NOTE: This VSK project by Andrew Topel is an extract from a series of 40 BLACK ON WHITE ON BLACK which will be published by Red Fox Press as part of its C’est Mon Dada series. More “Wreyeting & visualanguage” by Andrew can be seen on his Vviissiioonnss blog/ project space here. He edits Avantacular Press and the online visual poetry journal Renegade.
Kai Fierle-Hedrick
Exchange Value #2; 24 September 2010
[…] You see me there […]
[…] It’s that abstract […]
+ Rachel Zolf, ‘Poem 35 – Learning machines’
I say […] and we assess our difference:
stiffen with divisions and the prompt
to concede the stereotype: now we are ticks
and ticks of boxes: now not: we are awkward
humor turned currency: ransom: or code
for the labels we shy: in this classroom
owning each projection troubles it.
It(‘)s ease. It(‘)s lack of exchange.
The Department of Micro-Poetics, AC Institute, New York, 2010. Sara Jordeno with Jill Magi in residence
Rachel Zolf
The projection of the intimate into the historical
(for Exchange Value)
The day lives us and we it remain at home
Pilfered rhetorics track an economy of one thing after another
I send you the burnt rulebook, who baked that challah?
The Time, Manner and Place of Speech Activities and Expression Speech activities
This list of dominant frames refined by a chimpanzee tossing darts
I revisited each story featuring the divined Violence Frame
A Place Altered by Moods, Greek residues of hard and soft
Perhaps all three are chairs, or codes for one
Doesn’t logic depend on tact animated at birth?
When a person stumbles, sings in cracking high tones, makes nervous gestures, etc.,
everyone knew this is a Jew Gay Gene Mull Court-shy Borders Kitch Scribbler
I’m not sure that the text is as rich in thematic content as what Karen generated
There are broader problems of unspeakable bodies and of “interest”
The subject escapes its alienation through a term of 25,000 colors
The table a procedure of knowledge dying to pronounce its name
Jay MillAr is glad someone paid the ransom
Thank you to everybody that submitted ticks and tsetse flies
Can somebody please put the necessary code between my code?
There are no kids in class, they’ve all gone to tolerance camp, apparently
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
The above work by Kai Fierle-Hedrick and Rachel Zolf was the outcome of their residency in the DEPARTMENT OF MICRO POETICS at the AC Institute, New York City on September 24th 2010. Kai and Rachel describe the project as follows:
Rachel Zolf and Kai Fierle-Hedrick will collaborate – via an on-site/off-site residency at the AC Institute – to write a sequence of poems responding to the exhibition EXCHANGE VALUE. Fierle-Hedrick will write on-site at the gallery, and at the end of each session will forward an ekphrastic poem to Zolf.
Responding via The Tolerance Project – a collaborative MFA in Creative Writing rooted in an online archive of “poetic DNA” traces donated by 86 writers, artists and thinkers – Zolf will identify a set of search terms in Fierle-Hedrick’s poem and use these to generate a new response from within The Tolerance Project’s archive.
Zolf’s poetic permutation will then serve as the starting point for Fierle-Hedrick’s next session in the gallery, and so on. The residency explores a variety of exchanges – ekphrastic, dialogic, technological – in addition to embodying some of the challenges and creative loopholes of distance collaboration.
The residency concludes on October 1st 2010.
Press Free Press, A Time for Work
WRITING/ EXHIBITION/ PUBLICATION and THE FESTIVAL OF NEARLY INVISIBLE PUBLISHING concludes on October 3rd with a day of public residencies, performances, installations, and a closing meal.
From 2pm artists working and performing in the space include:
Matt Dalby, who will use voice, recordings and objects to create semi-improvised sound poetry in response to the exhibition and The Pigeon Wing space.
Karen Di Franco, whose CONCRETE RADIO: SCORE FOR ONE & TWO offers “intercedence/interference using short wave recordings with two radios and two transmitters.”
Karen Di Franco, Concrete Radio, 2010
+ from 2-5pm Rachel Lois Clapham in collaboration with Antje Hildebrandt present READERS WANTED:
READERS WANTED to share an intimate (w)reading performance for two. This is a little game, a small exercise in trust and a live cursive encounter. You can decide how long it might take. Two minutes is good though. Bring a + 1 with you if you like.
Please come. I’ll be waiting.
A score for READERS WANTED
Nb. I am waiting for you
You set off on from your home
Nb. I am waiting for you
You arrive
Nb. I am waiting for you
You find me
Nb. I am waiting for you
You take your shoes off and come inside
Nb. I am no longer waiting
We blindfold one another
I whisper to you
We might touch
We (w)read together
Then we look at what we have made
You leave me
You return home
Nb. I am still waiting for you
Rachel Lois Clapham, Readers Wanted, Colliers Wood, 2010
Artists concluding month long projects over the weekend include Pippa Koszerek’s INOPERATIVE MINUTES, whose documentation of the exhibition in shorthand will conclude with the publication of The Pigeon Wing glossary.
Marianne Holm Hansen will spend the weekend unfolding her installation FOR THE RECORD (A WRITTEN CONVERSATION) in response to the month’s events.
Tamarin Norwood, text performed at The Pigeon Wing, Sep 3rd 2010
At 6pm there will be a NEARLY INVISIBLE MEAL, prepared by Magda Fabiancyk, followed by a programme of readings and performances. Julia Calver, Helen Kaplinsky/ Hammam Aldouri, Tamarin Norwood, and Press Free Press will conclude month long writing projects, alongside performances by Matt Dalby and James Davies.
As Tamarin writes of her own project:
This month Tamarin Norwood has been trying not to write things away. It hasn’t worked. Her writing has persistently generated words, not things.
At the close of WRITING/ EXHIBITION/ PUBLICATION Tamarin will discuss the impossibility of a written form that might leave its object unwritten, considering a spectrum of practices from observing, swallowing and drawing to self-apparent, self-effacing and obliterated writing.
LIKE IT IS: PRELUDE by Nyeema Morgan is the first e-book of the FESTIVAL OF NEARLY INVISIBLE PUBLISHING. A festival in itself, a document, a proposal, of something that has happened, will happen and won’t.
Of necessity the book form offers a coherent sequence, a momentary sense of order, but only to enable the diverse wholes that LIKE IT IS: PRELUDE proposes.
LIKE IT IS: PRELUDE is available for online consumption and PDF download here .
LIKE IT IS:PRELUDE should also not be seen as the work itself. If there is such a work, it is to be found in the endless rearrangements that adobe and a hard copy might facilitate. A puzzle, then, but one in which the precise nature of the solution is up for grabs.
A work, too, to encounter in unknown ways – which is difficult for a book with its name and title.
As Nyeema writes, of previous incarnations of LIKE IT IS:PRELUDE :
It is a digitally modified xerox of a text excerpt. The work itself, existing and having been manipulated within the computer, has no form. When exhibited, the work exists as ephemera, given form particular to the exhibition context.
In one instance LIKE IT IS: PRELUDE was printed, framed and sat atop a night table left in the domestic space (similar to how someone might display a personal snapshot).
In another exhibition, it exists as a prelude to the work being shown in the form of the printed invitation, both mailed to the attendees and available in the space upon entrance.
For THE FESTIVAL OF NEARLY INVISIBLE PUBLISHING this e-book is instruction, ingredient, proposition, record, making and deleting sense. It is the work and not, with its materialities of types and ink and page that are not actually there. A delicate textual operation, but within modes of mass production and mass dissemination. Please disseminate.
(1)
Indistinct objects. He remembered the object of a gun and a loose eye. Wet leaves pasted together like sticky inner pockets soaked in blood. As the sun rose over the trees it deposited little fragmented fossils: white, gritty, and with an abrasive surface, they grated against shale and looked like part of a pelvis or a shoulder. The sun made its excavation and pieced together some bones that might stay together in plan view. They contacted other things – loose change – with the sound of coins sliding over a shale of coins, coins – these ancient things – encased in flannel. He was lying low in the mud with a feeling of something boozy swilling in him. The sun turned light over the coins and over his bones. His mind grated and slipped on all the proximal matter. He made careful arrangements of the unobserved leaves with his eyes tightly closed against the red of the new sun. He ordered the nearby pebbles according to the strange subject of their familiarity. Some small crescents filled with earth pressed somewhere out in the fields of his sensations. His head was lodged somewhere down below his face and his eyelids, so compressed, made no indented line on anything.
The funny thing was that things became blacker at dawn and his own lucid appellative SUNBEAM slipped away from his consciousness and gave itself over to the wateriness of the real sun. The name of the ‘real’ sun vanished. There was a treachery of the dark things and FOREST was stilled – in fact, their dialogue, which had roamed half the night, rounding on the small scratching sounds of nocturnal things, had lulled itself into silence. So that there was now only the exclamation of this hanging sound.
!
——————————————————————————
(2)
What—
is —
an—
intell—
ect—
ual———
freedom?———
Is—
that—
an—
owl
pellet
?
____________
The above texts were produced as part of SUNBEAM and FOREST, a month long residency by Julia Calver at WRITING/ EXHIBITION/ PUBLICATION. Julia has described the project as follows:
SUNBEAM and FOREST exist inside an interminable argument which takes place at the level of the forest floor. They argue over who forms the ultimate frame for their ongoing dialogue. This work switches on and off through various iterations as SUNBEAM slips into periods of silence and then ‘reawakens’ in new ideas. Performances throughout the exhibition; texts in the space to take away.
NOTES: (1) was first performed at The Pigeon Wing for the opening of WRITING/ EXHIBITION/ PUBLICATION on September 3rd 2010; (2) was performed alongside an evening of films by Matthew MacKisack at The Pigeon Wing on September 17th 2010. The final part of the project will be performed at the closing event on 3rd October.
BIO Julia Calver is a member of antepress and recently completed the MFA in Art Writing at Goldsmiths. Recent work includes a performative reading as part of Work in Progress; Art on the Underground and FormContent residencies; and Digestives, an ongoing Resonance FM art writing radio series.
Some work I produced as part of the SPILL: OVERSPILL writing project in 2009, has taken new form as part of A_ Impossible Reader, a project by Open Dialogues and Marit Muenzberg, exhibited in After Live, at the Norwich Arts Centre (4 Sep-30 Oct). As Open Dialogues describe the project:
A_ Impossible Reader is incomplete, unbound, personal and portable. It is (not) a record, (not) a document, (not) a marker of absence, (not) a work of art.
A_ Impossible Reader is a specially designed and made series of publications containing texts from SPILL: Overspill, an Open Dialogues project exploring the event of criticism in relation to performance and the SPILL Festival 2009.
Each reader is displayed in the gallery at intervals throughout After Live and contains a randomly curated variety of texts from SPILL: Overspill. If a text exceeds one page, it remains incomplete. A_ Impossible Reader is a partial document of Overspill, or a partial document of SPILL, or a work of art in its own right.
A_Impossible Reader also comes with its own assembly instructions for the curators of the exhibition:
To be printed and assembled inhouse by Norwich Arts Centre, print 3xA4 sheets, cut according to cutting lines, fold once parallel to the long side, slot into each other as on sample provided, cut A4 printed sheet with cover in half, wrap one cover/bellyband around folded assembled booklet aligned with the open edge of booklet, seal with sticker.
So far, I’ve only seen the various incarnations of A_Impossible Reader as online PDF’s. It’s a startling transformation of the generally straight reviews on the SPILL: OVERSPILL blog, opening them out both into a new found materiality of their textual existence, and into a new autonomy of presence separate – and/ or differently related – to the performances from which they originated.
A_IMPOSSIBLE READER is also a subtle and agonistic answer to some of the complexities of the SPILL:OVERSPILL project and the problems and possibilities of writing in (contractual) proximity within a performance festival. Curiously, if A_IMPOSSIBLE READER opens into the full possibility of a writing practice in proximity to performance, it also does so through illegibility and anonymity.
To this extent, A_Impossible Reader is usefully viewed alongside SPILL: ON AGENCY, the Pacitti companies publication about the festival, edited by Robert Pacitti and Sheila Ghelani. Here, alongside a spread for each of the performers, there is a gathering of essays by SPILL_OVERSPILL writers. Many of these are engaged with the same questions: what is the residue of a performance (and a performance festival)?
Should a writer in such a context be engaged with the specifics of a particular artists work, or be using it as material for their own investigations? How, even (feeling dissatisfied with this last sentence) to articulate the possibilities/ actualities of this relationship?
You can purchase a copy of SPILL: ON AGENCY for £15 +P&P here. My own essay BACK ATTHE SOUTH POLE AGAIN: CRITICAL FRAMEWORKS OUT OF PERFORMANCE begins as a postcard and, looking back at it now, it’s a curious document, turning to fiction and an almost cartoon imaginary to try and answer the disappearance of performance and the desire for it to have unfolded/ remained as memory unfolding into methodology:
I’m thinking about all the shows I saw in SPILL, six months after, on a small biplane about to land on the South Pole. I’m trying to articulate the residue of each performance, what stays in the mind, what emerges through thinking, writing, and ___________. I’m wondering if these residues, in whatever form they take, can be some sort of framework, through which I can think about the performance itself, my writing about it, performance and writing more broadly, about all that is proposed and enacted here.
Sound, talk, slogan, inscription, metaphor, critique, script, poetry, assemblage, history, polemic. It’s snowing. Through my goggles and the window of the biplane I can see physical evidence of melting ice caps, polar bears stranded on the remnants of huge ice bergs. I wonder if I’m overly preoccupied with the utility of these performances, or if the simplicity of my Antarctica could cause the plane to crash.
Both and more. An essay like this is a good opportunity to at least pretend towards such a utility and see what happens. A soft bump and we’ve landed. I hope my clothing is warm enough. I assumed a good knowledge of contemporary performance art would in itself be enough for an Antarctic winter.
A CAUTIONARY PREFACE: … It plays with its fiction and its reality both, with a script not adverse to examining its own premises even when it seems to function as a child to adult telling-it-how-it-is. On the night I saw the show, I felt as if the audience responded more to this second function, with parents audibly chuckling at some revelation of adult behaviour because “I also said (or did) that.” Such audience responses confirmed the script as truth-telling, ignoring or absorbing its self-critical aspects.
Leaving the plane I’m greeted by the Camp Entertainments Manager. She immediately warns me against whimsy and over-intellectualism, both fatal in such a landscape. I say I have three methodologies I want to use to explore the Antarctic, each one of which is devised from a performance I saw during the SPILL festival. These are:
(1)Puppet Writing
(2)Incorporating Refusal
(3)Song Notes
The rest of the essay unfolds these three methodologies.
SPILL OVERSPILL writers were David Berridge,Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Kate Connolly, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt.
seekers of lice, Invent the Present (part II), 2010
On Saturday September 25th 1.30-4.30, WRITING/ EXHIBITION/ PUBLICATION presents an afternoon of performances, discussions and installations.
1.30pm How To Blush – performance lecture by seekers of lice:
“The talk as an installation space: How to blush is a collaged text circling around blushing via the life of the bedbug, the colour puce, visceral reactions, earlobes, Sappho…”
2.00-3.30pm LemonMelon Publishing Seminar.
LemonMelon extends the following invitation: Please join!!! LemonMelon would like to discuss the following with you
a book as strategy
a book as a living organism
a book as a platform for research
a book as an exhibition space
a book as a place of collaboration
a book as nearly invisible publishing
a book as structure
Specifically invited contributors are asked to present their publications and to respond to the above.
Contributers include: seekers of lice, Phil Baber/ Cannon, David Berridge/ VerySmallKitchen, James Davies/ If P Then Q, Tamarin Norwoood/ Homologue, Marit Muenzberg/ LemonMelon.
Red Fox Press, C'est Mon Dada and ASSEMBLING archive at WRITING/ EXHIBITION/ PUBLICATION
3.30-4.30pm Janine Harrington, Performing Book Experiment No.2
“Performing Book Experiment No.2 is a structure for five or more dancers. The work aims to facilitate a playful interaction between the audience-reader and the performers. The structure is only activated when an audience member enters a “channel” of the space, their movement programs the danced material in a certain way. As the activator becomes aware of their role as co-author of the work they are able to play with the structure, changing the direction of movement, its relationship to time and scale.”
ALSO THIS WEEKEND:
The 25th will be the conclusion of Phil Baber’s The Archaeology of an Essay installation, the result of a 3 day residency at WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION:
“Through artifacts, images, and texts, I’ll be unpacking, plotting, and presenting the ‘source-code’ of an essay-in-progress.”
The Festival of Nearly Invisible Publishing also continues to unfold with Greetings from DEAL – an installation by Colin Priest, Malcolm Hobbs and Joe Reeves – plus the online launch of LIKE IT IS: PRELUDE, an e-book by Nyeema Morgan, and an announcement of five Titles by Raqs Media Collective.
WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION concludes with a final weekend of performances and events on October 2-3. See full programme of events here.
Exchange Value #1; 17 September 2010
[the moment where
the evidence is]
this catapult stress entry-point as stitch, as flutter
heartbeat and fingerprinting fiasco
as handle
as conductor
as pivot
as machine
as line
as such I brackets the length of corridor, a
written conversation
transcribed —
— for spatialisation
to braid interloper sun into silhouettes, a graphic language or
bid for some share of these
[neon geometries] the joint design loosening
I attends the grace instruction
action/beforemath facing down the document aftermath
to trace any intersection of mark, mobility
or passable other
however fragile letting flutter-flutter
to give [record] to take
Kai Fierle-Hedrick, Exchange Value #1
Learning machines
(for Kai, Exchange Value #1)
Aphorisms are done for the
Whole mass of documents that capture and fix them
Extension of and agent external to the body
So the speaker is the engine oil, what needs the additive
GRUUB can accesss the entiree diissk
Guns a-flutter with no evidence of microinvasion
You realize how important “feeling whole” is
With you my self-confidence has sky rocketed
But a time machine wouldn’t look like a booth with spinning wheels
The only way to seal the gap is leather soaked in oil
Mixed in with your soup
Your documentary can document anything
Such evidence accrued despite the best efforts of lacy aprons
Build a machine to fill up the pause in conversation
Self here is the implied mental comfort
A low ratio of formative roots and limber joints
Replete with just-before-recess name-calling
I vacate the moment when necessary
You see me there
It’s that abstract.
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
The above work by Kai Fierle-Hedrick and Rachel Zolf was the outcome of their residency in the DEPARTMENT OF MICRO POETICS at the AC Institute, New York City on September 17th 2010. Kai and Rachel describe the project as follows:
Rachel Zolf and Kai Fierle-Hedrick will collaborate – via an on-site/off-site residency at the AC Institute – to write a sequence of poems responding to the exhibition EXCHANGE VALUE. Fierle-Hedrick will write on-site at the gallery, and at the end of each session will forward an ekphrastic poem to Zolf.
Responding via The Tolerance Project – a collaborative MFA in Creative Writing rooted in an online archive of “poetic DNA” traces donated by 86 writers, artists and thinkers – Zolf will identify a set of search terms in Fierle-Hedrick’s poem and use these to generate a new response from within The Tolerance Project’s archive.
Zolf’s poetic permutation will then serve as the starting point for Fierle-Hedrick’s next session in the gallery, and so on. The residency explores a variety of exchanges – ekphrastic, dialogic, technological – in addition to embodying some of the challenges and creative loopholes of distance collaboration.
The residency continues on September 24th 2010.
Last Thursday saw the beginning of NierghtravAOnWint’sIf A Teller: a book in 8 chapters and 4 dimensions, edited by Simon Lewandowski for 24/7 at the Gooden Gallery on London’s Vyner Street (Sep 16-Nov 25 2010). I am one of 8 artists taking part in this project. Our collective description is as follows:
Each chapter lasts one week and is visible 24 hours a day from the street.
Each artist will construct a chapter
Each chapter will be embedded in the previous one.
Each will change, incorporate or move aside what is already in the space to develop a series of unfolding chapters.
The work is rule-based
THE RULES
• 8 chapters will follow a preface and in turn be followed by an afterword
• The order in which artists make a chapter has been randomly determined in advance
• Each chapter will be a response to the previous one
• Material can be introduced into the space but not taken out. Anything can be altered, moved, reconstituted (even destroyed) but must stay there till the end.
• The rules are a part of the work so subject to the same rules.
• New rules may be introduced but not removed.
The Artists (in alphabetical order): David Berridge, Wayne Clements, Cinzia Cremona, George Eksts, Anna Francis, Hugh Gilmour, Daniel Lehan, Simon Lewandowski, Richard Price, Barbara Ryan, Ben Woodeson
The images in this post are from the first weeks installation by Simon Lewandowski. My own week in the space will be October 15-21st.
We offer the following two passages by way of explanation:
“Alternating between second-person narrative chapters of this story are the remaining (even) passages, each of which is a first chapter in ten different novels, of widely varying style, genre, and subject-matter. All are broken off, for various reasons explained in the interspersed passages, most of them at some moment of plot climax. After reading the first chapter, the reader finds the book is misprinted and contains only more copies of that same chapter. When he goes to return it he is given a replacement book, but this turns out to be another novel altogether.
Just as he becomes engrossed in that, it too is broken off: the pages, which were uncut, turn out to have been largely blank. This cycle repeats itself, where the reader reads the first chapter of a book, cannot find the other chapters in his copy of the book, so he goes out to find another copy. But the new copy he gets turns out to be another book altogether. …Themes which are introduced in each of the first chapters will then exist in proceeding narrative chapters, such as after reading the first chapter of a detective novel, then the narrative story takes on a few common detective-style themes.
There are also phrases and descriptions which will be eerily similar between the narrative and first-chapter chapters. The ending exposes a hidden element to the entire book, where the actual first-chapter titles (which are the titles of the books that the reader is trying to read) make up a single coherent sentence…”
” … the … project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity. For it is plain, that every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of our lungs by corrosion, and, consequently, contributes to the shortening of our lives.
An expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on. … many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things; which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him…
But for short conversations, a man may carry implements in his pockets, and under his arms, enough to supply him; and in his house, he cannot be at a loss. Therefore the room where company meet who practise this art, is full of all things, ready at hand, requisite to furnish matter for this kind of artificial converse.”
SOURCE TEXTS: (1) Wikipedia entry describing Italo Calvino’s ‘If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller’; (2) Extract from Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gullivers Travels’
Kai Fierle-Hedrick and Rachel Zolf will be in residence as part of VerySmallKitchen’s DEPARTMENT OF MICRO-POETICS at the AC Institute in New York City, on Sep 17th, 24th and October 1st.
Kai and Rachel describe their project as follows:
Rachel Zolf and Kai Fierle-Hedrick will collaborate – via an on-site/off-site residency at the AC Institute – to write a sequence of poems responding to the exhibition EXCHANGE VALUE. Fierle-Hedrick will write on-site at the gallery, and at the end of each session will forward an ekphrastic poem to Zolf.
Responding via The Tolerance Project – a collaborative MFA in Creative Writing rooted in an online archive of “poetic DNA” traces donated by 86 writers, artists and thinkers – Zolf will identify a set of search terms in Fierle-Hedrick’s poem and use these to generate a new response from within The Tolerance Project’s archive.
Zolf’s poetic permutation will then serve as the starting point for Fierle-Hedrick’s next session in the gallery, and so on. The residency explores a variety of exchanges – ekphrastic, dialogic, technological – in addition to embodying some of the challenges and creative loopholes of distance collaboration.
Kai has also contributed an installation to the DEPARTMENT OF MICRO-POETICS based on Exercise 1-11, a series of texts that first appeared in Signals magazine here. The texts are prefaced by a quote by Paulo Freire – “ the child has, at the very least, the right to prove the craziness of his or her idea” – and offer documentation, proposition, and provocation of where experimental poetics and radical pedagogy (hopefully) meet.
Find out more about her work here.
Rachel Zolf unfolds the process of The Tolerance Project as follows:
Eighty-six writers, artists and thinkers have donated their poetic traces to The Tolerance Project, a collaborative MFA in Creative Writing. Each piece of poetic DNA in The Tolerance Project Archive has been assigned its own barcode. Each poem written for the MFA will employ traces from the donated traces. The MFA poems are restricted to The Tolerance Project Archive for their content.
MFA poems written for class will be posted on this blog. Poetic DNA barcodes for the traces used in each poem appear at the end of each MFA poem post. Click on the barcodes to reveal the donor identities and poetic DNA traces.
This collaboration includes you. The online public is welcome to use the comments field to give constructive feedback on The Tolerance Project poems. You are also very welcome to browse The Tolerance Project Archive and create your own MFA poems. Post them on the Archive site and if we like them, we may even bring them to class for feedback.
Based on cumulative feedback received within and without the institution, the MFA poems will be scrupulously revised toward the creation of The Writing Thesis.
As of September 13th the classes most recent project is: POEM 34- Homphobic poseur buffoon + narcissistic geometrical zip = nurture whose text is as follows:
The concept of geometrical tolerancing is complex
Buffoon of the Play house will die a ridiculous Death
She looked across the street and the tears fspell down (all the narcissus planted in rows)
I empathize deeply with the state-sponosored [sic] homophobia of the US government
We don’t follow the support and nurture model of learning – it’s more swill and swear
The feature toleranced is indicated by a leader line media berea arrowhead scenic allegoric Pandora minoan midday convulsion auk earthmover klein paper tug
Like a horrible cocktail party full of insufferable poseurs intent on name-dropping while grilling you on trivial gibberish
A geometrical tolerance is applied to a feature when there is a requirement to control its variation of form or position
Along the way it gradually jettisoned all feeling and emotion, until it arrived at an austere and impersonal form of so-called artistic purity or truth
Gear wheels, zips, bearings, pressure tubing, kitchen utensils and blow mouldings, and clothing fabrics
My grandmother’s hands zipping open pale skin in a metal bowel
To check out the full barcodes and DNA of this poem click the images above or go here. See more about Rachel’s work here, and an interview with Joel Bettridge in JACKET here.
Details of Jill Magi’s SMALL TALK SMALL BOOKS residency are here. Details of projects by Paolo Javier and Vincent Katz to follow. Matt Dalby will perform in the DEPARTMENT OF MICRO POETICS on Thursday 14th October 6-8pm.
VerySmallKitchen 