Vision, Voice, & Practice

"The Best Version of the Thing"

2012-01-27T22:24:00.000-08:00

SS: I’ve been in situations where I’ve felt like, “We’ve got some work to do,” or “I need to do some more shooting,” or, “I’m going to have to make some tough decisions.” I have an hour of edited material that was cut out of Contagion. I had to make some really, really tough choices there.

AVC: Are you ultimately pleased to make those choices?

SS: Yeah, you have to.

AVC: You’re not someone who’s like, “Well, I want a three-hour cut down the line at some point”?

SS: No, not at all. I’m not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post. It means nothing to the audience. I’ll chop limbs off. I’ll put an arm where a leg should be. I’ll do anything.

AVC: But it sometimes means something to the actors and writers, doesn’t it?

SS: Yeah. But, again, everybody, including me, has to submit to what it needs to be. The thing is at the top of the pyramid, the best version of the thing; we all have to serve that. You forget that at your own risk.

- From an interview with Steven Soderbergh

Veronica Burris & Chelsea Almeter, Senior Exhibition

2011-05-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

Veronica Burris and Chelsea Almeter were both members of this class. The semester ended with their Senior Thesis exhibitions. Themes of both thesis projects informed much of their VV&P production. This was such a rich and rewarding way to bring our semester to a close. Congratulations!

Final Collaborations

2011-05-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

As a final collaboration the students (visual artists and writers) were directed to create a site-specific work that in some way responded to the themes of the semester. Here are a few examples.

Amber Johnson - solo project

2011-05-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

Individual Projects: Prose

2011-05-23T23:20:00.000-07:00

MRI Daydreams of a 7-year-old

Upon exploding, he hoped to leave behind a finger for her to hold in her manicured hands. But eight and a half minutes passed smoothly by, and then there was nothing left to draw but black. The whole page turned black, leaving no room for greetings or goodbyes. When he finished, he hurled his letter towards the Earth and followed its clean white speck to the ocean.

Her face was in the sponges, her hands in every coral reef. One-way radio waves sang to him as he pried open oysters, collecting fat white pearls for a necklace that would catch on her ankle in the morning.

And when he surfaced on a sled, he could see her fur-lined neck and hot-chocolate hands to his left. They kept his body from crashing, from crumpling up in a pool of pink. But still, the small white lights whispered to him. Since he wasn’t sure which one to follow, he carved her name into the ice and rested.

Later, he was afraid his skull might swallow and send his brain sliding down the back of his neck. And as he wondered about the stillness of head nods, forgetting and being forgotten, her hands moved over him, smoothing all his white linen wrinkles.

- Anna Moreau

The balloon would lurch and set back down—rise and lower just like that—until Jemi and I were finally in the air. We moved higher and higher toward the Western sun, rapidly setting on our day’s labors. Or maybe I thought of this as our life’s labors—and mine in particular. The canopy of our balloon was stitched together from canvas with heavy threading and the seams were sealed with hide glue. The result was strong, and I thought that if we could manage to get North in this craft, we would be away from Fort Union. That would be enough. In my quieter moments I had made plans for us to leave this no-man’s land for Jemi’s sake.

Last week, I caught Jemi taking the lizards out of the washtubs we’d been putting them in. I quickly picked her up off the floor and she cried, but I held her tight in my arms and continued to carry her while I filled the remaining washtubs with dirt that I had put outside along the barn. She did not stop crying by the time I finished adding dirt to the bins. I carried her to the house.

We left a year after we first arrived—my contract with the U.S. government about run out. We were beginning to be run out ourselves by the pests that seemed like they followed us from Mississippi ‘cept here they are lizards instead of little rats and squirrels, and things. We tried to contain the lizards mostly in the barn but the more I found houses for them, the more they just kept coming asking for rooms. I guess I was not surprised when we moved here that the reptiles did appear, but there were few choices available to me about how to take my leave of them.

The plans for the balloon were simple and I was able to execute the design on my own. This was the only way I could see that I knew the lizards couldn’t follow. Jemi and I plucked the remaining ones that stuck to our basket as we lifted off the ground. It’ll be some other plague or infestation when we touch down who knows where next. But for now, Jemi is giggling a little and holding tight onto the basket frame—a little scared and a little happy to be where she is.

- Barak Wright

Narcissus

“You can't love anybody but yourself.”

Those words haunted him as he walked through the empty apartment that night. They'd haunted him every day since the last day he'd seen her, the day he'd moved into this apartment.

“I love people.” He said to himself, passing the mirrors he'd left covered when he hung them months ago. “I love people besides myself. Mom, dad, Matty, Kelsey, Cherish. . . I love them. I love my family.”

His restless steps brought him into the kitchen, where a pot of water stood on the stove, waiting to be boiled for his regular Thursday night pasta dinner.

“Only love myself. . .” He stopped in front of the stove, but didn't change anything. “That's not true.”

But he hadn't loved Esther, even though they'd dated for three years. She'd felt his boredom, his lack of attachment, and broke off the relationship. He'd felt bad, but there was nothing he could do. She'd wanted to be serious, and he hadn't. It wasn't that he hadn't liked her – she was great, and gorgeous, and sweet – she just – she just wasn't enough. He had to admit, she'd tried, tried to like philosophy and football and Italian food and those other things he enjoyed so much he seemed to have been born to enjoy them – those things that were part of him. Those things that were him. They were him, and she couldn't appreciate that like he did.

Maybe he was just supposed to be alone.

He leaned over the pot to see how much water he'd put in, and caught himself staring at his reflection.

Why did he need anybody, anyway? He knew what he wanted out of his life, and he knew how to achieve that. He didn't need Esther, or Pietra, or Rosamund – he didn't need any of them. He didn't need anybody, just himself. He could take care of everything. Girlfriends just messed up his routine, anyway. Always wanted to be held, always wanted to watch their own stupid movies, always wanted to know how they looked, if blue or yellow looked better on them –

Just the thought of it made him cringe, and he shook his head. His reflection caught his eye again.

Maybe he was just supposed to be alone.

- Alysa Spolidoro

Individual Projects: Poetry

2011-05-23T23:17:00.001-07:00

Us girls

Us girls never back down,

like the Spanish color yellow:

boom-boom, bounce back,

catapult upward with fast-luck,

conditioned to roll with the punch.

Bend us arrows and tightly pull

so that we can fly and hit the bulls'

eye square in the mouth

to break his teeth.

One pound flesh-and-bone we mix

into shepherdess pie. 'Mid

genderized beef, the mashed

potatoes smother the deed

which we waited,

for so long,

to eat.

- Katelynn Camp

Excursion

Unexpected splendor yielded by inner-city excursions

manifests in sun burnt kids with bare feet, wandering

their gated yards, lying so close to the metro tracks

that their mothers cast a wary eye every time it passes.

The leathery old men walk the baked cement sidewalks

of humming Los Angeles, shuffling unconcerned amidst

rushing middle class crowds pouring out of offices

For the too-short lunch hour, heads down and feet forward.

They, the thick life-blood of the city, chugging through

its intravenous structures, keep the California conurbation

alive and kicking, however rebelliously, or eagerly, or what-have-you,

moving the city-scape along, the creaking cogs and lynch-pins

of the sprawling metropolis, faces so fantastically various

that one could never be bored, the trains and buses

offering up their carriage for impertinent observation

as long as the observer manages not to get caught.

History is the substructure of the city, culture bursts out

On the streets in so many forms, art blooming unexpected

Appearing in stations, on sidewalks, in vacant store windows

Giving the rushing throngs something to look up at, to think about.

These the invaluable treasures the city keeps

and displays to its visitors and residents, a constant show

now veiled, now glowing, fading in and out of the smog

to astonish when least expected with its majesty.

- Candace Arce-Lindsay

Common Moments

One day you'll come home and trample

the carpet, flinging yourself out of

your coat like splitting skin.

You'll wash my nude lipstick

off the side of one of my favorite

baroque mugs,

listening for the sound of my voice

whose gratitude invites you in

to the grandeur of my embrace,

and then enter fully into a moment

that can overwhelm, like a river

running wild.

As the throat is tugged hard by the

rush of time, you calmly speak aloud,

in a current pounding past,

I won't remember much and I'll forget

the days which passed like single squares,

without a sound of carpet or coat.

- Delia Baltierra

Rhodes

You move through lost origins, not obvious,

Possible loop-holes of soft turquoise foam,

Or shove to fortress rocks above

Bold shadows of broken octagons-

Forget those for now; hot stones force

you down toward shore, freedom

Removed to move, to explore. Go now

To homes known only to moss-covered

Bones, or golden coins lost forever.

You drop below the gloss, tones of

Loss so frozen for moments, so open for

Movements. Silhouettes become gone so

Often, only to shoot out of coves

Once unnoticed. Above, before you drown.

Without rhetoric of topaz roars,

Orations of horizons pointing to

Other shores, onyx-mouthed oceans

Would lose voice, groaning only

Apologies of driftwood, driftwood.

- Jonny Mueller

Bevel

Water in the river was always red

and before I thought it was just the dirt

but turns out the river is made of blood

and the blood is actually Jesus’ blood

who is a carpenter who made me. His

blood is in all the rivers, and if you

float your pain in one of them for long enough

it will all get washed away into a kingdom

that is under the river. You go there too.

- Megan Jackson

recent collaborations - image/text

2011-05-22T20:24:00.001-07:00

"Life Itself As a Creation"

2011-05-08T22:04:00.000-07:00

The photos individually can be viewed here.

The Long Game

2011-05-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

Ira Glass on the life of the maker. Our student Veronica Burris sent this video to us.

Another student sent us to this tumblr, a working out, for the sake of it, of what interests one person in writing and vision.

Individual Projects, II

2011-04-21T12:58:00.001-07:00

Art work of AJ Ranson

Art work of Jesse Greenwood

We did another round of individual student's work. Today visual works were presented by AJ Ranson and Jesse Greenwood and text based works presented by Kelsey Vandeventer and Daniel Austell.

~

They Fell

We're the wispy ones
that shudder at the light
under the covers, withholding our palms
but drawn to the flame, nonetheless.

Entrusted with reality
but unable to bear it, it remains
our craving, our necessity,
super-glued to our souls, a beloved parasite.

Nature has turned on itself,
a fissure of heart and mind,
so we must break the chains of death
and hallow the depths of hell.

- Kelsey Vandeventer

~

from "Watermelon Caves"

"Sweetie," she said. "Children don't know better. They are mean because they, they are self-conscious. They hurt others because they've been hurt." Of course, that was what everyone said.

He wiped his eyes with his sticky hands and began to gain composure.

"But why did they make fun of me?" he wailed. "Why do people have to say things like that?" Anger took hold of his being, reminding her of the man she once loved, and she became fearful. She blinked to hold back the tears.

"Jeff," she said, "The world is a place of awful things. People do things they shouldn't. All we can do is our best and forgive those who hurt us. If we don't--" She trailed off and stared at her left hand. It was barren, adorned with scars instead of rings.

- Daniel Austell

Individual Projects

2011-04-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

Work of Veronica Burris

Work of Erin Vaughan

The students are starting to present individual portfolios. These are works from their individual practice that have been informed by the collaborative class. We started with two visual artists and three writers: writers Richard Gaffin, Christian Koons, and Maegan Taylor (below), and visual artists Erin Vaughan and Veronica Burris (above).

~
from "Pieces":

The door was cracked for him; he let himself in. She was sitting in the kitchen. She looked sick. Her cheeks were wet.

"What is it," Russell asked.

"I need to show you something," she said.

"Ok."

"Ok," she said. "Don't freak out."

"Ok."

"Come here."

"Ok."

She walked him into the bathroom. "My stomach started cramping out of nowhere," she said. "I was too scared to call an ambulance."

On the sink was a baby's leg. From heel to thigh it was the size of an eggplant, and of a similar bruised shade.

He look at her. She covered her mouth with her hands.

"Where's the rest," he asked.

She shrugged, started shaking her head, and started crying again all at once.

"What does that mean," he asked.

"There wasn't any."

He looked back at the leg. The top of the thigh, where it would normally attach, was covered by smooth skin. It looked like it grew as an independent unit. Fully intent on becoming only what it was.

"I need you to take it," she said.

"Carrie."

She looked at him.

"What the hell."

"I don't know!" she cried.

He looked back at the leg.

"I just--" She was trembling. "I can't."

Russell's mouth opened, but he hesitated. She was sniffling. He asked her, "Is it mine?"

"Yes," she said. "It's ours." He looked at her. "But, Russell," she said, "I'm sorry," she said. "I can't."

"Ok," he said. "Ok."

- Christian Koons

~

Ya'aburnee

The icon of the Virgin Mary holds a small, 
grown man we believe is Jesus. A full, whole man,
 proportional to ten

times less than his mother. Her halo and his cross 
are at odds and there is no quick-smile-loving 
embrace between them.

He has outgrown his hand-holding mother, her 
holy gilded-glow sparkles in the daylight and
 he, full God and full man,

cannot sleep in a house with her permeating 
body-light and she weeps, weeps, weeps at his bloodshot
 eyes but not his bloodied

prayers. Still, to the incarnate God, to Jesus the
 Nazarite, his mother, who would not leave him
 to his Father's work, who

is surely not the woman-judge of Israel, 
has not driven a tent-peg through the temple of
 a breathing man, and is not

even the one who hides bits of apple in her 
pocket for hungry children, is the woman who
 grew her Creator and

birthed, from her fleshy-imperfect womb, our savior. 
And now she has no body (but a brand-new soul)
 and is dead, blind, rotting

in her stone-rolled-close tomb. But he is the body 
and the bread, the good that died young. Happy are
 those whom you love, Lord, Lord, Lord.

- Maegan Taylor

~

Here’s to the Blues and Greens

When the housemaids scrub the floors they get the spaces in between. I appreciate that about them—it’s hard to get good help these days, to find people who give a damn about doing the small things. Their names all blend into each other though; so do their faces, the dark Spanish features running together until I can’t tell one from another. I also have a guy who does the garden, tending the flowers and things. I don’t recall what exactly is in there, or the guy’s name either.

The house is empty tonight. It often is these days, since the kids moved out, taking their groups of friends and their oppressively cheerful music with them. They were all popular in high school. I wasn’t popular in high school, and neither was their mom—the gene must be recessive or something. I got the family male-pattern baldness instead, and they say that skips a generation too. Once, not long after my wife left, I came home from a business trip to find a full-on rager going on at the house, the red-cup kind that I thought existed primarily on movie screens. I remember standing on the front lawn, looking at the way the multi-faceted window in the front door diffused the light from inside the house, like a stained-glass window in a cathedral. I remember hearing the bass notes pound out from inside, as if in my absence the house had gotten a heartbeat and an adrenaline shot. I remember hearing the voices from inside the house, voices of strangers, a crowd taking up a space reserved for individuals.

- Richard Gaffin

Spot Collaboration: Poems

2011-04-13T21:04:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, we showed the students a series of images from Google's image search. These images were of, respectively, a man sleeping, an Ikea bedroom set, a furniture warehouse, a factory, a forest, a forest during clear-cutting, a line drawing of a boy eating lunch, a plate of assorted fruit, a stack of thick-cut steaks (next to a steak knife standing on its tip), and a woman wearing a meat hat. Each of these images were shown for about forty seconds, and students were asked to write down their impressions ("first thought, best thought") as long as the image lasted. They could describe the image itself, or feelings and memories the image evoked, or whatever popped into their minds. Afterward, we randomly assigned students to groups of three, giving them twenty minutes to make out of the words they wrote down either a twenty-line poem or a ten-sentence paragraph. Below are the, ahem, meaty results.

The morning after, she wasn't there
Thank God I washed my pillowcase finally
The morning after, she wasn't there
Let me try sleeping in the drawer under the bed tonight
The morning after, she wasn't there
Jammed and packed and crowded, nowhere to move
The morning after, she wasn't there.

High walls give me and my father anxiety
The ceiling would make just anything echo
High walls give me and my father anxiety
The earth must look lovely from the sky, like clockwork
High walls give me and my father anxiety
If I was big enough, I'd sleep here, on top of the trees
High walls give me and my father anxiety.

I don't eat red meat
I think of human muscle when I look at raw meat
I don't eat red meat
It might be meat, it might be chocolate cake. Enjoy it
I don't eat red meat
In some cultures, meat headgear is a sign of the priesthood
I don't eat red meat.

Alabama, As Seen by God

I ain't got legs
But my mom makes a mean ham sandwich
I never had good lunches as a kid
I always wanted something sweeter
My mom wants me to be jealous
When I grow up

A finely groomed bed-chamber
Looks cold out of focus
Smoke & mirrors
to make it look bigger
I used to love
Now I smell the formaldehyde
Nauseous
That used to be blood
In its veins
And you're just laughing

The gentiles were told not to strangle meat
Because it would separate them
From the pagans

Why are you so dark?

Collaboración

You smell your worst
when you wake up in the morning,
like a sexy, Indian man
eating a cheese sandwich
and afterwards wanting to vomit.
In your celebrity bedroom
on a mattress spaceship
you realize you belong with
potatoes and gravy.
But, it's peanut butter & jelly time again.
Let's have a picnic!
Crustacean innards. Right now!
My mom made fruit salads
but mostly I like blood.
Eat it or die.
But make it yourself--it'll be cheaper
with a meat dagger.
Meat wood.
What the hell is this?
Tenderloin bonnet.

For Borges

Though it looks packed full,
the farm is gilded
under studio lighting.
Ugly, we destroy what is so orderly.
Cut open like a dried-up orange, no juices:
the murder of a fake home.
Calming room, congested tune, closed,
too clean to live in.
Would I rather be eating hair at lunch?
Why did the cool kids use paper bags?
I am home, past Chicago
sleeping in, alone,
reminded of how
I cut his heart out with a dull knife,
bloody freedom, consumption.
Whatever is in the middle
visits the sun
alone,
like an evergreen forest,
mass murder.

Different Shades of White

Only looking at the
American Northeast as far
as the eye can see.

Tendrils, but that was just my first
thought, the representation
is half eaten.

Pig-nosed boy, asleep in the style of
viking landscape art or

fruit that is neither ripe nor rotten,
smelling like anemone, feels
like home--too much space--
Are we selling a beauty
product? Anonymous
people and things which
are too neat and
organized to be ugly in appearance.

Why do you eat on a board
little lunchtime child?
Strange spots of orange, volcanic
in a way. Gooey South America:
no ice, but it looks cold.

You were once an animal Ricky
Martin--¡comida! ¡comida!
There are mints that come from this
butchered thing.

Well, That Slaughterhouse Was Nice

I live in red velvet cake. Why I do declare, I must have found the right wardrobe door to step through. Oh he has no legs, but "I can fly!" Almost like my favorite blanket to picnic over. Fresh meat, PB & J make for a great, stale banqueting table. In the meadow, I must have found perfect, sterile fluorescent lighting. Is that supposed to be fresh air? In cluttered stillness a door got bigger. Except it was too well decorated. No one lives here. Now can we eat?

Last Week

2011-04-11T18:46:00.000-07:00

Madeleine Avirov

Last week was very full. We read some Borges ("The Theologians"--with its dire implications for [mis]interpretation) and some Bonhoeffer (on polyphony, from Letters and Papers from Prison). We learned a bit about the work of Steve Roden. And we were visited by the L.A. artist Madeleine Avirov, who showed us slides of several of her paintings, and how her work--or her work-making practice--finds grounding in poetry. She wrote about it here.

Two Exquisite Corpses

2011-04-06T20:50:00.000-07:00

Some students this week gave a presentation on Frank O'Hara, and his connections to the painter Robert Motherwell. During the presentation, the class was split in two, and each half made a poem. The first student wrote a line, passed it to his/her neighbor, who added a second line. This student then passed it on to the next student, who added a line. And so on. The results are below.

A Girl & No Jazz

A girl & no jazz is like static at midnight:
go shopping, pack a bag, feed the dog, book a flight;
be a man, have a plan, Afghanistan, be polite.
Invite darkness, like a dentist drill, harsh screaming,
beaming, beaming--as if darkness doesn't exist
and if with a sip of Coke the world fades away in a mist.
But as with any magic, illusions are just lights on a list
like boats on a mist.
And then we kissed (again).

~

I Woke Up Naked

I woke up naked and stubbed my toe.
A curse almost rolled off my tongue, it was low.
The clock went slower, slowest now, slow
As I drank and drank--How much? I don't know.

Refractions through the glass--drink deep, drink low
Down to the last of the night, in the sunrise glow
And drown. The morning's always the first to go,
Followed by afternoon's sickening glow.

You end up discovering more than you should know.
The cuss I am, you know.

Went to LACMA

2011-03-28T22:22:00.000-07:00

The class went to LACMA yesterday, where we looked at a pair of Joseph Cornell boxes. Then, standing in front of the massive Robert Motherwell canvas (absurdly tiny in the link), we listened as Dan read to us excerpts from a correspondence between Motherwell and the poet Frank O'Hara. Talking about it afterwards, Dan and I agreed that we should have given the students some sort of task after our brief foray into Sound + Vision, but we weren't sure what it would have been. At any rate, seeing the stuff in person is always better than in a book or on a screen, as I was reminded by looking at the museum's enchanting Mondrian, with its marble-like cracks and expressive brush strokes, which are invisible in reproduction.

My eight-year-old son Troy came with us, and he was a good museum companion. He put his face up to the AbEx paintings in order to immerse himself in their canvases, side-stepping back and forth to observe how the colors in front of his eyes changed. He loved the various assemblages, he was disturbed by Victor Brauner's Suicide at Dawn, and he was told by a museum worker to stop running as he wound his way around Richard Serra's Bend and Sequence. He also thought the Mondrian-inspired chair was neat, and he was amused by the gigantic litter box. ("Lucy [our cat] would love this!") He was not as taken with Jeff Koons's balloon dog or floating basketballs or giant eggshell, though we did make a joke about how the balloon dog may have been born from that egg. When he saw Quad Elvis, he asked, "Why would that woman agree to be naked like that?" And then, "Wouldn't she be embarrassed to have everyone see her naked in a museum?"

Art Incursion! A Salvo of Softness and Color Fired on the Streets of Paris!

2011-03-28T22:20:00.001-07:00

More here.

Matter and Spirit: An Exhibition

2011-03-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

Matter and Spirit: An Exhibition

Biola University Library

Jan. 1 - July 1, 2011

The following posts have been compiled from text submitted by VV&P student observations.

Mary Ellen Long's books

2011-03-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

Mary Ellen Long's relationship to book is unique in the way it expresses her relationship between earth and spirit in a very physical way. She displays three books that were without covers and damaged to the point where they were all unreadable and held together by three cords of wrapped wire. The books had been left to the elements and as a result their appearance was decayed, fragile, almost romantically beautiful. These books had been part of an installation, a performance work and now are presented as sculpture. By removing the binding, and replacing it with wire, she was able to seal and bury the book and let natural corrosion take place. The installation portion of this work reads as a sort of funeral. She releases the book (along with its original content) to nature and in turn nature acts on it. It (nature) both acts on the text and well as reads the book. One finds one self asking if the original content was still there in the physical aspect of the book or did it leave the book along with the ability to read it? Samantha Leaden, Chelsea Almeter

Linda Ekstrom's Tendrils & Truck

2011-03-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

Top images: Trunk

Bottom images: Tendrils

When considering the power of the written word, one must also be keenly aware of the way in which the medium of a book affects the way in which an audience approaches the material within its covers. Although the text found in a magazine, a newspaper or a bound-book might be similar in content, they each invite the reader to interpret the information presented in often vastly distinct ways. Many of the works on display in the Biola Library's show Matter and Spirit, demonstrate the artists' exploration of the physicality or spirituality of matter or the intellectual or emotional weight of a chosen subject matter through a variety of media. While many of the pieces utilize video, multimedia, drawing or print, several artists chose to explore the show's themes through the utilization of books as their sculptural medium.

Linda Ekstrom, manipulated the same text repeatedly in order to create new meaning in each piece. Ekstrom often represents the kinesthetic energy of book, in which the movement of the materials is meant to symbolize the manner in which books extend beyond the confines of the page and interact with our ways of thinking and being. There are two particular pieces that created intriguing visual statements: one was called Tendrils and the other entitled Trunk. The
piece Tendrils, composed entirely out of the pages of the prophets of the Old Textament, is a series of wrapped cords that are suspended within their case in order to allow the trails of paper to coil downward like the roots of a plant or sprouts of a vine. This technique creates both a visually compelling and mystifying effect, but also allows for a rich "reading" of the piece as the way in which Christians view the Old Testament prophets. In contrast, Ekstroms's piece,Trunk, does not possess the same visual movement found in Tendrils, and instead uses an entire Bible, rolled and bound in gold thread, to fashion a small, round column. This piece does not lack interest, as its description might suggest, since the way in which the pages fan in contrast with the wandering gold thread along the perimeter generates an active visual gesture, albeit in a highly distinct manner from the cords of Tendrils. The structures and titles of both
pieces evoke the rich botanical metaphors found with in Scripture, while remaining sufficiently abstract so that one does not feel overpowered by the artist's meaning. Amanda Rountree

New Collaborations

2011-03-21T13:20:00.000-07:00

The students were paired visual and text artists and given one hour to produce a sixteen page zeen in which image and text negotiated possible new meanings.

Speaking as Making

2011-03-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

Still, the word has power to create. When God speaks, God creates. When God says, "Let there be light," light is. God speaks light. For God, speaking and creating are the same. It is this creative power of the word we need to reclaim. What we say is very important. When we say, "I love you," and say it from the heart, we can give another person new life, new hope, new courage. When we say, "I hate you," we can destroy another person. Let's watch our words.

- Henri Nouwen

Metaphor as Mistake

2011-03-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

We read the terrific essay "Metaphor as Mistake," by Walker Percy, earlier in the semester, and I came across this last week:

I like hearing things incorrectly. I think that’s how I get a lot of ideas is by mishearing something.

That's Tom Waits. More here and here.

Sonic Youth also make music based on mishearings, on accidents they (paradox!) actively cultivate, though the records fix in sound the resulting experiments, much as an improvised jazz composition gets fixed on vinyl. Greil Marcus, writing about Sonic Youth bootlegs, points up the difference between hearing Sonic Youth's songs, repeatable through speakers, and the live, unrepeatable experience:

The bootleg tapes can't capture the complexity, or define the intentions or accidents, of a moment in which Sonic Youth makes a room fly apart, but they can capture the band's negating influence, its will to function as a sort of sonic corrosive...

This last clause suggests the value of the made thing, imperfect though it may be in capturing the totality of the entity that made it. Just as no poem can capture everything about the poet--or the poet's process--we remain grateful for the poem we get. SY is, of course, influenced by the aleatory experiments of John Cage and others in the avant garde, whose work we have almost only via technology that "fixes" it. This is the problem, of course: assuming that the thing we get is the thing itself, completely. But if you don't make that mistake, you can enjoy the privilege of technology, which, gives us such artifacts as Kind of Blue, "The Steeple-Jack," and access to performances like this, at your fingertips.

Hurston / Hedberg

2011-03-04T08:31:00.000-08:00

In class yesterday, we watched a Mitch Hedberg routine from the David Letterman show, different from the one above. A great thing about Hedberg is the care he puts into his jokes. Check out the structure of this punchline:

If the pizza was a pie chart for what people would do if they found a million dollars, this dude gave me the 'donate-it-to-charity' slice.

That's a pretty complicated sentence, crafted so that the laugh doesn't come until the very last word. Anyone who writes knows how hard that can be. Even the associations are strange, and strangely apt: He's making the weird (but, as it's said, instantly reasonable) claim that a pizza looks like a pie chart, and he relies on the audience's cultural knowledge of what a pie chart illustrating the attitudes of random people looks like. (They've seen it on T.V. They've seen it on the Internet.) The word "dude" in there keeps the joke tethered to the ground...unlike, perhaps, this analysis.

In an interview in 2004, not long before he died, Hedberg talked about the limitations of his own innate capabilities, and how he used those limitations to arrive at the kind of comedy he made:

The one-liner style, that came because I'm not a good storyteller. I would add on to a concept that I thought was funny but was getting no laughs, and I'd get more uptight. I decided to get to the point quicker, get rid of all the fat. When I tell a story, it's always been very much just the facts, so all my jokes are really stories that are broken down to the most factual sense.

This gift for (poetic) concision might be thought of as one of the things "stuffed into" the brown paper bag that is Mitch Hedberg--to borrow Zora Neale Hurston's metaphor from yesterday's reading. She, too, had certain gifts--of dance, say--that distinguish her from her own people (when performing for the white travelers passing through her childhood town), from her classmates at Barnard, and, later, from the white man who staidly sits at the club, listening to the jazz that takes hold of her and, both physically and emotionally, transports her. She says she's a "born first-nighter," a born performer. It's nothing she asked for. And she tells us she must use her gifts, despite the long odds society tells her she faces. She must work, and she does:

I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.

Asked about how often he's working on new material, Hedberg replies,

Oh, all the time, man. I just got to start writing it out in full, though. Now I'm down to writing the shortest amount of buzzwords possible, hoping I'll remember it. It's hard to step backward from those words and say, "What did that mean? What do the words 'owl' and 'my dad' mean together?"

[Photograph by Prentis Taylor]

Image/Text

2011-03-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

VVP alum Melissa Gutierrez shared with me a link to an online journal, The Caterpillar Chronicles, which aims to create image/text-based artifacts, much like the stuff we're making in this class. At first blush, the journal seems like a(nother), conventional literary mag, but there is a collaborative intentionality at work in it that is easily missed if you skip over the editors' note at the beginning. The Image & Text project, we learn, collects poems inspired by--or written in response to--a particular photograph. Projects like these comprise the magazine's content. (And it reads like a magazine, too, with a beautiful interface.) My favorite thing, on first perusal, is Alexandra Magearu's "Thoughts About the End of the World," for which she provided both the words and images. It's an elegant, thoughtful piece.

Class Visitors

2011-03-02T21:08:00.001-08:00

We've been fortunate to have three class visitors, Aimee Bender, Carrie Purcell, and Allison Benis White. Aimee talked about "practice," as in our course's title--particularly about getting to her writing work every day. (She writes five days a week, two hours a day.) Carrie Purcell talked to us about an amazing art/music/poetry project, called Formal Inquiry, she's putting together for a weekend of performances in June in Seattle. Would that we could take our entire class on a field trip there! And yesterday, Allison Benis White came and talked with us about the poems she's made using Degas paintings as a "way in." We have more visitors yet to come, which is exciting, but so far it's been a feast.

Constriction, Limitation

2011-02-15T22:47:00.000-08:00

From an interview w/ Jack White, of the (now over) White Stripes:

AVC: Does a White Stripes song have certain parameters?

JW: Oh yeah, lots of them do. There’s an overall structure of simplicity, and it revolves around Meg’s drumming style. And it can’t be beat. We can’t do those structures in The Raconteurs. We couldn’t do them if we wanted to, and that’s the beauty of Meg. In The Raconteurs, there’s so many more components, so many more personalities involved. If you get another person in the room, you’re dealing with something else. It’s a different kind of collaboration, you know? The parameters of The White Stripes… you know, 70 to 80 percent of what we do is constriction, and the other 20 to 30 percent is us breaking that constriction to see what happens.

From Infinite Jest:

The point about not crunching serious stats is that Schitt had clued Incandenza in, all the way back at a B.S. 1989 U.S.T.A. convention on photoelectric line-judging, that he, Schtitt, knew real tennis was really about not the blend of statistical order and expansive potential that the game's technicians revered, but in fact the opposite--not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty.

Paul, to the Corinthians:

So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I beat my body and make it my slave, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified

And So We Begin Again

2011-02-09T13:36:00.001-08:00

It's taken a week and a half after the class has begun, but we're finally here, updating our class blog. Last week (the first week), we read Chapter 1 of Eagleton's How to Read a Poem, in which he calls for an integrative approach to rhetoric, in the service of connecting our reading and analysis to the rest of human life: "Forward to antiquity." Yesterday, we discussed Chapter 1 of Berger's Ways of Seeing, a book that, like Eagleton's, takes a Marxist approach to examining (in this case, visual) texts. There's a great concern in each about how words are used to soften reality, manipulate it, or divorce art from it. I'd mentioned the way such a concern is also manifest in Christian students, and brought to my mind was a panel at the 2010 AWP, "God and the Workshop: Accommodating Religious Students," which called attention to this same phenomenon, as experienced by various professors of creative writing. (Disclosure: It was led by my friend and mentor, Cal Poly Professor Kevin Clark.)

But I don't want to make this blog a mere--and boring--accounting of what we read. The students also made--spontaneously and in collaboration--some really cool stuff, photographs of which we'll shortly publish. And we listened to some great music. (The song-of-the-day updates will be posted on the right side of this blog.)

Finally, as I shared the pastiched / collaged / limited-by-record-industry-convention-but-forward-thinking / highly disciplined / mono / number-1-smash-hit-from-1966 Beach Boys' song "Good Vibrations," I highlighted one of its many great, deceptively simple lyrics:

I don't know where but she sends me there.

Re-reading Eliot's "Burnt Norton" this week, I came across this line:

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

Who knew what Eliot was onto would be echoed by a song one day used to sell soda pop?

Hybrid Book Fair!

2009-06-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

Neat: Link. We could have submitted some stuff!

Also, there's this angry, fun-to-read, and challenging rant about poetry-makers, like some of us: http://strongverse.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-holds-us-back.html

Finally, are you a hipster? Do you have hipsterish tendencies? Be careful! Not all will appreciate you.

Final Collaborations - Banners - You may like these images

2009-05-22T11:05:00.000-07:00

hollow men

2009-05-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

Danielle Hopper-Sanchez (text based visual artist) & Mindy Song (visual artist)

But these things are...

2009-05-22T10:53:00.000-07:00

Lt. - Vicky MacMillan (visual artist) & Allison Castellano (poet)

Rt. - Grace Mears (visual artist) & Jolene Nolte (poet)

messages of radness...

2009-05-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

Ariel Okamoto (poet) & Colin Snow (visual artist) & Shirly Tagayuna (poet)

...under while street...

2009-05-22T10:38:00.000-07:00

Monica Tzeng (visual artist) & Pablo Guerrero (visual artist)

...but the windows hum

2009-05-22T10:37:00.000-07:00

Rachel Zeleke (visual artist) & Erin Arendse (poet)

...enter with intention

2009-05-22T10:35:00.000-07:00

Michelle Kohout (poet) & Ashley Voelker (visual artist)

...and words are meat

2009-05-22T10:33:00.000-07:00

Melissa Gutierrez (poet) & Julian Francolino (visual artist)

solid seen from California ...

2009-05-22T10:27:00.001-07:00

Matt Gundlach (poet) & Greg Lookerse (visual artist)

Collaboration!

2009-05-12T10:52:00.000-07:00

We've had some fun this semester collaborating, as the images on the right side of this page attest. Erin sent me a link to this utterly enjoyable web project, which shares a spirit of fun that recalled to me the Flaming Lips' parking lot experiments from the late '90s. The hope projects like these carry in them!

student work

2009-05-11T15:40:00.000-07:00

rooms with no windows

couples old and young alike and even the single will glide through
model homes and other reselling dwellings and whisper
about the quality of the view. oh, that the fate of a real estate agent
lies just outside double-panes and other shuttered frames.

what hope for his career without lakeside or skyline?
as the mole thrives underground while the eagle
perches high on mountain pine,
the nearsighted and blind are the real estate agent's Godsent blessings,
the only hearts in which unlovely lots find admiring spots.

- Melissa Gutierrez

Poetry Games

2009-05-02T16:00:00.000-07:00

Last week we made, as an on-the-spot collaboration, versions of renga. Haiku derived from this form of collaborative poetry, which, in a drastically reductive definition, goes likes this: Person A makes a three-line, haiku-like poem. Person B "completes" the poem with a two-line envoy. Person C uses that envoy as the first two lines of a new poem, which she completes by writing another haiku-like poem. And so on. Part of the fun is how the poems keep transforming, and could, endlessly, as long as the energy of the participants holds up. The class was broken into three groups, and here is the result of one group's play:

I ripped the fringe
off of the red silk tablecloth
the plates fell

and the ringmaster's elephant
gave a big trumpet

~

And the ringmaster's elephant
gave a big trumpet

like a saxophone man,
the triangular brass post
shines for pennies

~

Like a saxophone man,
the triangular brass post
shines for pennies

round and round,
falling into the looking pool

~

Round and round,
falling into the looking pool

I grab the neck
of a black swan
who shrinks and sinks

~

I grab the neck
of a black swan
who shrinks and sinks

into dusky night
to sleep, to rest

~

Into dusky night
to sleep, to rest

her hair smelled of vodka and weed
her dress ripped in three places
her mind clouded

[The implied violence in this example was not unusal. Each of the group's poems had something--a cougar grabbing a zoo spectator; a kid getting hit--like this, indicating, perhaps unconsciously, the stress of the end of the semester. Better in a poem than on the streets.]

Practice, Craft

2009-04-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

Here's an article discussing, essentially, the third part of our course, practice, that activity we use to hone our craft. Let's hear it for those who labor!

The Pleasure of Close Reading

2009-04-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

Chapter 5 of Eagleton's How to Read a Poem closely examines a series of verse excerpts in order to define and demonstrate concepts like the texture of a poem, its tone and pitch, and its ambiguous nature. In a recent column in Slate, Robert Pinsky does the same thing with poems by Edward Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins. You can read it here.

Student Work

2009-04-11T11:00:00.000-07:00

A Mind Full

Contemplation and consumption seem to
hit home in the nineteenth year of the
omnibus. With concentration I focused
on the morsels that I consumed
without hesitation. I avoided frustration
and I considered the completion of the omnibus
that had taken nineteen years to reach fruition.
Now, raw is the "tion" of my tongue invalidating
and abandoning the "ing" ending.

- Allison Castellano

~

Costco Can Turn You Into An Obsessive Bitter Overweight Spinster

Alice once told me that she had two vices:
men and Cheez-Its.
I didn't believe her until
she finished a three-pound Costco box
in two days after her boyfriend
left her for a girl on the subway
reading Hemingway.
I told her she deserved better.

She finished another box
and emptied her apartment.

- Shirly Tagayuna

~

Stuck

An empty page stares
Back at me as I labor to get the inside out
My pen held in a cracked hand
Replete with dusty white rivers
Because the air is dry and
Words feel dry.
Much to say but how to convey
A life of hard lessons
The depth of questions
And joy in the day to day?

- Michelle Kohout

~

Morning

traps itself. Sunlight and fog,
dream and arpeggio waking-thought, before
movement, before time are things to be sought.

- Matt Gundlach

Losing Your Bearings

2009-04-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

This past Tuesday, for his contribution to the song-of-the-day part of the class, Kevin showed us the video for the Alphabeat song "Fascination." Why? Because, he said, he liked the song. Good enough for me. The song contained all one can hope for in pop music: it was catchy, light, joyous beyond what the material would seem to warrant. This is what makes songs like this so much fun.

After Kevin played us the video, I played a couple of songs by the Beach Boys that were recorded during the rise and collapse of the SMiLE album. You can read the story here. In the first, unfinished version of "Wind Chimes" that we listened to, we could hear some of composer Brian Wilson's optimism, which came from enjoying an already successful career, a record company backing him after a hugely popular (and pretty strange, if you think about it) single, a rock press repeatedly proclaiming his genius, and a band waiting for its next recordings to inspire an even greater wave of fan adoration. This earlier version of "Wind Chimes," like "Good Vibrations," embodies a proto-hippie utopianism: The wind chimes and the wind and me, man, we're all part of the cosmic order. Heavy.

So when, after recording delays and interpersonal squabbling and record company hostility and nascent fan desertion and the press revoking its endorsement, and after one more Brian Wilson psychic collapse, the Beach Boys re-made "Wind Chimes," in this version, which we also listened to in class, the sound has changed: We now hear a person--and group of people--losing their bearings. It is for me the more interesting of the two recordings. There's more going on musically (listen to the amazing acapella ending!) and thematically: the song predicts and evokes the sinister underside of all that hippie utopianism, creepily expressed later in the decade in the movie Gimme Shelter. By losing his way, Brian Wilson temporarily gained a vision.

We'll read later in the semester Flannery O'Connor's persuasive claim that only by keeping your bearings can you truly see. And maybe this is the truer case for Brian Wilson, as well. Music, and not the stuff that came with it, was what rooted him. He had been singing with his brothers (future bandmates) and sister since they were children, with Mom and Dad at the piano, working out the harmonies of hymns and standards. After his world fell apart, he could still sing with his brothers (and cousin, also in the band). That's what makes this song more substantially hopeful than the earlier version: It charts in its trajectory a means of respite. After the unsettling harmonies and insistent organ and sound effects drop away, what's left is the sound of voices working, harmonically, together. For Wilson, after the darkness, he still could make something, and make it well, and within a community who loved making this thing with him.

Two Poems

2009-04-08T15:27:00.000-07:00

Last night, Heather McHugh gave a reading (with August Kleinzahler) at LACMA, and it was about as scenic a venue as you could hope for. The poets were framed by a huge black painting (or what I took to be a painting) and were flanked by Richard Serra's immense sculptures Sequence and Band. McHugh's introductions were like little lessons in perception, and two poems in particular stood out: "Etymological Dirge" and "With wine and being lost, with," a Paul Celan poem translated by McHugh and Nikolai Popov. I couldn't find this one online, but it's worth seeking out. You can read another of their Celan translations here.

The idea for the reading was inspired: Speaking the well-considered word into a visual Eden. But the acoustics were terrible. The sofest shuffling of feet reverberated throughout the place and seemed to gain volume and momentum, like a roll of thunder. Kleinzahler's habits of delivery made hearing his work particularly difficult, and McHugh's was transmitted more effectively via her positioning of the mic (she stood away from it) and her mild projection, but I still missed a fair amount of what she said. In other words, when putting together future readings, the LACMA people and co-organizer USC might might look for another room on that indulgent, resplendent campus. Gregorian chanters, on the other hand, should be booked immediately.

Art, Reading, Memory

2009-04-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

Last week's issue of the New Yorker contained a wonderful review of a show in New York featuring five paintings from Southern California's Norton Simon Museum. (In the words of the writer, Peter Schjeldahl: "inch for inch, the finest collection of European paintings west of the Mississippi.") Only an abstract of the article is available online, which is too bad, given the number of insightful and provocative claims Schjeldahl makes, many in the first paragraph:

We know what a great painting looks like while we are looking at one. Turning away, we don't exactly forget, but our recall of the experience--how we felt, looking--starts to edit what we saw. Some details and qualities are magnified; others evanesce. With time, the picture becomes more ours and less the painter's. My several visits to the best painting in the world, Velázquez's "Las Meninas" (1656), at the Prado, instruct me in the phenomenon. My first reaction is always disappointment at the coarse, almost drab, handmadeness of the big (but smaller than I thought) canvas, the absence of a glamour that I have cherished in memory and may have refreshed by contemplating glossy reproductions. (Reproductions are pandering ghosts; they tell us what we like to believe.) Then, rather abruptly, I find myself under Velázquez's spell again, as if I had never been before--pitying the fool that I must have been when I last viewed the work. This time I get it! But will I keep it? Not a chance.

And the paragraph continues. (I love that bit about reproductions as "pandering ghosts.") Later, Schjeldahl curses his "memory's fecklessness" when describing a painting he loves by Francisco de Zurbarán, “Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” (1633). This article came to me at an interesting time, as I've been reading--partly for pleasure, partly for a paper I'm to present at a conference next week--Robert Hass's book Time and Materials. I had heard Hass read some of the work in this book five years ago in Lake Tahoe, including a powerful poem called "The World as Will and Representation," a title taken from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. After I heard him read it, I said to the people I was with, who also wrote poetry, "Who are we kidding? We're not poets!" What stuck with me was the poem's final image, of an alcoholic mother drinking and gagging, and of an ending address to the audience (that seemed very wise but in my memory lost all definition) that this image occassioned. Mostly what I kept was a feeling that I had experienced something beautiful and emotionally true.

When I came back to the poem last week, I felt something similar to what Schjeldahl describes, that the work was flatter than I remember, perhaps literally so: seeing it on the page seemed to rob some of its magic. But reading it aloud a couple times, navigating my voice across its sentences and lines, I felt rising in me something Schjeldahl also describes: "This time I get it!" (You can listen to Hass read the poem here. Scroll down to February 21, 2008. The poem is roughly at the 28-minute mark.)

This has been a recurring experience of mine, where my memory seems to threaten to undo--or actually undoes--whatever at-the-time valuable experience my reading seems to be leading me through. Close the book, and what remains for me is a feeling, perhaps vaguely outlined, but the details, or some of the best sentences, remain locked away until time and opportunity affords me a chance to open its pages again. This may be a product of unsystematic reading, or a weakness of memory, or of simply being human. Contextualization may help. The final paragraph of Schjeldahl's essay, like the first, offers a remarkable series of insights into the way paintings (or texts?) are arranged within a collection. The Frick's collection, in New York City, Schjeldahl characterizes by its "relative quietude, propriety, and subtlety," expressed mostly in portraiture and landscape. (He uses these words to describe the originator of the collection, Henry Clay Frick, whose sensibilities mark the paintings found there.) The Norton Simon paintings, on the other hand, are brasher, more emotional and sensual. Schjeldahl says that these paintings "are not made altogether welcome [in the New York museum]. I fancied an irritable shudder in the Frick's sensitively indefinite Chardin, 'Still Life with Plums' (c. 1730), at the blazing Zurbarán's sudden proximity." The paintings themselves talk to--or at least turn up their noses at--each other! Listening to conversations like this may help us remember what we've forgotton.

[Awkwardly pious aside: The problem of memory is not limited to reading literature or looking at paintings. Seeing the news this morning, on the heels of weeks of troubling events, both financial and violent--sometimes both--one can't help feeling there's simply too much to remember, too much or too many to feel responsibility for. (I'm thinking here of Alyosha's notion--from The Brothers Karamasov--of responsibility.) What to do when faced with such overwhelming information, including the usual, recurring crises closer to home? I may write things I take to be poetry, but I can only hope that my inarticulate human speech is translated into something beyond utterance.]

Under the Influence of Moore

2009-04-01T12:25:00.000-07:00

Like Erin's poem, below, here's another poem (written by Jolene Nolte) that works within a Marianne Moore-like syllabic scheme:

City Cats

Somewhere between the Spanish steps and the farm-
er’s market, ancient ruins sit sunken
beside the modern city’s streets. Orange plastic wrapped around
posts keep people out, but stray cats
pay them no heed. What’s the Roman
Empire to them? Bare foundations,
truncated

columns serve as homes, thrones for these fortunate
cats. Seeing them, History gives a little laugh that her
most coveted empire’s re-
conquered, Caesar replaced by these
Roman cats.

Visitors

2009-03-31T14:43:00.000-07:00

We've had the good fortune to have two excellent visiting poets the last couple-three weeks, Caley O'Dwyer and Cecilia Woloch. Both have worked at the intersection of art and poetry. Caley read to us from his series of poems responding to Mark Rothko's paintings, and Cecilia described for us a collaboration she participated in with an artist (whose name escapes me) for a show curated by Beth Shadur in Chicago.

The Wine Maker

2009-03-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

bottle clank against wood,
my heart beats in unison-
as grapes press beneath the wheels
that carry my wife who carries
my child who squints at a
sliding sun overhead.
it is an indian summer this
october and the fermenting fields cry out,
erupting from the vine,
their sharp odor.

the conversations of chickens
flutter like old women gossips
who, over tea, pick apart the newest
plot of dirt.

i listen in.

it just might be a good year.

- Shirly Tagayuna

Another Poem

2009-03-23T22:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem by Ariel Okamoto, written in haiku stanzas (i.e. five syllables/seven/five):

The Poetry of Particle Physics

      At the border of
Switzerland, CERN knows that the
      possibility

      of the Higgs boson
and the rumor of black holes
      run through their giant

      mass of particle
accelerator at speeds
      approaching that of

      light. Physicists grasp
after cosmological
      constants and rethink

      equations spitting
out answers with differences
      of minute quanta.

      Protons shoot on a
collision course, providing
      a fireworks show

      for those who know how
to interpret the soundless
      echoes of strange quarks.

Student Work

2009-03-19T15:08:00.000-07:00

The poetry students have been asked this semester to write poems according to some limitation(s) of their own choosing. So, for example, Melissa Gutierrez has been writing nothing but sestinas. More than one student has been working within syllabic restrictions, as is the case with Erin Arendse. Her poem, below, takes its formal cues from Marianne Moore, but part of the fun of this poem is in how it reveals something about Moore's voice: that it was not just a product of her idiosyncratic commitments to line length or syllabic count. If that were the case, Erin's poem would carry the same aura as Moore's. It doesn't. It carries its own, almost O'Hara-like vibe, while working within the kind of line and stanza limitations we don't see in O'Hara.

Replication with Projector on Vinyl

Searching each cornered tea house and street front
coffee shop hoping the next one will have
          a public restroom
          obliged to order
          every time

“12 oz. house brew please, black.” Each little place
unique yet somehow the same. With Billie
          Holiday crooning
          in the background at
          this one followed

by John Mayer then Norah Jones at the
next. The one on 3rd and State Street has a
          wall full of books, 4th
          and State’s place features
          local working

artisans and a painting of a man
with a coffee mug, staring at walls of
          books just like the one
          on 3rd street. On 6th
          Street, something new:

heat lamp on the veranda, tables for
two and four set in patterns according
          to the rule of odds.
          Gilpin didn’t know,
          neither did Marx,

what he was talking about. You see, I
figured it out. All men are born evil.
          If they weren’t, every
          tea house would have a
          public restroom.

But my grandparents always call at the
worst times and I can’t seem to remember
          what I never meant
          to forget, so I’ll
          answer this one.

“Hello. Yes, I’m fine. How are you?”

~

More poems to come.

Pushing against J. Cornell - student projects

2009-03-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

Worth Watching

2009-03-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

Talk about your vision, voice, and practice!

Hillman on Beauty

2009-03-11T08:18:00.001-07:00

Julian Francolino (class participant), meat, oil on canvas

Kevin Scholl (class participant), Exquisite, mosaic from shredded fashion magazines

In James Hillman's essay, The Practice of Beauty, he considers "Suppose we were to imagine that beauty is permanently given, inherent to the world in its data, there on display always, a display that evokes an aesthetic response. This inherent radiance lights up more translucently, more intensively within certain events, particularly those events that aim to seize it and reveal it, such as artworks." "The artist, of course, does indeed reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary. That is the job - not to distinguish and separate the ordinary and the extraordinary, but to view the ordinary with the extraordinary eye of divine enhancement."

L'Engle, Privilege, and Work

2009-03-09T11:01:00.001-07:00

We read Madeline L'Engle last week, from her book Walking on Water, and I noted this passage in our discussion:

When spring-fed Dog Pond warms up enough for swimming, which usually isn't until June, I often go there in the late afternoon. Sometimes I will sit on a sun-warmed rock to dry, and think of Peter walking across the water to meet Jesus. As long as he didn't remember that we human beings have forgotten how to walk on water, he was able to do it.

I said I was troubled by this passage, because it suggests to me an unawareness on L'Engle's part that her ability to contemplate beauty and faith--in this particular context--derives from her privilege. She has access--by ownership, by friendship, by leisure--to enjoy the beauty of "spring-fed Dog Pond," which raises the question: Is art for the privileged, for the people who have time and means to contemplate it? Is my own participation in art merely a product of being born into an upper-middle-class family, with parents who could finance my higher education while I dabbled in this and that?

This week we'll read Auden, who writes the following about the poet:

The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing? But nobody says this. The self-appointed unqualified nurse says: "You are to sing the patient a song which will make him believe that I, and I alone, can cure him. If you can't or won't, I shall confiscate your passport and send you to the mines." And the poor patient in his delirium cries: "Please sing me a song which will give me sweet dreams instead of nightmares. If you succeed, I will give you a penthouse in New York or a ranch in Arizona."

(Which suggests I'm either failing spectacularly as a writer or I'm singing to the wrong people.)

Free-lance philosopher (really? wow!) Jonathan Ree, on the other hand, suggests there's an ethical upshot to contemplating beauty (which isn't to say all art is conventionally beautiful):

Beauty is not only a source of pleasure but also an ethical summons, requiring us to “renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world,” and offering intimations of the sacred even to those who have no truck with religious belief.

Could it be that the young men in this heartening story, college-educated both of them, and like me, children of privilege, were influenced by beauty, or a contemplation of art? Did their classes in literature or art history--or whatever they took in the humanities--have any influence in their bold plan for revitalizing their hometown, when they could have chosen more personally lucrative paths? Are they, in fact, in the process of renouncing their narcissism? I don't know. But, as L'Engle might say, their actions, seen from the right angle, could be understood as two men remembering how to walk on water.

Poetry of Making Lists

2009-03-06T15:46:00.000-08:00

We talked in class briefly about what I heard the poet Dean Young call "the intrinsic poetry of lists." Marianne Moore often traffics in lists. "The Steeple-Jack," for example, takes a detour from the describing the sea-side town just to revel in list-making, and as we read Frank O'Hara's work in the coming weeks, you'll see the pleasure he takes in listing the activities of an afternoon, especially in what he calls his "I-do-this-I-do-that" poems. Then there's this song, a favorite of my kids, which I had mentioned in class:

It's the excess of lists that often charms. They go on longer than we might expect, and somehow, when they threaten to bore, they can re-enchant us by their momentum and conviction, like a fan whose praise of a singer or movie passes through obsession and into the sublime. (I hope I'm not overstating things...) I've been reading George Herbert's The Temple lately, and the following poem, a list poem, has been something I find myself returning to in the past few weeks for nourishment. Each quality he mentions suggests to him another quality, and another. And another.

Prayer (I)

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;

Engine against th' Almightie, sinners towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloude,
The land of spices; something understood.

That ending! Read the poem again and OUT LOUD.

Listening to the Material

2009-02-26T14:03:00.000-08:00

The Worth of the Work

2009-02-25T08:42:00.001-08:00

A nice example of the kind of work Sayers champions can be examined in this article. My favorite line:

These Brooklynites, most in their 20s and 30s, are hand-making pickles, cheeses and chocolates the way others form bands and artists’ collectives.

It takes work to make this kind of thing happen. And patience. And interest in the thing itself. I'm reminded of Sayers' description of the shareholders of the brewery who don't just want to know about the bottom line but who "want to know what goes into the beer." Such principles of work and patience apply to visual artists and writers, of course, but artists and writers always want to make a mark, to achieve for their work some permanence. What about those who, like these Brooklynites, make something one consumes (in the truest sense) and which, by that consumption, vanishes from the world? There's something lovely in the idea, because it means finding validation in things other than in what is tangible and measurable: community, sustainability, stewardship, the pleasure of process, the worth of the hand-made thing. A show like How It's Made finds its audience in showing us the way what's lying around the house is manufactured. As one writer has pointed out (in an article I can't find), part of the show's mesmerizing appeal is its lack of a human presence. Our stuff - including much of our food - is made mostly by robots on assembly lines. I don't want to paint too broad and unfair a picture, but you don't hear a robot remark about the Fritos it has roasted and bagged, "These are pleasant to the sight and good for food..." Which may be a long way of explaining the appeal Richard Scarry's books have for my children (and me!).

Presentations

2009-02-23T10:23:00.001-08:00

student video in response to"The Fish", by M. Moore

Our first group poet/arist presentations looked at the work of Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore. The presentations focused on the voice and vision of Moore and Cornell's practice.

Confusion of Categories

2009-02-23T09:37:00.000-08:00

One of the things Dorothy Sayers' writes in her essay "Why Work?", written during WWII in a period of scarcity and rationing, a crisis not totally unlike the economic crisis we currently face:

We have had to learn the bitter lesson that in all the world there are only two sources of real wealth: the fruit of the earth and the labor of men; and to estimate work not by the money it brings to the producer, but by the worth of the thing that is made.

The best way to understand "the thing that is made," according to Sayers, is to "serve it." She writes,

[The worker's] satisfaction comes, in the god-like manner, from looking upon what he has made and finding it very good. He is no longer bargaining with his work, but serving it. It is only when work has to be looked on as a means to gain that it becomes hateful; for then, instead of a friend, it becomes an enemy from whom tolls and contributions have to be extracted. What most of us demand from society is that we should always get out of it a little more than the value of the labor we give to it. By this process, we persuade ourselves that society is always in our debt - a coviction that not only piles up actual financial burdens, but leaves us with a grudge against society.

Further, Sayers writes,

The greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making.

Finally, describing how the damage a confusion of categories wreaks on society - in this case, a confusion of the right role of work in a person's life - is not mitigated by good - or even "holy" - intentions, Sayers comments,

No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie. [Emphasis mine.]

This applies to the artist's and writer's work, but also to the furniture maker's, the gardener's, the grocer's, the engineer's and the rest. But it seems especially relevant to this class, where we flirt with the idea of blurring categories. We tread carefully, therefore. A short and entertaining essay, entitled "Great Book, Bad Movie," which explores what happens when you don't tread carefully, can be read here.

Miscellany

2009-02-18T13:10:00.000-08:00

A lot has happened in the past week that has gone undocumented here. Our discussion of Dorothy Sayers' essay "Why Work?" has stayed with me, as has the idea, described a couple posts down, that progress brings tradeoffs. Two columns that address this, one of which is about the movie Wall-E, can be found here and here.

Sayers' essay also prompted my searching of Genesis, some passages of which I shared in class:

And God saw that is was good. - 1:12b

This is the first time this phrase is used in the creation story. One of the OED entries defines 'good' as "Having in adequate degree those properties which a thing of the kind ought to have," a definition anyone who makes should understand.

More:

And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food... - 2:8-9

Here, aesthetic consideration ("pleasant to the sight") is fused with utility ("good for food").

Finally:

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. - 2:15

Before the fall, the man was put to work. He was made to work. Describing Adam & Eve's Edenic labor, Milton has it thusly:

On to their morning's rural work they haste
Among sweet dews and flow'rs; where any row
Of fruit-trees overwoody reached too far
Their pampered boughs, and needed hands to check
Fruitless embraces... v: 211-15

And, last, at the risk of making this post 'overwoody,' a word about 'moral,' as used in Eagleton's definition of poetry, which we discussed yesterday:

A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end. 25

The OED, again, on "moral" (first definition):

Of or relating to human character or behaviour considered as good or bad; of or relating to the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil, in relation to the actions, desires, or character of responsible human beings; ethical.

This seems to comport with Eagleton's elucidation of the term:

...morality in its traditional sense...is the study of how to live most fully and enjoyably; and the word 'moral' in the present context refers to a qualitative or evaluative view of human conduct and experience. 28

This means that poems that don't appear to have a readily discernible moral dimension do, in fact, even poems as (merely) observational as haiku, like this one by Matsuo Bashō:

By the old temple,
peach blossoms,
a man hulling rice.

Ways of Seeing

2009-02-13T15:32:00.000-08:00

Francis Alys:Fabiola

One of the required class texts is John Berger's, Ways of Seeing. In discussing the first chapter we spent a good deal of time talking about issues of reproduction, originality and place. A work of art, the physical object, is created with the intention of physicality. The surface of the work is imprinted with the presence of the artist's actions. It's generally assumed that this surface will be received (seen) by an individual viewer in a specific location offering what Daniel Siedel l refers to as "a unique and complex "hypostatic union" between sensuous material and rational ideas." While reproduction and the technology of distribution provide a democracy of accessibility one does have to seriously consider what is lost in the vision and voice of the work when it is delivered/received via web or powerpoint.

A few days after the class discussion I stumbled into an amazing exhibition at LACMA. Francis Alys: Fabiola, a collection of nearly three hundred objects, all original works, all copies of a single work. The subject matter is a fourth century Christian saint known as Fabiola. The prototype from which every work derives is a lost painting by a late-nineteenth century French academician named Jean-Jacques Henner. Original, reproduction, original.

Learning and Losing

2009-02-12T15:57:00.000-08:00

The discussion about Dorothy Sayers' remarkable "Why Work?" today was fantastic, but I fear her essay can make us (or me) feel despair, given how far things have progressed away, in the last sixty or so years, from her vision of work and society. This afternoon, I was reminded of the following passage from Eagleton, Chapter 1, which speaks to the concerns we have about technological progress and its consequences:

If modern technology can be oppressive, it can also be emancipatory. If it can dilute experiences, it can also increase their accessibility. Even the Giant's Causeway Experience can help to educate us, in however formulaic a fashion. History-as-heritage is arguably preferable to no history at all. Such cultural technology opens up a world of possibility unimaginable to our ancestors. Only a dialectical viewpoint, one which weighs the gains of modernity along with its losses, can do justice to it. And this is inimical alike to the cultural Jeremiahs, for whom civilisation has been going downhill ever since the invention of the wheel, and the wide-eyed cultural progressivists, for whom R.E.M. has thankfully put paid to Rembrandt.

Avant-garde artists like the Futurists and Surrealists plucked new kinds of art from the very speed, flatness, flux, randomness, irregularity, fragmentation and multiplicity of modern experience. A whole new poetics seemed possible. The most celebrated poem of the twentieth centure, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, registers this haemorrhaging of experience from modern urban life, but views it as a spiritual catastrophe. Poets like Mayakovsky, Brecht and Breton, by contrast, did not look upon the emptying of the human subject with horror. Maybe being scooped out and dismantled might prove a prelude to being put together again, this time more productively. To learn something, as George Bernard Shaw remarked, always feels at first like losing something. 20-21.

Can such a (more hopeful) view of modern life fit with Sayers' argument? [UPDATE: In the current issue of the New Yorker, an article about Florida reads as a demonstration of the kind of judgment Sayers describes. A companion video to the article can be viewed here.]

Second Post

2009-02-10T15:45:00.000-08:00

Our first class field trip involved visiting two museums. The first was the Hammer Museum to see "Oranges and Sardines, conversation on Abstract Painting". The title is in reference to Frank O'Hara's "Why I am not a Painter". The second exhibition we visited was at MOCA Pacific Design Center. "To Illustrate and Multiply: an Open Book" This was an extensive survey show of artist books.

View the Marianne Moore slideshow by clicking here.