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Thursday, September 13, 2012
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Review of COLORFORM at Fontana’s (105 Eldridge, Lower East Side).
Made it over to Fontana’s last night for a performance by the concept band Colorform (that’s Colorform Music and Live Art). I don’t use the term “concept band” loosely, it can apply to “acts” as diverse as The Velvet Underground and Pussy Riot, not to mention the compositions of Cage, Berio, Glass, and where art is concerned there is of course the artist/theorist Sol LeWitt (who gave currency to the term), but, really, the term can be used and is indeed over-used to explain and to justify and to “upscale” just about anything. I use it here in its epitome sense to point out what is the real thing—which is to say, in Colorform the idea is realized, and it’s realized live, it happens live. Colorform is a multimedia event that lives up to its name.
Around the early nineteen-sixties there came about the phenomenon we call the “Happening.” A Happening was a live and in great part chance-derived event that could be “staged” anywhere and that, in one way or another, exceeded the spectator’s expectations. More than just the unexpected, Happenings held an element of awe (something unfolding before the spectator’s eye and often including the “spectator’s” involvement—even if only in that he was there to be awestruck, to be “entertained,” or, simply, to bear witness). A Colorform performance is a Happening.
Colorform is variously electric and acoustic with cello, percussion and atmosphere guitar (last night’s show was electric) and is fronted by singer-songwriter-guitarist Kate Logan and artist Sarah Valeri. Both Logan and Valeri are “physical” performers—Logan, who can wail lyrical riffs and in that she is constantly in motion, exuberantly “dancing” to her song and Valeri in that she is (most times, and as she was last night) on her hands and knees in the gestures of an Action painter over a huge “canvas” that is (most times, and as it was last night) stretched out on the floor before the stage. Her gestures bring to mind Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Valeri is an artist just born to create live, “live” as in before an audience, in a performance atmosphere. She puts out as much energy as a drummer.
Colorform lives up to its name, “Music and Live Art.”
Colorform is playing Fat Baby September 15 and on September 27 they’re at Cake Shop. See them now while you can still get up close.
Check out their Facebook Page for the rest of the story—
Colorform Music and Live Art.
by Sarah Valeri of Colorform Music and Live Art at Fontana’s 8/29/12 (detail).
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Made it over to Fontana’s last night for a performance by the concept band Colorform (that’s Colorform Music and Live Art). I don’t use the term “concept band” loosely, it can apply to “acts” as diverse as The Velvet Underground and Pussy Riot, not to mention the compositions of Cage, Berio, Glass, and where art is concerned there is of course the artist/theorist Sol LeWitt (who gave currency to the term), but, really, the term can be used and is indeed over-used to explain and to justify and to “upscale” just about anything. I use it here in its epitome sense to point out what is the real thing—which is to say, in Colorform the idea is realized, and it’s realized live, it happens live. Colorform is a multimedia event that lives up to its name.
Around the early nineteen-sixties there came about the phenomenon we call the “Happening.” A Happening was a live and in great part chance-derived event that could be “staged” anywhere and that, in one way or another, exceeded the spectator’s expectations. More than just the unexpected, Happenings held an element of awe (something unfolding before the spectator’s eye and often including the “spectator’s” involvement—even if only in that he was there to be awestruck, to be “entertained,” or, simply, to bear witness). A Colorform performance is a Happening.
Colorform is variously electric and acoustic with cello, percussion and atmosphere guitar (last night’s show was electric) and is fronted by singer-songwriter-guitarist Kate Logan and artist Sarah Valeri. Both Logan and Valeri are “physical” performers—Logan, who can wail lyrical riffs and in that she is constantly in motion, exuberantly “dancing” to her song and Valeri in that she is (most times, and as she was last night) on her hands and knees in the gestures of an Action painter over a huge “canvas” that is (most times, and as it was last night) stretched out on the floor before the stage. Her gestures bring to mind Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Valeri is an artist just born to create live, “live” as in before an audience, in a performance atmosphere. She puts out as much energy as a drummer.
Colorform lives up to its name, “Music and Live Art.”
Colorform is playing Fat Baby September 15 and on September 27 they’re at Cake Shop. See them now while you can still get up close.
Check out their Facebook Page for the rest of the story—
Colorform Music and Live Art.
by Sarah Valeri of Colorform Music and Live Art at Fontana’s 8/29/12 (detail).
e·
Monday, June 11, 2012
Made it over to the Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn this weekend for EXQUISITE FUCKING BOREDOM, Polaroids by Emma Bee Bernstein. This is the second show of Bernstein’s photography that I’ve been able to see. (She passed away in 2008, at the age of 23.) Both shows have been curated by Phong Bui, who here had access to more than 200 Polaroids from Bernstein’s personal archive and private diary notebooks. Unlike with the photography in her last show, An Imagined Space (Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, 2011), where the photographs were not Polaroids, but were blown-up prints, the photographs here are impervious to any aesthetic angle I might approach them from. Instead, I find I’m nonplused, and my feeling is of implication, insinuation. Trespass. It’s not a sense that what I’m viewing was not meant to be seen, but, rather, it’s the unexpected seeing of myself. One does not lose oneself in Bernstein’s photography, one finds oneself there, and we’re not always prepared for that. If we can base the success of an art on whether we are better off for having seen it, then I can say this art succeeds, and on that basis I can recommend it. (There’s certainly more here than you’ll find in any two-hour movie this coming weekend.) Now until June 25.Emma Bunny, Polaroid, estate of Emma Bee Bernstein © 2007
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Saturday, February 25, 2012
Friday, February 24, 2012
Susan Bee, Recalculating, 2010. (Oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches, from the collection of Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl.)
I am happy to have been able to make it over to the School of Visual Arts (133/141 West 21 Street) last night for a talk and presentation by the artist Susan Bee (see The Susan Bee Interview at E·ratio). This was part of SVA’s ongoing Art in the First Person lecture series. Bee is charming and amusing talking about her work and what I learned increased my appreciation of her paintings significantly and opened a new window on her collaborations, especially those with her husband, the poet Charles Bernstein. Bee is open-minded and undogmatic—and both where concerns issues of aesthetics in her own art and where concerns the role of art generally. She is humorous without being comical and serious without being stern, and this fits well with her Recalculating series: renderings, or, “recalculatings,” of details of scenes from film noir movies. (Her recalculatings add an element of paraphrase to the scenes sometimes bringing to the surface what was otherwise subliminal.) This film noir series of paintings makes up a very small part of her output and as a small series it succeeds. The presentation was too brief to be an actual overview of her work, for instance the series “Philosophical Trees” was left out. She did show some of her most recent paintings and I was deeply impressed by these and by what I would consider their “psychological content” (I was reminded of Hesse’s drawings for his Pictor’s Metamorphoses and C. G. Jung’s drawings in The Red Book). I am very much looking forward to her next show.
Watch the video: Susan Bee: Recalculating: paintings and collaborations.
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Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Next time you’re in a used book store that carries old journals and old art-lit ’zines, look for copies of Atticus Review. Atticus Review was edited by Harry Polkinhorn and David Quattrociocchi.
Featuring mostly concrete and experimental poetry, issue 17 (1989) includes contributions from Dick Higgins, Harlan Ristau, Clemente Padin, Jake Berry, Kevin Schiedermayer, Norman Conquest, Greg Autry Wallace, Ronald D. Rosen, John Eberly, Ruggero Maggi, Trudy Mercer, Petr Sevcik, Mike Miskowski, James Cushing, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, Barry Casselman, John Stickney, Serse Luigetti, Chris Winkler, Guttom Nordo, Kent Clair Chamberlain, Greg Evason and Erik Belgum. Highly collectable.
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Saturday, February 11, 2012
a noun sing e·ratio 15 · 2012
with poetry by
Morgan Harlow, Candy Shue, Jan Lauwereyns, Doris Neidl, Tim Trace Peterson, Jen Besemer, Sheila Squillante, Lisa McCool-Grime, Natalie Watson, Julie Wood, Kristina Marie Darling, Felicia Shenker, Scott Bentley, J. Crouse, Bob Heman, James Davies, Dylan Harris, Michael Sikkema, Kent Leatham, Parker Tettleton, Bobbi Lurie, Lauren Marie Cappello, Erin Heath, Wynne Huddleston, Jane Olivier, Elise, Nathan Thompson, Tim Wright, Tim VanDyke, Iain Britton, Ian Hatcher, C. Brannon Watts, Seth Tyler Copeland, Rich Murphy, J. D. Nelson, Howie Good, Monty Reid, Dave Shortt, Billy Cancel, John Clinton, Thomas Fink, Larry Ziman, Valery Oisteanu, Michael Crane, Jon Cone, Mark Cunningham, Rick Marlatt, Nikolai Duffy, Alessandro Cusimano, Jacob Russell, Corey Wakeling, Stephen Nelson, Steve Gilmartin, James Valvis, Greg Cohen, Derek Henderson, Travis Cebula, Sean Howard, Walter Ruhlmann and Márton Koppány
and featuring
The Mallarmé Project, an examination of a yearlong series of art and writing in Seattle by Joseph F. Keppler
and
The Susan Bee Interview
E·ratio is edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino with contributing editors Joseph F. Keppler and Lauren Marie Cappello
E·ratio is reading for issue 16, the fall 2012 issue.
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with poetry by
Morgan Harlow, Candy Shue, Jan Lauwereyns, Doris Neidl, Tim Trace Peterson, Jen Besemer, Sheila Squillante, Lisa McCool-Grime, Natalie Watson, Julie Wood, Kristina Marie Darling, Felicia Shenker, Scott Bentley, J. Crouse, Bob Heman, James Davies, Dylan Harris, Michael Sikkema, Kent Leatham, Parker Tettleton, Bobbi Lurie, Lauren Marie Cappello, Erin Heath, Wynne Huddleston, Jane Olivier, Elise, Nathan Thompson, Tim Wright, Tim VanDyke, Iain Britton, Ian Hatcher, C. Brannon Watts, Seth Tyler Copeland, Rich Murphy, J. D. Nelson, Howie Good, Monty Reid, Dave Shortt, Billy Cancel, John Clinton, Thomas Fink, Larry Ziman, Valery Oisteanu, Michael Crane, Jon Cone, Mark Cunningham, Rick Marlatt, Nikolai Duffy, Alessandro Cusimano, Jacob Russell, Corey Wakeling, Stephen Nelson, Steve Gilmartin, James Valvis, Greg Cohen, Derek Henderson, Travis Cebula, Sean Howard, Walter Ruhlmann and Márton Koppány
and featuring
The Mallarmé Project, an examination of a yearlong series of art and writing in Seattle by Joseph F. Keppler
and
The Susan Bee Interview
E·ratio is edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino with contributing editors Joseph F. Keppler and Lauren Marie Cappello
E·ratio is reading for issue 16, the fall 2012 issue.
e·
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Joseph F. Keppler on Ralph La Charity
THOUGHTS PROMPTED BY POEMS
ARRIVING WITH YESTERDAY’S MAIL
That ancient Greeks worked in the language and culture of their day comes as no surprise. Nor should it be a surprise that a contemporary American poet like Ralph La Charity works in his. Yet the consequences of being an artist in far different times and places are too little appreciated.
It is a small book La Charity sent me. Four 8½ by 13 sheets are folded in half and stapled to become a 16-page, 6½ by 8½ book, entitled flawed man drowns. For images, the booklet has three surrealist collages.
Reflecting on the once inspired Seattle poetry scene I remember the pro-vocative, confrontational way La Charity presents himself and his poetry. This seems to me to be how La Charity composes: to write poetry in con-temporary American English, speak like Homer, think like Socrates.
Yet our present language is, like us, full of sales and fury, signifying noth-ing. Just listen to radio, television, or the conversations around you. Today it seems much talk is a racket we make to one another. American English is maybe as stuck-up, musical, and abstract as Periclean Greek but surely not as momentous, meticulous, or particularly philosophical. The U.S. is not ancient Greece, and Bengal Cincinnati, La Charity’s home, not bronzed-armored Athens. Differences time takes take time. La Charity is practicing an ancient poetics in our noisy streets’ exhaust and exhaustion.
He performs poetry like a traveling rhapsode from a long-forgotten legend. Sometimes he’s a bard accompanied with music. He recites from memory and repeats stock phrases the same way oral poets like Homer have always done. Playing his voice and his words he appears to enter a trance as his rhythms work their way through his mind. He also wrestles with countless demons in league against divine poetry and that means challenging his con-temporaries. With Socratic insistence, he probes their knowledge and deliv-ers their affectations.
Poets like Ed Dorn, Lew Welch, and Roberto Valenza he admires. Using their work to accompany his own, he memorializes a period only slightly past. Other names in his poems are little known outside the poetry world and require footnotes like those supplied by scholars who translate the com-pany of Plato’s or Xenophon’s Socrates. Those who know who ‘Major’, ‘Bill’, and Tom Beckett are can better realize that in a poem like ‘pithy yet over’ La Charity is taking to task the publisher and editor of The Difficulties and E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S (the one a journal focussing on lan-guage-school poets, the other a series of poet interviews). La Charity criti-cizes this apparently sophist editor’s choice to surround himself with aca-demic starlight while slighting the lights shining in his own neighborhood.
Other poems in the booklet range from the sweeping Taklimakan Desert to La Charity’s own sense of what his life really means. In ‘flawed man drowns’ the poem that gives the book its title, La Charity writes his Apol-ogy. He wonders, “so what will it feel like to be deeply me/doing the very thing I want to & must do” when drawn into “the obliviating proverbial gun-fight armed / only with a smattering of mattering . . . dependent upon / the silent tympanic of strangers?”
Like La Charity we can only wonder what if any poetry from today might become as immortal as the ancient epics. We cannot decide that; it is not our decision or a decision at all.
Rather it is for poets to oblige greatness while alive and then to die like and unlike everyone else:
The dead do
not oblige
they do so
indefatigably.
For those interested in this unique booklet or in his poetics, La Charity’s email is raself@hotmail.com.
Joseph F. Keppler
Seattle, Autumn 2011
Joseph F. Keppler’s essay, The Mallarmé Project, an examination of a yearlong series of art and writing in Seattle, will appear in E·ratio 15.
e·
THOUGHTS PROMPTED BY POEMS
ARRIVING WITH YESTERDAY’S MAIL
That ancient Greeks worked in the language and culture of their day comes as no surprise. Nor should it be a surprise that a contemporary American poet like Ralph La Charity works in his. Yet the consequences of being an artist in far different times and places are too little appreciated.
It is a small book La Charity sent me. Four 8½ by 13 sheets are folded in half and stapled to become a 16-page, 6½ by 8½ book, entitled flawed man drowns. For images, the booklet has three surrealist collages.
Reflecting on the once inspired Seattle poetry scene I remember the pro-vocative, confrontational way La Charity presents himself and his poetry. This seems to me to be how La Charity composes: to write poetry in con-temporary American English, speak like Homer, think like Socrates.
Yet our present language is, like us, full of sales and fury, signifying noth-ing. Just listen to radio, television, or the conversations around you. Today it seems much talk is a racket we make to one another. American English is maybe as stuck-up, musical, and abstract as Periclean Greek but surely not as momentous, meticulous, or particularly philosophical. The U.S. is not ancient Greece, and Bengal Cincinnati, La Charity’s home, not bronzed-armored Athens. Differences time takes take time. La Charity is practicing an ancient poetics in our noisy streets’ exhaust and exhaustion.
He performs poetry like a traveling rhapsode from a long-forgotten legend. Sometimes he’s a bard accompanied with music. He recites from memory and repeats stock phrases the same way oral poets like Homer have always done. Playing his voice and his words he appears to enter a trance as his rhythms work their way through his mind. He also wrestles with countless demons in league against divine poetry and that means challenging his con-temporaries. With Socratic insistence, he probes their knowledge and deliv-ers their affectations.
Poets like Ed Dorn, Lew Welch, and Roberto Valenza he admires. Using their work to accompany his own, he memorializes a period only slightly past. Other names in his poems are little known outside the poetry world and require footnotes like those supplied by scholars who translate the com-pany of Plato’s or Xenophon’s Socrates. Those who know who ‘Major’, ‘Bill’, and Tom Beckett are can better realize that in a poem like ‘pithy yet over’ La Charity is taking to task the publisher and editor of The Difficulties and E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S (the one a journal focussing on lan-guage-school poets, the other a series of poet interviews). La Charity criti-cizes this apparently sophist editor’s choice to surround himself with aca-demic starlight while slighting the lights shining in his own neighborhood.
Other poems in the booklet range from the sweeping Taklimakan Desert to La Charity’s own sense of what his life really means. In ‘flawed man drowns’ the poem that gives the book its title, La Charity writes his Apol-ogy. He wonders, “so what will it feel like to be deeply me/doing the very thing I want to & must do” when drawn into “the obliviating proverbial gun-fight armed / only with a smattering of mattering . . . dependent upon / the silent tympanic of strangers?”
Like La Charity we can only wonder what if any poetry from today might become as immortal as the ancient epics. We cannot decide that; it is not our decision or a decision at all.
Rather it is for poets to oblige greatness while alive and then to die like and unlike everyone else:
The dead do
not oblige
they do so
indefatigably.
For those interested in this unique booklet or in his poetics, La Charity’s email is raself@hotmail.com.
Joseph F. Keppler
Seattle, Autumn 2011
Joseph F. Keppler’s essay, The Mallarmé Project, an examination of a yearlong series of art and writing in Seattle, will appear in E·ratio 15.
e·
Saturday, December 31, 2011
E·ratio's reading period for issue 15 is in full swing. If you're awaiting a response, please know you'll have one very soon. Meanwhile the issue is in production and we're expecting to go online sometime January 2012. It is the policy at E·ratio to continue reading submissions, and making acceptances, right up until publication time.
The number of submissions at E·ratio has been enormous, and, consequently, so has the work load, and so for the first time I have taken on two contributing editors to help shape future issues. Joining me at E·ratio are Joseph F. Keppler, sculptor, poet and theorist out of Seattle, WA, and Lauren Marie Cappello, poet out of New Orleans, LA.
If you are still awaiting a response to your submission, or you are awaiting your proofs, I apologize for the delay, and I thank you for your patience.
Issue 15 will be the biggest issue yet.
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Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Foreword by Jack Foley
Foreword by Carey Scott Wilkerson
A Parson, A Prior, A Parlour
Tender Telemetry
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
Catching Up
The Valise
Crossing Legs
Banjo
Jubilee
Mercury
Sills
Aver
The Archaeology of Palestine
Rummy
Warrens
Conklintown Road
Barker
Clapping Hands (Portrait of Beth Weisser)
Labor Day
The Crocodile
Sailcloth
Janes
January 2012
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Congratulations to Mark Young whose poem, “A line from Paracelsus,” which appeared in E·ratio 14, was selected by John Tranter for The Best Australian Poems 2011.
Congratulations, Mark Young!
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Friday, August 05, 2011
“all that is not you. I”
Notes after from IDYLLS & RUSHES by Susana Gardner (Dusie Kollektiv, spring 2011).
The book begins (?) with a quote from the writer Colette,
To write is the joy and the torment of the idle. Oh to write!
The binding (stapled, hand-made, folded pages, 3.75” x 3.75”) is covered by a remnant of text from the short novel, The Vagabond, also by Colette. The chap slips into a slip-case made from (read: recycled) a heavy-gauge page from a. . . . *
(This sounds like an autopsy. ORIGIN mid 17th cent. (in the sense [personal observation] ): from French autopsie or modern Latin autopsia, from Greek, from autoptēs ‘eyewitness,’ from autos ‘self’ + optos ‘seen.’)
“Kollektiv.” Modes of production and distribution. This chap is about a mode of production and distribution. Is this economics or poetics? What is my relation to this “chap”? Every “poem” is entitled, “(one).”
(one)
Freedom others bitter tonic
subtle certainties proof reflection
idiosyncratic looking-glass woman
among nuances class
rhythmical language, thought
(one)
Fate, keep away conquest
bouquet deference silent their
letters-physical, urgent,
brutal. Awkward
my garrulous love, idylls& rushes.
What is my relation to this poetry? Poetry depends, for its continued vitality and for its downright existence, upon the avoidance of definition.
* This reminds me of Janson’s. In Janson’s, names with the abbreviation “St.” are indexed/alphabetized under “saint,” as though they were spelled out. I appreciate that.
e·
Notes after from IDYLLS & RUSHES by Susana Gardner (Dusie Kollektiv, spring 2011).
The book begins (?) with a quote from the writer Colette,
To write is the joy and the torment of the idle. Oh to write!
The binding (stapled, hand-made, folded pages, 3.75” x 3.75”) is covered by a remnant of text from the short novel, The Vagabond, also by Colette. The chap slips into a slip-case made from (read: recycled) a heavy-gauge page from a. . . . *
(This sounds like an autopsy. ORIGIN mid 17th cent. (in the sense [personal observation] ): from French autopsie or modern Latin autopsia, from Greek, from autoptēs ‘eyewitness,’ from autos ‘self’ + optos ‘seen.’)
“Kollektiv.” Modes of production and distribution. This chap is about a mode of production and distribution. Is this economics or poetics? What is my relation to this “chap”? Every “poem” is entitled, “(one).”
(one)
Freedom others bitter tonic
subtle certainties proof reflection
idiosyncratic looking-glass woman
among nuances class
rhythmical language, thought
(one)
Fate, keep away conquest
bouquet deference silent their
letters-physical, urgent,
brutal. Awkward
my garrulous love, idylls& rushes.
What is my relation to this poetry? Poetry depends, for its continued vitality and for its downright existence, upon the avoidance of definition.
* This reminds me of Janson’s. In Janson’s, names with the abbreviation “St.” are indexed/alphabetized under “saint,” as though they were spelled out. I appreciate that.
e·
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
I am reading Around the Outsider: Essays presented to Colin Wilson on the occasion of his 80th birthday edited by Colin Stanley and published by O-Books.
Read my review of the documentary Strange is Normal: The Amazing Life of Colin Wilson.
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Monday, August 01, 2011
Happy to have been able to make it over to the first annual New York Poetry Festival yesterday, which was held on Governors Island. Can you spot the poet in this photograph?
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