Gwarlingo

The Sunday Poem : Paula Bohince

January 26, 2013 in Sunday Poem, Words with 0 Comments

Paula Bohince (Photo by Patrick Mullen)

“There’s movement in [Paula] Bohince’s poems, but it’s gradual and subtle — an eye passing like Ken Burns’s camera over a still image, discovering new details,” writes Eric McHenry in today’s New York Times Book Review:

The nouns pile up like snow while the reader waits for a verb that will never arrive…Even in narrative passages, Bohince lets participles do the work of predicates: “In the single room of a bathtub, humming ‘Love / Me Tender’ to hear a sullen human / voice. Then after, / fainting in slow motion to the tile.”

It is serendipitous that Bohince’s new book, The Children, is reviewed in this Sunday’s New York Times, for I have four of my favorite poems from the collection to share with Gwarlingo readers today.

“Bohince is a poet of fragments — not the scraps of history and literature that Eliot shored against his ruins, but ordinary sentence fragments,” writes McHenry. “‘April Blizzard’ begins, ‘Over humiliated fields, the blossoming / dogwood, stopped stalks / of daffodils, frills frozen, chagrin over everything . . .’ ‘The Peacock,’ about a depressed father who seems destined to leave his young family, mixes sentences and fragments to painterly effect.”

The Children doesn’t daze you with verbal pyrotechnics, but instead, subtly sneaks up on you like a prelude by Debussy, slowly revealing both beauty and sorrow.

As Carol Frost writes, “In every good sense…[Bohince's] poems avoid art’s perfections. They tilt. They tilt and create their own gravity.”

The Peacock

As dreams feather the pillow and make bearable
the day, so this figure
hauls his gorgeous body through

the yard’s depression. By the children
plumbing the anthill as a mechanic does for oil,
holding up the stick to sunlight.

Their play is serious business.
Their father has tired of his wife, of them.
He therefore lies down

in a room made his by grease and pain
and speechlessness. He lies down on his carpet
at midday, the television bright

and silent. What glossy plumage to envy
with the peahen near, and the peachicks near—
obedient, adoring.

The day is finding its Brueghel moment—
wine and sapphire and verdigris. His black hair
with sunlight on it.

A miracle. Something to recall
as beautiful, in the future. As the sewer was
in summer. Little childhood river.

Envisioning the Future with Yo La Tengo, R. Buckminster Fuller, & Sam Green

January 23, 2013 in Events, Images, Performance, Sounds with 2 Comments

Sam Green narrating his live documentary The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (Photo by Sam Allison)

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.”

–R. Buckminster Fuller

In 1927 designer, architect, and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller was contemplating suicide on the shore of Lake Michigan, when he had an epiphany:

“The thought then came that my impulse to commit suicide was a consequence of my being expressly overconcerned with ‘me’ and ‘my pains,’ and that doing so would mean that I would be making the supremely selfish mistake of possibly losing forever some evolutionary information link essential to the ultimately realization of the as-yet-to-be-known human function in Universe.”

According to legend, Fuller decided to “throw away” his “personal ego” instead of committing suicide, and use himself “as a scientific `guinea pig’… on behalf of all humanity.” He resolved to “make the world work for one hundred percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

At least that is the story as Fuller told it.

Although he grew up in an elite New England family, he flunked out of Harvard (twice), worked as a meatpacker, and served in the Navy before reinventing himself as a philosopher, engineer, writer, inventor, and lecturer. Never content to work in only one field, Fuller, or “Bucky” as his friends called him, embraced an interdisciplinary approach to global problems like poverty, shelter, transportation, education, energy, and ecological destruction. By the time of his death in 1983, Fuller held 28 patents, had authored 28 books, and received 47 honorary degrees.

F. Buckminster Fuller has influenced everyone from Pritzker Prize–winning architect Thom Mayne to Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities. (Photo by Roger Stroller)

Part TED Talk, part travelogue, and part Japanese benshi, Sam Green’s “live documentary,” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, was like no other film screening I’ve been to. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

But neither Fuller’s biography, nor his legacy are simple.

“If you really look for the details of his life at the time, it’s easy to see that the suicide story was a creation,” Stanford historian Barry Katz told the New York Times in 2008.

“There was nothing even remotely in the archives suggesting feelings on the scale he later described” in 1927, he said…

Mr. Katz said he found instead signs of depression and anxiety stretching from the time…[Fuller's] first daughter, Alexandra, died in 1922, through his financial failures and, finally, the collapse of a torrid extramarital romance in 1931. Still, he said, the suicide story seemed to serve a purpose.

“That’s why I now call it a myth,” [said Katz,] “but it was an effective myth. It gave a trajectory to his career. The story was constructed after the fact to show how he suddenly developed these new ideas. I think he came to believe the story himself…”

In recurrent dark periods Fuller was not trying only to persuade others his ideas were important, but to persuade himself that he mattered….

Supporting that view is [the late] Evelyn Schwartz Nef. “Those days were really quite exciting because he was so convincing that he was trying to save the world,” she said in an interview…“The question I had is whether he was as convinced as we were. He was trying to reassure himself that he was something.”

Buckminster Fuller in his Black Mountain College studio (Photo courtesy of SFMoMA)

Sam Green and Yo La Tengo performing the “live documentary” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the ICA in Boston (Photo by Sam Allison. Click to Enlarge)

As James Sterngold writes in the New York Times, “by conventional measures…[Fuller] accomplished little. The efforts to mass-produce his houses, though written about widely, failed. His project to develop his efficient three-wheeled autos collapsed after an accident killed the driver of one. His soaring geodesic domes, built with a distinctive pattern of triangles, have been used — memorably for the United States pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal — but never for the large-scale projects he envisioned.”

Mention Fuller’s name to a group of artists and architects and you’re likely to be bombarded with passionate responses from both supporters and detractors.

Philip Johnson once called Fuller a “lousy architect,” and Fuller’s vision for Manhattan provoked this response from one architect I know: “Fuller envisioned covering mid-town Manhattan by an enormous climate-controlled bubble. How in the world is that an environmental improvement? It would have consumed enormous amounts of energy, contributing immensely to air pollution and global warming. And the prospect of enclosing city dwellers in a bubble, cut off from wind and rain and sun and the play of the elements, is something that I find horrifying…I’m very suspicious of big universal theories, like those of Fuller, when it comes to architecture.”

But Fuller’s impact can’t be discounted. He has influenced everyone from Pritzker Prize–winning architect Thom Mayne to Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities.

“Bucky…looked at the world big-scale, in terms of the number of people who didn’t have enough to eat,” architect Nicholas Grimshaw says. “He talked about the really big issues, like food and water and shelter. And that’s really just coming home to roost. Everything he wrote then he could have written right now.”

The Dymaxion House as presented by Buckminster Fuller in Fortune magazine in July of 1932 (Click to Enlarge)

Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao Dome Over Manhattan, 1960. Black-and-white photograph mounted on board, 13 3/4 x 18 3/8″ Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries (Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)

As K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, explained to me via email, focusing too much attention on Fuller’s popularization of the geodesic dome or his idea to shroud the city of Manhattan in a bubble misses the point. According to Hayes, Fuller made other contributions that are still relevant today, if we can look past the outdated designs and cultural critique:

The current generation of artists and architects who rediscover Buckminster Fuller will not be inspired by his structural inventions or cultural critique but by his spatial modeling of a globalized system of pattern and contingency, organization and change, temporary stability and constant renewal. That is his legacy.

“Fuller was the original systems thinker, with regards to the ecology of a building and its relationship to the environment,” explains artist, designer, and engineer Chuck Hoberman:

When he asked, ‘How much does your building weigh?’ it immediately put it into the realm of material usage and embodied energy, all of which are now very hot topics of discussion—not driven by stylistic concern, but simply by the need to make buildings more sustainable. His work framed a lot of those issues very early on…

I think he’s been highly influential as an iconoclastic spirit, who never accepted that the boundaries between disciplines were anything other than something to be climbed over or circumvented in some way. To me that’s not so much a heroic stance as much as a very practical way to proceed in the world today.

Whether R. Buckminster Fuller was visionary or naive in his beliefs is one of the subjects that interests Sam Green, a genre-bending artist in his own right. (Photo by Sam Allison)

Fuller’s sketch of a Three-Frequency Geodesic Sphere. Felt-tip pen and graphite on paper, 8 1/2 x 10 1/4 in. Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries (Photograph by Ben Blackwell courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)

“At many other points in history…people had high hopes and a great imagintion for the future. You remember: we’d all be living in space, or flying around using jetpacks, or robots would be doing all the work for us. Today, it seems to me that most people don’t look at the future with fancy or hope or a great imagination.” (Photo by Sam Allison)

We live in a dystopian age—one more interested in zombies from The Walking Dead and Cormac McCarthy’s grim, apocalyptic vision than in slick, futuristic fantasies about jet-packs and cars that drive themselves. “There are too many of us who wonder whether civilization is going to make it or not,” former Vice-President Al Gore commented in a recent interview. “When people flirt with despair about the future, they are less likely to take the actions necessary to safeguard it.”

In marked contrast, R. Buckminster Fuller believed that cooperation, not competition, was the key to a better life, and he remained optimistic about humanity’s future. ”It no longer has to be you or me,” Fuller wrote in Critical Path. “Selfishness is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.”

Whether R. Buckminster Fuller was visionary or naive in his beliefs is one of the subjects that interests Sam Green, a genre-bending artist in his own right.

It’s fitting that a multi-media artist like Green should tackle an enigma like Fuller, while accompanied by the live music of a critically-acclaimed, three-piece band that also defies categorization. Part TED Talk, part travelogue, and part Japanese benshi, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller was like no other film screening I’ve been to, with Green narrating a special cut of his film (created for his Boston audience), while the intoxicating sounds of Yo La Tengo pulsed through the glass-walled auditorium. As writer Rebecca Solnit described the experience, it’s like “a movie being born as you see it and hear it, as alive as music.”

“It’s really exciting to perform this way,” Yo La Tengo band member Georgia Hubley told me via email. “You feel like you are a piece of something bigger and doing your part. It is different than presenting yourself as a band with songs etc., which is more personal.” (Yo La Tengo photo by Ed Dittenhoefer courtesy Sam Green)

The Sunday Poem : Evie Shockley

January 19, 2013 in Sunday Poem, Words with 2 Comments

Writer Evie Shockley on Signal Hill in Cape Town, South Africa (Photo by Stéphane Robolin)

“Evie Shockley seems to step to us wearing an alluring silk gown and steel-toe guerilla boots. She possesses that rare combination of grace and subversiveness.” This is poet Terrance Hayes commenting on Evie Shockley’s most recent book the new black.

I couldn’t agree with Terrance more.

Art that tackles topics like politics, race, injustice, and identity can be hard to get right. Personally, I’ll take a quiet film like Billy Wilder’s The Apartment over a brash, hyperbolic Oliver Stone flick any day of the week. Shouting is easy, but it takes real talent and skill to mix the personal and political and end up with compelling art. (Just ask the filmmakers who worked under Hays Code for nearly 40 years).

But subtlety spiked with truth-telling has its advantages: resonance. Shockley doesn’t need to shout to get our attention. Her poems will echo through your mind long after you’ve shut the book.

Shockley is a genius of language, form, and wordplay. The poem “x marks the spot” is appropriately shaped like an X, while another poem forms an almost perfect circle. She playfully uses fonts, superscript, line breaks, and spacing. She shuns capital letters not as a gimmick, but to allow her readers’ eyes to focus on lines, instead of sentences. As Shockley told The Dead Mule, ” I like the way all-lowercase lines allow a reader’s eye to glide along, uninterrupted by visual obstacles that have nothing to do with the concerns of my poem.” Luckily her publisher, Wesleyan University Press, has accommodated her inventiveness with language. The only downside is that there are many excellent, eccentric poems whose formatting simply refuses to translate into HTML on the web.

Evie Shockley (Photo by Brett Hall Jones)

Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Shockley’s Southern heritage shines through her poems. The tired cliched of a Southern magnolia becomes something entirely new in her hands.

In her interview with The Dead Mule, Shockley said, “What I mean when I speak of myself as a ‘southern poet’ is that I grew up: hearing certain accents and vocabularies and speech patterns that were the aural essence of ‘home’ or the audible signal of danger, depending; thinking that racism wasn’t much of a problem in other parts of the country; eating a cuisine that was originally developed under conditions of make-do and make-last; enjoying five- or six-month summers and getting ‘snow days’ out of school when the forecast called for nothing other than ‘possible icy conditions’; knowing that my region was considered laughable almost everywhere else; assuming there was nothing unusual about finding churches on two out of every four corners; and believing that any six or seven people with vocal chords could produce four-part harmony at the drop of a dime—and that all of this informs my poetry, sometimes directly and sometimes in ways that might be unpredictable or illegible.”

The rigorous, compassionate “silk gown”/”steel-toe guerilla boots” combination pulsing through the new black is a knockout.

In 2011 The Academy of American Poets asked Evie how she begins a new poem:

“There is a fullness in my mind, a crowding and jostling and rumbling of ideas, outrages, phrases, and images, reaching as far as my mind’s eye can see in any direction, and I begin wading into the crowd and trying to make a space from which to think about what some (or all) of the things in it have in common or what they might have to say to each other—if I could only create an arena where that analysis or conversation could happen.

There is an emptiness on a page, a vacuum represented and magnified by the whiteness of the space, that goes until it ends but even in ending implies an endless continuation of that blank refusal of inscription, and I begin to muss it up, to get it dirty, to bring it into contact with the world in which it exists, to pollute it with laughter, injustice, loss, ambiguity, laundry, and any other thing that goes into the human experience of life.”

Here are five poems from the new black to start your Sunday. You can pick up a copy of Shockley’s book from Amazon here or an independent bookseller using this link.

Visiting writer Evie Shockley discussing craft at the Vermont Studio Center (Photo by Ashley David)

a background in music

music city u.s.a. it was, nothing doing without a song,
               and not just twangy tunes that rhyme southern drawls
with guitar strings, though it’s true i knew charlie pride
               before charlie parker, but music, music, music, broadway
numbers (one! . . .) broadcast over speakers in the park,
               pointer sisters fingering ohio players on the school bus,
the elementary chorus performing a patriotic medley
               for the bicentennial, the high school madrigals wringing
the carol of the bells out of our overworked throats each
               december, WVOL simulblasting car wash or little red corvette
out the windows of every deep ride rolling in the black
               neighborhoods, melodies to carry over the clap*slap*snap
of our hands clocking time (miss mar-y mack mack mack)
               or to keep us out of trouble with the jump rope, pep squad
cheers to perfect, spontaneous spirituals in the church
               parking lot, and, yes, some country, the mandrells, the oak
ridge boys, tuning in to hee-haw’s banjo humor and gloom,
               the music was howdy and whassup, hell naw! and aw yeah!,
merry, happy, baby-baby, and god loves you if no one else does:
               to ourselves, to applause, in talent shows, in choirs, on cue
and (mostly) in key, we sang everything there was to say.

statistical haiku (or, how do they
discount us? let me count the ways)

only 3 of 100 black boys
entering kindergarten will graduate college—
in the night sky, shooting stars

every day a black person
under 20 years old commits suicide—
plucked magnolia blossom’s funereal perfume

a black man is 700% more likely
than a white man to be sentenced to prison—
scattered thundershowers in may

every 3 minutes
a black child is born into poverty—
pine needles line the forest floor

—after langston hughes’s “johannesburg mines”

Soaring High: The Art of Auto-Giros, Rocket Planes, Airships, & Strange Aircraft

January 18, 2013 in Books Worth Reading, Images with 0 Comments

It’s Friday and another week has almost come and gone without a mid-week post on Gwarlingo. Apologies to Gwarlingo readers for neglecting everyone but the poets the past 14 days. I’ve been traveling on business and working on an exciting (arts-related) project down in Philadelphia. While Gwarlingo is my priority, other projects and deadlines sometimes intervene. I’ll be catching up on new stories, reviews, email, and members profiles in the coming days.

I have an in-depth story about film, Yo La Tengo, and Buckminster Fuller to share with you next week. But while I put the finishing touches on my interview with filmmaker Sam Green, here’s something fun to kick-off your Friday and the coming weekend.

Perusing the shelves of used bookstores is one of my favorites ways to spend an afternoon. Recently, a friend and I were rifling through boxes and teetering stacks of used books in an overstuffed shop when I found this little gem, Soaring High.

The book is a mystery. There is no publication date or publisher name. It only says Printed in Japan. I could find nothing like it online.

I love the colorful illustrations and the glimpse of air travel almost a century ago. (When is the last time you heard the word auto-giro used?) The page showing Strange Aircraft and a Rocket Plane is downright comical.

One of the things I miss most about working in a library is browsing books by the dozen, most especially children’s books.

There is so much history in these wrinkled, torn pages.

Enjoy your Friday and have a fabulous weekend!

(Click on images to enlarge)

The Sunday Poem : Erica Funkhouser

January 12, 2013 in Sunday Poem, Words with 0 Comments

“I think I don’t really know who I am, or what I think, or what I believe unless I’m in the process of writing,” says poet Erica Funkhouser. “That’s where all of my discovery takes place, that’s where all of my confrontation takes place — I would say not just with my own interior life but with the exterior life, the rest of the world. I wouldn’t know what I thought, or who I was, or what I cared about, or what was going on in my imagination if I weren’t writing. That’s how I find out.”

As Funkhouser told Steven Rosenberg of the Boston Globe, doing chores and roaming the woods on a farm in Concord, Massachusetts shaped her love for words and nature as a child. ”I thought that words were so much fun to move around and to play around and to invent, and I think I felt free to make up my own words when the right ones didn’t seem to be available. And I just liked the music of words, the kind of clang of them together and the sound and the playfulness of them. So that’s really how I started writing poetry.”

“Impossible,” published here for the first time, is a fine example of how Funkhouser combines astute observation with both empathy and quiet lyricism.

But it’s the poems “Swarf” and “Kerf” that really showcase Erica’s facility with language. ”They’re part of a series that explores words of Anglo-Saxon origin,” Funkhouser told me this week via email, “a kind of exercise in approaching the world with a concreteness that breaks through in unexpected ways to metaphor, even abstraction. The mark of the maker on the hand-made object — you can almost see it in those ancient words for things and relationships which are no longer part of our lives. ‘Gwarlingo’ is a beautiful example, from a time when people noticed not just the sounding of the hour but also the wheezing intake of breath just before the hour was struck.”

We so rarely think about the fluidity of language and its connection to time and place; it’s one of those things we typically take for granted. Ancient words like “swarf” and “kerf” that express “the mark of the maker on the hand-made object” have given way to new inventions of language, such as “cloud computing,” “gastropub,” and “sexting.” As poet Derek Walcott once said, “To change your language, you must change your life.”* “Language” and “life” are inextricably linked.

“I think the way you get to be a good writer is to practice your craft with the magic combination of chutzpah and humility,” Funkhouser explained in the Boston Globe. “I mean, on the one hand, you have to be brave enough to try things, and on the other hand . . . you have to know when you fail . . . . I say this to my students all of the time: It takes just as much work to write something that is a failure as it takes to write something that is good.”

“You just might not know until the end of it that your idea wasn’t a good one and that it’s a failure, but you have to see it through.”

Impossible

I watch my mother’s nearly century-old foot
search for the curb from the street.
No mammal has ever hunted as hungrily
as the rounded toe of this mouse-colored zip-up sneaker.
Is this it? Is it here?
When the second mouse is finally level with the first,
she taps the granite curbstone
with her cane. There.
We’re on our way to the hearing aid store.

Afterward, in a sandwich shop,
the young mother at the next table
asks the waitress for a few leaves
of spinach — her son would like to sample it
before he orders lunch.
My mother is of the “kids should eat what you put
in front of them” school, definitely of the
“kids don’t go out to lunch” school.
The disappearance of home life in this country
is her chief complaint after joint pain
and the thinness of the Red Sox bullpen.

Stone-faced as Buster Keaton,
she waits for her egg salad sandwich
and listens as the earnest woman coaxes her son
to say spinach in Spanish.
My mother doesn’t like the word espinaca.
She doesn’t like Spanish any more than she likes English.
She thinks the world is full of foolish mistakes
that must be faced with composure.

Like a character out of silent film,
she points to what she wants, puts her hat on
when it’s time to go.
In the face of adversity, she’s an acrobat,
one eyebrow lifted in perpetual surprise.
A building is about to fall down on her,
a train about to crush her,
and this is her expression: What next?
What will they think of next?

Years have been spent interpreting this gaze,
fighting over its significance, competing to discover
the secrets contained in her perfectly level lips.
Mouth like a line drawn straight through a word.
What are words but little corrections
of what needn’t have been spoken at all?
Spinach. Espinaca. What next?

She doesn’t laugh but she makes me laugh,
her deadpan disapproval thrilled with its new material.
She’s not going to tell it now, but she has one story.
When she was in high school, her father
drove her to Pittsburgh to watch Babe Ruth play.
There’s one other thing she might mention.
For this, if you are family,
she will offer up her shapely ankle,
where a dozen BB pellets have been lodged
for nine decades. “My own brother shot me,”
she’ll say as you marvel at the dark constellation
swirling beneath tissue-thin skin.
“A mistake, of course,” she’ll add. Then a pause:
“One of many.”

The Sunday Poem : John Lane

January 6, 2013 in Sunday Poem, Words with 0 Comments

John Lane (Photo by Helen Correll)

John Lane is a poet with the eye of a naturalist. Quarries. Cottonmouths in a creek. Civil War battlefields. Suburban lawns. These are the places he turns to for meaning.

Lane understands that our relationship to the environment is a symbiotic one — that there is a connection between the plastic objects we put into our shopping carts and a strip-mined hill in Kentucky.

“John Lane has created poems that lament what’s lost, praise what is, and prophecy what could be,” writes poet Gregory Orr. “Reading them, we hear a clear voice that does what the best poetry always does — persuades and sustains.”

As a native Southerner, I was struck by the gritty descriptions of sweet tea and Southern landscapes in Lane’s most recent book, Abandoned Quarry: New & Selected Poems. (I must confess that sweet tea is the first thing I order at a roadside restaurant when I cross the Mason-Dixon Line.)

These vivid poems about Cumberland Island reminded me of the Spanish moss, wild horses and boar, and crumbling mansions on this breathtaking barrier island in Georgia, one of my favorite places on earth. Few writers have captured this beautiful, haunting island as well as Lane.

For today’s Sunday Poem selection, I’ve chosen five poems from Abandoned Quarry to share with you. These poems were written between 1978 and 2010, and represent not only Lane’s range as a poet, but also his deep passion for the environment and place.

As Kate Daniels writes, Lane “shows us how to make stories and music out of what remains, and how to thrive in the small epiphanies still to be found chopping wood, climbing rocks, or drinking sweet tea on a shaded front porch.” I hope you enjoy these poems as much as I have.

Happy New Year!

My Dead Father’s Bypass

In high school I lied about my father’s death,
said he died of a heart problem. I couldn’t say
the word suicide. But it was heart trouble
that took him so low he couldn’t come back up.
He owned the ESSO on the main highway, Number One,
from New York to Florida. This was the Fifties.
Southern Pines, small town south, and my father,
with a station on the highway. Then the by-pass
shut him down, traffic speeding past the local,
the beginning of the end for the slow life.

So I believe now it was speed killed my father,
not the gas from his car exhaust. His heart
was with the land, not the road, a farm boy
from the country, where land is slow like blood,
the pulse of spring through the plowed fields.
I didn’t lie in high school. I told a truth
slower in coming. I was only five. Like a by-pass,
the traffic flowing around my heart, my daddy’s death.

A Day in the Life of a Homeless Piano: A Short Film by Anthony Sherin

December 30, 2012 in Images with 3 Comments

One of the images from Anthony Sherin’s Solo, Piano – N.Y.C.

Since creating its controversial pay wall in 2011, The New York Times has continued to explore new ways of merging storytelling with technology. Their recent multi-media piece “Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” is an impressive glimpse at the future of web publishing as we move into the new era of HTML5.

Another Times addition that has become a personal favorite of mine is Op-Docs, a “forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with wide creative latitude and a range of artistic styles, covering current affairs, contemporary life and historical subjects.”

The series is produced and curated by filmmaker Jason Spingarn-Koff (@jskoff), who does an exceptional job finding thought-provoking content. The films are created by both emerging and established artists and are told from a first-person point of view.

Anthony Sherin’s Solo, Piano – N.Y.C. is one of the films featured in The New York Times’ Op-Docs series

This five-minute short, Solo, Piano – N.Y.C, by New York-based filmmaker Anthony Sherin caught my attention a few weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to purge the images from my mind since. To me, Sherin’s piece, and the Op-Docs series as a whole, is the perfect way to tell a story online. These short films are both intimate and personal and offer glimpses of everyday life that we would otherwise not be privy to. In other words, they’re the very antithesis of big-budget, commercial filmmaking.

Sherin discusses Solo, Piano – N.Y.C in more detail on the Times website:

“Making this film was pure serendipity. After a January snowstorm in New York City, I decided to do some work on another film, in my home in Washington Heights. But as I approached my desk, I thought I heard a piano plinking. I looked out the window and saw a piano on the curb below. I was mesmerized by the pattern that emerged. Passers-by would slow, stop and play. Some played well. All day long they collected and dispersed, and into the night they measured, shoved and deliberated the piano’s fate. (If it stayed on the sidewalk, the city could have issued a fine.) I was riveted. Pianos have histories. No one who stopped seemed eager to leave it behind. Their thoughts were obvious: Can we take it? Who abandons a piano? Is it worth anything?

I eventually started snapping stills and thought I would end up with just that — a lot of stills. To my surprise, I discovered after 24 hours that I had captured a story with a beginning, middle and end. My friend Art Labriola created an original piano score, and I had a film. It has screened at several festivals, and I’m pleased to share it with the world on Op-Docs.”

This quiet, poignant piece of storytelling has haunted me since I saw it. (You have watch the entire five-minute film to understand the narrative arc, so don’t abandon Sherin’s piece too soon.) I hope you find Solo, Piano – N.Y.C. as moving as I did.

Merry Christmas from Gwarlingo (And Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam)

December 24, 2012 in Images with 0 Comments

A still from Terry Gilliam’s 1968 animation “The Christmas Card”

Merry Christmas!

This holiday I’m grateful to readers like yourself who have made 2012 such a fulfilling and exciting year. Thank you. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed connecting with so many of you in person, through email, social media, snail mail, and through the comments on the site.

I’ll be taking some much-needed time off over the next few days and taking a (working) holiday down in Philadelphia over New Year’s. Next weekend will be a rare break for Gwarlingo’s Sunday Poem series. I know how disappointed readers are when they don’t find the poem in their inboxes on Sunday mornings, so consider yourself forewarned! The good news: my shelves are bulging with fabulous, new poetry collections that have arrived in the mail recently, and I’m eager to showcase some of these talented, contemporary poets in 2013. Soon…

In the meantime, I have a fun, irreverent, animated Christmas card from animator and film director Terry Gilliam to share with you this Christmas Day. Gilliam was responsible for giving Monty Python’s Flying Circus its unique visual style, and he also directed a number of memorable films, including Brazil, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Time Bandits, and 12 Monkeys.

A still from Terry Gilliam’s 1968 animation “The Christmas Card”

Mike Springer at Open Culture describes the origins of this humorous piece in more detail:
Continue Reading…

The Sunday Poem : Mark Doty

December 22, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 4 Comments

Mark Doty at Readers’ Books in Sonoma, California, after the publication of his New York Times bestselling memoir Dog Years (Photo courtesy the author)

Finding a memorable contemporary poem about Christmas is a lot like discovering a jaw-dropping piece of Christmas music. In other words, the task is nearly impossible. I’m a softy, it’s true, but my tolerance for sentimental goo is as low as a cockroach in a crawl-space.

I’d been searching for the perfect Christmas Sunday Poem for nearly a month when I encountered Mark Doty’s “Messiah (Christmas Portions).” Humor is a good buffer against the pitfalls of sentimentality, and believe me, these pitfalls are plentiful when it comes to angels, yule logs, and the birth of Christ. (This is the reason I also fell in love with Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s poems about Christmas, which were featured here two weeks ago: they are surprising, irreverent, and totally unexpected.)

“Readers want to participate in the process of discovery,” Doty explained in an interview on the Leonard Lopate show, and as a writer, Doty excels at bringing his readers along with him as he moves from uncertainty to recognition, from curiosity to revelation.

“We long to connect,” Doty once said, but “we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.” ”Messiah (Christmas Portions)” is all about this tension between individualism and community. The skeptical narrator slowly lets down his guard, and in the process, experiences insights that are both humorous and moving.

“Messiah (Christmas Portions)” is one many notable poems in Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. The collection was awarded the National Book Award for poetry and lauded for both its emotional range and skillful exploration of beauty. As the Poetry Foundation notes, with his “emphasis on beauty Doty brings an attention to the particular, and a deep engagement with the world. Or, as Elizabeth Lund put it in the Christian Science Monitor, ‘Mark Doty holds a magnifying glass to his subjects. He uses language as a way to highlight a moment, elevate it, and unearth hidden depth and meaning. Fire to Fire…illustrates how he has done this over the past 20 years.’”

“Poetry is a vessel for the expression of subjectivity unlike any other,” Doty remarked in an interview in the Cortland Review.

“A good poem bears the stamp of individual character in a way that seems to usher us into the unmistakably idiosyncratic perceptual style of the writer. I think we’re hungry for singularity, for those aspects of self that aren’t commodifiable, can’t be marketed. In an age marked by homogenization, by the manipulation of desire on a global level…poetry may represent the resolutely specific experience. The dominant art forms of our day—film, video, architecture—are collaborative arts; they require a team of makers. Poems are always made alone, somewhere out on the edge of things, and if they succeed they are saturated with the texture of the uniquely felt life.”

Today, I’m sharing two video versions of “Messiah (Christmas Portions).” The first is of Mark Doty reading at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival. This version of the poem is funnier, and I like the fact that we can laugh along with the audience. The second version, produced by PBS NewsHour, intercuts Doty’s reading with his own thoughts on the poem, as well as scenes from a local community performance of Handel’s Messiah.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

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Gwarlingo highlights some of the most inventive work being made today in visual art, music, writing, film, performance, design, and more. It's also a place where creative people can connect, explore, and share ideas. Gwarlingo has been featured on Andrew Sullivan's The Dish, NHPR, and more. And the name? Gwarlingo is a Welsh word for the rushing sound a grandfather clock makes before it strikes.

“Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.”

― Theodore Roethke

About Michelle

My name is Michelle Aldredge. I’m a writer, photographer, and the creator of Gwarlingo. At Gwarlingo, I share in-depth conversations with artists, as well as some of my own exciting finds in contemporary art. I've done radio appearances on NHPR and consulted on arts projects big and small. From 1999-2012 I worked at The MacDowell Colony, the nation's oldest artist retreat, but I've also done time at an arts magazine, a library, an art museum, and a raptor rehabilitation center. You can read more about me and my work here. Thanks for visiting. Come back. Come often.

Greatest Hits

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A Chain Link Fence Transformed: On my recent visit to the deCordova Museum, one of the artworks I found most compelling was “Capturing Resonance” by sculptor Soo Sunny Park and composer Spencer Topel, which is made out of chain link fencing. Read more about the piece here.

Sol LeWitt's Advice to Eva Hesse: DO! In 1965, when Eva Hesse found herself in a difficult creative place, artist Sol LeWitt wrote his friend a long letter of encouragement: “Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping,…Stop it and just DO!...If you fear, make it work for you – draw & paint your fear and anxiety.” I’ve never had so many overwhelming, positive responses to a piece. Read LeWitt's entire letter here.

The Sunday Poem: Gwarlingo subscribers receive The Sunday Poem in their inbox each week for free. The Sunday poets include Matthew Zapruder, Ravi Shankar (shown above), Meghan O'Rourke, Donald Hall, Kevin Young, Matthew Dickman, Seamus Heaney, Cristián Flores García, D. Nurkse, Jane Hirshfield, Stephen Dunn, Anzhelina Polonskaya, Eduardo Corral, Jean Valentine, Maureen McLane, and more. Explore the entire series here.

The Complete Creative Series: In 13 years working for an artist residency program, I've seen it all. I understand both the psychological and practical barriers to creating your best work. Fear, doubt, financial worries, procrastination, the distraction of technology, presenting yourself online and on applications, creating an engaged community: these are just a few of the challenges you face in any creative field. The Complete Creative is an in-depth series that examines some of the topics that most concern you and your creative life. Read the series here.

Envisioning the Future with Yo La Tengo, R. Buckminster Fuller, & Sam Green: Recently, I had a chance to hang out with Sam Green and Yo La Tengo at the ICA in Boston. Their "live documentary," The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, was like no other film screening I’ve been to and is a must see. Read more here.

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The Debut of Mary Ruefle's Erasure Melody: Mary Ruefle is one of today’s most admired practitioners of erasure poetry. A new erasure by Ruefle is a rare event, and the publication of one online or in print even rarer. Gwarlingo is the only place where you can see this one-of-a-kind piece. Read Melody in its entirety and learn more about erasure poetry here.

Little People in the City: While the public goes mad for Banksy, a more polished street artist named Slinkachu has been producing brilliant, evocative artwork that has largely escaped the attention of an American audience. Slinkachu is everything Banksy is not–-subtle, poignant, empathic, contemplative. Gwarlingo readers loved Slinkachu's photographs. Check out 33 of his images here.

The Art of Focus - 5 Ways to Free Yourself from Digital Dependency: Our day begins with good intentions. We resolve that today will be different from yesterday, because today, we we’ll stay on task. But then we turn on our computers and smart-phones, and before we know it, we’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. How do we make the most of technology without frittering our lives away? How do we create time and space for deep thinking, creation, and real connection within the chaos of digital life?

13 Years, 3500 Artists, 7 Memorable Lessons: After thirteen remarkable years of working at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, I decided to leave the Colony in May of 2012. Letting go of a 9-5 job (with a regular paycheck and benefits) in order to expand an arts website is a risky thing to do, but I've loved every minute of the Gwarlingo adventure. Did I learn something from working with over 3500 artists in those 13 years? Hell yeah. Read more here.

52 Pieces by British Street Artist Banksy: Banksy is a walking, breathing oxymoron. Depending on who you ask, he is either a genius or an overhyped vandal, a talented documentary filmmaker or a brilliant faker. He is both a lefty and a critic of liberal piety. He flips off the art world establishment, and yet courts the very art world he claims to detest. He is a street artist who sells his work for high sums in galleries and auction houses, and “an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. Is Banksy an arch prankster or an art genius? Read more here. (Above: Cardinal Sin by Banksy)

How Creativity Works: Why do creative epiphanies happen? Are there specific things we can do to encourage innovation in our personal lives and in the workplace? What can Bob Dylan, Julia Child, and Picasso teach us about the creative process? Read more about Jonah Lehrer's book Imagine: How Creativity Works here.

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The Spectacular Snow Drawings of Simon Beck: Beck creates these incredible designs by simply walking in the snow. These massive installations take two days to complete. See more photos here.

Creativity is the Power to Act: Ai Weiwei's interviews and blog posts are a thought-provoking read. “Creativity is the power to act," Ai says. "It’s the power “to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential.” Ai is an architect, sculptor, curator, poet, critic, publisher, and photographer--an artist who created installations out of 1,200 bicycles and 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds. Read more about Ai's writing, political activism, and art work here.

Not Your Average Flashmob: Last month the Copenhagen Philharmonic pulled off an audacious stunt—performing Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt on a crowded, moving metro train for unsuspecting passengers. Readers loved this video. I dare you to watch it without smiling.

How to Feel Miserable as an Artist: This marvelous list, which is relevant to artists of all disciplines, was created by illustrator Keri Smith and is part of The Artist’s Survival Kit, which Keri wrote and designed. I like Keri’s list because it emphasizes the ways in which we tend to stay in our safe zones as artists. Read the full list here.

Hugo Author Brian Selznick Shares 20 Favorite Books: Martin Scorsese's film adaptation of Brian Selznick's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret has won over critics and fans alike. In this popular Gwarlingo exclusive, Selznick shares his own favorite books for children. There are some wonderful discoveries on the list for readers of all ages. View all 20 titles and see illustrations from Selznick's newest book, Wonderstruck here.

95 Rare Color Photographs: The second most popular post in Gwarlingo's short history has been this feature on the rare color photographs taken by FSA photographers like Jack Delano, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott. The overwhelming response to this piece leads me to believe that I'm not the only one who finds these early Kodachrome photos from the 30s and 40s a fascinating discovery.

Grace Paley on Writing: "If you want to write, keep a low overhead...The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write." Read more here.

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Tour the Tate Modern: The Tate Modern in London, a former power plant, is the most visited modern art gallery in the world. I share some of the highlights from my own visit in this special tour.

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Creative Spaces

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Explore the Archives

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Before and After Dinner: Most people know André Gregory through his critically acclaimed film My Dinner with André, but Cindy Kleine's new documentary reveals so much more about the respected theatre director and raconteur. Read my full review of the film here.

A Good Man is Hard to Find: Click here to explore the artwork and propaganda posters from past presidential elections.

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Re-Branding the Barnes: Has a 25-Billion-Dollar Art Collection Been Disneyfied? The controversial new Barnes Museum in Philadelphia has finally opened its doors to much acclaim and protest. Read the full story of how a spiteful, visionary genius created the greatest collection of Post-Impressionist art in the world, as well as a bureaucratic nightmare for his predecessors. My own review of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's new building is also included here.

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New England Artists Finally Get Their Due: Read my review of the de Cordoova Biennial, featuring work by Mary Lum, Anna Von Mertens, Chris Taylor, Ann Pibal, Steve Lambert (shown above), Cullen Bryant Washington, Jr., and More.

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Composer Steve Reich with reel to reel tape recorders

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Errol Morris on Photography: What makes an “honest” photograph? Is the medium of photography more factual and authentic than other art forms? Can a photo be objective or does it always have a point of view? When does a photograph document reality? When is it propaganda? When is it art? Filmmaker Errol Morris addresses all of these questions and more in his new book Believing is Seeing.

Ira Glass on the Creative Process: Ira Glass, the host of NPR’s This American Life, gives some useful advice about the art of story telling. Remember the method you learned in college–opening paragraph, thesis sentence, supporting material? Glass says to throw that tired technique out the window!

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This Revolution is for Display Purposes Only: Click here to explore the world of street art, the first article in an ongoing series.

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Occupy Writers: Who could have guessed that one of the sanest pieces of writing about the Occupy movement would come from children's book author Lemony Snicket? Read “13 Observations Made by Lemony Snicket while Watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance" here.

P.J. Harvey's "Let England Shake": "I only sing the songs that I can still believe," says singer P.J. Harvey. The emotionally charged "Let England Shake" is one of the strongest records of her career. Listen to samples and watch videos of Harvey's collaboration with filmmaker Seamus Murphy here.

A Secret Garden in the City: These gardens on the roof of Rockefeller Center are one of the best-kept secrets in New York City.

The Discomfort Zone: V.S. Naipaul believes that female writers are inferior and sentimental. Jonathan Franzen observes that "you can't deconstruct and undress at the same time." Has writing about love without hipster irony become a radical act for male novelists today? Read the full story here.

Ten Rules for Writing Fiction: Writers like Zadie Smith, Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, and Richard Ford offer guidance on the art of fiction writing. A sampling of their advice: "Have children." "Don't have children." "Get an accountant." "No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write." Damn. What am I going to do with all of those black turtlenecks?

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Watch an Animation Classic: Yuriy Norshteyn’s Hedgehog in the Fog is one of the most stunning animated films ever made. Nick Park is a fan of Norshteyn's work and so is Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. Click here to watch the 10-minute short film and to learn more about the Russian animator.

Composer & Cellist Paul Brantley: Brantley makes a case that Bach's cantatas are theologically subversive and gives Gwarlingo listeners a preview of his own Gnostic Cantata.

Animal Architecture: What if architects designed shelters not only to accommodate humans, but also to accommodate the animals? A five-star hotel for bugs? A towering home for bats? Why not?

More Than a Voice: A writer. A performer. A pianist. A cabaret act. A storyteller. An opera singer with a 3-4 octave range. Is there anything Joseph Keckler doesn't do?

Poetry Bombing: Explore two very different poetry bombing projects--one from the Chilean art collective Casagrande and the other by artist Agustina Woodgate.

George Bernard Shaw Exposed: Not many people realize that George Bernard Shaw was a passionate amateur photographer, as well as a prolific writer. When Shaw died at the age of 94, he left behind over 10,000 photographic prints and over 10,000 negatives in his home in Ayot St Lawrence.

Olafur Eliasson, the Danish artist who brought the sun to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and created man-made waterfalls in New York City, has a new project--Din blinde passager (Your blind passenger), a 295-foot-long tunnel filled with dense fog.

Movie Barcodes: A movie barcode for The Wizard of Oz. Click here to read more about movie barcodes and the use of color in cinema.

Breathbox by Antti Paalanen: Watch a mesmerizing piece of music by Finnish accordion master Antti Paalanen. "Mesmerizing accordion music?" you ask. Yes. Really.

The Fear of Failure: Even if you don't know his name, you know his work. Legendary designer Milton Glaser discusses the myth of creative genius and gives advice on how artists can move past the fear of failure. “Find out what you’re capable of doing or not capable of doing,” says Glaser. “Admit what is.” “Embrace the failure.” Watch Glaser's talk here.

Documenting a Revolution: Two filmmakers, who risked their lives to document the looting of archeological sites during the Iraq war, now find themselves in the heart of the Egyptian Revolution.

The Sunday Poem : Paula Bohince

The Peacock

Envisioning the Future with Yo La Tengo, R. Buckminster Fuller, & Sam Green

The Sunday Poem : Evie Shockley

a background in music

statistical haiku (or, how do they
discount us? let me count the ways)

Soaring High: The Art of Auto-Giros, Rocket Planes, Airships, & Strange Aircraft

The Sunday Poem : Erica Funkhouser

Impossible

The Sunday Poem : John Lane

My Dead Father’s Bypass

A Day in the Life of a Homeless Piano: A Short Film by Anthony Sherin

Merry Christmas from Gwarlingo (And Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam)