Taking Stock/In Stock :: Editorial Updates AND at a Bookstore Near You
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clockwise from top left: Exit Strata PRINT! vol. 1 "brownie", PRINT! vol. 1 limited edition, blood atlas (DeSilva-Johnson), obsolete objects in the literary imagination (Pinder), limited edition vol.1 broadside[/caption]
You know how, just when you think that everything is about to slow down, and you're going to have time for all the things on your To-Do-list, which is looking more and more like an epic poem? And then, you know, it doesn't slow down at all?
Yeah. Then.
Well, that's kind of how it's been since the print launch...
AWESOME CREATOR: Legacy Russell, Brooklyn NY: Wayward Ceremonies for Our Times
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WHO:
Legacy Russell
Legacy asks of her work, "Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?"
She creates "tangible constructions inspired by the often intangible landscapes of memory and identity, the objects that rise to the surface have escaped their original owners and serve the function of participating in wayward ceremonies of remembrance, iconography, and idolatry."
And we are thankful that she does. Legacy's critical, playful, artful examinations are the work of a committed woman whose production across a range of mediums is at once is intimate and universal, searing and comforting, ephemeral and concrete. Here is someone who has continuously engaged in the public sphere, creating and enabling community and connection, questioning and interrupting our visual and verbal culture -- yet who never ceases to turn the lens on herself, writing fiction and poetry with the deft quietude of the best hermits.
Every inch the model of the AWESOME CREATOR, Legacy is tireless in her efforts, and has been very rightly been recognized as a force to be reckoned with (but also well loved and appreciated) by her peers -- one comes quickly to realize the great humility, kindness, and generosity of spirit in this young artist, one that is rare in someone on whom such accolades have been showered. Just this year she was recognized as one of the "10 Most Inspiring Young Artists in NYC Right Now" by Refinery 29, who had previously profiled her site specific, interactive piece, OPEN CEREMONY, begun in association with Trust Art in 2011.
Guest Blogger: GEORGIA ELROD: NYC ART RECS: What to see now
AWESOME CREATORS :: SPRING PREVIEW
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With Poetry Month recently ended, I find myself having separation anxiety from the influx of lovestuff our 30/30/30 series was made of. I've been excited to note that our poetry community's efforts have been making the rounds -- that connections are being established, gratitude circulated, and love received amongst circles of readers, friends, our terrific contributors, and many of the profiled poets, as well.
Of course, to everything there is a season and by no means does April's close equate an end to Exit Strata's commitment to mutual appreciation. In fact, it gives us an opportunity to shine more, and well deserved light on our ongoing AWESOME CREATORS profile series, the inauguration of which slipped in on little cat feet amidst the Poetry Month festivus.
What a bunch of awesome folk we've got in the bullpen to introduce to you this season! We could not be more excited, and since I've always been the kind of kid who wants to wear ALL her new clothes RIGHT AWAY I just *had* to share.
I've given you mini preview schpiels here, in case you want to w(h)et? your whistle.
You can look forward to conversations with:
RICHARD EOIN NASH : RED LEMONADE, SMALL DEMONS
ANNA BARSAN/JESSIE LEVANDOV: SIGNIFIED
NICK LEAVENS : THE CLAQUE
JOSEPH RIIPPII
VELCROW RIPPER : OCCUPY LOVE
POETRY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK / NY POETRY FESTIVAL
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WOOHOO!
AWESOME CREATORS *NEED YOUR HELP* :: SUPPORT THE OCCUPY POETRY ANTHOLOGY!
In the introduction to the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology it reads, "all movements need their poets to set the tone, to raise the questions and express the sensibility."
And so begins a tome of over 1000 pages, one that compiler Stephen Boyer originally imagined as merely a "few pages stapled together."
If you wonder how it sets the tone, you need only read the cover page, where the first words after the title are, "WE LOVE YOU."
POETRY MONTH 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition: DAY 25 :: Ana Bozicevic on Marguerite Yourcenar
disclaimer, from Ana: "if you need a word about why I am featuring a novelist as a poetic influence; her work is poetic to the point of absurdity." et alors...
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I, YOUrcenar.
None of my friends seem to give a shit about Marguerite Yourcenar. Sure, someone’s father read her in the 80s—probably Memoirs of Hadrian—and there was an interview in the Paris Review with her just then—just at her death. Naming her as an influence has been taken at times (dans mon cas) as an affectation. {This is supposed to be personal, so I’m making it so. But what isn’t? There’s no person, so person’s everywhere.} So this is what I can tell you about Marguerite Yourcenar & “I” (“L’être que j’appelle moi”/the person I call myself, as she puts it):
That
- it was my father who introduced me to her. And started me toward owning most of her books.
- “I” passed her novella of incestuous love, Anna Soror, around my Croatian high school like the mind-porn that it sure was.
- “I” translated parts of her Fires, a reimagining of antique myths—especially the one about Sappho—and made an offering of them to a young woman. This was my idea of courtship; should’ve read Plato’s Lysis first.
- when “I” had a blog for four years, called Quoi? L’Eternité. it was named thus after Yourcenar’s memoirs, not Rimbaud. She also introduced me to Yukio Mishima.
That’s enough now. But from a current vantage, it’s incredibly ironic that Yourcenar’s writing should have served as a queer f-to-f offering – considering the fact that though she quite likely was queer, she was also very oblique about it – what I’ve heard called “old school.” Here’s a passage from that Paris Review interview cited here without value judgment – neither for Yourcenar nor her interviewer and his “deviance:”
POETRY MONTH 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition: DAY 20:: Annaliese Downey on CA Conrad
CA Conrad gave a reading at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where I study poetry, about a week ago, and afterwards the general consensus among the students in attendance was that Conrad was “insane.” We meant this affectionately and admiringly. If the motto of the Situationists, with whom Conrad has much in common, was “Be realistic—demand the impossible!”, then a suggested motto for those wishing to proceed in the spirit of Conrad might be, “Be reasonable—do what is insane!”
Conrad’s most recent book of poems, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, [from Wave Books] is a guide to practical insanity. Collected within are twenty-seven “(soma)tic exercises,” instructions for the radical disruption of routine living at the individual level, and the poems resulting from those created conditions. For example: “(Soma)tic 7: Feast of the Seven Colors,” which instructs the reader to consume and surround themselves with a single particular color each day for seven days. Or “(Soma)tic 17: OIL THIS WAR!,” an exercise in making visible the linkages between waste and war. Many of the exercises are even wilder, weirder, and more uncomfortable than these, and Conrad has performed them all.
POETRY MONTH 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition: DAY 18:: Ben Wiessner on Dean Young
Before Fall Higher’s table of contents Dean Young booms out a call to action:
hark, dumbass,
the error is not to fall
but to fall from no height
As soon as I came across those lines I snapped a grainy picture on my prehistoric flip-phone and sent them to the person who knows most clearly my errors, how much of that dumbass I can be.
This book belonged in my apartment. It was meant to be poured over on a couch, read with dinner. His words and I line-danced toward and from each other, catching promising glimpses between partner switches:
When you finally admit you’re broken,
Can I come back up now? asks the chair
with its leg snapped in the basement
and Don’t even get me started, says the sky.
- (“Irrevocable Ode”)
AWESOME CREATOR*S*!: THE HELIOPOLIS PROJECT
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The Heliopolis Project is a storefront gallery and project space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn NY dedicated to fostering a dialogue across all disciplines of making.
Founded in 2010 by Eliza Swann and Jason Grabowski, Heliopolis has recently expanded. Collaboratively run, its members now include Bill Abdale, Georgia Elrod, Baris Gokturk, Leo Goldsmith, Rachel Rakes, Sarada Rauch and Andy Wolf.
The first show curated by the new members was Soft Opening, March 9th-April 11th, 2012.
The space was established to support artists with experiments in literature and art and to foster interdisplinary and translocal dialogues by hosting poets and artists in residence from around the US. As the economy and art market plummeted in the past few years a tightly knit arts community emerged that granted themselves authority over their own work and gave each other mutual permission and support to pursue an alternative way of thinking about the purpose and formal nature of art.
POETRY MONTH 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition: DAY 15 :: Peter Milne Greiner on Stefan George
The most recent and significant reference to Stefan George’s legacy is Fassbinder’s Satan’s Brew, which is one way of saying there is no legacy that does not involve excavation. Two other ways of hearing about him are through Mallarmé’s biography and exhaustive research of the NAZI party. I can scarcely imagine a more dubious constellation of access points.
George was one of those yesteryear poets who doubled as a public figure. An early conscript of French and German Symbolism, George toiled to shape his reputation not only as a poet, but as the editor of the recherché Blätter Für Die Kunst, and as the oracle of a new German cultural revival. By the turn of the twentieth century, his retinue of young male acolytes in tow, he was poised to affect national transformation. Using poetry.
