what he said

"And when I say that I like poetry I don’t understand I don’t necessarily mean dadaist odes or jumbles of Zaum – it can seem like perfectly normal text at a first glance. But it’ll contain something that’s a little off. Something jilted or tilted or tainted. A shade of imbalance.

What this boils down to is a dimension of understanding or feeling (or whatever) which I can only recognize as religious – a belief or faith which prompts the reader (or writer) to jump the gap to join the poem on the other side."

-Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, So is the Wasteland

maudlin

"Rather than employ the normative sentence for communicative or representational ends, Stein inhabits the sentence as a compositional field in which the mechanisms of language and of the sentence itself are subject to minute examination and are thus revitalized as immediate and originary acts."

Apparently I wrote that, and about a hundred pages of sentences like that, almost 10 years ago. I barely remember any of the writing, can't even recognize my style in it, stilted and constrained as it is by fear. I like to revisit it every now and then, when it pops up on my vanity google searches, although each time it's more distant from me, less plausible somehow. What I do remember are the sprawling days on the 10th floor of the library, reading through the entire Gertrude Stein section, which took up several shelves, of which I read or at least skimmed every single book. As a research strategy, it was utterly absurd, but what a pleasurable use of time, and how fortunate to feel that I had time, what felt like endless time, to devote to such a methodical approach. How privileged to indulge in such futility. If I have any regret, it's that I did my Master's when I was way too young to appreciate how lucky I was and way too insecure to enjoy it as much as I could have.

Same goes for poetry

Modern Art by Craig Damrauer

Squares

The other night in my Art Appreciation class, we compared De Stijl painter Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue with Dada artist Jean Arp's Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, with class members choosing sides for a bit of a debate on the merits of the two works.




I went with the Arp, for a number of reasons. On a first-impressions, visceral, visual level, I find the Mondrian off-putting, while the Arp is soothing, calming. It just occured to me that there's something quilt-like about the Arp, although I didn't notice that during the class. We did, however, discuss how the Mondrian looks like a shower curtain, or basically any other home accessory sold by IKEA, which I guess sort of complicates its reception for a contemporary audience. The Mondrian style has been so thoroughly co-opted and replicated by designers, particularly since the 1980s, that it's difficult to conceive of it as new or challenging.

Other facets of the Arp that our side approved of are its organicness, its warmth, its balance, its muted colours, its naturalism. And of course the humour and irony of the title in contrast with those qualities. The composition of the painting has nothing to do with chance, and chance has nothing to do with law.

We determined that the Mondrian represents reason and logic, while the Arp represents emotion and intuition. From there, it's not too much of a leap to assert that the Mondrian has patriarchal overtones, making the Arp a de facto matriarchal image. That's a troublingly essentialist conclusion, but it tied into thoughts I've had over the past week since a conversation at my book club about the end of patriarchy's usefulness to the world and the urgent need for a revisioning of all our institutions in some matriarchal form. Now when I look at the Mondrian, all I can see are the failures and horrors of the age of reason and its limping demise. How's that for overloading a simple image?

echo echo

Grateful to Pearl Pirie for this reading of my chapbook echo localial (the most in-depth review of any of my writing anyone has done to date). Also a bit mollified by her conclusion, that the poem presents an overwhelmingly negative world view. Ugh. That's not the kind of poetry I want to write. I always thought echo localial had some levity in it, a bit of humour, irreverence, even some sensuality. But I can see that to a more objective reader than me, maybe what comes through most persistently is all the negative emotion. Although I didn't put out the chapbook until a bit later, I wrote the text during my first year of law school, a time when I was (quite obliviously) in a state of constant crisis. In retrospect, I'm just glad I survived. Glad I wrote a poem at all.

little nothings

"I am past thirty. I fear the nights.
I hunch the sheet with my knees.
I bury my face in the pillow, shamefully weeping,
that I have squandered my life on little nothings
and in the morning will squander it again.

If only you had known, my critics,
whose goodness is so innocently under question,
how tender thundering condemnations seem
compared with my own scolding,
you would be relieved, if late at night
you found your conscience tormenting you unjustly.
When leafing through all my verse
I find this: by squandering myself so rashly
I have soiled the pages with so much rot...
but I could not burn it; it is scattered over the world."

-- from “I Journeyed through Russia” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

the poem resists

"The poem resists. It resists coming into being. It resists eloquence. It resists transmitting unpleasant or embarrassing knowledge. It resists grammatical constraints. It resists moving away from simple utterance. It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well."

- Jennifer Moxley, Fragments of a Broken Poetics

missing the point

Overheard at the Glenbow museum this weekend, in the Historical Artwork collection: [father to his preteen son] "You can see some of these paintings in books, they're very expensive."

the language art

"I think of poetry as the field of potential writing, as a supergenre that is striated by subgenres but is also hyperabsorptive—it can sop up an infinite range of linguistic styles and forms. It’s more interesting to me to think of the lyric poem (or pastoral poem, urban poem, found poem, disjunctive poem, epic poem, constraint poem) as a genre, in the most debased and self-conscious sense, like thrillers or detective fiction, than to think of poetry as an intrinsically high art form. Creating such debased genre poems—that’s fodder for whatever activity I’m involved in, but that activity operates within the supergenre, the pluriverses, of poetry, consciously reflecting poetry’s very long and dubious history. Poetry as a supergenre, rather than as a subgenre, can be understood, as David Antin likes to say, as the language art. It’s the verbal art, the research-and-development arm of language. Yet, despite its history, the possibility of poetry still remains a surprise, because, in a way, the fact of poetry as art remains unknown."

- Charles Bernstein

Because there really is some

Whaddya know? The Calgary Herald has done something useful: starting this blog called Art in Calgary by Nancy Tousley. Today's post is about the upcoming Painter as Printmaker exhibit at the Glenbow Museum. Very much looking forward to that.

Just posted book 31 on the 95 books blog, which puts me slightly behind schedule if I want to read 95 books by the end of the year. April started off strong, but then I'm not sure what happened: a couple of weeks of being distracted by life and unable to focus, alternating between being out or being in but watching TV instead of reading. Also instead of writing. Now I have that melancholy, incomplete feeling that comes from giving too little time to the life of mind. Have to get back to it soon.

mall art

I'm one of those people who sometimes buy cheap prints of famous art at mall stores, but I don't feel so bad because I only buy Van Gogh. I had a large print of that Cafe Terrace scene for ages but then I got tired of it and abandoned it at my parents' house. Now I have the same size print of Vase with Twelve Sunflowers in my bedroom. If I tire of that, I think Wheat Field with Crows will be next. I love this painting.

satisfactory

"I trust you will find the enclosed satisfactory, but please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns." I type this sentence a couple of times a day at least. It would be more efficient to copy and paste it, or dictate it, but I find typing it out to be a strange form of meditation, or of penance.

AGA

Toured the brand-new Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton the other week. There were five exhibits, with a nice mix of historical (Goya and Degas), Canadiana (Yousuf Karsh), and contemporary (Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller), and an extra exhibit on display throughout the lobby of pictures by Edward Burtynsky of the construction of the gallery.

Careful readers will have noticed, as I certainly noticed, that of the six exhibits, only one half is by a female artist. That may be forgivable in the context of historical works -- the gallery can hardly change the fact that women didn't have equal opportunities to make art in previous centuries -- but they could have tried harder to make up for the disparity by featuring more female contemporary artists. It really bothered me as I made my way through the gallery. It bothered me even more when I noticed that the song playing in the gallery giftshop was "I'm Just a Girl" by No Doubt, although that in itself would bother me in any case. For shame, Art Gallery of Alberta, when a fifteen-year-old pop song comes off as more enlightened than your programming.

That complaint aside, I really enjoyed my visit. The Degas exhibit was lovely, showing mainly sculptures of horses, dancers, and bathing women Degas made to study movement for his paintings. Apparently he only showed a few sculptures during his lifetime, and they were met with disdain for being too realistic and thus vulgar.

The Goya exhibit featured dozens of small prints of various scenes of torture and assorted horrors during the French occupation of Spain in the early 19th century. It became a bit repetitive after a while, but I guess that's sort of the point: the endless, numbing evidence of the inhumanity of war.

The Karsh exhibit was my least favorite, although it was kind of neat to see a display on the image-altering techniques photographers used before Photoshop (like scraping, etching, and colouring the negatives to remove imperfections, alter shadows, etc.).

The Burtynsky photographs were gorgeous, stark and bright, framing lines of scaffolding and arcs of the gallery-in-progress against the Edmonton skyline.

My favourite exhibits were the Cardiff-Miller sound works. The first, Storm Room, was a recreation of an installation created in an abandoned dentist's office in Japan. Viewers stand inside a rectangular construction while the sound of a thunderstorm plays and water rushes over the windows. Standing in the "room", you get quite an intense feeling of being inside during an interminable storm. The original, mostly unfurnished room has been replicated to the last detail, including stains on the ceiling and scraps of paper with Japanese script (maybe a calendar?) tacked to the walls. I couldn't place my finger on exactly why, but the whole thing reminded me so, so much of Japan: something about the slight dinginess of the room, the coziness of it, and of the course the sound of the rain...

The second installation, The Murder of Crows, inspired by Goya's war prints, was set up in a large room on the top floor of the gallery, with 98 large speakers scattered through the room, and one old-fashioned megaphone horn in the centre in front of chairs arranged in a semi-circle. A woman's voice describing disturbing dreams and imagery alternated with various sounds such as an army marching, bird noises, traffic, music, all in a wave ebbing from quiet to cacaphony. Apparently each speaker plays a different track, so the experience shifts depending on your location within the room. I think we sat through an entire rotation of the installation, but I'm not sure how long it lasted, maybe about twenty minutes. It was mesmerizing.

Two spam pomes

1.

Care took sit syllable:
rub desert / sea common
hurt duck / atom them

Fire try, ring something, pick window.
(Were less knew each big most more)

Seat farm afraid how across dress?
We sudden be able sister,
turned which. Question number share,
replace in express.
Continue nine,
but into talk / prevent season.

Large liquid achieve system probable.
Encourage / brought liquid /
ocean ready / followed

Such release able told sun farm.
“Eye identify describe key difficult hurt born into.”
“Mr cool time tree verb”

City sat own -- rather near morning.
Reveal, inform, quiet, prove
(Hear prove fasten major by).

Quick cat supply appear attack verb!
Same, i avoid early born caught party step.


2.

length translates directly
to happiness –
ejaculate like a fountain

Ceramic animals

Wendy Walgate is the featured artist in the first issue of Branch, a new magazine of "art and words" (via CanCult). I enjoy this work quite a bit. It's so precious, yet so crammed. It fetishizes the darling ceramic animals as the same time as it devalues them. Also the disarray of colours. I dig colourful disarray.

Play at Being, Wendy Walgate

My Little Chair, Wendy Walgate

april hates u

It's nothing new, but I couldn't resist linking.


And speaking of nothing new, here's my favorite April poem, posted here two Aprils ago.

get your ass the hell off my boat

eatsleepdraw is a neat blog of artwork submitted by "contributors across the globe". This drawing of Bill Murray as Steve Zissou makes me very happy:


dcbowers.co.uk

Wind; snow; light

Charles Simic writes a chilling portrait of winter wind (via @poetrynews on twitter), but the really interesting writing is in the comments section:

Marjatta Ripsaluoma [Moderator] Today 07:19 AM

As a Finn, and been one for almost 65 years, I know what is a snowstorm, or blizzard or continuing hard cold, especially now after an unsually hard winter, colder and more snowier than since 1961.

I love cross country skiing, but as I moved for more convenient life to nearby city Vaasa, which is right on the coast of Gulf of Bothnia, in Ostrobothnia, we get the benefits of the already warmed North Atlantic in form of more snow - or water, like it's been more common lately.

We don't get many power failures, hardly none at all, but in countryside they would be common. And the older eyes cannot take oil lamp light for reading no more. We have a summer shack in inland, where that was necessary, until we got a sunpanel.

I like the snow rather than sleet and mud. It makes the SAD-syndrome harder to hit. It makes things light. You live more South than we do, as you may know that this is the world's northern most grain growing area. This country would be uninhabitable if Gulf stream would stop.

Soon you'll get the Spring winds again!

I love this! It's so charming: The slightly off grammar, the Finnish place names, the sentence rhythm. Just lovely.

Also lovely and suitably wintry is the latest print at 20X200:

Nethermead by Joseph O. Holmes

Colours

Drawn to colour lately, combinations, cacophonies. Documenting colour in my house, with either my camera or photography skills not quite up to the task. These photos are faded, or too saturated, some glinting missing:

Dispatchwork

Matrix magazine posted a link to a picture of Jan Vormann's work on twitter yesterday, and I wanted to see more so found his Dispatchwork website. He has travelled to cities around the world (mainly in Europe so far) fixing crumbling infrastructures with LEGO. I love seeing the shock of colour among the mostly grey or brown bricks:


It's particularly effective when the LEGO fills a small chink in the building that you might barely notice if you walked past:

Milkshake 'n Honey

Oh, Sleater-Kinney, you were so hot:

Happy International Women's Day!

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn is the 16th book I’ve read so far this year; I’ve started to write up a summary of it for the 95 Books blog, but have been struggling because it’s a really important book and I’d like to do it justice.

For now, check out the website to get a sense of the book’s scope. Also check out the long list of charities that help women in the developing world (all, frustratingly, American charities, although some have Canadian chapters, i.e. CARE).

Also, check out non-charitable philanthropic opportunities, like Kiva.org (you can lend money in increments of $25 to women entrepreneurs throughout the developing world) and Women for Women International (you can sponsor a woman who has survived war by providing financial assistance to her and her family, funding her rights awareness and job skills training, and writing her letters of support).

The disparity between the freedom and opportunity we enjoy in the first world and the oppression many women suffer in the developing world is profound and troubling. "Women's liberation" might seem like an antiquated term but it's still a vital concept, and it won't be complete until all women have some measure of autonomy, power, and self-respect. Let's make it happen.

Art, for cheap

I spent yesterday all in a flurry over 20x200, a website from New York that sells limited edition prints for very reasonable prices: editions of 200 (8x10) for $20; editions of 50 (11x14) for $50; and various larger sizes for various higher prices. At first I wanted to buy everything, but I've since calmed down and placed a modest order for three prints today. Tangentially, I wonder why my first urge is to buy art that interests me. Shouldn't viewing it, linking to it, knowing it exists out there in the world be enough? Why commodify it, why own it? Luckily, 20x200 artist William Powhida has some answers:



Good points all. I'm just excited to cover the off-white walls of my apartment with something other than cut-outs from art-themed calendars, crap paintings I did myself, scarves hanging from those 10,000 Villages wooden fabric hanger things, a scary early-70s wood face carving my parents got in New Zealand and blackmailed me into rescuing from their basement, and some university degrees.

Anyway, here's a couple of prints I like but didn't buy (yet):


Photographer's Dilemma by Tatsuro Kiuchi


Untitled #10 by Kent Rogowski

Woodcuts!

I saw some intriguing woodcuts by Calgary artist Lisa Brawn at the Axis Gallery in Art Central this weekend. Apparently she's been using hundred year old Douglas Fir beams from heritage buildings and grain elevators for her material, which is so flipping cool: I love art that salvages local history. If only I had a few hundred bucks to spare, I'd get this Johnny Cash (something about the background stars really appeals to me):

Something Beautiful Calls

I felt mid-afternoon despair encroaching and wanted to stave it off, so I typed "something beautiful" into Google. Amid the song lyrics and music videos, I found this website for Virginia artist Charlie Brouwer, through a link to his installation piece "Something Beautiful Calls and We Rise":



I love this image, the ordered disorder, the starkness, the red tree, the bleached sky.

Olympic cruise ship as floating hotel plan could be sunk
Anglican head warns of ‘chaos’ over gays and women

Arts groups lament budget cutbacks
Cancer vaccine could aid men and women

Dearth of goals flummoxes Sutter
Study backs gastric surgery for obese teens

Grounds for double-double trouble

Greeting cards get licked by clicks

Mustn’t forget to plan for dementia tsunami

New rules for rapist troubling

Halting hazing

Afghan people abounding in hope

cooldu ladg

And another one:

cooldu ladg

bee o o u31t -mCheirn, a. I G moogrle fiosr deoiging owmith -

Calgary Herald January 21, 2010

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© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

gtamt e) , i

Below is the full text of an article from the Calgary Herald website. The link is here, although I'm sure it will be corrected eventually. So much for proofreading.

gtamt e) , i

Calgary Herald January 21, 2010

ibpe mryese owtosphsileltel -encein Vancouver. The prob -lem that Cindy Ady, the min -inesxotep ired ocefta odhu otrowis flmo, uwadc hmb amitcsko s nthoe y A ials -

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© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

ditch anthology

ditch, the poetry that matters has published an anthology of poets who have been featured on the site. You could scroll through the archives for the same material, but the anthology is much more readable, thanks to Issuu software which mimics the experience of reading a book much more effectively than websites or PDFs ever have. It's a really lovely production and I'm thrilled to be included.