Category Archives: Art

I don’t know much about art, but that doesn’t stop me from writing about it now and then.

What are your favorite web periodicals of 2009?

As a follow-up to my previous post, I was thinking I’d put together a new list: Ten Favorite Web Periodicals of 2009, until it occurred to me that my picks might not be as interesting as yours. For one thing, I’m too busy publishing my own periodicals (qarrtsiluni, Moving Poems and this beast, among others) to read as extensively as I otherwise might. Plus my list would be heavily weighted toward publications of a literary nature, such as Cordite Poetry Review, Born Magazine, The Peter Principle and Terrain.org. There’s a lot out there that I’m missing, to put it mildly.

So I’m interested in hearing what other people are reading, for possible inclusion in a new post and/or poll, depending on the response. It can be any kind of online magazine, blog, or blog carnival, covering anything from political commentary to science to the arts. My only requirements: its most recent content must be no older than June 2009, and it must have a working RSS or Atom feed. In the case of a blog carnival, it should have a coordinating site with its own feed. Oh, and please don’t nominate any of my stuff or your own stuff — let’s keep this classy. (Nominating magazines you’ve been published in is of course fine.)

UPDATE: Please let me know if your comment doesn’t appear; I don’t normally check through the spam folder before deleting it. I have temporarily increased the limit on the number of links you can leave in a comment to five. If you have more than five recommendations, feel free to leave multiple comments.

Posted in Art, Blogs and Blogging, Books and Music, Nature/Ecology, Poets and poetry | 8 Comments

Buson tells a fart joke

Gakumon wa...  haiga by Yosa Buson

Gakumon wa... haiga by Yosa Buson (photo by ionushi on Flickr, Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)

Gakumon wa ketsu kara nukeru hotaru kana

(Study/scholarship as-for, ass from exiting/emitting firefly [exclamatory particle])

All this study—
it’s coming out your ass,
oh firefly!

*

I found this gem while looking for a photo of one of Buson’s haiga (haiku illustration, a proto-Manga-like genre he did much to advance) as a possible addition to Sunday’s post. It comes courtesy of Mexican blogger and man-of-letters Aurelio Asiain, who, as it happens, now teaches at the very college in Japan where I spent a formative year as an exchange student back in 1985-86.

This is as close to an outright simile as a haiku can get. Notice that there’s no firefly in the painting, which acts as a kind of commentary on the poem. In the absence of any additional information, one could certainly read this as a poem about a firefly whose diligent study bears fruit in the radiance coming from his abdomen. But the facial expression of the figure in the painting encourages a more Rabelaisian interpretation. Notice, further, the placement of the text in relation to the figure, the calligraphy suggesting curls of vapor. This is a fart joke.

It translates particularly well into modern American English, since “talking out one’s ass” is such a popular way to characterize know-it-all bloviating. Intellectual pursuits had a much higher value in Edo-period Japan, though, where students and scholars were often poetically said to study by firefly light — a conceit that survives to this day:

“Keisetsu-jidadi” which literally translates into “the era of the firefly and snow,” means one’s student days. It derives from the Chinese folklore and refers to studying in the glow of the fireflies and snow by the window. There is also an expression “Keisetsu no kou” which means “the fruits of diligent study.”

So Buson’s insight consists simply in pointing out where on its anatomy the firefly’s light emerges.

We shouldn’t be surprised that such a humorous haiku came from the brush of one of the greatest haiku masters. Humor and earthiness were primarily what distinguished haiku and haikai no renga from the much older renga (linked verse) tradition in the first place. In social terms, haiku poetry represented a middle-class appropriation and popularization of what had been a very aristocratic pursuit. And Japan was and remains an earthy culture; there’s nothing like the split between classical and vernacular views of the body which has afflicted Westerners since the Renaissance. Buson was able to paint equally well in a high-brow Chinese style and in the cartoonish fashion seen here, just as Chaucer included the Knights Tale and the Miller’s Tale in the same work.

Posted in Art, Greatest Hits, Humor, Poets and poetry, Translations | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Clive Hicks-Jenkins has a blog!

It’s true, he does. Well, O.K., he actually calls it a log — an artlog. Go visit.

What, you’re still here? Look, if you’ve been reading Via Negativa much at all this year, from the various comments he’s left you must already have some idea of the man’s generosity and way with words, not to mention his stunning artwork, as exemplified by the Tempations of Solitude paintings I wrote about. All three qualities are on display at his brand-new blog, which reproduces the contents of letters he’s been sending out to a few friends over the past eight days chronicling the progress of a major new work.

This ‘Artlog’ has been set up to provide a glimpse into my studio and the way in which I work. I’m kicking off with a day by day photographic diary of the current painting on my easel. (A bit of an experiment as I’ve never done this before, so bear with me.) The subject is Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds. The idea had been long gestating. I had a notion to conjure a more threatening mood than the usual bucolic approaches to the story. The key image that kept niggling at me was a violent maelstrom of birds with the saint at the heart of it. Almost as though he’s being mobbed. (Tippi Hedren comes to mind in Hitchcock’s The Birds.)

I’ve thought for a while that Clive should be blogging, and I’m glad he finally seems to agree. Since he was already an inveterate letter-writer, I didn’t think it would require too big a shift in his patterns, though granted, I am a shameless evangelist for this medium. It will be interesting to see how Clive uses it. Anyway, do go say hi and check out those birds!

Posted in Art, Blogs and Blogging | Tagged | 6 Comments

In the House of Night

In response to a three-dimensional etching by Aine Scannell.

In the house of night, a blue bear
pores over the screenplay for your dreams.
Somebody’s bad heart wrinkles
like a sack of cheese tied to the rafters.
I dreamed that I was lucid-dreaming,
and then I was.

In the house of night, neither ink
nor midnight oil ever run low.
Bed-time prayers flutter out
through a cross-shaped window,
anachronistic as bats on a winter day.
The mild poison from a house spider bite
spreads a dark delta down one thigh.

In the house of night, every time
a clock stops, some unloved language
or species dies in its sleep.
A nightjar blows its lid
& the bogeyman jumps, an obvious fraud,
under the parchment eaves.

Posted in Art, Greatest Hits, Poems & poem-like things | 6 Comments

“Tempations of Solitude” series now half as solitary

This entry is part 10 of 11 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

I’m very pleased to announce that my “Temptations of Solitude” poems now appear side-by-side with the paintings that inspired them on the artist’s own website. Though we’ve become regular email corespondents, I barely knew Clive Hicks-Jenkins when I started writing this series last spring, and was blown away by his enthusiasm for the poems. After all, he’s a fairly major figure in British painting, and it’s not as if I was the first to write poems in response to his works. In fact, I’ve joined a small online exhibit which includes five other poets (click on their names to view their pages on the site). I am particularly pleased to be published alongside my friend Marly Youmans and the wonderful Callum James.

I put these poems into the proverbial (and wholly suppositional) bottom drawer for many months, but didn’t end up making more than a few, minor changes when I finally took another look at them. This should probably worry me more than it does. I used to be such a perfectionist! Then I discovered blogging, and realized I was only as good a writer as my next post. Some of the poems in the Temptations series are stronger than others, and I’m O.K. with that. You can’t hit a home run every time, you know? I’ve decided there’s value in unevenness, and that if you attempt to reach the same peak each time, you end up with a featureless plateau.

At any rate, thanks to Clive for the inclusion — and for creating such damn fine paintings in the first place.

Posted in Art, Poets and poetry | Tagged | 15 Comments

The Beating of the Falsely Accused

This entry is part 9 of 11 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

in response to the painting by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, from his series The Temptations of Solitude

This ash-colored immigrant come
to steal an honest man’s job —
give him the business, why don’t you.
Let every slack muscle learn

what real work feels like,
how it aches & bruises.
Then let him go swimming
with a cast-iron kettle around his neck.

The sanitarium should’ve known better,
trying to hire orderlies from outside.
We’re hungry here.
The sun itself only gets in

a few licks each day,
& the sea eats like a drunk —
a nibble here & a nibble there
to steady itself against the shore.

We’ve all been tenderized.
We marinate in the tall salt cellars —
the rapeseed oil cans —
the cold ovens of our houses,

watch the flickering pilot light
in the corner of the room
& dream of an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Let us pray for the firm

flesh of angels, white,
with eyes that can sprout,
that can finger, that can shove
green fists through the dirt.

Posted in Art, Personal/Political, Poems & poem-like things | Tagged | 9 Comments

The Righteous Man Surprised by the Devil

This entry is part 8 of 11 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

in response to the painting by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, from his series The Temptations of Solitude

Chopping wood & carrying water
at the old collieries,
a sudden smug thought popped up:
I should be enlightened
in no time!
And just like that,
no-time snagged me

there in front of the tipple,
by the monkey puzzle tree.
The ground buckled as if
from a blast of dynamite.
My ears filled with roaring
from the long-closed pit.

Pride is an itch you can only
ignore for so long until
Old Scratch surfaces again,
naked & ridiculous, like
a malevolent penis with two
blind eyes instead of one.

I dropped to my knees,
sank into the vetch & nettles
while the others went on
with their meditations,
lowering buckets into the well
of the long afternoon.

Only a dog paused to watch
my clawing at the air.
A rash spread above that un-
reclaimed stripmine like the glow
from some legendary sunset
in a land without smog.

Posted in Art, Philosophy/Religion, Poems & poem-like things | Tagged | 4 Comments

Binding words

This entry is part 14 of 15 in the series Self-Portraits

Publishing houses that will print poetry are almost extinct (I know Dave B. Porcupine would argue that so are readers of poetry), yet the numbers of people writing poetry seem to have grown at an equal or greater rate. Some of them self-publish online or at print-on-demand shops like Lulu.com, but there can be a considerable cost to doing even small numbers in this way.

Just to get a bit low-tech on you for a second: you can hand-bind books yourself.

Through coverWhen a poet friend, Rachel Barenblat, had a miscarriage earlier this year and worked her way through the trauma and grief by writing poetry, yet wondered how to make these poems available to others going through a similar experience, I suggested a small hand-bound edition. Ten poems, title page, table of contents, acknowledgments: this adds up to 15 pages, plus one blank at the back. The magic 16. (Bookbinders think in multiples of eight and get super excited when all the pages add up to multiples of 32…) We settled on a tall, skinny format which conveniently fit on a standard letter-size sheet, folded in half: a pamphlet.

How to do it

Get familiar with your printer, and with whatever software you use to produce sheets with your poetry on them. (I use Adobe InDesign because I’m a designer but you can do this quite adequately on a word processor.) Always make a dummy and number its pages and then unfold them, so you know where the poems are going to fall. And then put them all together before you run off large numbers to be sure it still works. You can use imposition software but it’s not necessary; what IS necessary is a good understanding of where each page is going to end up after folding. Automatic pagination is not your friend here.

Find the longest line of any of your poems and work backwards in the design of your page from that (if the line will be split, find the longest line that won’t). Try and leave a generous gutter/central space, which should almost never be smaller than the optical margin of the outside when the booklet is held open. Remember to leave a wider margin at the foot of the page than the top and outside margins, to avoid that sinking feeling.

Through middleIn terms of typography, remember that you can use a relatively small font size if you allow generous leading (interline spacing). Look at books of printed poetry and see what they do and what you like, and why, and what you don’t like, and why, and use those to guide your page design. Try and identify the character, the personality, of typefaces and match the character of your poetry. Less is usually more with typography… it is almost never a good plan to use more than two typefaces in a book of poetry (or much else), and if you are tempted to do this, ask yourself why. Let the poems sing for themselves rather than be tripped up by clunky type.

You can use a simple sheet as the cover or you can use different paper, or papers. You can do collage, you can paint on them, you can use photos. Experiment. You don’t have a publisher’s marketing department breathing down your neck! Just make sure that the grain of the pages matches the grain of the cover or it will buckle.

There are many online resources for bookbinding.

  • Short chapbooks can be bound with a simple pamphlet (figure 8) stitch.
  • A longer book can be done easily as a stab-bound (Japanese-style) book, where the folded edge faces the outside, not the spine.
  • Accordion-fold books are sculptural and lend themselves well to open display, though require a long sheet which may not work well in most printers — consider hand-lettering or cutting poems or stanzas out to stick to this format.

What you need

  • paper for text pages and cover
  • cutting board
  • metal ruler
  • utility or exacto knife
  • bone folder (optional, but this is a great tool)
  • awl or long needle to punch holes
  • needle for sewing
  • linen thread, silk ribbon, etc.

A better reader

Through last pageAs I folded the sheets for Rachel’s book, 176 in all, getting engulfed in the rhythm that comes from doing a repetitive task for love, I started seeing the same lines over and over. A different word would jump forward. I noticed connections within stanzas, within poems, across poems. In short, I was reading the poems in a different way. A better way. Binding poetry makes me a better reader. Try it; I think you’ll discover new things about your poetry — or someone else’s. And you’ll have a few hand-bound booklets to give or keep or even — gasp — sell.

—Alison Kent (Feathers of Hope and Bird by Bird)

***

Still to come in this series, I hope, are guest-written pieces on typewriters, Twaiku, Facebook update poetry, Second Life, and more. If you have an idea for an essay you’d like to contribute, let me know.

—Dave

Posted in Art, Books and Music, Guest writers, Poets and poetry | Tagged , | 14 Comments

The Celibate Couple Pursued

This entry is part 7 of 11 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

in response to the painting by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, from his series The Temptations of Solitude

Who let these two pawns crowd
into a single square? The game
requires that we each defend
our solitude. We have banished
the bird from the tree & the tree
from the horizon. But now

the white knight wrestles
with temptation: can’t he take
the direct route to head them off,
pin them against the straight-
arrow castle, instead of sidling up
in waltz steps like some kind
of goddamned dandy?

The black & white squares begin
to merge — a gray quicksand.
His horse grows scaley,
anadromous, gathers itself
for a leap worthy of Cúchulainn.

The disobedient pair flee
to the far edge of their flat earth
& turn into queens,
resplendent & terrifying.
The watchman bawls
from his tall tower,
Check & Check & Mate.

Posted in Art, Poems & poem-like things | Tagged | 10 Comments

The Barbarian Brought Down by a Lioness

This entry is part 6 of 11 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

in response to the painting by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, from his series The Temptations of Solitude

Did he taste of loneliness, sour & marmoreal,
that man from away who came out here
to get away from himself?

What vapors rose from the punctured
balloon of his gut, which he used to tap
with the small end of a fist when explaining

the pull of mountain scenery,
the open spaces & abundant peace?
He would settle here

as lightly as a leaf, he swore, praying
for the developers to be enveloped
& the subdividers subjected to division.

They didn’t feel the wilderness
the way he did, living off the land,
conscious only of God’s grace

as he looked back: the poor earth raw
from harrow & bulldozer, a snaggletoothed jumble
of lighthouse, smokestack, steeple.

Nothing like the orderly ridges
rippling under his attacker’s pelt,
that figment of the blue distance suddenly at hand.

Posted in Art, Philosophy/Religion, Poems & poem-like things | Tagged | Comments Off
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