Jennifer Scappettone

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

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

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

… 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

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

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

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.