lynne desilva-johnson Tag

July 19, 2012

Announcing: CO-CO IN CONCERT:: Exit Strata and Home Audio present : Infinite Combinatoriality vs. Animal Language:: July 26th, 2012, Brooklyn NY

Exit Strata is VERY excited to invite you along on a new (ad)venture, as we team up with the Avant-Classical/Experimental concert series Home Audio to co-curate these monthly evenings of sound and music collaboration. For our first evening together, we tackle Infinite Combinatoriality vs. Animal Language, or simply, HUMANS VS ANIMALS which will take place on July 26th, at 141 Spencer Street, #203, Brooklyn NY. (Doors at 7) Your hosts for the evening will be Mara Mayer, founder of Home Audio, and Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Exit Strata Editor. What can I expect? Well: A concert-contest between words and music, in which the lines between instrument, voice, word, sound, animal, and human are blurred. A collaborative, experimental space in which the lines between performer and audience may blur, as well.

Mushroom Admin

July 17, 2012

IT'S a FAMILY AFFAIR: Get to Know Exit Strata's Poetry Festival Team

and sometimes, when no one is watching I pick up sticks and place them in my pocket so they can feel like they belong to something again.

But let's stay grounded ... At plains and prairies' end, sharp mountains loom, obscured by residueof fire. Many dim gray columns of smoke rise, slanted like sunbeams, reversing, it seems, the old image of radiant grace, a sign to score the acrid skies.

3 as I cut, the pane of glass was simple until I came across a second hand I cannot say for sure why I found it repulsive longing and apathy became synonymous- but still like an angel without a synthesizer 4 like lips whistling with more wind than melody the note held in fingers blurring fresh ink with sweat stained shirts my old roommate’s collar colored yellow yolks run down the sandwich, down my hand shaking trying to light a match to light a cigarette ashes and coffee grounds augured over mornings spent trying to find the right word, to say what I want to hear glaciers falling down mountains 5 the air is aggressive not to be moved within but to rub against, to slide skin on skin on humid skin until these damp curtains all zippered buttoned tied show themselves remnants of an obsolete notion: solitude and summer are dissimilar to the point of mutual exclusivity (1: Tishon, from Sometimes; 2: Bill Considine, from Continent of Fire; 3: Lancelot Runge, from The Hell Out; 4: Ben Wiessner, from Slow Dancing Answers, Banter; 5. Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, from Kinsey Report)

Mushroom Admin

June 26, 2012

EDITORIAL :: FIELD NOTES and the RHIZOME : the series grows wild and free

[caption id="attachment_1521" align="alignleft" width="632"] "from the seemingly random the rhizome develops" - Bob Holman, June 23rd, 2012 @ Naropa SWP | intuitive responsive visualised field notes by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson[/caption] Since the inauguration of the Field Notes series there has been a great rumbling -- not only of interest in the project [on deck: filmmakers, musicians, programmers, visual artists, activists...!] but also in the expansion of its attentions. Given our proclivity towards community collaboration we eagerly sop up the runoff of creative juices that gathers like dew on you all in the morning! So, naturally, to the question, "could we also include ____?" the answer is, why NOT? If you're new to Exit Strata, this is a good time to introduce you to our commitment to PROCESS: as much or more than we are excited to share and celebrate the products we create, we thrive and exist around the notion of creating community together via an intentional desire to the work of art. That is to say the WORK that is art, and the collaborative acts of craft across many disciplines that make this work so rich. We are not interested in what is NOT. We are interested in IS. Human attention, human questioning, universal energetic wanderings, coding, mathematical formulation, scientific inquiry, yoga, chanting, dance, film, music, sound, translation, fiction, poetry, prose, aphorism. Is it ART? is it art? is it Art? This is an interesting question for another time, but also a different question than it may appear to be. For our purposes, we are more interested in "does it inspire? does it help me and my community grow/think/learn/be better?" and to look at how the creative people (which doesn't necessarily mean "artists") in our midst use their notes to grow themselves and their work. Above, you see a responsive notebook page of mine that ebbed and flowed, responding to the rhythms of a poetry reading that was introduced by Bob Holman, who spoke the words above: "from the seemingly random the rhizome develops." Something perhaps I never would have shared before this series, which brings some questions to the fore, for all of us: What does your field-note-book look like?

Mushroom Admin

June 15, 2012

Taking Stock/In Stock :: Editorial Updates AND at a Bookstore Near You

[caption id="attachment_1414" align="alignleft" width="504"] 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...

Mushroom Admin

April 8, 2012

POETRY MONTH : Inspiration, Community, Tradition :: Week 2 :: Editorial Recap

HO! TRIBE! April 1st brought us poetry month, and on that day of inauguration and celebration many members of this community came together for POTLATCH 2012 to share and co-create. (Photos, updates, and CoCo content to come -- follow link above for gallery). We read, we shared, we sang, we broke bread, we laughed, and we felt -- well, I'll speak for myself -- I felt in my very cells a shift towards what can be possible when a community commits to themselves and each other, and the work we make individually and together. The elation, the purity of relaxation into common purpose, the love and mutual respect has carried on not only from this event but from this week's posts, kicking off Exit Strata's wholehearted effort to serve as a platform for this love-in and value creation via virtual space.

Mushroom Admin

April 1, 2012

POETRY MONTH 30/30/30: Inspiration, Community, Tradition :: Overview and DAY 1: Lynne DeSilva-Johnson on Mina/Traver Pam Dick

Welcome to the first Exit Strata poetry month celebration! As we announced recentlyin our call for participants, what we’re looking for via this exercise is shared brea(d)th: to have this month introduce our community to the universe of poetry that affects and alters ourselves and our colleagues, others with whom we may share a practice but whose influences are vastly different than our own.As we read and write this work, other poets become important to us for a million different reasons, often ones we could never entirely anticipate or explain — in observing our community one quickly notices that each person’s own relationship with poetry has grown in diverse and unexpected ways, with little known, local, foreign, or forgotten poets taking up solid and subtantial residence in the heart, mind, and psyche of each — in turn, altering inestimably our relationship to craft.When we are in school or in workshop, perhaps even more than from the didactic intention we glean from our *community* a richness ofengagement and influence, as density of dialogue provides each of its participants an unending supply of suggestions — names, books, poems, movements, and so on.

An introduction to an entirely new voice that speaks to you, as an adult out of these systems, is a rare and potentially life-altering gift… one that Exit Strata’s international creative network has the chance to offer all of us, as we replicate that atmosphere here in the virtual Commons. I am *very*, shakingly, jumpingupanddown excited for the brilliant and gorgeous poets we have "playing" with us this month. These people stepped right up to the plate with fervor and love, to bring a range of inspiration to our shared table that will blow your minds. I'm going to kick us off today by totally drooling all over Mina Pam Dick, who ousted my old friend Paul Goodman from this spot when I saw her read for EAOGH at the chapbook festival the other day. (Goodness do I ever love Goodman though, too! we'll come back to him and why he changed my life another day.) This week we'll be hearing from: Pete Reilly, Bill Considine, Tishon Woolcock, Caits Meissner, Gregory Crosby, and Frank Ortega, with many more to come. BOOMTIME! __

Mina/Traver Pam Dick (commence drooling) is, per her boiler-bio-plate, "a writer, artist and philosopher living in New York City. She's a native New Yorker. She received a BA from Yale and an MFA in Painting as well as an MA in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota. Her writing has appeared inTantalum, BOMB and The Brooklyn Rail, and is forthcoming in The Portable Boog Reader 4 and Aufgabe#9; her philosophical work has appeared in a collection published by the International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria)." Reviews of her first book, Delinquent, are smattered with praise like this apropos nugget: "Like a gender-errant Benjamin, Mina Pam Dick constellates recombinant philosophies, aesthetic forgeries, and the intertextual detritus of the big slithering city. The poems and prose that pack Delinquent’s sucker punch are weighted with the freight of excess baggage, which means they are the very work of today" (—Vanessa Place)