Reed College Library Due-Date Card from the Pocket of Clothes Worn at Home, Ancient and Modern by Friedrich Hottenroth, 1890
The card’s left column stacks rows of the library’s black inked date-stamps, a wheel turned to a long-past future time, a foreclosure on rights to pursue, a squint against a short span of immersion, due dates and the possibility of fines. User names are smudged in pencil, crossed out when the book comes home. Only in the early years did any patron ask for these illustrations more than once a year. Twenty years have passed. No one asks for the book at all. Herr Hottenroth died penniless in a home for destitute artists. This is aging – out-dated fabrics, yellowed paper with ragged edges. Tricia Knoll Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who retains a special fondness for the smell of old libraries and books whose paper has yellowed at the edges. In early 2018 Antrim House will bring her collection of poetry How I Learned to Be White. Website: triciaknoll.com
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Self-Portrait Superimposed The year of my birth, you were already painting me after your death: forehead against forehead against canvas, your name etched in our skin, tiny strokes beneath eyes and mountains, leaves, fields inside the iris. You knew then how brush and pen intersect and what shows through. These nights, back roads and what's left of their lights hover outside the pane, your silhouette scratched out on an easel of trees. Everywhere is someplace old and lived in, a small landscape, this world, posed delicately, like us, at each window. Marjorie Maddox Editor's note: This poem is about the writer's aunt, Marjorie Rickey, for whom she was named. Rickey painted the poet's portrait when she was young, and the poem was inspired by it. Rickey studied with Hans Hoffman and had several exhibitions. This poem was previously published at Perpendicular and I. Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University (MFA) and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published eleven collections of poetry-including True, False, None of the Above; Wives' Tales; Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I; Weeknights at the Cathedral; and Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation; the short story collection What She Was Saying; the anthology (co-editor) Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and four children's books. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com Self-Portrait as the Artist Working in the Dark
after Stephen Hannock Fingers contain the medium, colours liquid as blood, luminosity confined by a bell jar, perfect vacuums all ambidextrous artists need for manipulating twin brushes, one each for different blank canvases stretched beyond breaking, though each surface reflects something that has never been seen before: poems acid etched in concrete where paint will not adhere, a welder's mask nothing can be seen through, black lights that images can be seen in only when sunglasses are affixed, gray light apparent like a strangeness on the skin, a kind of living presence no heat source can eliminate or effect; in the end the artist can only offer an addict's last days as seen from inside a medicine chest, time on a soiled platter offered as if it were a head. Alan Catlin Editor's note: Alan Catlin's poem was inspired by the work of artist Stephen Hannock, whose stunning landscape paintings can be viewed at http://www.stephenhannock.info. Alan Catlin has been publishing for parts of five decades in little, minuscule, not so little, literary and university publications from the Wisconsin Review to Tray Full of Lab Rats, to Wordsworth’s Socks and The Literary Review among many others. His chapbook, Blue Velvet, won the Slipstream Chapbook Contest in 2017. He is the poetry and review editor of Misfitmagazine.net, an online poetry journal. Another surprise ekphrastic challenge!
The theme is "birds." Winged creatures have captivated humankind from as far back as any records, art, music, words, or relics were made. Art through time gives us a vivid picture of the various ways humans have thought about birds. Use these artworks to prompt poetry or prose. You can investigate the artwork thoroughly by any means necessary, or use it as a springboard or scrawl down thoughts from a flight of fancy. Learn more about the artist, or use the picture alone to find a new window into your world and your work. The Ekphrastic Review invites you to write about all of the artworks for a complete experience. Looking deeper at art opens unexpected invitations of engagement for writers, and be open to surprising yourself and having different responses, as opposed to just going by initial instinct with what you like immediately or what you find familiar. But that said, there are no rules. Do as much or as little as you can. Don't censor yourself in the process of writing or rewriting, but please, send us only your best ones! Subject line: Birds -Surprise Challenge Submission theekphrasticreview@gmail.com Include a brief bio. Deadline: January 31, 2018 Poetic Psychoanalysis: Graceland
All week, the entire town in sequins-- pompadoured teens, side-burned street vendors, pant-suited septuagenarians— their foreheads and chests slick with sweat, their hips gyrating in sequence, yet-- more surprisingly—in this poem, it’s my first-time-to-Memphis trek, and somehow I’ve slipped through the thick-as-grits crowd and am giddily maneuvering my suddenly svelte self up flower-strewn stairs of the King’s mansion past the secret-service types guarding the master suite and into the padlocked bathroom of pure mystery of what happened when and how and why it should matter to you, the reader, who are dreaming your own poetic investigation beyond the barricaded second-floor doors of Graceland or wide-open windows of grace that, yes, leave us grateful and greedy, wanting one more wailing hymn or crooning ballad. We’ve all paid the entrance fee. Marjorie Maddox Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University (MFA) and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published eleven collections of poetry-including True, False, None of the Above; Wives' Tales; Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I; Weeknights at the Cathedral; and Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation; the short story collection What She Was Saying; the anthology (co-editor) Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and four children's books. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com Icon It’s not a story I expected I would ever tell. Certainly not a poem. A dusty road somewhere outside Zagreb. Yugoslavia was still its full egg. Vendors were perched along the roadside selling flashy artifacts to tourists like us, alighting from the bus to take care of business and maybe eye the local fruit. It struck my eye: maybe walnut, carefully framed, a golden mother and her child embossed within. It couldn’t be real gold; not at that price. I looked at other artificial treasures then kept returning in my steps to the sad Madonna cradling. That one needed a home, and so I carried her beyond the road. Some years later I think hard on the country that was, and Humpty-Dumpty, the broken self at the bottom of the wall. The Zagreb of imagination, patient behind the road we traveled, now centre of the new Croatia. Many died, claims were made for it. New shops beckon with fresh glass. The Madonna still glistens on my bookshelf without change. And what of our own country, that may have fallen into pieces? Or maybe not. We are surrounded by eggs, and few handle them carefully. The stalwart frame still cradles the gold woman and child, who by now have seen everything, even the fall of powerful states. How much she remembers with her quiet eyes. There’s nothing more to tell. An image brings back the dead, foretells the future of our fragments. The bus drives on, we are all convinced we have something in our hands for memory. Mother of God, protect our coming and our going, the shells we walk on, the stories we inhabit with no frame. David Radavich David Radavich's recent poetry collections are America Bound: An Epic for Our Time, Middle-East Mezze, and The Countries We Live In. His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe. He has served as president of the Thomas Wolfe Society, Charlotte Writers' Club, and North Carolina Poetry Society and given performances in such countries as Egypt, Germany, Greece, and Iceland. www.davidradavich.org. Field With Wheat Stacks He fell in love with a simple field of wheat, and I’ve felt this way, too; melted, like a pool of mint chip ice cream, foolishly in love, even though we know how it turns out in the end: snicked by the scythe, burnt in the furnace of the August sun, threshed, separated, kernel from chaff. But right now, it’s spring, and the wheat aligns in orderly rows: Yellow green. Snap pea. Sage. Celadon. His brush strokes pile on, wave after wave, as the haystacks liquefy, slide off the canvas, roll on down to the sea. Barbara Crooker This poem is from the author's book, Les Fauves, C&R Press, 2017. Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian-Americana, and has published eight full collections and twelve chapbooks. Her latest book is Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017). She has won a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. A VCCA fellow, she has published widely in such journals as Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Green Mountains Review, The Denver Quarterly, and The Beloit Poetry Journal. website: www.barbaracrooker.com Shouting at the Ground, Through the Trees “A silent man, walking in solitude by a mountain stream… We begin to see what is real and what really deserves our allegiance.” Gary Snyder ☉ Listen to the radio show as you read this: Wreck Zoviet France Shout 1190 Roquette, Pimprenelle, Hirondelle, Lézard des murailles, Muquet de Mai, Bruyère, Patience, Fongère, Sapin, Chataigner, Laurier Franc, Pissenlit, pie-grièche à tête rousse, Guêpier d’Europe, Mauve des Bois, Chauve-souris, Épicéa, Fauvette, Traquet motteux, Marronier d’Inde: repeating any of these French flora or fauna species in any number, in any order overandover will transport you to the place I am about to describe because as we all know, language is the basis of our world, how we perceive it, how we construct it, how we negotiate through it, and, through mantras, transcend walls, borders, and this “blooming buzzing confusion,” as William James described our world. Religious people, monks, gurus, musicians, and poets all know this. Language is the effluvia that allows us to interact, to inspire. And the above is my mantra, my escape clause ... The reason may very well be that this particular album has a long personal history: It has stood by me, has enchanted and provoked me over the years but most eidetically for a long period of self-imposed hermitude in the south of France – and elsewhere. It justifies and endorses the very solitary life that is both sought and endured. I recorded Shouting at the Ground in pre-digital times from vinyl to cassette in the basement studios of WFMU shortly before I moved to France. The magnetic cassette tape I chose was already occupied by other sounds, and yet, I had no moral qualms about recording over it. This was a tactic generally frowned upon by audiophiles and WFMU DJs obsessed with high fidelity. While some people pack a rucksack with an emergency medical kit, a hip flask filled with a liquid of some proof, or a big lunch, I packed mine with cassettes and an apple. I knew my survival would hinge on essential sounds the way others would never forget a canteen or a pocket knife before they set out on a hike. I spent great, long stretches of hermetic time out of Paris, in the South of France, in a stone house on a hill to the east of Albi and just north of Castres and Mazamet – a beautiful area with a view of the Montagnes Noires; there are few tourists, few locals, and a broad selection of great, modest, underrated Languedoc wines and wonderful breads such as the miche, which I describe as made of water, salt and flour in the shape of a baseball catcher’s mitt. Albert, the property’s caretaker, picked me up at the train station in June. His English was limited to a dozen words. My French was a timid stream of nouns and unconjugated verbs. But somehow communication happened: He showed me where everything was: silverware, work gloves, linens, wood for the stove, some basic provisions: bread, cheese, coffee, eggs, wine. How to open the mint-green shutters and windows. There’s no TV, just an old portable radio with a cassette deck. That’ll be my companion for the next 10 to 12 weeks. I am going to write a novel or maybe just fill the endless time barely passing with something that pretended to such a purpose. But also, I just wanted to BE – be away, be somewhere else, be myself in relation to the world and all its attractive and distractive features ... and, I was there to make money as a kind of tree trimmer/lumberjack – and upon further research, discovered I could have been called a land manager too. X’s uncle drove up from Toulouse to make sure I full comprehended the importance of my task. He was a dapper man with a moustache you associate with movies from the 1940s and an aptitude for English he was proud to show off. My days were simple: It was summer, I did not need an alarm; the sun managed daily to part the mist and squeeze through the slatted shutters at just past 5 AM. I would rise, and as I reheated yesterday’s coffee, I might scurry out briefly to touch dew on grass, behold it, and then return to write until 7:30 with equal cups of reheated coffee and cold Ricoré [instant chicory coffee substitute], which was perfect for dunking hunks of my miche brought fresh ever 3 days by Albert on his way to work. [Are the crazy people those who do this kind of thing or are they the ones who never-ever experience this dunking delight in their entire lives?] I made a big breakfast, packed an even bigger lunch, dressed in my holey work pants, high rubber boots, checkered shirt and bandana, checked to make sure I had my citronella oil insect repellent before hiking off to my job along the rusty barbed wire that kept a few grazing sheep [moutons, I repeat overandover] in their part of the pasture, la-la-ing, singing, repeating hypnotic phrases in French – “le tapage des oiseaux ivres de lumière” [The twittering of birds drunk with the sun, Charles Baudelaire] – blowing kisses to the sky, humming, talking to a rabbit or a pheasant – the only thing a spider web has caught this morning is dew – along this magical petit chemin, a path consisting of 2 old tractor ruts that attract many audio and olfactory delights – like how a story line through a novel attracts logic and intrigue. I notice that the telephone poles wear tin caps to prevent them from rotting. Oblivious to how ridiculous this would all seem if viewed on a hidden camera. The permanence of elements – stone walls, like slate, like a stump wearing a green sock of moss, like this old rusty saw attached to an ancient pole, shiny with a hundred years of a hand gripping it – contrast with the floral effluvia or the tufts of early morning mist caught in the grasses, illuminated from a mysterious source as a breeze runs its fingers through the tops of the trees. The brouillard [it’s onomatopoeic, it describes mist in sound] envelopes you in its swaddling layers as it descends into the shad of the valley, leaving behind the stone house. The work [over a summer and then through a good deal of the following winter] was in a beautiful woodland, a tree farm of lumber-bound firs and pines, but to me just a wood of somewhat hypnotically, symmetrically planted evergreens – perhaps 10,000 of them in total. Upon arriving in the wood at 8 AM, I lap on citronelle to neck, head, hair, and arms to keep the gnats away. [This mostly works only if I believe it does]. I put on my work gloves and begin trimming branches up to a height of 6 metres, using 2 tree pruner saws mounted one on the end of a 2-metre wooden pole and the other on a 4-metre pole. I take periodic breaks for a sip of iced water, juice, an apple, some nuts or I might write something down, an observation, a line to a poem never finished, gibberish. “How does one see the thing better when others are absent? Is looking like sucking: the more lookers, the less there is to see?” -Walker Percy As I worked I heard the crackling of branches, my groans and heavy breathing echo through this wooded parcel; my body already steaming from the exertion and its not even 9:30 AM. The saw dust falls from the scythe-shaped saw and sticks to my skin. I am totally alone here. At the end of my workday – 2 PM [before the full heat and full annoyance of gnats] – sawdust covering my head, pine resin drops sticking to the hairs on my arms, I noted how many trees I had trimmed. If I trim 80 trees at 5 francs per tree, I could earn an OK living wage of about $66 a day in the middle of nowhere. From my scratchy notes it looks like I averaged about 95 trees in 5 to 6 hours, or about 1 tree every 3 minutes. I see from my rows of figures in a notepad that on good days I’d finish 149, 145, 131. The harder I worked in the morning, the less hours I’d have to put in and the more time I’d have for living and writing. The pace is sometimes frustrated by resin that builds up on the saw blade. This I have to clean off using rough stones and a cloth soaked in rubbing alcohol. [Back at the house I might use a rag soaked in gasoline]. Then I walked back home – the 40 varieties of flowers along the way mock any hubris we may manufacture – with a plucked bouquet of wild flowers or a pocket full of wild strawberries. I stop to listen to the bees buzzing, the birds chirping [I only look them up many, many years later: Skylark, Common Linnet, Crested Lark, Swift, White Wagtail, Serin, Corn Bunting, Goldfinch and Fan-tailed Warbler]. The running brook: I want to record it and, like Beethoven getting down on his belly to listen to its gurgle, I try to learn its enchanting secrets. The mud sucks up my boot; the mud smells a million years old. Two young lovers holding hands in the distant midday sun, heading to the reservoir to go skinny dipping. I have seen the gleeful and carefree on my days off, lying, white-skinned, on striped towels along the shore. A teenage summer doing nothing is a summer well-spent. One day – maybe it is how like a good frame enhances a painting – the stillness frames the ambient sounds. I hear the cows [vaches] 100 meters off in the pasture slowly chewing, each at peace with her own halo of flies. I find two mouton skulls, parched and bleached; I bring one back to place on my work desk. I run a steamy tub of aromatic water which was – I don’t remember – probably some mix including sage, chamomile, or orange peel, offered as a going-away gift by X whose resentment at my leaving reminds me of the girl in the movie Betty Blue. I kept this observation to myself. [I refuse to even entertain the notion that she is secretly relieved that I am gone]. Probably more than once you could have caught me drinking some of this bathtub tea. I press the PLAY button and Shouting at the Ground begins to waft, to loop through the house as I lay in the bath. I am aware of my body and its constituent parts, by how much each muscle and joint aches. My body has been rearranged by honest work in the thorns and hard brittle twigs crackling to produce a glorious sensation of pain, callouses, blisters, cuts, and scratches – I am in good shape but I hurt. Shouting is looping as I eat a lunch of local cheese, hunks of miche, a salad of greens grown out back, or omelette, artichaux, avocado salade, cup of coffee, while fiddling with the radio dial to listen to human voices discuss issues on Radio France. I return to Shouting; it loops and drones as I climb back up the stairs, as I take my chair, as I begin to write, sitting in the blazing sun at a desk with a view of the Montagnes Noires in the distance. The ritual-routine is: Wake, work, bathe, eat, listen, write. Invariably, and perhaps a thousand times during my 10 weeks of hermetic non-contact with other humans, I would press this tape into its carriage, press PLAY and set it to auto-reverse on this old padded-casing cassette deck and AM-FM-Shortwave radio [bent antenna] and just stare. I was indeed creating auto-reverse loops of loops, reimagining the orbits of the universe and the orbits of our preoccupations simultaneously. Most of Zoviet France’s compositions hinge on pre-digital looping techniques [which gives them a palpable organic-mechanical feel]. Loops are closed circuits, are rings, are halos, are lifesavers that continue on into eternity unless you switch them off at bedtime or a lightning storm causes an outage. Music is based on repeated patterns, rhythms as prescribed sets of notes repeated, rhythmic repetitions. Music and the things music makes us do like dance, dream, enjoy the moment, are hot-wired into the deepest of natural processes. Nature is a series of circuits, the seasons, perennials, precipitation, making the audio loop an analogous ecosystem of sorts. And these loops are Zoviet France’s way of making a certain sense of all these cycles.
The early tracks send me [I hope you too] off on a surreal, lightheaded walkabout with unsure footing down a long, dimly lit path serenaded by exotic instrumentation and flautists as anonymous as the wind. “Smocking Erde” has its lurking and heavy-sighing-among-trees vibe; “Palace Of Ignitions” with its mesmerizingly open plucked strings that act like a geo-psychological reconnaissance device, while “Come To The Edge” represents a pure, organic loop that places you in the realm of maybe a lesser-known Monet, lost in the mesmerizing sweep of the outdoors and various fleeting, disconnected snatches of mysterious audio blossoms. Albert, a solitary man with cheeks urged red by the sun and wind, and a stoop that forebodes our lot as we head toward dust and worm, delivers a huge miche, a bottle of vin rouge that he holds up over his head in his earthen hand, a basket of potatoes and tomatoes from his own garden. He tells me this house was burned down during WW2 by the enemy, having served as a strategic outpost for the Resistance – it’s all about the view in both war and peace. I tell him the howling wind, the clattering of a loose shutter, and thunder kept me awake last night. I don’t tell him I kept dreaming about cars full of hoodlums pulling up outside because I couldn’t figure out how to phrase it in French. He brings me to the west side of the house; he shows me the shale shingle wall that protects against lightning strikes. Chauves souris [bats] live under the shingles – Je les ai vus – he smiles as he shows me. [I first translated “chauves souris” as “hot smile” but that, of course, was wrong]. They come out at dusk. Je sais. Hundreds. Je sais. Bats are mostly our friends because they eat mosquitoes and gnats. Some eat more than a thousand insects per hour! And with that fact and a flip of his beret, he departs. I doze off, awaken in the sun out back and, in a squint, I see a green lizard nuzzled in my solar plexus. I laugh and the laughter seems to be coming from a foreign body – not me. I notice the dark splotches of mosquitoes smashed against the white wall; they remind me of the eyes of some women in Paris cafés late at night. Some tracks on Shouting escort us into a world out of tune, a world devastated by industrial forces and their exuberant magnates... While the atmospheric pipes and flutes on “Dybbuk” help realign us with our surroundings. I might be in a hypnagogic state now, somewhere between reverie, exhaustion, a pastis [yes, why not], and the lightheaded effects you feel just before an electrical storm. Shouting has a bit of an idyll-invaded-by-industry dialectic, of jarring misalignments and dissonance [“Stoke Blauwers,” “Fickle Whistle,” “Carole The Breedbate”] in a world upside down, which then, just as suddenly, shifts and sways to audio antidotes [“Marrch Dynamic”] to disharmony and then pretty much grounds you up and casts you to the ethereal winds [“Wind Thief”]. My self-imposed solitude meant I saw other humans only once or twice a week briefly: Albert and then my weekly trip in the old white Peugeot 505 station wagon to greet the smirky, bright-eyed cashier whose check-out line I would always choose in the local supermarket. I would cherish that lovely smile for the following week. Or there were the wine givers, adjacent to the boulangerie, a couple who seemed to inhabit a dark cave or had once modeled for a Millet painting. They magically tapped vin rouge ordinaire from a wall spigot into heavy liter bottles with saved corks. They insist you take a glass from a ledge and toast the fetid basement air and I will compliment her and I will thank her. I did not bring music with me on my promenades [no Walkman] but “Shamany Enfluence,” serving as Shouting’s sprawling, epic looping, immersive and Buddhist monk-like, ethno-ambient chanting and moaning centerpiece gives you the sensation that you are indeed sweeping across the primordial topography on a sort of magic cloud. It served me well as remembered soundtrack, enhancing my interactions with, and my wanderings into, these strange surroundings, these deep gazing people who have had their feet on and in the earth around here for a very long time. The organic loops are drawn like buckets of water, right from the earth and, yes, I daily drink deep well water, cold even in July – the music, the water. When it rains I work or maybe I don’t. My raincoat is fit for a cinematic phantom that one day spooks a lost dog. I drink the rain water that flows down my face as I pick murs [raspberries] and watch an old lady hobble by – where does she come from; where does she go? – bent in half, no more than 3 feet high, with her knobby walking stick and laced-up boots to support her ankles. The final track [“The Death of Trees”] offers you an audio corollary to some spectral viewpoint – you simultaneously feel depth as if indeed the sound is outlining some hidden cul de sac. Call it enchantment or meditation or a smelting of self, of dreams, of location and sound so that the mind is released from all grief and distraction. Many of the album’s tracks are perhaps about negotiating a landscape, attempts at engaging our earth, which is hindered by the collateral damage we know as “progress.” It’s not as if Zoviet France’s analogue, pre-computer collaging is program music but they do seem to be tinkering with a visceral narrative, a poetic dialectic between nature and man, which, although Zoviet France was thoroughly groundbreaking, was also a central fixation of Romantic-era musicians and artists: how humans with their emerging self-awareness fit into the grander scheme of nature. We think: Beethoven, Berlioz, Grieg and Mahler; Strauss claiming that music can describe anything, even a teaspoon. But there are also many Zoviet France contemporaries I will not now name. I will instead pick up the young toad and carry it out of harm’s way, placing it on the shoulder of the path, shoving it along into the brush. All of these efforts gather at gestures of mimesis and mnemonics: the smell of wood, burning wood, the landscape folding into memory, my muscles strained to their limits, the act of writing, the birds, the weeds and their bursts of effluvia, the scent of sweat + citronelle + resin, the texture of the bread, the complexity of my joy with the simplicity of the cashier’s smile – of greengreengreen in every direction but up. This leads me back to my desk, the writing, the fat notebook; I manage to finish the first draft of my novel, which will eventually become BEER MYSTIC. I now invariably also associate this album with this accomplishment, but also the hikes around the barrage and reservoir, the meadow sloping away from the house, the smell of the wine cork, moisture jiggling on blades of grass, creme fraiche with framboises from the garden, playing rounds of reussite [solitaire] while listening to France Culture 93.2 FM discussions about the effects of extreme surprise on the body or the effects of loud rock music on the performances of professional athletes, as I watch the lizard’s detached tail wiggle on the wood floor for half a minute as the color of the sunset blazes, prisms through the wine bottle, a toast to its glory with an evening pastis, fire flies the size of planets, the bats darting through a dusk brimming with the calls of cicadas and toads, swifts and swooping swallows. Do I care to interview the members of Zoviet France? I’ve thought about it; probably wouldn’t mind. I am interested in what they have to say, but for the purposes of maintaining the sanctity and integrity of the music loose from any framing of it in terms of strategy, reviews, or the artist’s aesthetic intentions, it is probably better to know less specifics than more. Never mind the peril of reading an interview with a musician you respect only to discover too much about him or her, leaving you disappointed and the music forever tainted. To be honest, I am more interested in dissecting how the elements of chance fell into place so that my destination plus the music I brought along, plus my ambitions and situation helped to create this magical moment in time with serendipity as the guest conductor. Despite being one of the most compelling entities to emerge from England’s fecund 80s post-industrial scene, Zoviet France remain a largely unheard “band.” And it is in uncertainty that myth and legend are fostered. I prefer mythical to overrated or overplayed or over-cited – enough of crediting the Velvet Underground with starting EVERY trend and fashion since 1966. Zoviet France’s work may be hard to track down, impossible to find in stores, but you can listen to much of their back catalogue on Youtube – so, no excuses. The reason they are there even if you do not notice is that Zoviet France evades the classic capitalist symptoms and marketing strategies of popular music by forcing issues about what music is or should be and they pay the price – or reap the benefits. This elusive round-robin, idiosyncratic collective of sound-shifters, post-ethnic-industrialists, dronologists, and pata-ethnomusicologists, based in the Newcastle area in northeast England is known as :Zoviet*France: but also Zoviet France, :$OVIET:FRANCE:, Soviet France, and :Zoviet-France and has included, among others, co-founder Ben Ponton, Mark Warren [Penumbra] and periodic collaborators such as Neil Ramshaw, Peter Jensen, Robin Storey [Rapoon], Lisa Hale, and Mark Spybey [Dead Voices on Air]. They’ve recorded countless hours of improvisations, splicings, edits, cut’n’pastes, manipulations and many of this on analogue equipment [pre-sound-software], which is key to their unique organic sound, which reeks of wood and dirt. I may even convince you that you are witnessing the evening rites of a tribe lost in our cultural ADHD-induced amnesia. Anyway, it is always eerily, beautifully “other,” hauntingly enchanting like the soundtrack to an unreleased moral mystery-thriller directed by Eric Rohmer or a meditation on nature by Werner Herzog. After dinner, the sun doesn’t seem to want to set as I watched my friends the green lizards scurry after flies. The bats and swallows are also my friends. The surrounding sound, a sharp, tinny buzz in the dusky woods is not a chain saw but the sound of a million insects rubbing their wings in unison. By the end of the summer, my work gloves have formed to the fit of my clenched hands and the sweat, sawdust and resin have left them stiff; they stand upright on the kitchen table like plaster casts and that is how I leave them – as if to say “hello” or “give me your hand.” As much as we may try to adjust to a location, become an actor in a place that has seemingly accepted or tolerated you, you will forever just be an interloper here, walking barefoot on moss one day and broken glass on pavement the next, an intruder everywhere. bart plantenga bart plantenga is the author of the novels Beer Mystic & Ocean GroOve, the short story collection Wiggling Wishbone, the novella Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man & the wander memoirs: Paris Scratch and NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor. Sensitive Skin is hosting 6 short movies illustrating stories from these 2 books. His books Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World & Yodel in HiFi plus the CD Rough Guide to Yodel have created the misunderstanding that he is one of the world’s foremost yodel experts. He recently finished the Amsterdam-Brooklyn novel Radio Activity Kills with his daughter, Paloma. He is also a DJ & has produced Wreck This Mess, in NYC, Paris & now Amsterdam since 1986. He lives in Amsterdam. Adam and Eve Pose For Durer
Durer’s Adam and Eve cover their privates with fig leaves glued on to prevent slipping and embarrassment to the artist They are curly-haired, these two and we get the sense of Papageno and Papagena, only here Eve has a double chin and her belly button is more defined than her breasts – one wonders what Freud would say about this At their feet, a sleeping cat, a nonchalant mouse, a placid rabbit behind them a goat on a branch that Adam holds, a parrot, in the background a cow is sitting down Between them a tree, though the leaves don’t seem to be those of the apple; wound around a branch is the world’s most famous serpent – wait – are those four nails embedded in its head? whatever for? also note, it holds the top of an apple in its mouth, while the bottom part rests in Eve’s hand Adam does not seem to protest; he’s concentrating so hard holding this pose for Durer – and the parrot must be heavy too – also, perhaps he needs to relieve himself, given the pressure of the fig leaf on that strategic area, so he may not really be focusing on the apple transaction So what happens next? What, you don’t know, can’t even guess? Well, there’s the Bible on the shelf behind you, open to Chapter One and be enlightened Helen Bar-Lev Helen Bar-Lev was born in New York in 1942. www.helenbarlev.com She holds a B.A. in Anthropology, has lived in Israel for 46 years and has had nearly 100 exhibitions of her landscape paintings, 34 of which were one-woman shows. Her poems and artwork have appeared in numerous online and print anthologies. Six poetry collections, all illustrated by Helen. She is the Amy Kitchener senior poet laureate and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2013. She is the recipient of the Homer European Medal for Poetry and Art. Helen is Assistant to the President of Voices Israel. She lives in Metulla, Israel. Cityscape in Rain
Four-part cityscape-- rain fog silhouette fire Rain slashes air pavement glimmers with streaks and drops each a prism holding arcs of colours that quiver on the edge of breaking Fog dominates distance a line beyond which buildings do not exist and mountains may have moved in or parking lots cracked and fell away unheard Silhouettes pierce mist and shush of dampness striding turning standing they pulsate to random rhythms only skin hears until they become lines of kanji Fire ripens rain and fog and silhouettes a faint sun pushing through the distant expanse spreading a creamsicle sheen into the moist air throughout puddles casting a deeper orange onto the black figures waking and warming them with ropes of gold that snake through cityscape gleaming. Taunja Thomson Taunja Thomson’s poetry has most recently appeared in Claudius Speaks and Pink Panther Magazine. Three of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards: “Seahorse and Moon” in 2005, “I Walked Out in January” in 2016, and “Strum and Lull” in 2018. She has co-authored a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry entitled Frame and Mount the Sky that was published in 2017, and her chapbook Strum and Lull placed as a semi-finalist in Golden Walkman’s chapbook competition (2017). She has a writer’s page athttps://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter. |
The Ekphrastic Review
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May 2024
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