Matthew Trygve Tung & (personal update)

Personal Update

Much poetry going around these days, check these magazines out:

I have four prose poems in the latest Action, Yes, Vol. 1 Issue 7 Winter 2008.

Poems by Rosa Alcalá, Per Bäckström, Raymond Bianchi, Rocio Cerón (translated by Rosa Alcalá,) Lara Glenum, Daniel Groves, Dan Hoy, Richard Kostalanetz, Sergio Medeiros (translated by Raymond Bianchi,) Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray (translated by Robert Archambeau and Jean-Luc Garneau,) Catherine Taylor, Daniel Tiffany, Andrea Loselle, Daniel Rothman, Theodore Mook, Colin Upton, Jasmine Dreame Wagner, and Lila Zemborain (translated by Rosa Alcalá.)

Also, they call me "Jasmine Dreame Weaver" in the sidebar.

Also, I have poems coming out in American Letters & Commentary and NÖO Journal.

Some more info on American Letters & Commentary No. 19:

Poems by Erik Anderson, Yosa Buson, Sean M. Conrey, Matthew Cooperman, Amy Dickinson, Steffi Drewes, Amy England, CJ Evans, Norman Finkelstein, Andrea Fitzpatrick, Michael Gessner, Michele Glazer, Hillary Gravendyk, Gary Hawkins, Kirsten Kaschock, David Koehn, Nancy Kuhl, Laurie Clements Lambeth, Jee Young Lee, Dawn Lonsinger, Mojdeh Marashi, C. J. Martin, Joshua McKinney, Kat Meads, Ralph J. Mills Jr., Jennifer Militello, B.Z. Niditch, Emily Pérez, Jennifer Pilch, Zach Savich, H.E. Sayeh, Lisa Sewell, D.E. Steward, Stephanie Strickland, Mathias Svalina, Chad Sweeney, Arthur Sze, Steve Tomasula, Jasmine Dreame Wagner, G.C. Waldrep, Rob Walsh, Suzanne Wise, and collaborations between Anna Rabinowitz, John Dermot Woods & Kristen Iskandrian, Joyelle McSweeney & Johannes Göransson, Mark Nowak & Ian Teh, Lea Graham, and Michael Anania.





More information on printmaker Matthew Trygve Tung:

Matthew Trygve Tung's personal website
Windows Gallery

Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Gary Yuan Gao

Joshua Marie Wilkinson's
Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk




As the subtitle of Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk suggests, this collection of short, fractured images and notions is "a poem in fragments." Wilkinson leads us through a flickering labyrinth of telephones, moths, fences, and dusky doorways, examining our experience of the otherworldly mundane: the ghostly familial, the everyday violence of the accident in the street, the inevitability of insects and birds trapped in hands and the miniature heartbreaks in the moments they break free. The book opens with two of these moments, "a laundry truck, seconds after / Phone in the apartment ringing / above the accident" and "a boy of six cups his hands / around a wet moth / as he stands up / in the bathtub / releasing it to the mirrorlight," setting the stage for two central themes to evolve throughout the course the volume: the physical distance between our bodies and the world in which we live and the transience of each connective moment and the bridges we construct to connect.

Wilkinson's poem-fragments alternate between images and questions that examine these spaces between people and their material surroundings. In "The Unofficial Handbook of Librarian Tricks" he writes:


Phonebooth & rain spatter & calls
from the dead in the middle of the night.

***

Could you re-hide the note I hid inside your steering wheel?
Who fell down the flight of stairs without me?
Did nobody's dog follow you properly home?






Phones, phonebooths and phonebooks appear over and over again throughout Lug Your Careless Body, like images strung through a dream or a silent film. "The man tears out the page in the phone book / at the pancake house," "Couldn't you unwind the phone cord in the dream?" Did you wait in the phone booth and feign speaking?" The characters that handle these phantom objects appear and disappear from the page in a matter of lines, as though each were a fading memory, or a fleeting notion. The ephemeral quality of memory itself seems to fascinate Wilkinson and he returns to the concept frequently, in spurts, like each of his images and inquiries. "Surely you remember the legendary earthquake," he writes, as though the earthquake in question were both unforgettable and already forgotten.

The world that unfolds through Wilkinson's pages is scattered, de-centered and cracked as "a curse of split melon / on the kitchen counter." Objects and their owners are forever parted ("You took your apricot dress to the drycleaners / & left it forever," "The boat flung back from their bodies.") In fact, a central question - do objects have owners, are they owned? seems to unfold through the accumulation of image after image in this universe of disconnected strays, missing teeth, and spoiled oranges, where nothing exists quite long enough to become a possession. Everything exists only long enough to become, and thus will, in the next frame, cease to exist. In one short line, the narrator's "I" tiptoes into the room as Wilkinson writes, "I pack a bag absently," a bag that stands alone and also resembles this book of images and conjecture. The overall outcome is, however, not one of absence, but of longing and residue, distance and parting as necessary elements of existence and experience:


You still must keep
at a certain distance
for the whole body to
appear
          in the photograph.





Though memories (constructs that depend on our ability to create relative measurements of time through linear narrative) distance us from the events they replace as we attempt to maintain proximity to them, they are also a means of connection, a thread between vacancies, as first a photograph, then the text that describes the photograph, becomes a thread between poet and reader.


                              Here is
where I sat as it began to snow
& here is a picture of it.





More information:

Links/info page for Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Purchase Lug Your Careless Body online at Powell's
Joshua Marie Wilkinson online at Typo Magazine
Purchase screenprints of Gary Yuan Gao's Camera Ghosts and Gramophone Ghosts online at Karmasoup.org

Sean Cheetham & (personal update)

Personal Update


I have a few poems online and a few more forthcoming from journals in the next few months. If you care to check them out, here they are:

"Shoal" and "Cassiopeia" in elimae
"1985 The Book of Sand" in Colorado Review

32 Poems
La Petite Zine
Kulture Vulture
Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets

Lately, I've been stunned by the talent of figure painter Sean Cheetham. His paintings make me homesick for both home and a place I'm sure I've never been. In 2005, his oil paintings won him the BP Portrait Award from the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. He is currently an instructor at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art.





More information on Sean Cheetham:

Sean Cheetham's personal website
Sean Cheetham at the Mendenhall Sobieski Gallery
Sean Cheetham: Common Weaknesses in Figure Paintings in American Artist
Sean Cheetham: Using a "Mud Palette" to Achieve Harmony in American Artist

Sol LeWitt & Greg Hill

35 Sentences on Poets and Poetry


By Greg Hill
(adapted from Sol LeWitt's "35 Sentences on Conceptual Art")


1 Poets are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap toward what they cannot reach and see what is there only in potential.

2 Poets are electricians, not architects.

3 Illogical judgments lead to new knowledge.

4 Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.

5 The poet's will is secondary to the process she initiates from idea to completion. Her willfulness may only be ego.

6 Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. But all ideas need not be made into poems.

7 All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and contravene the conventions of art.

8 For each poem that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.

9 Poems are not literature, and poets are not authors.

10 One only understands the poems of the past by misunderstanding the poetry of the past.

11 The conventions of poetry are altered by poems.

12 Successful poems change our understanding of the conventions of poetry by altering our perceptions.

13 Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.

14 The subject of a poem is always its own becoming.

15 A poet's style is her own unfolding in the poem.

16 All successful works of art are utter failures.

17 The poet cannot imagine her poem, and cannot perceive it even when it is complete.

18 It is impossible to misperceive a poem.

19 The poet may not necessarily understand her own art. Her perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.

20 An poet may perceive the poetry of others better than her own.

21 The concept of a poem involves the process through which it is made.

22 The process is mechanical and should run its course. A poem is "a machine made of words."

23 Poems can only be known in terms of their effects.

24 There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.

25 There is no distinction between form and content.

26 One's initial judgment about the success or failure of a poem is always correct.

27 Success and failure are aesthetic judgments and bear no relation to a poem's subject or execution.

28 Every reading of a poem creates a new poem.

29 Poems are answers to questions yet asked, and are not questions themselves.

30 All poets lie and this is natural and fitting.

31 Poems suffer from dissimulation on the part of the poet.

32 When a poet learns her craft too well she makes slick poems.

33 Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.

34 It is difficult to bungle a good idea.

35 These sentences comment on poetry, but are not poems.





"LeWitt is one of the key artists of the 1960s. His work bridges Minimal and Conceptual art, movements that abandoned the emphasis on psychological content and gestural form typifying Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. In a seminal text in written in 1967 titled 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,' LeWitt emphasized his view of art: 'No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea,' and, 'When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.'" -From the Sol LeWitt Retrospective at SFMOMA

Greg Hill is an MFA student at the University of Montana.


More information:

Sol LeWitt's 35 Sentences on Conceptual Art
Sol LeWitt Retrospective at SFMOMA
Sol LeWitt at Crown Point Press
Sol LeWitt at the Barbara Krakow Gallery
Sol LeWitt at the Dia Center

Jason Salavon & George Oppen

Jason Salavon, contemporary artist, and George Oppen, modernist poet, use divergent aesthetics to approach similar themes of isolation, distrust of modernization/homogenization of American culture and (as I intentionally warp the Williams quotation) "truth in things." Salavon averages realtor photographs of single-family suburban homes for sale across the United States, creating blurry composites of middle class neighborhoods. Striking in their disintegrating pastels, these images are as much a statement on the homogeneity of suburban architecture as they are on the blurry psychology of the average American who drives an average distance to an average place of employment to work, on average, 8 hours a day.

"There are things / We live among 'and to see them / Is to know ourselves'," writes Oppen. Oppen's early poems adhered to the formal aims of Objectivism and Imagism: "thinking with things as they exist" according to Zukofsky, arranging "minor units of sincerity" into a whole, poetic object. Oppen often considered the objects closest to him and the world just outside his door. Salavon's photography follows similar principles. The image shown above is composed of 124 suburban homes for sale in the 5 boroughs of New York. The following, 112 homes for sale in Miami-Dade County. Averaging discrete units of the world outside our doors, Salavon considers contemporary America as an average of its "minor units of sincerity." These images themselves become our new units of perception, accurately reflecting our age of speed, our whirlwind of technology, our disposable culture in which we purchase cheaply and almost instantly toss our mass-produced purchases away.



Geoff Manaugh writes on BLDGBLOG:

"How do you even know where you are? New York? Chicago? St. Louis? What's so exciting about these images is how sarcastically condemnatory, rigorously critical, and yet strangely beautiful they really are. Of course the promising landscape of "America" is being destroyed by its own architecture; of course that country is falling victim to bad – or utterly absent – planning. But Salavon's images make this visually obvious, graphically accessible; they take what every American sees, everyday – driving through the exurbs, living in the midst of the homogeneous – and these images give it an iconography."

Oppen writes in his Pulitzer-winning work Of Being Numerous:

One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads
       in his hands,
He must somehow see the one thing;
This is the level of art
There are other levels
But there is no other level of art

Of Being Numerous was published in 1968. Almost 40 years later, we continue to search for our "one thing", a truth or principle by which we can navigate and understand the folds of our intricate world. By now, however, with an ever-increasing barrage of information, references and layered meanings imposed on us, our "one thing" has become the blur itself.




Individuals adrift in systems of blurs find themselves suspended in a unique isolation. Why else would we create such nets?


Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck
Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous.


More information:

Jason Salavan's series "Homes for Sale"
Jason Salavan on BLDGBLOG
George Oppen at The Academy of American Poets
Purchase George Oppen's New Collected Poems online at Powell's

William Wenthe

Birds of Hoboken


Here there is space, and what innocence
I can hold on to, alone—
neither Adam nor Ecclesiastes.
The tremendous fact that is Manhattan
shimmers across the river's crumpled foil;
but the dweller upon vanity could find enough
behind him on this world that ends
at the concrete bumper of a railroad wharf—
a flatcar load of rusted wheels,
or the derrick of a half-sunk
wooden ship, unable to raise itself
from its berth of silt.

There is a recoverable grace
in the fine joinings of wood, soft grains
bleached by sun and the river's chemicals.
That it has remained this long
seems a bit of a miracle, but the very water
of this place has been abandoned,
a trapped rectangle, rainbowed only
with petroleum seepings, obsolete
to anyone, it seems, save myself—

and the birds, now half my reason
for coming here. It is too far
to call back the first time
the appearance of a bird above the river
opened a new world. It may have been
the croak of a heron, flying to roost
at seven o'clock, that struck me so out of time
as if the sky itself had spoken.

Now in winter, I stand in the disused
shadows of Pullmans painted the old
green, my fingers stiffened on binoculars,
to watch small rafts of scaup
and others brought here in the amplitude
of migration. There are black ducks, goldeneye,
mergansers, occasional pairs of tiny
bufflehead sheltering among still-rooted
pilings, abiding here on their commute
that measures a continent in a year.

As darkness obtains, I look more
for the significant flashes of white—
the pure body of the canvasback,
or the half-hid speculum
in the gadwall's folded wing, or, once,
the white crown worn like a lily petal
by a widgeon that had flown from extreme
spaces of tundra, of muskeg lakes.

The birds speak that way (oblivious
to my desire, to the whole city
brighter now in dark) of remotenesses
we haven't killed yet. They know nothing
of abandonment, and yet I think
they want this place simply
because we have wasted it
even of ourselves.
                 They allow me
to watch them, though by now I can see only
the way bodies keep their even keel
in waves that may be killing them.
They don't exclaim: again, as if
willing to forgive, they arrive.


Copyright William Wenthe, from Birds of Hoboken, Orchises Press, 1995. First published in The Georgia Review, Winter 1988.


More information:

Purchase Birds of Hoboken online at Amazon.com
Poems by William Wenthe online at Texas Tech University
Poem by William Wenthe online at The Paris Review
Orchises Press

I NY

From the corner of Nassau and Monitor, I would ride my bike east until the residential streets of East Greenpoint funnelled into corridors between warehouses and walls of corrugated steel. There were yards of barbed wire corralling unkempt yards and a private filling station for the fuel trucks themselves, but mostly long stretches of loading docks and windowless concrete. On other days, I would follow Monitor to Greenpoint Avenue and ride over into Queens, following the iron rail of the cemetary under the merging expressways.

One evening I lost my way just as the sun was beginning to set over the double-skyline of Brooklyn and Manhattan. The sun dropped below the horizon at the exact moment while I was cruising, mid-daydream, leaving me in the dusk. Pedaling faster, I attempted to backtrack along a series of unfamiliar streets, following the distant sound of what I assumed to be the BQE. I hoped I hadn't ended up too far out, under 495 or elsewhere in Queens. My calves and thighs ached. Suddenly, I heard a loud clanking above me and as I looked up, three enormous billboards blazed to life, illuminated by titanium spotlights. The atmosphere around them glowed in a hazy blue halo. The billboards were empty.

I spent almost every evening that summer riding around Greenpoint, Bushwick and Long Island City, seeing what I could find. I carried a ziplock bag where I stored broken windshield glass with some kind of hope I'd use it in making jewelry. Sometimes I wore my digital camera around my neck, or brought a plastic dispoable one from the Eckerd and kept it my pocket. I took pictures of abandoned factories and walls with peeling paint, but also of the smaller artifacts - paintings, collages, stickers with messages scrawled with a Sharpie. Sometimes, while pedaling along a seemingly interminable wall of warehouses, the sidewalk would disappear and I'd pause, climb off my bike and stand on the asphalt, feeling as though I might have been the only person to ever actually set foot on that exact spot of tar (a similar feeling I had while attempting to cross a rest-stop intersection somewhere in the midwest - running from Taco Bell to McDonalds in an area where people drove from one drive-thru to the next, drivers and passengers alike stared me down like I was crazy, waiting for them to pass so I could dart across the street.)

This the barrier that street art seeks to demolish. Each tag is a tiny "I was here, I stood here."


From Kelly Burns' book, I NY:

There's a lot out there that could be considered street art; a cup of coffee scratched on a wall, a manifesto - spreading like a militant microbe, and all the countless bits and pieces in between.

I prefer the personal, handmade stuff most of all, especially when it's kind of bizarre and pointless. Sloppy, tattered paste-ups, spanked and stained by the elements, well placed stencil-stickers cut into weird shapes, endless collaborations and curious sculpture, almost hidden, waiting to be found. One of the best things about this work is its anonymity. Not knowing who's responsible for what offers great license to imagine what it's like inside the perpetrator's head.

Giving something away is powerful. The result of someone's inspiration, condemned to a harsh existence against the wall. From that precarious position, a statement is made. An image pasted onto the side of a building wall will soon rot away into nothing, but until that happens, we are offered a moment of contemplation. It says that, while the object itself does count for something, it's the interactions which spark that matter.

This art feels like a language with a mind of its own; a visual language that evolves and operates on a frequency just slightly over our heads. The people who make it happen are truly "in the midst of it", and may not be fully aware of why they're standing on the sidewalk at four in the morning, pasting a fish on the wall. Creativity is working through them in the freshest way, and the outcome is an unprocessed piece with a limited shelf life.



From November 2000 until April 2005, Kelly Burns photographed tags, collages, stencils, paintings and posters from his travels around New York City. He compiled them into a book, a huge book full of street art and street scenes, found objects, essays and a brief interview with Swoon, a street artist whose woodcut prints and papercuts have shown up all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, primarily in SoHo and DUMBO. When I found the book at Spoonbill and Sugartown I couldn't put it down. I'd seen so many of the stencils, stickers and paintings on my long bike rides around Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick - many of them I had never expected to see again. Posters are torn down and tags painted over by a building's landlord or maintenence crew. Tags are layered over tags. Buildings and facades disintegrate, only to be replaced with new ones. Street art is ephemeral. It is not so much about perfection of technique but about creating in the moment and establishing a dialogue with the surrounding environment. Establishing a dialogue with the few other people to stop and take notice. I was here, and you were here, and now you, and you, and you.



More information:

I NY (book website)
Interview with Kelly Burns at ekosystem.org
Buy Kelly Burns' I NY at Powell's Books
streetsy.com (street art website)

Masahisa Fukase

Sometime during the winter of 2002, I bought a plane ticket to London and left on a whim to visit two friends of mine, one of whom had just taken on a job at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I'd never been to the V&A before, and stopped by one afternoon to visit her at work. I wasn't sure what to expect, having heard many rants and raves about the Tate Modern but not so much about the V&A. I decided to take a look through one of the newer, temporary exhibitions, namely, a room full of photographs by Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase.

The room was crowded, not with people but with grainy, black and white photographs of ravens. There were close-ups of ravens on branches, on wires and in the air. There were dark and foreboding storm scenes with rain clouds and birds circling. There were photographs of dead birds on concrete. Stepping into the gallery was like stepping into the opening credits of a black and white horror film from the 1940's, not just on account of the subject matter, but in the way the pieces the were hung: close together, with almost no breathing room between frames. The walls were tiled with birds. I began to feel dizzy.






The walls were tiled with birds. In certain patches, on certain walls, the birds began to resemble Japanese calligraphic paintings. On others, they resembled fleets of B52 bombers streaking through the atmosphere. The images evoked feelings of paranoia and despair, as though the viewer were being watched by thousands of eyes, about to run for cover.

From the press release prepared by the Stephen Wirtz Gallery:

Masahisa Fukase is considered to be both a legend and an enigma in his native Japan. For a culture that is traditionally reluctant to expose emotion in public, the expressionistic character of Fukase's work was, in part, the result of the development of the generation that evolved after WWII.

Fukase was born in 1934, growing up in a decade of the first Japanese children in which mannered self-control was not the ideal civic behavior. This new perspective, coupled with the effects of war, exploded into the avant-garde art scene in Tokyo. Inelegant printing techniques emerged and the manic style of photography that Fukase shared with his contemporaries, among them Eikoh Hosoe, Daidoh Moriyama, and Shomei Tomatsu, reflected the "reaction to a world turned upside down."

Fukase began photographing his ravens on a train ride to Hokkaido after the dissolution of his marriage. He spent over a decade capturing the birds on film.

More information:

Masahisa Fukase at the Victoria and Albert Museum
Masahisa Fukase at the Stephen Wertz Gallery

Songs About Ghosts

Revitalizing an old idea to keep myself typing and around and about on the world wide-ish web, AKA updating my website has lost its thrill, Livejournal is fun but not often enough interesting, and honestly, I kind of like linking to people and things I'm interested in. Namely: poetry, literary fiction, painting, collage, drawing, cities and snowy places.

A brief biographical note: I read, write, and make things. I travel often (well, as often as I can, but not nearly enough as I'd like) and have lived at times in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Paris, and California. My writing has appeared in places like the Colorado Review, Indiana Review, The Seattle Review, The North American Review, ONTHEBUS, The Columbia Review, elimae and is forthcoming in 32 Poems and La Petite Zine. My photographs of the Nevada desert and the abandoned Soviet nuclear submarine base in Paldiski, Estonia have appeared on the Unpleasant Event Schedule. My art books and zines, a series entitled Songs About Ghosts, have been featured in exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art and at Boise State University. I also perform in the folk/experimental collective Cabinet of Natural Curiosities.

That's a bit about me. Now, onto other stuff.