a dialogue with a friend

A Collaboration with George Angel 




his words, my image


Heap Is the Punctuation of Tumbling

"Ask a drum to expectorate.
Hammering has made me
As stupid as a reflex.
Dust is the grey matter
I am left with.

Blockages of breath,
The debris of honking,
Make radios almost pastoral.

Leaps to connect minutes.
Like voices calling out to each other,
Across mounds of shoveled noise,
They stutter and fall short
Into rubble.

Trembling, muted by syllables,
Spaces drilled into
What is opened out of, rubbish."

--George Angel



my image, his words


"I carry the street in the rain in my hands.
The sun had fallen out like an unspun bulb,
Like butter icarussed down into my bowl.
The valley in autumn another nestle just,
Glistens the shatter of a frame, shadowed
My brow, the falling away of the street
In the rain, the facades thicken my fingers,
Seal me away beneath a silent gaze,
Its pane of milky light between us.
To balance a membrane mesmer,
Meander your attention over the motif
Light curdles out of the surface
Of the air spilling between houses
Where I carry the street in the rain."

    --George Angel





a dialogue with a friend


This is a collaboration between George Angel and myself.  
A narrative and a study of inspiration. 



my image, his words


  "It was particularly before a storm that the legend of Jack Nimble seemed to linger in a small coastal village founded by Dutch immigrants just north of Davenport along the rocky cliffs. Presumably a tall, lanky youth with sad sleepless eyes, he would sour milk, tangle little girls’ hair, and frighten livestock off cliffs; all without ever being seen. He would burn your house down because a wedge of cheese you had in your cupboard enticed him. Bells rattled without ringing whenever he passed. He had only ever been perceived in the shadows, and then more as a kind of flicker than as the silhouette of a figure. Children could be rid of him by simply opening a window wherever they were. Jack shared the mirror of every pond and puddle with his brother Quick, each from his own side, each yearning to drown in the other by hurling himself at him. Jack made trees bloom wildly and left tobacco stains on shirt cuffs. Jack Nimble was alleged to help sailors’ sons remember their fathers, and he was said to enjoy making young women drowsy. The food was always salty wherever he decided to take up lodging. Some of the children had wooden dolls in his likeness, always with one leg stretched out horizontally before him, as if he were about to push off and unlatch from the face of the world."



his words, my image


Aperture

Stolen for a clapper,
The fence slat left an absence,
A summer’s long shutter.
The first rung of the latter
Was a teeter-totter in a yard.
Tintinnabulation from a sprinkler,
Squeezed pungent of all its green shade
By the leaf prickle of loose-legged drowsing,
Within which a radiant stain pulses darkly behind bone,
Inclines to polish its has to say,
Purpling across night’s brass murmurs.

                        --George Angel



George Angel is an author, play-write, artist and musician.   For bio and published works of George Angel please visit Poetry International
George's book, The Fifth Season is available at Amazon and I highly recommend it.  

Thanks George.



a poem


A cage of sound 09:


GOOD ADVICE

"Beware of repetition, the malignant
dawn, the looming threat of meals
on the dining-room table; resist

the film of her end when you lie down,
every night – get up, refuse. Again and
again, it will not help. Sit down then

at the piano and flee into your fingers.
Translate notes, limit yourself to
a modest review, two measures at most.

Gradually the music consumes you. You slip
through the bars of sound you have raised,
patiently repeating the healing notes."



© 2013, Anna Enquist
From: Een kooi van klank
Publisher: Stichting CPNB & Poetry International, Amsterdam, 2013, 9789059651852

© Translation: 2013, David Colmer
First published on Poetry International

dots and thoughts of you

Kiss - A Love Story from RACECAR on Vimeo.

As Paul Auster once said



"As Paul Auster once said “The sun is the past, the earth is the present and the moon is the future.” In our first independent short film we explore the consequence of something as innocent as a kiss. A love story between the sun and the moon. We believe that every solar eclipse is the moons attempt to reach the sun... x"







On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.

Extreme Wisteria

BY LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.
The hydrangea
Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself.
Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.
A throat to come home to, tupelo.
Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.
Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.
Wistful, woke most every afternoon
In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.
Beautiful cage, asylum in.
Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not
Have been there.
So few wild raspberries, they were countable,
Triaged out by hand.
Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others,
Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence.
Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves
Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.
High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles,
Scarlet fevers;
Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home.
Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations
Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths.
Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,
In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such.
Wisteria, extreme.
There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

Bill Schwab

seen through your eyes



The Art and Poetry of Mark Erickson


It's music in paint, it's "spectrum" and curves. 

Anatomy of Flight - 18x12-canvas



the single sheet of lyrics

in the temptation of nature
her tree limbs sway
the leaves
swirl along in the rhythm
of the wind,
the ground underneath
folds amongst the rocks
and the dirt,
while the bugs climb through
their forest of grass and twigs
the size of skyscrapers and towers,
secrets hidden under the pebbles
soaring into the mountains
as the sun pours down
in her naked body
cooking the land
her legs move
her hand touching
in her single sheets
of her lost paradise

by Mark Erickson


For more art by Mark Erickson please go here.



Thank you Mark. xx

"For last year's words belong to last year's language...



And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning." 
 ~ T.S. Eliot



"May you always have walls for the winds,
a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire,
laughter to cheer you, those you love near you,
and all your heart might desire."--An  Irish blessing



It's a nice dream I think.

Don't Worry About Me

"When the twilight shadows fall
and the nocturnal creatures call
from the place where you are,
Still! I see you in each star.
So, please don't worry about me?

When the song birds awaken the dawn
and the starry night is gone,
Though I wander ways apart,
where the shadows stir and start,
Still! I will hold you in my heart.
So, please don't worry about me?"

Joseph T. Renaldi


Lin Tianmiao - Artist


Bound Unbound

7 September 2012 - 27 January 2013





"One of Lin Tianmiao’s clearest recollections of her childhood in China was helping her mother sew clothes for the family. When she returned to China after spending eight years living in New York, she was inspired by this memory to create a technique she calls thread winding, where she winds silk or cotton thread around an object until it is completely covered and ultimately transformed. She used this in one of her first major works calledThe Proliferation of Thread Winding in 1995, which began her career as an artist and is included in the exhibition. Her use of the technique continues today and can be seen in such recent works as All the Same.





Lin Tianmiao’s paintings, sculptures, and installations have always been about a series of dual tensions. These are frequently played out in her works through contrasts between materials, but they are also evident in binary themes such as male versus female, function versus form, and physical versus psychological experience. Underlying all of these themes is a keen exploration of a physical experience, at times emphasizing the female body. We see this in the works Chatting and Mothers!!!.
Lin is one of only a handful of women artists of her generation born in the 1960s to have emerged during the 1990s when the Chinese art world was coming of age and gaining substantial international recognition. Her works over the past twenty years are as much about her personal journey as an artist as they are about a desire to articulate broader social issues. Through her focus on a female experience, she comments on the enormous social progress made in Chinese society during Mao Zedong’s tenure, yet she hints that some promises remain unfulfilled. Her consistent exploration of these issues, sometimes latent, makes her a significant artist of our time. This exhibition represents Lin Tianmiao’s first major solo exhibition in the United States.
Bound Unbound: Lin Tianmiao is part of Asia Society's yearlong programmatic focus on China, titled China Close Up."






Exhibit:
725 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
+212-288-6400



Houseboat Days






Saying It To Keep It From Happening


Some departure from the norm
Will occur as time grows more open about it.
The consensus gradually changed; nobody
Lies about it any more. Rust dark pouring
Over the body, changing it without decay—
People with too many things on their minds, but we live
In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,
Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness
And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.
How careless. Yet in the end each of us
Is seen to have traveled the same distance—it’s time
That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,
Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it 
were
The same as making it happen. You’re not sorry,
Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen,
Yet would like an exacter share, something about time
That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it
means.
It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it,
Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there.
If it isn’t enough, take the idea
Inherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowers
Lying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means more
In pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the end
As though you cared. The event combined with
Beams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the 
wiser
Usages of age, but it’s both there
And not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight,
At the back of the mind, where we live now.” 
John Ashbery




Realism in a time of Expressionism: August Sander


Denying tonality as a principle, without formality to replace it. Expressionism. A world phenomena of artists who would go beyond natural appearances to put forward the inner meaning. Expressing elemental feelings rather than a description of the visible world. In contrast to these ideals August Sander who lived from 1876 to 1964 would remain a realist. A portraitist in a time of artistic coercion, documenting every day German life during great tyranny.

Many plates were destroyed under Nazi regime for failing to portray Aryan sensibilities. Some precious negatives and plates would be saved after the war. Therefore, looking at the faces that remain, perhaps one can see beyond the posed figures and into the expression of a climate less conducive of emotion.

When you look into this stunning gelatin silver print you see a young man posing who perhaps, given the way in which he is dressed could be of some social standing. The look in his eyes tell the infinite story.



 Sander held a heartfelt fascination with circus people. As one historian puts it, " a suggestive, almost tantalizing narrative unfolds: of freedom and confinement, security and danger, things visible and hidden."


August Sander

 Facial language in a Sander portrait is not only hypnotic it poses a tale of reflection. 

August Sander would go on to influence artists such as, Edward Steichen and Diane Arbus. A collection of August Sander's works can be found in a permanent exhibit at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. 
I originally wrote this for Imeem. 

longing to dissolve

I listened to this in a darkened room laying on the floor with my tablet tucked under my chin as the volume pulsed into my chest.



Thanks to Betina

a quote




“If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.”


― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Shaman and Poe


The Village Street

In these rapid, restless shadows,
Once I walked at eventide,
When a gentle, silent maiden,
Walked in beauty at my side.
She alone there walked beside me
All in beauty, like a bride.
Pallidly the moon was shining
On the dewy meadows nigh;
On the silvery, silent rivers,
On the mountains far and high,--
On the ocean's star-lit waters,
Where the winds a-weary die.
Slowly, silently we wandered
From the open cottage door,
Underneath the elm's long branches
To the pavement bending o'er;
Underneath the mossy willow
And the dying sycamore.

With the myriad stars in beauty
All bedight, the heavens were seen,
Radiant hopes were bright around me,
Like the light of stars serene;
Like the mellow midnight splendor
Of the Night's irradiate queen.
Audibly the elm-leaves whispered
Peaceful, pleasant melodies,
Like the distant murmured music
Of unquiet, lovely seas;
While the winds were hushed in slumber
In the fragrant flowers and trees.
Wondrous and unwonted beauty
Still adorning all did seem,
While I told my love in fables
'Neath the willows by the stream;
Would the heart have kept unspoken
Love that was its rarest dream!

Instantly away we wandered
In the shadowy twilight tide,
She, the silent, scornful maiden,
Walking calmly at my side,
With a step serene and stately,
All in beauty, all in pride.

Vacantly I walked beside her.
On the earth mine eyes were cast;
Swift and keen there came unto me
Bitter memories of the past--
On me, like the rain in Autumn
On the dead leaves, cold and fast.

Underneath the elms we parted,
By the lowly cottage door;
One brief word alone was uttered--
Never on our lips before;
And away I walked forlornly,
Broken-hearted evermore.

Slowly, silently I loitered,
Homeward, in the night, alone;
Sudden anguish bound my spirit,
That my youth had never known;
Wild unrest, like that which cometh
When the Night's first dream hath flown.
Now, to me the elm-leaves whisper
Mad, discordant melodies,
And keen melodies like shadows
Haunt the moaning willow trees,
And the sycamores with laughter
Mock me in the nightly breeze.

Sad and pale the Autumn moonlight
Through the sighing foliage streams;
And each morning, midnight shadow,
Shadow of my sorrow seems;
Strive, O heart, forget thine idol!
And, O soul, forget thy dreams! 

The Village Street by Edgar Allan Poe
Photographs by Evgeniy Shaman