For my study of an arcane book, I went to a second-hand book store and found this.
I think the schematics, are beautiful and I had insane difficulty trying to bring myself to dismember it for collage purposes. In the end, I couldn't do it. Not only was it beautiful all by itself, but what would I add to it? What to juxtapose?
It kind of reminded my of science diagrams of the brain. All the little parts labeled. As though psychologists could really figure out what each structure does. They have spent so much time studying it and still we have very little idea of what the consciousness is.
I went out for dinner with a man a few weeks ago and he was telling me about how when he was doing a his BSc they were still performing vivisection on white rats. Cutting open their little skulls to disable portions of the brain and see how the rat behavior changed.
I guess I feel too sentimental about the old schematics to ruin them, or make them into something different anyway. They are like something out of a different time. I am sure on some farm somewhere this could actually be put to use, but it certainly seems archaic now.
New Vintage Theatre, is currently doing a series of short plays called The New Vintage Soap Opera and in October I was lucky enough to go and see the Halloween edition.
The play was at the Black Box Theatre in downtown Kelowna. Part of the reason why I chose to see this particular play is because my roommate, Joe Welton , an actor and writer was in the cast. The play was a comedy that satirized soap opera's, with a large cast of ridiculous characters. The play was set at a hotel/bordello and involved a large cast of characters including the bordello's madam, a sinister and wealthy vintner (played by my roommate), his brother (a surfer dude), who in the play was supposed to have killed the vintners ex-wife so she couldn't come back to take his money and he would be free to marry the bordello owner for her wealth, the ex-wife, a snobby rich ditz who throws a Halloween party in this particular edition of the play serial, a journalist, who in the last episode gave birth to a random baby with a mustache, who stole the bordello owners fortune, and quite a few others.
The play was funny and partially improvised. It is always a good experience to get out and see a play. I am not sure how this is going to impact my writing, but it was a good experience all the same. I think that it is illustrative of how writing should be fun and collaborative.
I have had an interesting time in the past year with collaborations. Decidedly, I love them and think that they are one of the most important things to do as a writer, and as an artist.
My first collaborative project was for a class I did last year: Community writing, with Prof. Nancy Holmes. This class was a fantastic opportunity to do a project that would teach us real world creative writing skills, and how to be marketable, and many other things that writing students don't really seem to get in university. Naturally, as is my way I wanted to do a book of poetry. The community we were working on was Rutland so this was going to be a challenge. The thing was, there were two poets in the class who wanted to write a book of poetry, and the project only had room for one book of poetry. I was lucky enough that the other poet was the talented Sarah Megan Hunter, and together we wrote a book of poetry that I would never have been able to create on my own.
Working with another poet was one of the most challenging and fruitful experiences that I have had in university. It was a lesson in structure and compromise. We wrote poems together and separately, bringing them together through the execution of experiments on the poems. We blacked out each other's poetry, and wrote on the same topics. We cut them up and pasted them back together so that I can barely tell now looking back what is mine and what is hers, and ownership, on my end at least didn't matter because it was about the thing that we created together. It belongs to both of us like a kid, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
And this is how I ended up mostly naked on the internet.
Not so fast there, I wasn't completely naked or anything or should I say am not completely naked or anything. Last week a friend of mine approached me. She is a video student and wanted to do a video that featured one of my poems. Naturally, I thought this was awesome. I had modeled for another friend a week or two earlier for her end of term project, which mostly involved me jumping around in a toga in a dark room, doing poses, and pretending to be serious. Honestly, it was fun and kind of a boost to my ego to be asked to help.
I gave my friend a few poems to choose from and she picked one that we then projected on my mostly naked body while I did some vaguely yogic movements. The video ended up being beautiful.
Yes, you can see my breasts, but it is really very tasteful. The film plays with light and shadow, ideas of embodiment, and femininity. The thing I am struggling with is how much credit I want to take for it. I am comfortable with my body. I think we are all too hard on ourselves here in that department, and I think that the world is far too afraid of nakedness.
The question is, how afraid am I of being judged? What my friend created is a thing of beauty. She took a piece of poetry that I care deeply about and made it into something new and different. It was collaborative and something that I am shyly proud of. Giving over a piece of my art to create a whole between us is what collaboration is about. As a feminist why am I afraid? There is no sin in my body as an artwork, it's just a body.
In the Fine Arts gallery at UBCO this November there was an art show that was particularly interesting to me as both a writer and an artist. Brenda Feist, a UBCO MFA graduate, had her grad work featured in an art show entitled Keeper and the Zoo.
The exhibit utilized text elements and collage. In the center of the room hung a very large white cube wood frame. Behind this hung a mobile from the ceiling with wire and clear plastic clouds that cast translucent shadows on the wall behind. One wall was painted black and completely covered in chalk scribbles, this seemed to me to be a practice in mark making and worked to make me feel a bit like I was in a classroom. The other walls, had quotations written in marker on the white walls.
The room felt good to be in, and I think that the show was trying to say something about how we humans are trapped by our own language. The floating cube seemed to say something like think outside of the box, to me, but not so loudly as to be cliche.
Exhibits like this are important to me as a writer, as collage comes very close to what I want to do with poetry. Indeed, I think that collage is a kind of poetry and art, and it`s label as far as this goes is entirely dependent on presentation. The question is, is the work in a book or a gallery?
Poetry, I think, of all written art forms, comes the closest to visual art because of it's nature. Poetry, since Ezra Pound, has functioned strongly on the level of image. Show the reader what you want him or her to feel.
All in all, I enjoyed the show. It was disjunctive and deeply intellectual, touching on problems of semiotics and what it means to be human, or animal.
The public reading is one of those necessary evils in art. Like artist talks and gallery shows. There is something really vulnerable about the experience of doing one. Going to a reading is a bit like going somewhere to get high.
Oral tradition is a drug. It gets the listener into a particular brain state. It's something near meditation but different still. A public reading is a shared dream experience. It is an act of performance that hinges on the power of voice. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in his book Poetry as Insurgent Art, advises the reader that one should never do a Q&A after a reading for exactly this reason: because it takes people out of the dream, it kills the high. I have had the pleasure of going to several readings over this past semester, and have been lucky enough to host a few as well, but this feeling of luck and gratitude is not the way so many writers view the reading experience, and I suppose this should not surprise me considering that the most common fear among humans is public speaking. And it's true, I said it earlier, it is a seriously vulnerable experience. But that's what makes it great.
Most recently, I went to a book launch for one of my professors, Matt Rader. Matt has been published widely as a poet, in such magazines as sub-Terrain, Grain, Event, Malahat Review, Prism International, Broken Pencil, Geist, Fiddlehead, New Quarterly, Paradigm, Stylus, Riddle Fence, Arc, Stylus, Another Lost Shark, and Memewar. He has also published three books of poetry, The Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Across the River Arno, Living things, and Miraculous Hours. His most recent book, the one for which I attended a reading, is called What I Want To Tell Goes Like This. Matt`s new book is a collection of short stories about labour activism on Vancouver Island, some focusing on the life of Albert Goodwin, and activist for unions who was eventually shot and killed.
The reading was set in the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art in downtown Kelowna, (a space that I am very familiar with, as I have hosted my own readings in that gallery and have attended many more, as well as art shows and things). The current show up in the gallery is the Red Dot members show. The November members show at the Alternator, is an annual event that is intended to showcase and sell member art, with a portion of the sales going to the gallery as a fundraiser. The walls were lined with paintings, in seeming in-congruence. It was interesting for me, to see the juxtapositions of these paintings, some of which I recognized from other shows, fascinating that two things placed beside each other can make such a different statement from their meaning on their own. A friend of mine, talented artist and member at the gallery, Lucas Glenn, had a few of his collage pieces from an installation that he did at the end of last year called Goods for Men. The installation was an exploration of hegemonic masculinity. One of the pictures in question was that of a sailing ship with the word BRAVERY. The piece had a completely different feeling to it when placed next to a members gay rights activist piece, all rainbows and people holding hands. The patchwork feel of the installation made the reading feel a bit like being in someone's living room, homey, and the space was pack with people and chairs. The lighting was good, there was wine and beer, and two trays of sushi for everyone to enjoy.
Ashok Mathur, head of creative studies at UBCO, also read from a few of his books and introduced Matt. One of the things I love about these events is the feeling of the crowd, people drifting in and out of focus on the words, fidgeting and unsure of what to do with their hands. Matt got up and read two stories out of his new book, one about a boy who was killed, and then it was over, and people, myself included, were rushing to the book table to buy one of the writers books. He seemed relieved that it was over, and I think most writers are that way. For me, I am always relieved once it has started, because I become as entranced by the voice as anyone in the crowd. It's like the world melts away and there we all are, dreaming the same dream, and I think maybe there is some connection here in the solitude of other peoples minds. A reading as a communal act, filling a hole where religion has failed us. As for the open mics I go to on a monthly and bi-monthly basis. It seems to always be the same people that come out and the same people that read and the same people that go out afterwards, and I think these are the most important kinds of things, because you don't do it for yourself, you do it for everyone else. You do it for the community. If you are doing it for yourself, you're doing it wrong. The only way that we get anywhere is by being there and doing the thing and talking about our friends like the New York poets did because then you make a scene. You make a real scene and then people start paying attention when the scene is over and everyone wishes for those times to come back again and they become golden. I think Elizabeth Bachinsky in her book I Don't Feel so Good, said it best: sometimes the readers were great but most of the time they were our friends and most of us had books and that was fine we published each other in chapbooks and magazines and we thought no one was looking but that someday someone would look and then one day they did and it still didn't matter.
I started this blog talking about Stanley Fish's book, How to Write a Sentence, and here we are again.
Here are the last sentences that I have collected to discuss:
From Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk:
Being tired isn't the same as being rich, but most times it's close enough.
From A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews:
Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I'll become when I leave this town and remembering when I was a little kid and how I loved to fall asleep in my bed breathing in the smell of freshly cut grass and listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.
From Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow, J.K. Rowling:
This weekend, I had the pleasure of creating a Zine with some of my Creative Writing comrades for a school event that is coming up. At some point in the afternoon, the question of self-publishing was brought up, when one of the lovely ladies that was helping with the zine asked me if I thought it was worth her time to publish a collection of poems that she had been working on through Amazon.com and their new independent self-publishing initiatives.
This is really a hard question to answer for someone because it totally depends on intent. There is a stigma that goes with self-publishing (the idea that the work, in question, is not good enough to be published) that makes some writers stick their noses up at the idea. I regrettably have been one of these sorts of writers in the past. The truth is, that my own snobbery in this department came from some ignorance about what self-publishing really means.
There are so many ways to publish things now that make copyright complicated if you are ever planning to have your work published by a "legitimate" publisher. This question of self-publishing has created a sort of tug-of-war between big publishing and independent publishers. Writers want their work to be legitimate but they also want to get their stuff out there. (In the case of my friend, she wants to be done with that group of poems and create a book as an end marker of the way that she used to write, in order to make way for her writing in the future. Which seems to me like a perfectly logical reason to choose to self-publish something.)
Here we are, creating a zine for an event and talking about self-publishing, but the two things are somehow disconnected in the discussion. Making zines is a form of self-publishing. It is making art that enhances and enriches the text. It is, in my opinion, fun and communal and worthwhile.
There is still a part of me that cringes at Amazon's independent publishing directives. It is the squishy-hippy part of me that wonders why a person would want to self-publish something in order to have it look like it was published by one of the big name publishers. Self-publishing to me is about making something beautiful and different. When I look at Amazon's CreateSpace page it is all about marketing and not about art, which is where I think the problem is. It doesn't feel like it is about sticking it to the man, it feels like trying to be the man, and that is something I have never been interested in.
Getting back to the question of whether I think my friend should publish her collection of poems through Amazon's CreateSpace, I have a complicated answer and some questions:
Yes, I think that if a writer feels like something is finished and wants to self publish it as an end-marker of a time or for any other reason, he or she should do that. That is to say, if he or she has no desire to publish them elsewhere (because first publishing rights blah-de-blah).
As far as using Amazon, I have feelings about giving money to massive corporations that are obliterating independent markets and book chains, and none of them are good. (something something I don't shop at Walmart?)
The questions that I am left with are these: Who is your audience? Amazon is looking to help the self-publishing authors sell themselves, so, how likely are the people that shop on Amazon going to buy poetry? How likely is it that online customers are going to buy a book of poetry by someone they haven't heard of? If it isn't about selling, why use Amazon?
All that said, here are some excerpts from the Zine, for your viewing pleasure:
The first thing that we have been asked to do as a class is look for sentences. The assigned readings are out of a book recently published by Stanley Fish, How to Write A Sentence. The book begins by relating the reason for looking at and loving sentences as a writer. Sentences, says Fish (and Annie Dillard) are the paint used by writers. In order to be a writer one must first love sentences, in the same way painters must love paint.
Naturally, I completely agree. However, I want to focus on the advice that Fish gives at the end of the first chapter in which he explains that a study of good sentences requires the imitation of good sentences. This is the same I would argue for all art. Imitation is key to a practice of writing because it teaches you about form and style. This is the same advice given by Austin Kleon in his book Steal Like an Artist.
"Once you get the hang of it -- " says Fish (pg 10), "zeroing in on a form that can then be filled with any number of contents -- you can do it forever."
I see this as fundamentally the work of poetry. Take a form, understand it, break it down and use it. Perhaps this is the way with all art, but I think that it is especially important to the crafting of poetry because you are working specifically with form.
Take a sonnet. Writing a sonnet has rules: It must have 14 lines (except when it doesn't), it must have a particular rhyme scheme (except when it doesn't), it must have a turn or volta somewhere in the middle (except when it doesn't), and it most often discusses love (except when it doesn't). If we take the sonnet form and zero in on what those aspects mean, we poets can break it, use it, change it to being something different and new. In this way Fish seems to be saying, every sentence must be a poem.
I absolutely love this line. It is an excellent reason to subscribe to the poem-a-day from the Academy of American Poets. I took it from the poem Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors, by Richard Siken.
I think I like it because it does something to the brain. It is more powerful still because of the rejoinder on the next line:
I have created RUMMAGE as a journal of writing experiments and an exploration of my writing life and practice.
The weekly posts for this blog are a project for a creative writing class at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, taught by Anne Fleming (2014). The content will come out of the exercises and musings, brought about by this class.
Where to start?
First, a little bit about me: I am primarily a poet and print maker. In my work, I am exploring visual art as a medium for the
expression and exploration of poetry. My work in creative writing in the last
three years has lead me to regard publishing and the creation of books, as a
fundamentally visual practice.
Throughout this summer I have been lucky enough
to have the opportunity to self-publish Genesis,
as a handmade work, (You can see more of this book making project here) which, in turn, has lead me to think of myself as a
printer, or, (although the definitions differ) a print maker. Although I am
fundamentally a poet, I am very interested in how the form of the book and its
content come together to create a cohesive whole.
I am interested in what it means to live in a place and a body, I am interested in the innocence of objects and how humans make meaning of the things around them, and I am interested in how art impacts and reflects culture.
My major project for this class will be the creation of a series of about four chapbooks of poetry and experimental fiction. I will also be creating an art series of prints that reflect these writing projects. I want to explore and experiment with different things, especially the juxtaposition of form and content.
I went out for dinner with a man a few weeks ago and he was telling me about how when he was doing a his BSc they were still performing vivisection on white rats. Cutting open their little skulls to disable portions of the brain and see how the rat behavior changed.
