infusoria

infusoria: the movie

2009-05-02T21:02:00.002+02:00

I spent this afternoon at Svend Thomsen's place putting the titles on his film of the exhibition. It is the first time I'd seen it, and with real life getting in the way a bit the last few weeks, I'd pretty much forgotten he was working on it.

You know how often you come away from an exhibition and the catalogue, postcards, leaflets or whatever just don't hit the spot? They miss the magic? And you end up buying a postcard anyway as a reminder of something that isn't in the picture? Well this is a whole different thing. It's all there. Short of actually letting you mess around with the dice and music box and magnifying glass yourself, it has everything.

You will have a chance to see it soon, I promise: it is absolutely exquisite.

Jessica Smith, a.rawlings, Helen White

2009-05-02T20:46:00.003+02:00

Jessica Smith: Veil

a.rawlings: rule of three

Claire took this amazing picture of the shadows cast by angela's poems

Helen White
I like giving away my pebbles to people. Dirk Vekemans swapped me a pebble for this lovely little Buddha, who spent the rest of the exhibition as part of my piece. He lives on my bedside table now (the Buddha, not Dirk).
These last two pictures are stills from Svend Thomsen's film.
I think this last one in particular comes closer to what I was trying to do than the piece itself - thanks Svend!

People

2009-04-23T23:01:00.002+02:00

A few of the visitors on the last day of the exhibition:
A man who came back three times (one of the neighbours who got an infusoria flyer through his door). His only comment was that the exhibition was strange, that I obviously liked strange things, but he kept coming back for more. A woman who said she had enjoyed the exhibition, to which I replied with my belief that if one person takes something away with them then the whole thing is worthwhile. A man from India who happened to be walking past about half an hour before the very end: he kept repeating that if he had walked the other way home, he would never have known. Many people walking by who look through the windows, sometimes for quite a while, but don't come in.

There are two particular things about infusoria that matter to me. One is providing a gathering place and an opportunity for communication between the participants. The other is offering visitors that butterfly-winged experience of seeing something beautiful when you are not really expecting it. I didn't think I'd be able to tell whether people "get anything" out of the exhibition or not: politeness and shyness can both get in the way. But with strangers I have found that I often can tell. Some clearly walk away unmoved, even irritated; others take the trouble to tell me they were glad they'd bothered to step off the footpath and come inside.

Sharon Harris, Moniek Darge, Ayşegül Tözeren

2009-04-23T22:56:00.003+02:00

Sharon Harris

Sharon and Moniek

Moniek Darge

Ayşegül Tözeren

Two calls for work from House Press

2009-04-20T22:50:00.002+02:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: derek beaulieu
Subject: concrete / visual

hey folks;
i'm making an occasional concrete / visual poetry "magazine" (read: multi-page leaflet / handout / ephemeral item) which will feature new visual poetry, with possible historical / rare examples ... do any of you have work you could perhaps email me which i could include?

im thinking previously unpublished (or if published, then infrequently seen...)... colour or B&W is fine, email or snail mail is also good.

id be honoured to include work from any of you (the deadline is open, i'll publish when i have enough feature-able work) ...
feel free to forward this call on to people who's work you think i should know of...

thanks!
d

derek beaulieu
derek at housepress dot ca
-----------------------------------------

And - separately, I think? - House Press is accepting submissions for Source Material 04 until 20th May. That's all the information I have, although there is a pdf of SM03 on the link above.

Silke Rath's exhibition in Germany, 3 - 17 May 2009

2009-04-20T22:47:00.002+02:00

Michelle Detorie, Silke Rath, Alixandra Bamford

2009-04-20T22:35:00.004+02:00

Michelle Detorie, Lunar Baedeker

No, really, "ecatstic." It's Claire's word for how cats feel when you stroke them till their bones go runny.

Michelle Detorie, Cleromancy

Every time I walked past 'Cleromancy,' the dice were in a different position. People couldn't leave them alone.

Silke Rath, Horizont and B

Silke Rath, Mallarmé

Alixandra Bamford, Tasseomancy

Jennifer Scappettone's new book is out

2009-04-16T19:25:00.002+02:00

From Dame Quickly can be ordered from SPD.

Although I wish SPD had a surface mail option for Europe. $18 for a $15 book is too much. Hmmm... maybe I can set up some kind of underground book-trafficking network with visiting poets... or graft wings onto bindings and implant a migratory instinct...

... or stop whingeing and just pay the Fedex bill. Yes, good plan, Helen.

angela's angles

2009-04-16T19:17:00.006+02:00

So you can see things how someone else sees them...

(with thanks to angela for letting me plunder her facebook album)

Sharon Harris, Blues

Jessica Smith, Veil (as modelled by the lovely Xavier Roelens)

Maja Jantar

a.rawlings

Moniek Darge

Jenny Sampirisi

Helen White

Alixandra Bamford

Angela Szcepaniak and Jennifer Scappettone

Derya Vural and Maja Jantar

2009-04-14T12:17:00.005+02:00

Derya Vural

So mindlessly

As Derya explained before, her calendar project is a record of visual poetry 'days.' So I figured if there was one day whose associations I might understand even though I have never met Derya in person, it would be November 4th 2008. I found a black circle and three white K's; my friend Magali found the stars and stripes. I like the green patches on there too...

Here are two other individual poems from the series:

the last rebellion against the grey

without 'where' and'why'

Maja Jantar

Maja exhibited different work this time. Since we weren't allowed to hammer nails into the walls of the Zilverhof, it would have been too difficult to hang the Marilyn series she exhibited in Brussels. This series is made of bamboo leaves in translucent rice paper, and is inspired by Chinese characters. I felt that it resonated in certain ways with Jessica Smith's veils on the other side of the room.

a.rawlings and Isabeella Beumer at Logos (2nd April)

2009-04-13T19:35:00.013+02:00

It was a fantastic concert. I'm still not really up for reviewing - conversations with angela, Jelle, Maja, Claire make more sense to me - but here are some pictures etc.

a.rawlings
angela's performance began with a short reading from Wide Slumber, which she dedicated to Claire. High up at the back, behind the camera, Claire's jaw dropped so far I thought I might have to crawl under the seats to retrieve it.

She followed it with her new Cochlea manuscript - with the line 'Robots in Ghent' there could be no better place to perform it - and an excerpt from Environment Canada. I want to hear them again, especially the permutating, perhaps spiralling, sound patterns in Cochlea.

I already posted a short clip of her improvisation with Maja a while ago, but here it is again to save you having to look for the older post:

Looking at it now, it is spooky how closely matched they were (that's angela on the left there and Maja on the right, for anyone getting confused). I hope the film gives an idea of how awesome it was. The performance was based on a tarot reading: a three-card spread (i.e. past, present, future) using only the major arcana. And they did shuffle the pack; it was a genuine improvisation. The film shows the first two cards, can you guess them? Go on. Maja told me the answers afterwards; I guessed the second one but not the first.

Isabeella Beumer's performance made an impressive contrast: the generation difference and a solo, virtuoso performance of relatively fixed pieces rather than a collaborative improvisation. Beumer reminded me of Meredith Monk in certain ways: her incredible range and virtuosity, and her fascination with voice techniques from other parts of the world. There were moments when she had me completely mesmerised, and predictably enough those were the parts where I lacked the wherewithal to press down the camera button. So the films aren't the best bits of the performance, but I have two excerpts from near the beginning:

... and a little piece of the encore. The entire performance was unaccompanied voice: there's no backing tape or instrumental accompaniment apart from the little percussion instrument you can see in the second clip.

web archive of infusoria exhibition

2009-04-12T17:11:00.003+02:00

Just to give you advance notice of my plans for the next few months:

It's still going to take me a while to get everything together, but I do have plans to create a permanent web archive of the exhibition. I'll be e-mailing round later to ask your permission to include photos or 'original' jpgs of your work.

I also hope to make a print-quality pdf catalogue of infusoria and put it on Krikri's website for free download. Since some of the work in the exhibition has been published elsewhere, there may be restrictions on what I can include, but hopefully there will be something pretty in pdf format by the end of the summer.

Several people have asked about a print catalogue, and we did look into using Lulu, but it works out too expensive from Europe because of the postage costs. Hopefully the pdf will be an affordable and environmentally friendly alternative.

In the meantime, if you have any suggestions, objections etc., you know where to find me...

Jennifer Scappettone and Suzan Sari

2009-04-12T16:50:00.003+02:00

Suzan Sari

red leopard

times up roman

without pressed by its name

Jennifer Scappettone
Text: "arrow humm--"
Text: "not brightsome but excess-"

Logos robot orchestra: Jokes

2009-04-10T21:08:00.007+02:00

If you can't come to Belgium and see the Robot Orchestra for yourself, click here and scroll down to the little video of Godfried explaining how they work. No, seriously, click on this. If you don't watch any other internet films all month, watch this one. There's nothing like it anywhere else on the planet.

Besides infusoria, Krikri helped to organise two concerts at Logos during the Literaire Lente: the robot orchestra 'Jokes' concert on April 1st and performances by angela rawlings and Isabeella Beumer on April 2nd. I've been thinking all week about whether or not to review them for the blog; since most of you are outside Belgium and don't have any way of comparing my opinions with anything else, I've decided not to. But if anyone who was at the concerts wants to blog or comment about them on here, go for it, I'm all for multiple voices. Send me a mail and I'll publish it.

I still plan to tell you a bit about the concerts though, if for no other reason than Logos' eye- and ear-popping wierdness. There is an <M&M> or mens en machine - human and machine - concert every month in the Logos Tetraeder, with music composed by the in-house composers at Logos as well as outsiders and played by various combinations of humans and electronic/mechanical instruments. Claire and Svend were filming, so at some point I may be able to post snippets of video. In the meantime, you'll have to imagine Scott Joplin's Entertainer played first by one of Moniek Darge's music boxes and then by a boisterous full orchestra (arr. Sebastian Bradt):

Twenty-four well-tempered fire alarms dolefully wailing a Bach chorale (arr. Godfried-Willem Raes). Each set at a different pitch, they crooned and faltered their way through while angela and and I tried to bite back our guffaws...

A "hello angela" composition by Kristof Lauwers, based on recordings by bp nichol. (I never did get that photo of angela, Maja, Claire and myself standing together with our hair up. Roll over bp, Steve & co, we're the Four Ponytails ...)

This is Moniek's piece for electronic violin and robots...

And here is Godfried trying to trigger the robots' infrared sensors with popcorn. Normally he uses the sensors to react to human movement, which means that the robots produce sounds in response to dance, but here the popping corn is making the robots whistle and clatter...

After the interval (with fresh popcorn), French-Belgian poet Vincent Tholomé and Logos composer Yvan Vander Sanden premiered a voice/robot collaboration. Vincent had never worked with the robots before, but it was fantastic. His poems are usually anecdotes or inner monologues in prose, featuring all kinds of quirky characters and usually with a certain degree of improvisation.

Unusually for Logos, the piece also had a light show, with whirling lights on several of the robots accompanying Vincent's tantalizingly slow-paced, looping text and Yvan's spooky soundscape.

As far as I know, none of Vincent's work has been translated into English (time to start shaking your translator thing at it, Helen,) but he has two books in French out from Maelstrom - People and no entry - for anyone who needs an evening full of belly laughs at three euros apiece.

More pictures: Angela Szczepaniak and Rebecca Eddy

2009-04-10T20:39:00.005+02:00

Rebecca Eddy

Escapology

Cadenza

Hypothetic syringe
I asked Rebecca to send all five of the pieces she suggested because I loved them all. We displayed them all in Brussels, as you probably saw on earlier photos, but the way we set up the space in Ghent meant that we only had space for four. But here is 'Hypothetic syringe' again for you in close-up.

Angela Szczepaniak

Clicking on the pictures will enlarge them to legible size, of course.

hellooooo

2009-04-07T23:50:00.004+02:00

I'm still here ...

... and I'll be posting again as soon as I get half an hour to myself. For the last few days I've been trying to catch up on all the 'real work' I was neglecting during the exhibition, as well as starting new things with angela.

Can't resist

2009-04-05T23:40:00.001+02:00

Linking to this

Estelle Boelsma

2009-04-03T13:29:00.004+02:00

Sadly Estelle's film didn't make it here in time for the Brussels edition, but it is very much here in Ghent:

5.11

“Boredom is the desire for desire.” Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

My focus is perceived reality, in all its repetitive banality; it is a question of magnifying apparently pointless actions; what is normally concealed in activity is accentuated. The moment is stretched out almost into infinity; one sees that “this is what there is.” The separate film fragments present scenes that only refer to themselves. They do not communicate. The story they tell is of a world where otherness is irrelevant.

~~~~~~~

Estelle Boelsma (1971) is a visual artist and poet. She studied at the College of Visual Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands. She has published poems in 'De Revisor', 'De Brakke Hond', 'Op Ruwe Planken' and 'Lava'. In 2006 she founded the e-zine blue-turns-grey with Edwin Fagel, which is for and about visual art, literature and poetry. Her short films have been shown at film events and exhibitions.

When vispo goes viral ...

2009-04-03T12:33:00.003+02:00

I have thoughts and opinions most days about visual poetry in general and infusoria in particular. I have a blog post from last week in which I say everything I want to say about my own work. I even distinctly remember writing a Masters thesis all about visual poetry. So did I tell the nice television lady any of that? Did I fandango. I read the back of my green box poem and paraphrased that, putty-brains.

In our defence, the television station first called Jelle to arrange things about an hour in advance. It wasn't some spectacular feat of organisation and publicity on our part; none of us had any idea it was going to happen. If I had had a little more presence of mind, I would have asked to talk about the organisation of the exhibition itself, which interests me, rather than about my work, which basically doesn't.

And one of the things I might have said - not that it would really make sense in a three-minute spot - is how excited I am about the possibilities of new media for semi-underground or otherwise low profile art forms. I need to blog about it in more detail when I have time to gather my thoughts, but clearly Facebook and blog providers have changed everything. The people who are interested in what Krikri does are never, never going to be all in the same country - or even the same continent - at the same time. But there are so many possibilities for community.

I am reminded of Carlfriedrich Claus, a visual poet who lived in East Germany all through the Cold War. He corresponded fairly intensively with poets in the West and published regularly in Belgium and elsewhere despite the Iron Curtain. (Possibly because his poems are huge tangles of illegible handwriting. The censors must have gone home weeping.)

If he can do that, we can do anything.

a.rawlings and Maja Jantar improvising at Logos

2009-04-03T02:32:00.005+02:00

Yesterday was the first time I tried using my camera to make films. So this post was just an experiment to see what happened and whether any trace of a stunning performance would still be audible/visible in a 2x3 inch moving picture.

Svend and Claire did make proper films again of the whole evening, but it will take them much longer to do editing and get them online.

I have more.... you are going to be so excited when you see my more .... but I'm going to try and keep the posts as chronological as I can.

Infusoria report on AVS television

2009-04-02T02:06:00.007+02:00

I finally got home to see it long, long after you all posted it on facebook, you famous filmstars you... there's an English transcript below.

Vanessa: The first days of summer also mark the beginning of the Literaire Lente [‘Literary Springtime’ festival] this week in Ghent. If you’re up for a king-size portion of culture, there is a whole range of literary activities to choose from. The infusoria exhibition in the Zilverhof for example, which focuses on visual poetry.

Jelle: ‘Infusoria’ is actually the word for little, microscopic water creatures, but in this case it refers to an exhibition with work by seventeen female poets from three continents. The intention of Helen White, the curator, was to show that all sorts of things have been happening in visual poetry since the seventies, and particularly in work by women. It is a whole different way of looking at poetry and what poetry, and by extension visual poetry, can mean.

Vanessa: Don’t come here expecting readings from poetry books. What you will find is a creative and playful treatment of poetry.

Helen: This is a little series about the different layers you find in language. So on the surface of course there is the semantic level, the meaning of the words, but just by the way you write, using handwriting or typing or with crossings out or whatever, you get different layers of meaning. It is a kind of body language in addition to the semantic language, the meanings. I have worked with lots of different layers to try and convey that. I often work with illegible texts. There are little fragments of a poem on each of the pebbles, which is an attempt to say the same thing.

Angela: These nine poems are part of a longer piece called ‘Rule of Three.’ There are seventy- eight visual poems like this in that series and they’re designed to be eventually printed on tarot cards. I’m very very interested in working with found text and found image, so the image that appears throughout these – the bivalves, the shells – they come from a Creative Commons image that I found on the internet. The little poem that’s off to the side here I found in spam in my e-mail at one point so I pulled that out.

Vanessa: Infusoria is open until Sunday, which is the end of the Literaire Lente. On Thursday you can also go and see poetic performances in the Logos Tetrahedron. You can find all the information here [on the Krikri website].

Microtopes

2009-04-01T12:32:00.003+02:00

Claire and I have lots of new pictures of what we have done with your work this time round - we'll be posting it over the next few days / weeks.

Jenny Sampirisi kindly allowed us to try something different with her work, which I think turned out beautifully....

Opening (Sunday afternoon)

2009-04-01T12:08:00.004+02:00

The opening was fun, if slightly chaotic. Claire and I arrived a couple of hours early to find that two of the perspex sheets had fallen down (again) and had to invent a whole new sticky-tape-inside-clips system.

Ghent is home and most of the people we know came to this opening rather than to the Brussels edition. With a poetry crowd, natural sunlight, performances and refreshments it had a whole different feel. (Mostly panic. But good panic. My new Dutch nickname is streskonijn, ‘stress bunny.’)

Some of my poetry friends were there: Luc Fierens, Dirk Vekemans and Tine Moniek as well as lots of the Logos people, but the best part was that I had never met about half the people who turned up. Some were friends of friends, but others had found the exhibition through the Literaire Lente publicity or picked up one of our flyers. Claire and I did a bit of late-night flyering in the surrounding streets on Saturday night and at least one of the neighbours came to see what we were up to. I recognised him as a customer from years back when I worked in the bookshop next to the cathedral but I didn’t know he lived nearby. The City of Ghent is amazingly supportive as well: not only in the sense that they subsidize us to put on events that are not exactly mainstream or high-profile, but also in the sense that people from the council regularly turn up to see what we’re up to. Thank you Ghent!

Lucille Calmel and Dirk Vekemans

I tried to take some pictures with lots of people on so you'd see the opening was well attended - maybe I should have stayed still for long enough to press the shutter down? And apparently I only managed to snap people I know (Yvan and Kristof from Logos, Maja, Patrick).

I left my camera over on the other side of the room during the performances – a long-standing tradition that dates all the way back to the Krikri 2002 festival. But Svend was filming so hopefully I can upload part of the film sometime. It’s a pity because Lucille in particular had an incredible physical energy during her reading: crouched on the floor with her Mac, making live recordings by scratching her fingers across the back of it and spitting on the case to make squeaky noises with her fingers, it is the best of her performances I’ve ever seen, online or off. The performance was based on Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedecker (the poem that also inspired Michelle’s work and provided the title for the exhibition). She read phrases at random from the original and the French translation, recording them live and replaying them in overlapping loops. I’ve never seen her give such a quiet performance, but at the same time it was full of restrained power, fireballs held down in the balls of her feet.

You can find Maja’s own work on her myspace, but yesterday she read pieces by other people, starting with her stunning party piece, Ernst Jandl’s bestiarium. It’s on Maja and Jelle’s Ubu page as well.

On a springtime and pond life theme, she continued with Kusano Shimpei’s 4 or 5 Tadpoles and Birthday Party from the Rothenbang, as Claire would no doubt call it, Paul Snoek’s Only for Poets...

... and finished up with a very, very cool reading of Steve McCaffery’s Positions of Sheep I and II (from Seven Pages Missing vol. 2).

I think this is the first time I’ve heard her give a performance with none of her own work, but it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed hearing poems from Poems the Millennium that I had either not read or paid no particular attention to before. Go Maja! Rumour has it she'll be improvising with angela on Thursday night as well...

Claire

2009-04-01T00:26:00.002+02:00

My lovely cousin

A hundred little monkeys riding tricycles round my brain

2009-03-31T23:56:00.004+02:00

Today was supposed to be a nice quiet day. angela rawlings was arriving from Canada and since she hasn't got a mobile phone we'd arranged that Claire and I would go and meet all the trains from Brussels beween about ten and one until we found her. Then the plan was to get a nice relaxed lunch, settle angela into her new home, saunter down to the Zilverhof in time to open at five and everything would be Zen.

The angela part was good - she managed to phone ahead that she was going to arrive about twelve so I had a sunny two-hour breakfast break with Claire before we had to start chasing trains. But at two mintues to twelve Jelle rang to say the local television station had decided to film infusoria - WAAAAAAAAA - and he needed the keys to get in. Stress Bunny whirled into action, and poor angela got whisked straight off the train to the Zilverhof for Belgium camera action without so much as a chocolate waffle.

More tomorrow, I'm exhausted. Please don't worry, dear Canadians, I have since fed your national treasure and put her to bed in her new house.

Setting up in Ghent

2009-03-30T12:18:00.006+02:00

We worked all through the day...

Maja

Claire

...and into the night...

Jelle

Maja and me

Some people had rented the upstairs room for a birthday party, and they were curious about what we were doing. So when we were finished we did a special pre-opening for them. It was great, there were about 40 people and they got really into it.

I'll take some better photos in the next couple of days so you can all see how we've hung your work - I haven't had time yet. It is completely different to Brussels: because the space was so different and we had access to different resources, it doesn't look anything like it did last month. But it's going to be fun :-D

I love you Sharon Harris!

2009-03-30T12:10:00.002+02:00

It looks like Sharon got to the door of the Zilverhof before us

Manifesto # 1 : NO EXHIBITION OPENINGS WITHOUT COOKIES!

2009-03-27T16:50:00.007+01:00

Specifically these, although they're not on the photos.

And an batch of oaty datey ones just out of the oven ... and M&M cookies tomorrow if there are still any M&Ms left in the bag by then. Bar snacks are boring. If I'm the curator then I'm going to make three different kinds of homemade cookies.

Today is not the way it is supposed to be. Maja and I were supposed to be hanging the pictures in the Zilverhof this morning but a succession of disasters at Maja's house (involving blocked water pipes and a poorly dog, as far as I can gather) left me at the Zilverhof on my own, where I couldn't get much further than mopping the floor. So Maja and Jelle are going to make a start this evening while I'm in Brussels fetching Claire, and the rest will be for tomorrow. Which is why I'm still at home with one hand on the keyboard and the other in the cookie dough. Could be worse...

Helen White

2009-03-27T10:01:00.004+01:00

Although it didn’t start off that way, this piece is a response to the experience of curating the infusoria exhibition. Most of the poets are women I have got to know online; almost all our communication has been by e-mail, and on blogs, listservs and Facebook because I’ve only met a few of them face to face. We’ve discussed the emergence of common themes and concerns in women’s visual poetry over the last few years, and as works for the exhibition began to fill my living room, some of these became apparent. In particular, recurrent fascination with smallness, fragility, ephemerality, and with the body grotesque. Fluid, ambiguous language and organic, sometimes tactile forms are crossed with the electronic, robotic, machine-driven, nerdy.
I am fascinated by texts left open for the reader to create. By poems that can be held in the hands. By the idea of writing in order to not say something: presenting the act of trying or failing or refusing to speak. I love working with illegible or partly obscured texts, poems you can only read if you pick them up and play with them, shake them, hold them up to the light. For the last few months, I have dreamed recurrently of finding a cache of blue-green stones or curious jewels, buried in the ground.

~~~~~~~

Still can't think of a damn title though. I hate titles.

~~~~~~~

Helen White is a founding member of Krikri vzw, a visual poet and the curator of this exhibition. Her work has been shown in exhibtions in Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Cyprus, Japan, and Argentina, and has been published in several magazines including De Poëziekrant, Foursquare, Phoebe, Karagöz and The Big Ode. Her visual poem “Holding” has just been published by Paper Kite Press in Pennsylvania as the first in a series of visual poems from around the world.

Review by Moniek Darge

2009-03-27T00:12:00.002+01:00

Moniek has written a review of infusoria for the next issue of the Logos Blad (the Logos Foundation’s monthly magazine): the text should appear there shortly in Dutch. In the meantime, here’s an English translation. (I added the links myself, for anyone who might want to know where Molenbeek is or what the Koekelberg looks like...)

Infusoria

Organiser Helen White and I are on the train to Brussels, to put the finishing touches to a small exhibition of visual poetry made by women just before it opens. Without wishing to dwell on my own expectations, I imagine mainly videos and internet pieces. As for myself, I have been invited to contribute two music boxes, which Helen has already installed for me.
The activity is part of a “Foire du Livre OFF 2009” and is being held at the Maison des Cultures in Molenbeek.

The metro takes us as far as the avenue that leads to the Koekelberg Basilica. We walk down several side streets with mainly North African residents, pass a typical grocer’s shop with vegetables displayed in front of it and end up in a building that looks like a school. The corridors are decorated with colourful silhouettes of children, drawings and photos and the place exudes a vibe of multicultural community work similar to initiatives in our part of Ghent.

The exhibition has found a home in a small room that has been given a highly original atmosphere with huge cardboard boxes placed in the middle of the room on their narrow sides like a sculpture. Some of the contributions to the exhibition are fixed to the sides of the boxes and there are plinths around the room with three-dimensional works. There is no sign of the internet or video works I had expected.

An employee of the Maison des Cultures is hard at work attaching the spotlights and bending them to the correct angle, and a second man is pacing nervously back and forth with his hands full of materials and tools. He warns us to hurry up and is clearly not convinced that we will be able to open on time, because at three o’clock he is going to open the doors, whether we are ready or not. I’m at a loss as to why he is so worried, because everything seems to be just about ready. I can’t resist having a quick look round to get an impression of the whole exhibition. A couple of striking works grab my attention right away. A group of old-fashioned teacups with teabags covered in text; underneath a bell jar, all kinds of little dolls, toys and dice with letters on them that have rolled out of a bottle lying on its side and a six-sided wooden box in which blocks with letters on them are displayed on a cheerful pink cushion. The playfulness of the exhibition is right up my street.

Helen is already busy attaching name cards and I offer to help. This is how I find out that the teacups are by the Canadian Alixandra Bamford and that the bottle under the bell jar and the box with blocks inside are by the same person, Michelle Detorie from California, who grew up in South Carolina. I’m curious about what Helen’s own contribution is, and it turns out to be little plexiglas cubes, one of which contains transparent films with text on, and another contains balls of sticky tape with letters on them. In places openings have been made to look through, bordered with a star of red or gold thread. Small pebbles are lying between the boxes with text on them. As a whole, they emanate both endless patience and great playfulness.

On one of the side walls, a door is concealed behind a translucent curtain into which messages in Morse code have been worked in stitching and beadwork. It was made by Jessica Smith from Buffalo and bears the self-evident title “Veil”. Unfortunately I can’t read the texts, but they remind me of my father who used to spend whole evenings signalling when we were small children, and often let us listen in to the mysterious Morse code messages from distant lands. Might that be where I get my wanderlust from?

My two music boxes are displayed in all their glory under their plexiglas domes. I have chosen to exhibit two particularly visual boxes with lots of different colours and quirky shapes. One of them displays curled Thai finger extensions in yellow copper, with blue glass marbles and two moving eyeballs that roll back and forth between them. The other box contains brightly coloured fishing floats and two blue tropical fish.

It is almost three o’clock, and I make eager use of the last few minutes to take a quick look round at the other activities. Besides the alternative French-language book fair, there is another photo exhibition by local residents that gives us a view of colourful festivals and overflowing living rooms. An African man stops me with a steely glance and a brochure in his hand: he turns out to be from some christian sect or other which wants me to listen to the voice of jesus calling my name and warmly invites me to come and sing his praises.

I beat a hasty retreat back to our room and at three o’clock the doors swing wide open and our first visitor come in. When he stops at the music boxes, I lift off the dome and start the first story. When I hold the fish to his ears so he can hear the ultra-quiet sound they make, he protests, telling me he used to be a long-haul sailor and that the sea is not silent at all, but that constant pandemonium rages over the waves.

The time flies by and as I make my way back to the metro, the lively images of this small exhibition full of good things are dancing in front of my eyes. I am genuinely delighted that there are people like Helen White who put their heart and soul into promoting visual poetry, which would otherwise remain unknown.

Moniek Darge

Thanks Moniek! *blushing pink*

You can find more of Moniek’s strange and wonderful music boxes here.

Maja Jantar

2009-03-26T11:45:00.003+01:00

Marilyn

Maja Jantar is a voice artist working in the fields of performance, music theatre, poetry and visual arts. She studied Art Sciences and has been giving performances since 1995 (Gent, Antwerp, Vienna, London, Chemnitz, Geneva, Madrid, Brussels etc.).
She has also created many pieces as a voice artist and is an active member of the group Krikri.
She has directed the opera Infinito Nero by Salvatore Sciarrino, La Corona by Gluck, Aap Verslaat de Knekelgeest by Peter Schat, Al Amin Dada by Lucien Goethals on the libretto of Jelle Meander and Bastien en Bastienne by Mozart. She has worked as an assistant to Guy Joosten at the Flemish Opera House in Antwerp and assisted Vincent Boussard at the Royal Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels.
Recently she has been working with the theatre group Crew with whom she performed at the Vooruit (Ghent), Buda (Kortrijk), De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), Rotterdamse Schouwburg (Rotterdam), Spielart Festival (Munich), and La Chartreuse (Avignon). She regularly performs with the poet Vincent Tholomé with whom she also gives workshops on the use of language and sound, and with whom she is preparing new material for a CD.
Currently she is collaborating with Ivan Vrambout and Ewout d'Hoore on the creation of "No Time Off for Bad Behaviour" a production by 'Action Malaise' and 'De Kopergieterij'.

Can't stop jumping up and down in my chair because because...

2009-03-26T00:37:00.010+01:00

... because: soon Maja and I can start installing infusoria in the Zilverhof. Here are a few photos I took when we went to visit a while back (the snow only lasted a day or two)

... because: Claire will be here soon! She is Krikri's very first work experience student / intern / stagiaire, a Creative Writing and Media student at Leicester De Montfort, and besides helping with the exhibition and the performances later in the week, I hope I can persuade her to write some reviews or something on here. She's also my lovely cousin - nothing like mixing nepotism and slave labour - who I get to borrow as a housemate for a whole week.

... because: angela is coming back :-D She's back in Belgium for a residency (and waffles. And that big snail on the cycle path outside Jelle and Maja's house who never dreamed what stardom awaited him).

When it's packed away, almost the whole exhibition fits into my laundry bag. I can walk over to the Zilverhof with the whole damn thing on one shoulder (and Moniek's big plastic domes in the other hand).

Silke Rath

2009-03-25T16:44:00.003+01:00

Horizont

B

Mallarmé

"Words unlock a universe.
Words carry whole worlds inside them.
Words need nothing but themselves.

A word contains all the information it needs to function. It is precisely this content I try to trace by examining single words or groups of words. What interests me above all are the associated images and ambiguities that words conceal. 'Horizont' (Horizon), for example, shows the meaning of the word in pictorial form by imitating what it designates. The many layers of a word can be revealed by taking them out of context. In texts such as 'B' or 'Mallarmé,' I dissect the word structures in an attempt to find their individual 'subtexts.' In investigating single words my approach is analytical rather than poetic. I try to give each word its space, thus creating new possibilities for interpretation.
Hamburg, 26.01.2009"

~~~~~~~

Silke Rath was born in 1976 and lives in Hamburg. She studied classical archaeology with German studies, modern German literature and history of the sciences. After graduation, she began a degree in Fine Arts, for completion in 2009. She has participated in a number of exhibitions in Germany, and published several short stories. In 2006 she won the literature competition “Der Duft des Doppelpunktes” for her short story “Leise” and in 2008 she won the “Spiel” competition for her story “Baggersee.”

Jessica Smith

2009-03-24T14:30:00.004+01:00

Veil

“Beauty is neither the veil nor the veiled object but the object in its veil” – Walter Benjamin

The beading on these translucent veils forms writing in Morse code. It is a kind of homage to that quality of language that we hardly ever experience once you know a language well, but that is common when learning a language: when you look at a sign system and you know it has meaning and that you should be able to understand it but you can't. The “aha moment” of recognizing meaning in a series of signs is magical for me, but that moment, as the language passes from opacity to translucence, fades as quickly as it arrives.

Veil texts:
1
abandon the real in favour of strata folds of fake above the Real a masterpiece of cloaked desire not only minds not only behaviours have strata sense has layers and their random tectonic intersections may mean or not

2
surface is sceptical; beware the clear surface the one without history rejoice in the palimpsest, however cloudy or alien when what comes through is horrible monstrous the result is at least in the palimpsest traceable

3
check the history of your expression how many things fall under a smile that turns into pursed lips at the end sometimes smiles lie or one has to cut them off before they reveal a real happiness stop smiling before someone recognizes

4
A linguistic substratum consists in the survival of features typical of a language
formerly spoken in an area in the language which has replaced it talking about the morphology of language is not accidental language is both topographical and animalistic

5
we can use language to veil our thoughts language more often veils and reveals and indeed it benefits power structures by veiling I am with language and I am with silence I have language and I have silence I have power and I have power

6
language is what consistently bubbles to the surface language fossils can be unearthed from sedimentary languages thus while the limits of my language are the limits of my world the implicit history of my knowledge is a history of coverings-over erasure shift veiling palimpsest

~~~~~~~

Jessica Smith studied at SUNY Buffalo, where she founded the poetry magazine name and won the Academy of American Poets Prize twice. She has written one full-length poetry book, Organic Furniture Cellar (2006) and several chapbooks: bird-book (Detumescence), Telling Time (No Press), Shifting Landscapes (above/ground press) and butterflies (Big Game Books). She is the editor of the magazine Foursquare.

~~~~~~~

As with several people's work, my photos don't do the veils justice. The beaded veils are lilac and the ones without beads opalescent white, which doesn't really come across with the back-lighting. Who am I trying to fob off with photos anyway? Come and see the exhibition live, this Sunday at four! I'm still working on the big red hot-air balloon that will be stopping by in New York, Toronto, Istanbul etc. to bring you all here. Clap your hands if you believe in subsidies....

Water calligraphy

2009-03-24T12:49:00.002+01:00

An anecdote about street calligraphers in Beijing...

Street calligraphers give the poems of the Tang and Song dynasty a fleeting form on slabs of the pavement. They use water as ink, and the stone is their paper. [...] Their creations are ephemeral, lasting no more than three or four minutes, but that doesn't bother them. They are spending time with their friends. Passers-by admire and comment on particularly spectacular verses - for example, those by Li, a retired bookkeeper. Li Wendao imitates Chairman Mao Zedong's calligraphy. 'A great leader,' says Li, 'and an accomplished calligrapher and poet.' In one respect Li surpasses the Great Chairman himself: he writes Mao's verses backwards.

Sometimes in winter a small miracle occurs. Teacher Wang Jiuxiang adds a little salt to the water. The characters freeze and the verses are like little sculptures, fixed in a silvery frost. Wang fiddles with the clip and from his brush flow the verses of the drowned poet Li Po. He writes in powerful, clear kai shu (block characters):

'...Oh, let a man enjoy his life before it fades'

'Can you imagine that? Silver frost?' Wang asks excitedly.

- from "China A-Z" by Kai Strittmatter. I'm not suggesting you buy it, it's crap, just semi-conscious tourist stories. But I liked this passage, and the hint of things buried beneath it. Second time round, it is Mr Li who catches my imagination, and the observation that the calligraphers 'are spending time with their friends' that makes me think.

Rebecca Eddy

2009-03-23T12:13:00.004+01:00

First Study in Counterpoint ~ Escapology ~ Hypothetic Syringe ~ Manipulation ~ Cadenza (clockwise from left)

First Study in Counterpoint

Manipulation

"Manipulation is control, bad influence and the conscious effort to distort and exploit. Manipulation is also the protective manoeuvre, the steer to safety and the dexterous engineer of success. Arguably the greatest literary manipulation exists in the composition of a piece itself. The choice of diction, the deployment of punctuation and the synthesis of image combine to construct the ultimate expression of creative control."

~~~~~~~

Rebecca Eddy lives in Cornwall, England. Her work can be seen in a variety of publications in Europe, Australasia and North America. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary practice and creative catachresis.

Last day in Brussels

2009-03-22T21:28:00.003+01:00

2 German-speaking mail artists. They knew Jelle and Krikri because they’d been to Jerome Rothenburg’s lecture in Brussels in 2006.
2 French-speaking ’pataphysicists, wearing those knitted hats with flappy bits over the ears
2 little brothers, Mehdi aged 6 and Nael aged 2
2 joke eyeballs, being chased around the floor by Mehdi and Nael
4 more kids, a bit perplexed by Sharon’s Braille piece: “woah, you should hide that from blind people, they’re going to smash it.”
1 poetry editor who was all over your work like a rash, girls, and wanted links to all your websites
2 families with kids, looking for the workshops
1 friend of Bob Cobbing, who works for a publisher of scientific books and came to Brussels for the book fair. He got bored and ended up hanging out at infusoria all afternoon talking about poets we both know.
2 cookies left ...

It feels like months ago, although it has only been two weeks. And this time next week we'll be doing it all over again in Ghent.

Ayşegül Tözeren

2009-03-22T21:21:00.002+01:00

Poetic Attack

Ayşegül Tözeren was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1979. She graduated from Istanbul Medical Faculty in 2005. In the same year, her first visual poem was published in Zinhar magazine. Since then, her visual poems have been shown in the Zinhar Galeri, which is the only visual and concrete poetry blog in Turkish. They have also been published in magazines and shown at festivals.

Alixandra Bamford

2009-03-21T20:15:00.004+01:00

Tasseomancy

This quality verbal tea is composed of phrases plucked from only the finest sources and combined to produce unique blends; refreshing, zesty, naturally caffeine free.

Tasseomancy investigates recombination by blending concepts instead of flavours, using craft, ‘found’ phrases, word play, and tea.

“The game is to say something new with old words” – Emerson

~~~~~~~

Alixandra Bamford is a writer and artist from Toronto. She edits and publishes small-press magazine "Knives Out", which features the work of Toronto youth. Current projects include a graphic novel, and an (English language) poetry anthology which is open to submissions .

Jenny Sampirisi

2009-03-20T22:01:00.002+01:00

Microtopes series:
Burdock ~ Was As Is
Burdock Script ~ Spam Spore

Jenny Sampirisi is a Canadian poet, prose writer and editor. She is the managing editor for BookThug and facilitates the online concrete poetry journal, Other Cl/utter. She teaches English at Ryerson University where she runs the Ryerson Reading Series. She is also an executive member of the Scream Literary Festival. Her first novel, is/was, explores the flexible boundaries of language, media, and the body.

Sharon Harris

2009-03-19T12:39:00.006+01:00

Blues

“Blues” is a Braille translation of bpnichol’s poem of the same name which turns nichol’s “love” matrix of language into a tactile, feeling experience.

Where do poems come from?

“Where do poems come from?” is part of the series, “Fun with ’Pataphysics,” which appeared as a column in Word magazine, a section in Harris’s Avatar (The Mercury Press), and in chapbooks from BookThug and above/ground press. The series was also part of a Globe review of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry, entitled “Let’s Get ’Pataphysical,” by Christian Bök.

~~~~~~~

Sharon Harris is a Canadian artist/writer who has been accused of having “ethereal interests” (Toronto Life). She thinks that her eight-year long study of the power of love as a catalyst for personal and political change is nothing but practical. In 2006, her first book of poetry and art, Avatar, was published by The Mercury Press and her first photography exhibition, I Love You Toronto, received national attention. She curates iloveyougalleries.com and iloveyougraffiti.com and blogs at iloveyou365.blogspot.com. Not coincidentally, her current book project is a cultural study of the words, “I love you.”

Jennifer Scappettone

2009-03-17T20:09:00.004+01:00

Twelve Stills from Neosuprematist Webtexts (2008-09, in progress)

Statement: Atropostic

The premise of these neosuprematist webtexts arose by accident: coastal, fortuitous plunge into structure.
From the page’s placidity to the strife of other dimensions: the verse accumulates gravity, suffers remoteness, recession.
The poetic line endures its mereness in that all-context which is the natural and its
contradiction.
The poetic line endures its obsolescence.
Abjectly concrete. Captive of camera alone.
Non-aeolian winds vie with pyrolidin and page to force suppler architectonics, present in time as well as space:
Reader, persist please every which way & repeatedly;
a hoard of these awaits animation, permutations.

—Jennifer Scappettone
Woodside, California—Inwood, Manhattan

Jennifer's new book, From Dame Quickly, is forthcoming from Litmus Press.

Literaire Lente 2009

2009-03-16T18:14:00.004+01:00

Don't miss Krikri @ Literaire Lente 2009 ...

29th March - infusoria opening with performances by Maja Jantar and Lucille Calmel (17:00, Zilverhof 34, Ghent; admission free)

1st April - concert 'Jokes' - Logos Robot Orchestra feat. poet Vincent Tholomé (20:00, Logos Foundation, Bomastraat 26, Ghent; admission €8)

2nd April - performances by angela rawlings and Isabeella Beumer (20:00 Logos Foundation, Bomastraat 26, Ghent; admission €8)

a.rawlings

2009-03-16T18:01:00.005+01:00

rule of three (excerpts)

noticing them wherever i go, i now see the use
of computer images. text is
supported by images. images are augmented
with undefined. this means
that i am writing about nothing which is
behind Golden Ears sun-drenched the Pacific the Pacific

~~~~~~~

The recipient of the bpNichol Award for Distinction in Writing (2001), a.rawlings is a Canadian poet and multidisciplinary artist. She has worked with many arts organizations, including The Mercury Press, Lexiconjury Reading Series, Theatre Gargantua, and the TV series Heart of a Poet. rawlings also instructs sound, text, and movement workshops.
rawlings' first book, Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006), was featured in The Globe and Mail’s top 100 books of 2006; it went on to receive an Alcuin Award for Design and was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Wide slumber was recently translated from page to stage for Harbourfront Centre’s Hatch: Emerging Performance Projects in Toronto. rawlings also co-edited the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury, 2005).
rawlings is on the board of directors for the multidisciplinary performance company bluemouth inc. and frequently collaborates with The Element Choir and other improvising musicians. As a recipient of a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, rawlings will spend part of 2009 and 2010 living in Belgium and Iceland, where she will continue work on her manuscripts EFHILMNORSTUVWY and Cochlea.

You can see more excerpts from Rule of Three at Other Cl/utter. Or you could just come to Logos on 2nd April, where angela will be performing with Isabeella Beumer and all those lovely robots. 14 sleeps till yaaaaaay!

Hnh

2009-03-16T17:39:00.001+01:00

… and nothing can ruin Jelle’s day like getting his car broken into and the radio stolen while he and Maja were performing. He thought he was safe with an unglamorous car and a cheap radio, but apparently car thieves need smaller cars to practise on (they only bother stealing the Mercedeses and BMWs; with Suzukis or Sudokus or whatever Jelle has, they take the radio and leave the car). Plus the – predictable – indifference of the police, who just shrugged and said that’s what you get for parking in Molenbeek.

And people shrugging and saying “if it’s the kind of place where you only see men in the street, you don’t leave your radio in the car.” It’s not true about only men, by the way, although almost all the women are veiled. I’ve been walking around all weekend in a dress and heels, and I haven’t had any hassle at all. It would be different in the city centre, which is like Paris in all the wrong ways.

But then two old Moroccan men came out of their houses to apologise for the break-in and ask Jelle not to judge their area or Moroccans in general. They went round the neighbours asking if anyone had seen who had smashed the window. I’ve met more nice people this week than in the three whole years I worked in the city centre. I went back to the baker’s this morning with the 2 euros I owed him and a poetry book from the book fair.

Another post about cookies

2009-03-15T21:08:00.006+01:00

Our subsidies partly depend on how many people come to Krikri events. As a poetry organisation, and a polypoetry organisation at that, audience numbers are not always our strong point. But the exhibition had almost 200 visitors spread out over the week.
Since almost everyone who came to the book fair also stopped by at infusoria, it was tough on the publishers participating in the book fair. They had been hoping to sell a lot of books but as you can guess from the visitor numbers, they didn't. Spreading the book fair over three venues didn’t help. For a small exhibition, though, the numbers were ideal: enough for it to feel worthwhile without the space getting noisy and crowded. The right numbers to be able to spend time talking to people or letting them look round without distraction. But some people are so nice I reckon we deserve a double subsidy for them:

- that art student on Thursday who went running from one work to another, squealing “ooh, what’s this, tell me about this one! Why is it a poem? Oh, wait, I see.”
- a woman on Friday night who took the trouble to offer a lot of intelligent and perceptive comments.
- a woman who came in two minutes after I opened on Saturday afternoon saying “I’ve heard so many good things about this…” and left saying it was “extremement beau” (self-congratulation time, everyone).
- the baker on the corner. He hasn’t been to the exhibition but he gave me Moroccan cookies on credit on Saturday morning because he couldn’t change a ten-euro note.

... so next time you're wandering round Molenbeek all cookieless, the bakery on the Parvis St-Jean-Baptiste will make everything happy ever after.

I feel like I’m in the anti-Brussels. I’ve hated the city with a passion for three years: taking the train here from Ghent, it strikes me almost every time how miserable everyone looks and how generally unfriendly they are. And when I take the Eurostar, I get out in London and think ‘wow, look at all the smiley people’ (no seriously, in London). Brussels is filthy, corrupt and lacking in urban planning: it is theoretically one of the richest cities in Europe, but something like 17% of people live below the poverty line. Closer to the other end of the social spectrum, friends who work for the European institutions tell me there is a huge amount of mental illness, alcohol abuse etc. up there in the shiny buildings.

The Maison des Cultures rocks, though. The people who work here weren’t immediately positive about the exhibition, but once we had set up and they saw we weren’t going to flake out on them, they were lovely. It seems to be a fantastic place for community arts as well: I’ve seen an Indian dance class, photography lessons, huge installations made by children, a rehearsal for an opera they are making from scratch, posters for a pop-up book workshop and Mozart’s Requiem, sculptures being carved outside from trees that fell down in a storm…
… and the baker gave me cookies. Nothing can make my day like free cookies.

Moniek Darge

2009-03-15T20:51:00.004+01:00

Music Boxes

Moniek with the Ocean Box

Ocean Box

Mona Lisa Box (because its eyes follow you everywhere...)

"These alternative music boxes tell a poetic audio-visual story, with tiny sounds, subtle light reflections and a little liberating kitsch or humour as ingredients. Music boxes have fascinated me since childhood. Once I visited a small family museum at the back of the Beaubourg in Paris, to discover the most fabulous collection I've ever seen or heard. From that day on music making has become even more exciting: I visit flea markets, looking for the most appealing, still silent, box and listening to the sounds in my head. What kind of sound will I decide to let escape from what kind of box? Once a box has been chosen I start working on the visuals. Little by little my ears become pregnant with the most appropriate sounds. Soundscaping and building alternative music boxes are adventurous journeys into the audio-visual world. The vast universe of audio art is there to be explored."

~~~~~~~

Moniek Darge (Bruges, 1952) is active as a composer, violinist, performer and audio artist. She has built light and sound sculptures, installations and musical instruments. She has been performing around the world since 1970, first with the Logos Ensemble, then with Logos Duo, and more recently with the M&M robot ensemble and the Logos women. The latter are a small group founded by Moniek, who specialise in intermedia improvisations and perform their own compositions for various instruments, voices and music boxes.
In 1997 Moniek received the title of Cultural Ambassador of Flanders for the Logos Duo. Belgian radio has broadcast programs about her music experiences in Kenya, Rwanda, Japan, China, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. She has also created her own radio programmes about women artists over the world.
She studied music theory and violin at the Music Conservatory of Bruges, painting at the Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and Art History, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Ghent. She is assistant professor at the University College Ghent, where she teaches 20th Century Art History and Non-Western Art Studies in the Fine Arts Department and an introductory course to Ethnomusicology in the Music Department.

~~~~~~~

One of the very first visitors to the exhibition asked where the language element of the music boxes was. Given Moniek's background, I had considered the boxes as combinations of music and visual art, and hadn't really thought about the language element of these particular boxes (although there are others with where language is a more obvious factor). The visitor's suggestion was that the feathers in the Mona Lisa box referred to writing. When I thought about it later - having listened to Moniek talking about the boxes with all sorts of people and giving half a dozen demonstrations, and then doing the same myself, it occurred to me that the boxes are visual works that incorporate oral language. The stories are part of the boxes.

It doesn't make sense to type out the stories here. Perhaps I'll get a film of Moniek demonstrating the boxes when the exhibition comes to Ghent.

Derya Vural

2009-03-13T22:40:00.002+01:00

Calendar Project

"We determine and count time with the help of repetitive sky events. A day means the time between the rising of the sun twice. We name it according to the instruments we have. In 2008 I named time according to the rising of visual poetry. A visual poetry day means the time between two visual poems. All the things I have lived, seen, exposed, witnessed, thought and not thought have turned into a visual poem on a page of the calendar. "

~~~~~~~

Derya Vural was born in 1974 in Germany. She lives in Istanbul and works as a child psychologist and addiction consultant. She is interested in modern/contemporary visual arts, maths and motor-sports. Her visual poems have been published at Zinhar/Poetikhars (Turkish visual poetry website/magazine) and at www.391.org, and exhibited at the Asian visual poetry exhibition in Russia since 2005. She continues to publish visual poems on her personal website.

Angela Szczepaniak

2009-03-11T22:16:00.004+01:00

Heart Bundles ~ Honeycombed Heart ~ A Lovers’ Feast

"I respond to language viscerally. I think of words as solid, tangible, almost like you can feel them on the tongue, savour them. Language is plastic and mutable—different configurations change a word’s shape and density, not just its meaning. Treating words playfully, experimenting with word arrangements visually and sonically, can set up wonderfully non sequitur worlds that are intriguing and inviting, exuberant, surprising, repulsive… Once, after first seeing one of these organ-recipe pieces, someone threw up. I was delighted."

~~~~~~~

Angela Szczepaniak is a doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo, neck-deep in a dissertation on innovative poetry, experimental detective fiction, and comic books. Her first book is a novel-in-poems, called Unisex Love Poems (DC Books, 2008). In addition to publishing poetry and critical essays, she recently participated in a hygiene themed poetry-art project with LOCCAL, and as a result her visual poetry can be found on placards in some of the finest public restrooms in Seattle, WA. At the moment, she lives in Toronto and is a poetry editor for Redwood Coast Press.

Unisex Love Poems, which is a mixture of visual poems, dialogues, prose poems and all the dinner party hints you could ever need, ships to Europe by surface mail to keep the cost down, but it’s well worth the (5-6 week) wait...

Setting up

2009-03-11T21:49:00.005+01:00

Le OFF is an alternative book fair. A group of small presses created it last year ago when they felt that they were swamped by larger publishers at the main French-language book fair in Brussels. It is held in three different venues: in the Maison des Cultures, where we are, there are book stands, workshops for kids, poetry performances, a photography exhibition and concerts as well as infusoria. The organiser of the performances, Damien Spleeters, asked Krikri to perform and also offered us a space to do ‘something else’ of our choice. I’d been wanting to do something with women’s vispo for several months, so Le Off seemed like a good opportunity. Since Krikri mainly works in Flanders (the Dutch-language area of Belgium), it made a change to work with a French-language organisation.

The building is a former school that is now a community arts centre. So there is a lot to fit into one place, and the room we were allocated was … uh … not the world’s best-suited to an art exhibition. The venue in Ghent is completely different, as you will see next month. In the meantime, for your Schadenfreude-filled pleasure, here are some pictures of how it looked when I went to visit in January…

I'm inordinately proud of the pun "eyesaws" ...

Gratuitous pic of me, Eduard Escoffet (Catalan poet), Jelle Meander (il capo di tutti Krikri) and Damien Spleeters (who organised the poetry performances for Le OFF)

Shameless self-aggrandizement, and Suzan-aggrandizement too

2009-03-10T19:07:00.003+01:00

Whilst I'm thinking about Suzan: she and I have both just had a visual poetry poster published by Paper Kite Press. Thanks Dan and Jennifer!

Paper Kite Press has launched a new series of Visual Poetry Posters,
sold in Six-Packs.
Featuring Visual Poetry by:
Helen White
Satu Kaikkonen
Ted Warnell
Suzan Sarı
Klaus Peter Dencker
Michael Peters
and more to be added throughout the coming months, until we've shown the whole world.
To order: Visual Poetry Posters Order
Full-color posters of contemporary visual poetry from around the
world. Six posters fit in a tube, but you're welcome to mix and match
quantities however you like as long as you always order in multiples
of six. Each poster measures 11" x 17" (27.94 x 43.18 cm) and is
printed on cover stock.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Paper Kite Press Studio & Gallery
443 Main Street
Kingston, Pennsylvania 18704

Suzan Sari

2009-03-10T18:41:00.006+01:00

don't kill by mistake

my dear, lovely adjective

no one has

as bad as to turn someone from a decided suicide ~ don’t kill by mistake ~
local consciousness ~ my dear, lovely adjective ~ no one has ~ red leopard ~
that surrealism couldn’t do ~ time’s up roman

Suzan Sarı was born in 1981, Rize, Turkey. She graduated from the American Culture And Literature Department of Istanbul University in 2002, and since then has been teaching English in public schools. Her first visual poems appeared in Poetikhars in 2005. She publishes visual and conventional poems and essays in national magazines. Suzan has also created three visual poetry books that she printed herself.

Cabin fever

2009-03-10T18:19:00.002+01:00

Someone from the Maison des Cultures suggested I should come at ten on Friday morning because there would be lots of people around earlier on. And who am I to turn down a twelve-hour shift after five hours’ sleep? So there I was at five to ten.

There was one visitor all morning.

And then the cookies ran out…………

Oh my ears and whiskers

2009-03-09T13:02:00.004+01:00

I'm daaaaays behind with the blogging. It's all on my hard drive but I didn't have enough time with internet access to get everything online. Now that the Brussels leg of the exhibition is over, my plan is to post one poet a day over the next two weeks...

Michelle Detorie

2009-03-09T12:36:00.009+01:00

Michelle comes first because her work provided the exhibition's title:

Lunar Baedeker poetry puzzle

The letters of six words from the poem “LUNAR BAEDEKER”" by Mina Loy - chandelier, whirl, phosphorous, ecstatic, museums, infusoria - are gathered and stored in a triangular jar. The brightly coloured letter beads allow the player/puzzler to experience the letters synaesthetically, feeling and seeing them as simultaneous acts of “reading.” The letters can also be used to make anagrams and new words. Other materials are harvested and added to the jar as well for further delight and stimulation. These additional materials are -- to a certain degree -- intended to conjure sensory details related to the poem which inspired the puzzle. This “syntax of tangibles” can be used to create poems, to conjure new ideas, and to amuse, delight, and inspire.

CONTENTS: Letter beads * one hematite bead * tiny silver key * blue yarn * two mermaids * zinnia seeds * tiny silver bells * small brown glass bottle * bundle of bedtime tea (organic mint and chamomile) tied with iridescent organza ribbon * 3 black liquorice cats * blue and purple sequins * tiny blue crayon * bitty dried flowers * flower shaped sequins * white feathers * iridescent bird confetti * small white plastic dove * 3 sea-green medium sized beads * red glass heart * six hexagon shaped zinc nuts * small round mirror * iridescent thread * red plastic heart bead

Cleromancy Poetry Game

Cleromancy is a form of divination using sortilege, casting lots or casting bones in which an outcome is determined by random means, such as the rolling of a dice. The cleromancy poetry game consists of six word dice for poetry, divination and play. The words in this game are sourced from poems by Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti.

~~~~~~~

Michelle Detorie grew up in South Carolina and now lives in Goleta, California where she edits WOMB, an online magazine for poetries by women, and Hex Presse. She is also a contributing editor for Little Red Leaves and Narrative Magazine. Besides numerous publications in magazines, she has published three chapbooks, Daphnomancy (Small Chapbook Project), Bellum Letters (Dusie) and A Coincidence of Wants (Dos Press). Michelle has taught writing at Johns Hopkins, Loyola College, and Texas State University. In addition to her work with college students, she has also taught middle and high school students, most notably at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and the Katherine Anne Porter Young Writers Program. When she is not writing, designing, or editing, Michelle teaches writing at Santa Barbara City College and works with injured seabirds through the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network.

Links please

2009-03-07T11:57:00.002+01:00

I don't have everyone's blog / website link. Please send me yours if it's missing!

I've never blogged before so I'm not sure the comment settings have struck the right balance between human-friendly and spam-unfriendly. Please send me an e-mail if you have trouble commenting.

Thursday evening performances

2009-03-07T11:20:00.004+01:00

The poets included Ricardo Domeneck, an originally Brazilian poet who lives in Berlin and edits Hilda magazine, and Eduard Escoffet, a Catalan poet who performed the Krikri festivals in 2003 and 2008.

I’ve been unlucky with Ricardo’s readings: his outdoor performance at the Poesiefestival Berlin was cancelled due to torrential rain, and last night the projector wasn’t working, which is tough on a poet who uses a lot of video art in his performances. The pleasure of a straightforward reading, though, was that it brought out the quality of the texts. My favourites were a piece in English based on various dictionary definitions of ‘body’ – I’m making it sound boring, but he did original and surprising things with an old idea – and a multilingual piece that danced from Portuguese to German to English to Spanish to Italian without tripping over its toes. It reminded me a little of something Jessica said about her ‘Veils’ (in the exhibition – I’ll blog about them soon): the experience of language learning “when you look at a sign system and you know it has meaning and that you should be able to understand it but you can’t … that moment, as the language passes from opacity to translucence, fades as quickly as it arrives.” For me Ricardo’s poem was constantly slipping between the veils, girasoles and Schmetterlingen.

This is the fourth time I’ve heard Eduard perform, I think. I don’t know whether he has ever performed in North America (hint hint Jenny, angela…) but if you get the chance to see him you will come out of the auditorium floating several inches off the ground. His Catalan translation of Paul Celan’s ‘Sprich auch du’ (parla tu tambe sprich auch du, on his myspace page) is the only poem that has ever had me dancing round the living room… I’m not sure how Celan would feel about that, but then he never heard his poem in Catalan. Eduard uses a mixture of languages, and often works with translations projected onto a screen behind him, but as I said the projector wasn’t working last night. The performance and musical aspects of his work are easily strong enough for it not to matter that the audience don’t always understand the words, but this is the first time I’ve been struck by the oddness of regularly performing for a roomful of people who don’t speak your language at all. And by the beauty of Eduard’s hand gestures: he dances his work, much in the way that an Indian dancer mimes a song text.

Thursday 5th March

2009-03-07T11:13:00.002+01:00

An art student, who wants to write a report on infusoria for school. She wants photos to use in their project, but the deadline is tomorrow, my photos are still on the camera / laptop, she hasn’t got a printer at home… we think she might be able to print some of my photos in the office. I hope so. She was up for the full guided tour, I had fun.

An older gentleman told me that in a computer age it is rare to still ‘find objects.’

It’s easier today. I’ve stopped being nervous of people or (even mildly) disappointed when they walk out after a few seconds.

A crowd of people came in after the performances this evening, and I was immediately struck by how differently they reacted to the work. Until about six in the evening, the visitors are people who primarily come to see the book fair or the children’s workshops. The evening visitors are people who come to hear the poetry, and I was surprised to notice within a few seconds that they were looking at the pieces in an entirely different way. I’m not sure I can describe the physical gestures (approaching, stepping back, considering, reading the information sheets, occasionally laughing out loud) as opposed to how the daytime people approached the exhibition (wandering, gazing, sometimes touching things, picking them up: something more like window-shopping). But it was immediately clear that the evening people had experience of looking at exhibitions … and that many of the daytime people didn’t. I had forgotten that it is a skill to be learned.

I remember ‘sneaking in’ to an exhibition of paintings with my sister when we were teenagers. We just saw a sign, admission free, and my sister dared me to go in so we did. I thought art galleries were like shops: you would only go in there if you had the money to buy a painting and we obviously didn’t, so I was just waiting to get thrown out. I think I spent more time with an eye on the ‘security guard’ (guard? just an attendant, surely) than looking at the paintings.

There are a couple of obvious things I could improve, such as having more French-language information about the work, and putting the information beside the work instead of on a sheet on the desk. Doing that would mess things up a bit visually, but it would help people out. And housing an exhibition in a place where all kinds of people pass in and out is one way to lower a threshold. I’m enjoying working in a community centre, and I like that all the various events this week are free of charge. But it’s not enough. If people are interested enough to put their head round the door, they have a right not to be excluded by invisible barriers. Holding lots of exhibitions in community centres is one way to make things easier for people, simply because it makes the concept more familiar. Guided tours are probably good too, and I’d get better at showing people round if I had more experience. I could learn what they are seeing, what they are missing, what they might be interested in seeing if I could point them in that direction. With the kids it’s easier, I’m better at imagining what might interest them and what they might figure out for themselves with a couple of hints.

It’s very, very cool that all the staff of the Maison des Cultures have dropped in, though. Office staff, bar staff, workshop leaders and co-ordinators, technicians and maintenance guys, the lot. I’ve worked with Krikri at plenty of places where the organisers and everyday staff seem completely indifferent to whatever is going on at their own event.

Wednesday 4th March

2009-03-06T00:34:00.003+01:00

I had the enormous good luck that Moniek Darge wanted to come to Brussels with me for the beginning of the exhibition. There is no particular opening event in Brussels, because it didn’t really fit in with what Le Off were doing (there will be an opening event in Ghent). So it was a quiet beginning, but having Moniek’s boundless enthusiasm there made all the difference. She helped me with the last finishing touches and stayed to welcome the first few visitors. She talks to everyone, listens to everyone, and – implicitly, by example – gave me a crash course in how to make people interested in an exhibition. Instinctively I’d just pretend not to be there, give people space to look or not look at the work as they choose. (I don’t usually talk to attendants in museums or galleries when I’m the one visiting, beyond a hello or a smile or whatever basic courtesy seems to require. I prefer to be left on my own to look around so it hadn’t really occurred to me that other people might not want the same).

Each of Moniek’s music boxes has its own story, which she tells to everyone who comes through the door. The stories have given me a ‘way in,’ a way to approach the visitors. People have been in and out all day but I’m too shy, I’d rather hide behind my computer in the corner typing this than talk about the exhibits. I have to force myself to be open, which does not come easy. (What a phrase, forcing oneself open. It’s more or less accurate.)

Stuck in the room, inside the exhibition, I find inevitably that I am an exhibit myself. People look curiously at me, and often they want to talk. They want to tell me about an artist they saw in Korea who did such-and-such, about the need for art during an economic crisis, what a tiring day they’ve had. I don’t think I’ve had any direct questions about individual works yet, although I have had a couple about the exhibition as a whole, and a few discussions of the work where people seemed to want me to volunteer information. There’s a whole printout with each poet’s statement and biography, but nobody wants that. I’ve exhibited work before and had people come up to me and say “this is shit, this means nothing,” or “I like this one” – I haven’t had any of that today. People have asked factual questions, such as where the artists come from, but tended not to express opinions.

Three kids (Salma and Latifah, aged about 10 perhaps, and Zakarias who was maybe six or seven) asked great questions. How did you find all these things? Did the poets just give them to you? Why do you only use difficult things? (I asked Zakarias what he meant, but he wasn’t bothered by the ‘difficulty’ of the works – he just thought it would have been easier just to use sticky tape to attach the works instead of fussy little pins and photo corners.) Zakarias wanted to spell his name with the Lunar Baedeker. We couldn’t find all the letters but it was more fun anyway to make them out of the other objects (a crayon and a bent flower stem makes a K, the I looks cool with a bead on top). Latifah didn’t think the Ocean Music Box made the sound of the sea, but Salma made the sound of crashing waves for her. And the girls understood Sharon’s Braille poem without me having to explain. Once I’d asked them if they knew what the little dots inside the frame were, they were totally there: they got the point of the glass, the hammer, and what it meant to write the name of a colour in Braille.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaafuck! A SWAT team just crashed my expo. It was cool, they were lovely. The French Community Minister of Culture is coming over at seven and Mr Big Anorak and Mr Walkie-Talkie just came to check I wasn’t hiding any riot grrls in my teacups. Mais non messieurs, ici on est toutes gentilles.

A man just told me that what people look for in a time of crisis is the ephemeral. I’d have thought the opposite, but it’s an interesting idea.

There’s a language barrier. My French is rustier than I thought. In Brussels, which is bilingual in theory and mainly French-speaking in practice, I’m supposed to provide all the information in both French and Dutch, although Le Off haven’t bothered with Dutch. I thought I could get away with English, which is less politically loaded than opting for only one of the official languages. It would be fine in Flanders. Here people are like ‘ooooh, no, I can’t speak English.’ I realise I’m spending so long understanding the words of what people are saying in French that I have no attention to spare for a response. For example I didn’t ask the ‘ephemeral’ guy why he thought that. I’m not sure if I could phrase it as a genuinely curious question, rather than implicit disagreement/censure.

When I’m here, sitting among poems made by my favourite peers and surrounded by echoes of their hopes and well-wishes, I’m happy. When I get home, all kinds of doubts creep in. What if the exhibition is shit? What if things that inspire me leave everyone else cold? Has anyone who came in here today gone away with something worthwhile? Does it … um … matter?

There is something in this room. Maybe only the tiniest thing. Part of it is Maja’s inspired placing of boxes and photographs. But there’s more than that, although I don’t know if people have the patience to find it. I am discovering it as I go along, ever since I started getting parcels through the door at the beginning of February, and I suspect there still lots more to find. There is a photograph of the phrase “shall not damage it’s silver” caught in a cobweb on barbed wire. There is an interaction between Michelle’s tiny objects and a glass dome. Three recipes for cooking human hearts, suitable for a candlelit dinner. Alixandra’s teabags, which attract everyone’s attention. Silke’s funny vagina poem. The veiled door in the corner.

First pictures

2009-03-06T00:22:00.004+01:00

I know you all need to see what we’ve done with your work but I’m going to post the photos gradually, taking my time to get a good photo of each piece. In the meantime a couple of general pics…

I went to Brussels with my Krikri colleague Maja Jantar on Monday to set everything up. Maja is an absolute genius when it comes to adapting a space, and I am so grateful to her for the hard work and huge quantities of inspiration she has put in this week. I’m not sure if the photos entirely reflect the way the two huge cardboard boxes open up the space and change it from a cramped rectangle into a garden of echoing lines. They also provide extra surfaces for exhibiting work, and something eye-catching to entice people into the room. The boxes are courtesy of Thomas, who scoured Antwerp’s music shops for big instrument boxes and went to unbelievable lengths to get them to us in time, and also gave us the idea of using them this way (he did something similar at the Krikri 2006 festival).

The positioning of Derya’s series make the height of the room more manageable and echo angela rawlings’ work across the room, as well as Suzan’s series down the side of the larger box; Angela Szczeapaniak’s red mounting boards resonate with the red floor tiles and the red background to angela’s series; the shape of the boxes work with the covered blackboard, which we couldn’t take down from the wall. Moniek’s big plastic domes covering her work, and the glass dome we used to keep Michelle’s tiny objects safe, take some of the solidity and squareness out of the surroundings, as do Jessica’s veils with the lamp behind them. One visitor described the space as ‘Zen,’ which it certainly wasn’t when we arrived there on Monday morning.

Raison d'

2009-03-06T00:06:00.003+01:00

I missed you all so much yesterday! The Krikri festivals up to now have been centred on performances, so the poets / performers / musicians have always been there in the flesh. We’ve had time – and in later years, consciously made time – to eat, drink and party together. Talking with the artists has been one of the most rewarding aspects of the festival, and I’m looking for ways to recreate it with the exhibition, which has a much smaller budget and few possibilities for the participants to attend. I’m starting to feel that my original plan to keep a permanent archive of the exhibition online doesn’t meet (all) our needs. It will just be there, a finished, dead thing. There is little opportunity to discuss it, criticize it, talk to each other about what we are doing or think collectively about where we might be going.

Hence the blog. I do still plan to put the exhibition online in the late spring or early summer, and hopefully make a free, print-quality pdf of any works I can get the rights to (Dusie/Ubu style), but in the meantime this is an attempt at something less formal and more dynamic. It is mainly intended for the infusoria participants, but it is public and anyone interested in visual poetry (specifically women’s vispo) is welcome to comment or e-mail me something to post. If you’re an infusoria participant or Krikri member, you’re welcome to co-author the blog – just mail me and I’ll add you to the list. I can translate any posts / comments in Dutch, French or German; if you want to post in another language, go ahead and hopefully someone will understand and translate for you.

This is all a bit of an experiment, but I’m hoping it will turn into something multi-authored and thought-provoking. We’ll see. I also want to be able to post photos for all of you outside Belgium, so that you can see what is going on without having to wait until I get round to writing all that html. If you’re in Belgium, get off the internet and come to the exhibition, dammit!

I’d be really interested in any reviews, commentaries or criticisms of the infusoria exhibition, reflections on individual participants’ work or writing on women’s visual poetry in general. You don’t need to be a visual poet or a woman to comment. On the other hand I’m really not interested in pointless bitching, especially if it’s aimed at individuals. As if you would. If you hate what the exhibition is about or if you think it really turned out badly, send me honest and well-argued points, and I’ll post them. I’m definitely open to constructive criticism, doubts and questions (because my head is full of all that anyway).

From my own perspective, I’ll be spending the whole week at the exhibition in Brussels. There’s no one else to supervise the exhibition, so I’ve set up home in a corner of the exhibition room with my laptop, camera and a big pile of translation work for company. I don’t have an internet connection here, which means I have to wait till I get home to post everything (sometime round midnight central European time). I’m exhausted, frazzled, and my English is suffering from speaking French and Dutch all week, so don’t expect any polished gems of vispo wisdom. And don’t be too surprised if I delete my posts suddenly without notice, if I get an attack of the cringes.

I do plan to blog about the experience of being locked in a box full of vispo for a week. I also want to include a post a short feature on each participant’s work, with the information you sent me and photos of how we’ve exhibited it.