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Tag Archive: poetry

Series of Exceptions

Filed under: Art, Tribute — 60 Comments

June 30, 2012

for Francesca Woodman

medium format intimacy
10,000 negatives survive
120 culled for display
30 years after the suicide:

Self Deceit #1

another year of dishonesty
psychic risk of embodying an artist
your face was unidentifiable
a persona defenestration

rewind from tragedy
address the art (she would prefer it)
pernicious action you presaged had
‘nothing to do with melodrama’

Francesca as Alice

delicate, fragile interior
probed by a functioning interrogator
superego peering in from the edges
(who exactly obliterated you?)

Francesca Woodman

you invented a visual language where
clothes pins pinch flesh,
wallpaper camouflages or liberates,
women unbutton identity

‘I am floating in plasma…
I am so vain…
I was (I am?) not unique but special
This is why I was an artist’

Sloan as Francesca’s Doppleganger

Quotes are from Francesca Woodman’s journals and letters

Linked to Poetics at dVerse http://dversepoets.com/2012/06/30/poetics-button-button/

Tags: poetry

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The Collector

Filed under: Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, Tribute — 20 Comments

June 29, 2012

Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe

Sam’s repeating Purgatory, enacting a self-assassination in American silver
Repeating his regression, photography collector to curator (debonair style cast)
Purgatory regression as he confronts personas, morphs 1970s to 1980s

Enacting photography he examines dark contrast: art, his sexuality, death
A collector confronts dark ecstasy, voyeuristic demi-gods creating visages
Self to personas contrast: voyeuristic beau-monde, pornographic trends override
Assassination curator morphs art, demi-monde, drug culture, Mapplethorpe lovers

In debonair 1970s his gods: pornographic culture, cigarettes, photographs, positing
American style to sexuality, creating trends, Mapplethorpe photographs exuding possession
Silver cast 1980s, death visages override lovers, positing possession matters

Notes:

This is a 10X10 matrix (after Lewis Carroll) inspired by the Form for All challenge at dVerse. The connecting point happened during the documentary film Black White + Gray when it is mentioned that Sam Wagstaff collected photographs taken by Lewis Carroll.

Samuel Jones Wagstaff Jr. (4 November 1921 – 14 January 1987) was an American art curator and collector as well as the artistic mentor and benefactor of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (who was also his lifetime companion) and poet-punk rocker Patti Smith. Wagstaff was known in part for his support of Minimalism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Earthworks, but his aesthetic acceptance and support of photography presaged the acceptance of the medium as a fine art. After selling his collection of photographs in the 1980s he, surprisingly, began collecting American silver. Wagstaff died of pneumonia arising from AIDS at his home in Manhattan on January 14, 1987, two years before Mapplethorpe. – Wikipedia

Tags: poetry

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Transmarginal Inhibition (Elegy of Solitude)

Filed under: Art, Personal, Philosophy, Postmodern, Science — 60 Comments

June 23, 2012

Thermik by David Schnell

‘To be nobody but yourself in a world
which is doing its best night and day
to make you everybody but yourself –
means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight –
and never stop fighting’*

Syncretistic perceptions, an undifferentiated overlay, defies analysis
charcoal line smudges of general schemas obscure impressions
rich encounters snap floodlights of jutting rebar arousals

Hypersensitive virtualization creates painted landscapes
interior silhouette projects an invasion of organic forms
brushed upon the tethered denigration of industrial life

Here in the interstices my song floods the synapses
sanctuary of full intellection and emotive grace
perpetual motion unaware of constraints

Rigorous self-actualization, joy in overcoming
physical and mental obstacles, planes of perspective
in a carmine sky, layered with personal/political history

Equivalent Phase

Universal current skips along a straight colored line
zaps as the artist’s tinted horizons chase imaginative space
indeterminate semantic memory emanates
parkourist streaming cobalt sparklers in an art of human reclamation

Paradoxical Phase

Ratcheting optimal levels of arousal to overstimulation
reality wends an anfractuous path towards the essentially absurd
interior integrity crumbles under the tonnage
crushing architecture of exterior inhumanity

Ultra-paradoxical

Extreme choreography of pure constructs, pandemonium of agonies,
dissuades association, enforcing a gaze of self-negation
trace elements lose gravity, reversal’s insidious influence reigns
as intensely private volition deconstructs

(initiating post traumatic dissociation in my supratemporality field)

*E.E. Cummings

Notes:
Transmarginal inhibition is a psychological term denoting an organism’s response to overwhelming stimuli. Ivan Pavlov through his research found “that the most basic inherited difference among people was how soon they reached this shutdown point and that (those with) the quick-to-shut-down (response) have a fundamentally different type of nervous system.” Patients who have reached this shutdown point often become socially dysfunctional. Patients who dissociate during and after the experience, will more easily dissociate or shut down during stressful or painful experiences, and may experience post traumatic stress disorder.

There are three stages passed through for state of transmarginal inhibition to be reached.

1. equivalent phase: response matches the stimuli, which is considered normal, baseline behavior.
2. paradoxical phase: associated with quantity reversal, occurs when small stimuli receive major response and a major stimuli elicit small responses.
3. ultra-paradoxical: the final stage, associated with quality reversal in which negative stimulation results in positive responses and vice versa.

An organism can progress through these stages by increased stimulation, random negative stimulation, reversing positive and negative stimulation, or physically debilitating the organism. – from Wikipedia (with modifications)

Parkour (also called Le Parkour, PK, or free running) is an activity in which participants attempt to clear all obstacles in their path in the most fluent manner possible. A traceur, parkourist or free runner is a participant of parkour. The term free runner has been commonly used by the media.

The ultimate goal in parkour is to ‘flow’ along one’s path, for the entire journey to be as one fluent movement with no pauses or breaks. A principal rule of parkour is to never go backwards. Free runners believe that there is path to every obstacle which is achieved through forward movement.

The magnitude and technicality of a move in parkour are secondary to the flow and beauty of it. Explains Jerôme Ben Aoues, one of the traceurs featured in in the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary Jump London, “The most important thing really is the harmony between you and the obstacle; the movement has to be elegant, that’s what will make it prettier. Length and distance only add to the beauty of the move, if you manage to pass over the fence elegantly that’s beautiful, rather than saying ‘I jumped the lot.’ What’s the point in that?”

To many, parkour is an extreme sport, to others a discipline more comparable to martial arts, to others an art form akin to dance, a way to encapsulate human movement in its most beautiful form. Parkour also inspires freedom; being free in an urban environment designed to trap, not restricted by railings, staircases, even buildings. It is for many people a way of life. – from wordiQ
More of David Schnell’s paintings can be viewed in this German language video

Tags: experimental poetry, poetry

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• Postmodernism

  Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.

• Robert Anton Wilson

  Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

• Witold Gombrowicz

  Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke

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  I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.

• Gustav Flaubert

  Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

• Dušan “Charles” Simić

  Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

• Monique Wittig

  Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.

• W.S. Merwin

  All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible

• Thomas Aquinas

  Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.