shifts, first in poetry, then in much more generalized acts of thinking, configuring, playing, responding, making, creating, perceiving, framing, etc.

                         Go ahead; play with the fork and fork away!

This approach to anything on any scale in any location came into being under very simple non-scholarly circumstances, but affects everything, and constructs powerful flexible learning spaces and experiences.   Great for integrative learning and living in the fork's interest in putting things together in all the ways things can be put together (temporarily). it's useful and good to fork things up! Limited Fork is food for thought and a way to serve it. Alternative and warped fractal mapping of infinite path systems that connect anything, everything. From these connections come poams: products of acts of making (any acts of making by any makers) --all of them creative and possible. Limited Fork is what happened when forkergirl realized that poetry IS a dynamic, complex system with its own rules and principles, instead of looking for a way to apply tenets of complex systems
in theoretical science to what those tenets exclude. Those tenets and everything else are amazingly imperfect (limited) tines of the limited fork.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Oscar Sparrow reading "Hill Fort"




__________________________

Oscar Sparrow was born in Winchester UK in 1949, apparently thanks to the American Marshal Aid programme to re-build Europe after the war. As the colour red leached its way out of the map of the British Empire, Oscar attended a die-hard Church school designed to create noble savages to serve what was left of the savage Nobles. The Eleven Plus exam revealed that he could not even count to eleven and he became a mechanic, labourer, truck driver, boxer and poet. He read Wordsworth and Ford Cortina manuals in a lorry cab near both Oxford and Cambridge universities. He married a kind forgiving woman who eventually forgave herself for that one big mistake. He has several wonderful children and hopes that one day they will all meet. At the age of 25 he heard the music of Edith Piaf and learned to sing all her songs. A few years later he realised she was French and that he was an ugly swan not a beautiful duckling. The shock propelled him to London where he joined the Metropolitan Police. Car chases and riots followed but he did not take it personally. He spent his spare time touring the Art galleries, singing Piaf and learning Italian. Eventually The Authorities fell for the con and gave him a desk job in the Art department of Interpol London at Scotland Yard. One day a few years later, the lure of the wild swept him away to the roads of Europe as road gipsy trucker. His love of fried battered fish eventually drew him back to England where he drove sewage tankers and set up a taxi business. Throughout all this time he was a would-be poet, short story writer and novelist.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Poem by Billy Cancel


blank master's capricorn error maintains the doldrums
perfect-obedient-cargo but how you'll change when metal
waters are restored all city-worker-wild-wood-wild-wood-
girl-in-white-dress upon her majesty's secret surface but very
much oblivious amidst their laughter you stagger central snake
spread flame out an inelegant taste but the young night is still
burning so more butter scoop dad.     travelling east i left
new road swallowed memoirs as i was third     came to my
very first any place accidental purple muscle set up     faster
biege variations of home coming     couplembraced rejoiced
by candlelight     shawl full of moon     these compressed
trend occupants didn't dwell upon the trace "grace shall be
assigned upon us field farmers stick leaning fuckwits rocket
maybes target tuesdays" but two things happened rotation
tilt simplicty & fast track grey sweep.     such dissolver whining    
aggrevating circumstance so     my own game     bait & switch    
i take it to grand central atlantis sick market     field queries
about doing time in unquiet bumpkin throttlehold     ongoing
rezoning of square 1 causing
delays on route 1

_____________________
Billy appears in AlteredScale.com 2.
Billy Cancel‘s work has recently appeared in Shampoo, Glitterpony & Cricket Online Review. He co-runs Hidden House Press. A collection The Autobiography Of Shrewd Phil was published by Blue & Yellow Dog Press last year. Sound poems, visual shorts, & other aberrations can be found at www.billycancel.com

Monday, October 15, 2012

MadHat presents:



The Carol Novack
Christmas-Hannukah-Kwanzaa-Solstice-and-Atheists-Who-Love-to-Party
Tribute Party
  • Readings by the spirits of Carol Novack, Andrei Codrescu, Cornelius Eady, CA Conrad, Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich, Lee Ann Brown, Marc Vincenz, Susan Lewis, Larissa Shmailo, Brendan Lorber, Gretchen Primack, Sarah Sarai, Patricia Carragon, Tom Bradley, Hugh Fox, and a heavenly host
  • Music of the spheres by Dewanatron  (The Social Network)
  • Launch and ascension of Hugh Fox’s Primate Fox and Carol Novack and Tom Bradley’s Felicia’s Nose
  • Art by MadHat's Artistic Souls
  • Angelic Ale and Wine
And much, much more!
Costumes encouraged.

December 8, 7:00 p.m. until late.
A Gathering of the Tribes
New York City, NY
285 E. 3rd Street (between C&D)


Contact: Larissa Shmailo
212-712-9865 /Larissa_Shmailo@yahoo.com

___________________________

Larissa Shmailo appears in AlteredScale.com 1 and AlteredScale.com 2.

Marc Vincenz appears in AlteredScale.com 2.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Mark Wallace as reviewer and reader

On his blog, Thinking Again, Mark Wallace—who will be featured artist in AlteredScale.com 3—once again attends to the work of writers who deserve wider attention, in this case Amy De'Ath and Murat Nemet-Nejat. Thank you, Mark, for decades of devotion to writing, rather than simple careerism. 


Let's give Mark a little attention:



_______________________

Mark Wallace appears in both AlteredScale.com 1 and AlteredScale.com 2. 

Mark Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays.Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism. Most recently he has published a novel, The Quarry and The Lot (2011), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008). He teaches at California State University San Marcos.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

"Curtis" by Todd Clouser & Love Electric, followed by documentary

I heard Todd Clouser this past Monday at Icehouse in Minneapolis as part of a mind-blowing Monday night series curated by R.T. Bates. It only cost $5! Originally from the Twin Cities, Todd now lives in Mexico City.

The sound on this song is pure late electric Miles Davis, with Clouser taking it in new directions with his bluesy licks and Meckler's muscular trumpet. On Monday, he also sang and played highly contemporary blues.

(Video uploaded by express permission of Clouser.)




Bryan Nichols, k
Adam Meckler, t
Chris Bates, b
Greg Schutte, d




Todd Clouser Webpage

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

"i am falling in lots of love so what the heck" by Donna Kuhn



_________________________

Artist Statement: "i am the dancer/actress, the visual art is mine, the animated dancing is mine.
the sound is taken from speech synthesis and sound effect sites and melded together into a found sound collage.
photography/video is mine. i basically use the same formula for my videos: sound, sometimes my own poetry,
my art (i animate it) and i dance. the effects are from studio artist software by john dalton. i also used strange
free japanese and polish software. some footage of girls hula hooping on new years eve with lit up hula hoops.

i am a dancer with chronic fatigue syndrome and this is the only way i can perform because i can't go to rehearsals etc
i turned to video for this reason and found i could combine all the art forms i do. i like that my videos
dance for me when i can't. i sometimes collaborate with other poets and musicians. have done a few music
videos for musicians which i really enjoy. part of this video was shot in a motel room because i couldn't
watch american idol. it was also shot in 2 different houses i've lived in cause moving slowed me down."

___________________________ 

 Donna Kuhn appears in AlteredScale.com 2.

Terrence Folz Reading From "Bunt Burke"

  Terrence Folz's chapbook  Bunt Burke will appear from The Circulatory Press in August 2021. The above film features him reading some o...