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Chromapoetica

Category: Postmodern

Tanztheater (Totentanz)

Filed under: Art, History, Philosophy, Postmodern, Tribute — 21 Comments

September 6, 2013

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

I speak now to the audience in your head
not the voice that reads this line
(nor the voice that speaks alongside it)
but instead to the part of you
that observes the voice,
(hush now)
watch the unfolding theater:

here is an excursion of the artist into war
from the safety of the mind’s constructs
(you will not have to take a stance)
so you, the observer,
have assurances
double indemnity

Pina choreographs the performers
writhing masterfully among the corpses
wrap flesh around their toes
to raise on point
(incongruous)

upon a beach invaded
by the long dead
(whale song)
marching to the sacred shrine
(come away)
the listening shores rebound

hand-held spotlight illuminates
an iron triangle against the
politics of a graffiti sky
jagged edges slice the dancers
(to operatic pleas)

she stands alone
undulating arms
(come away)
frenetic, kinetic shapes
haunt in liminal space
(collapsing)
consume your ideas,
bury your children

confront the psychology of obstacles
strewn across a room within a world,
a café, a memory, a drama
(inextricable motion)
painting your psyche,
(behind the fourth wall)

bid the virtues,
bid the graces
(come)
daughters of art

cry your overflowing river of dust
a rite of spring granting muddied feet
to reclaim the earth of this stage

incursions into our perspectives
wormholes to exquisite pain
(as I write to you)
of this excursion
of the artist
into war

we close the door (castaways)
seaweed tossed by the storm
mimicking the dance
emotive intensity whirls
in the roar

violent intent permeates Nature,
from whom we learn not
seeing with closed eyes

you hear my voice, your voice,
the observer draws horrific pictures
for your inner sight
you travel, exploring this interior
view of war

at a remove that fans out
like a house of mirrors
dancers mime

(terror)

(exhaustion)

(bloodlust)

death

Pina Bausch 1940-2009

Tags: experimental poetry, poetry

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Too close to be named

Filed under: Art, Personal, Philosophy, Postmodern, Science — 20 Comments

July 23, 2013

Acrylic on paper 2005 Anna Chamberlain, poetry 2013

Tags: experimental poetry, poetry

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Aquiline Excitations

Filed under: Art, History, Philosophy, Postmodern, Writing — 18 Comments

July 9, 2013

Frank O’Hara 1926-1966 by Grace Hartigan

Frank O’Hara says to Grace Hartigan
‘I do not always know what I am feeling.’
(but in For Grace, After a Party
it will become about you)

spouting a poetry of indeterminacy
as he builds his identity,
a compulsion of artistry accusing
her of the betrayal of figuration

pure abstraction was required to
invent a self-referential language,
to find the convincing limits of the self
she asserted the definitive line
in his elegy in paint, Frank O’Hara, 1926-1966

now imagine the Abstract Expressionists
on Facebook, drunken missives
of fluid modernity existing within
the persistent lateral surveillance of decorum

gorging on sycophants sexting naked pictures
from the front facing cameras of smartphones
deKooning’s women couched in
an art of internalized misogyny

in this iDubai world of conspicuous
consumption, anything can be a commodity,
masquerade as a pretense or solipsistic dissolution
accompanied by a string orchestration
to score a cinematic self-expression

all devolves into projection and reflection
tactical apologues in the life of the mind
code-talker paradox a side effect
in a cyber-context devoid of meaning
simultaneously blocking and enabling communication
digital age where we cannot make marks
that depress the paper, only unembossed gloss

we’re so far from the sumptuous feasts
debauched scenes and willful obscurities
of Lycophron’s Alexandra, offering instead
staid symposia and motivational speeches
forgetting the orgiastic origins
and slave owning of the intelligentsia

Plato was the first literary dandy
explicating the joys of exploitation
revived by the Queen of Versailles
time share dream pushers building
90,000 square feet of opulence because they can
suing the filmmakers for life story rights

we bleat mutilated themes like Adele anthems
(registering attempts at emoting)
obsessive tracks running on elliptical trainers
to avoid over-hyped terrorist psychosis

virtualization is an act of fallacious connection
Time polls reiterate being rich will make you happy
performance art in the social hierarchy undermining
Rich’s dream of a common language

private and public merged
process and product revealed
so that the art and artist are one
unheeding the warning signs
Pollock’s unveiling killed him because
he knew the falsehood he stood upon
(cigarette butts and ejaculate
embedded in house paint)

how could we not continuously turn
to the melodic tones of dancing limbs?
pregnant looks, throwbacks to lover’s songs
ingestions of longing, You Belong to Me
melds into Make You Feel My Love

both speak intensely of possession,
of an invented and distorted humanity,
at the edge of thought as it becomes volition
or fades into the void, a gnat’s worth of life energy
in the storied American pursuit of happiness

Tags: experimental poetry, poetry

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Linguistic Indolence (Disconcerting Idioms)

Filed under: Art, Postmodern, Writing — 20 Comments

June 5, 2013

Richard Diebenkorn – Berkeley #57

incendiary convergence, blood-dark magnolia
caught in a wounded harvesting, profound incursion,
an exile – suicide volition in a fading Arcadia

oscillating secrets, pleasure traversal
dreaming plunge on a transparent, violet night
blue smoke ushers a vestigial solemnity

(the text intervenes –
a mutilation which language
supports and denounces*)

cavernous figurations, internal adorations
aesthetic conceptions underscoring
an invented landscape

elegant silence of seclusion’s verdancy
ephemeral horizon, an evasive, mirrored shore-line

inclination, reflection, formidable curiosity
abstraction of Diebenkorn’s expressive,
succulent brush-strokes

dancing exclamations of luminosity
hieroglyphs of absence enabling
an atmosphere of poetic contingency

glistering disquisitions, light echoes – shadow colors
bewitching lexicons, internal archways of lavish resemblances
banished beauty, castles built on unbounded mists

pale branches atop evasive stones, incommensurate
reaching toward scorched estuaries

impenetrable worlds of hearth ash
remains of an intense art

painted mountains, the apparent vanguards,
figurative defacements of a gestating destiny

* from Anne-Marie Albiach’s The Wasting Away “of Chance”
posted for Charles Miller’s dVerse prompt Meeting the Bar: Form for All and was created following a random method of word selection (including allowing another poet to choose words) from multiple texts and then arranging them poetically. The texts include the complete novels of Jane Austen, Women’s Poetry in France 1965-1995 translated by Michael Bishop, Possession by A.S. Byatt, American Hybrid A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, Gerhard Richter Paintings from Private Collections, and Richard Diebenkorn The Berkeley Years 1953-1966. Please join us at dVerse Poets Pub.

Tags: experimental poetry, poetry

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Method of Loci (House of Mirth Rewrite)

Filed under: Art, Personal, Postmodern, Science — 6 Comments

April 1, 2013

This is a digital alteration of a polaroid picture I took when I was 6. The original was purposely out of focus.

Peering into the past
lenses initiate selective focus
a fantastication brought about
through a child’s eyes
prismatic sensibility only possible then
encased in the vault of unextinguishable incunabulum

developing the picture as it emerges
revealing the essence of a life
showing one moment, one side of perception
in its inability to capture without speciousness
(the exposure length is too short)
belying motion, upheaval and change

in the niveous nature of memory
my meandering dreams recast
glimpses of truth like halations appear
ocular glitches hinting at tathata
of what can be distinguished, claimed
flashbulbs of burning visions

encoding through elaborative rehearsal
all known and unkenned phenomena
to create a picture story, a meaning,
yet these converging lenses are limited
by one focal length expanding as
depth of field grows, patulous schemas incubate

my evolving mind forms eidetic imagery
uniting as episodic memory stitches an identity
holographic retrieval reveals
clarity amidst the circle of confusion
a positive memory distortion prevails
polaroid process makes positive images

without negatives (they were never created)
artmaking acts as my nepenthe
coalescing strands of experience
collaging each image of striving
into a concatenation of aspects of a self
lighting recesses in this house of mirth

Notes: Method of Loci: A mnemonic device that relies on memorized spatial relationships to establish order and recollect memorial content. Selective Focus: Is a technique in photography that allows one part of the image to be sharp while the rest of the image is out of focus. It works to great effect in macro shots where the foreground should stand out intensely from the background. Fantastication: Action of framing in fancy. Incunabulum: Early stages of development. Speciousness: An appearance of truth that is false or deceptive; seeming plausibility. Halation: Spreading of light beyond its proper boundaries to form a fog round the edges of a bright image in a photograph. Tathata: Ultimate nature of all things, as expressed in phenomena but inexpressible in words. Encoding: The process of transforming information into a form that can be stored in memory. Elaborative Rehearsal: A memory strategy that involves relating new information to something that is already known Unkenned: Unknown, strange, unperceived, unexplored. Converging Lens: Lens such that a beam of light passing through it is brought to a point or focus. The lens of your eye and that of a camera are converging lenses. Focal Length: The focal length of an optical system is a measure of how strongly the system converges or diverges light. In most photography where the subject is essentially infinitely far away, longer focal length (lower optical power) leads to higher magnification and a narrower angle of view; conversely, shorter focal length or higher optical power is associated with a wider angle of view. Depth of Field: In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field (DOF) is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance at a time, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on each side of the focused distance. Patulous: Open, expanding, gaping Schemas: The integrated frameworks of knowledge and assumptions a person has about people, objects, and events which affects how the person encodes and recalls information. Eidetic Imagery: The ability to retain the image of a visual stimulus for several minutes after it has been removed from view. Episodic Memory: The type of declarative memory that records events as they have been subjectively experienced. Circle of Confusion: In optics, a circle of confusion is an optical spot caused by a cone of light rays from a lens not coming to a perfect focus when imaging a point source. In photography, the circle of confusion is used to determine the depth of field, the part of an image that is acceptably sharp. Positive Bias (Memory Distortion): States that pleasant events are better remembered than unpleasant ones and memories of unpleasant events become more pleasant over time. Nepenthe: Something capable of causing obliteration or reduction of grief or suffering. Concatenation: A series of interconnected or interdependent things or events.

Tags: experimental poetry, poetry

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