APG @ Eyedrum Periodically

Been a while. We've surfaced just to note a couple APG collabs at the latest Eyedrum Periodically:
https://eyedrumperiodically.org/. The current issue's theme: Grub.

Erika reading her poem Frudetrusks at April 30 meeting

fudetrusks

remoticons 1

[from:    the Loss Lieder]

the worst are full of passion ate them in tents, itty

bitty nonsense yawn stabilize   worthless values?

valse use value, exchange in yr free marked-up

systemization branding flocculent & leaving

in ranch barred all howdy dust poured

into intro P:  reality show as 101,  digital con version, meaning

cross-platform bland-creation, oops, stepped between

the 3^rd rail at who?  everyelse,   allows for social

media utilization, loud scream gifts you

that soldier’s  triangulated narrative Dis coursing thru the

vanes the whether, the don’t need a man to fish

in a bicycle rust ammo dump truck sleazing

that’s how everyone knows in the city

emracing the new domesticated violence,

monuments exist marking grand geometric lines

leading from twitters to contempt for twang

lug over to where ya spill yer guts

patrol on a dim wall,  mentionless to menschen or

measureless to mammoths at least, oh and while yer at it

art in public spaces reeks of Samonite locked elitism

or is that a satellite licked E Lite schism?  well,

i’m sure where you’re listening, the walls ring

almost as much

the snail’s dodering across the lay of the land

the whine of the country cricrossed by loopy & oblate

babble-lines Oh let’s just gavel that session forgotten

shifting gears into cog nightive daylighting—

EPI-IMPROPER: Remixing Bruce Andrews Via Twitter

On April 1, the APG participated in the Bruce Andrews 25-Hour Twitter Project, an interactive performance piece that stretched across an entire day and included as many participants and media formats as America's favorite social media platform could support. Described by its curator, Maria Chavez, as a "sculptural documentation" and a "real-time archive of Bruce Andrews' current poetic writing and the responses it elicits in real time", the enterprise was irresistible to us for many reasons. Many of us have been either fans or even full-fledged students of Andrews' work for many years, and of course we found ourselves more than simpatico with the intermedial thrust of the piece, its radical openness, and its emphasis on collaboration and group composition. Also, April 1 seemed like a fittingly foolish day for the APG to release its first Twitter pigeon, so there ya go.

The project's Twitter account quickly became a site of reflection, refashioning, remixing and re-imagining of Bruce's 300-part poem "Improper" as its staccato bursts of 140-characters-or-less passed through various hands. Tweets were usually accompanied with links to the project's SoundCloud page where you could hear Andrews read the material. Once we were underway, I mainly just contented myself with riffing on Bruce's tweets as I reposted them, responding to, say, Andrews' "one beast cross-tool in full queer. Reading it made us all less incompetent" with "Reading it made us all less incompetent. Midwife as voyeur to beast? Apes in parallel, or stereo-perp a hot mess", etc. Or else I dropped slaphappy one-liners that echoed bits of Bruce like "my swastika nacho drips with porn" as I got drenched in the wave of socio-politically pointed mutations-of-utterance that "Improper" seemed design to release. Lots of other folks did similarly snarky, off-the-cuff things, and many were cogent and artful, but it was especially cool when a few participants got a little more ambitious with the pictures they posted and the recordings they uploaded. Along those lines, there was a widespread and enthusiastic reaction to the manner in which my fellow apgista James Sanders chose to respond.

Iteration #9 of the "Epiimproper" series

The "Epiimproper" poems are definitely striking as images or word-sculptures in their own right, but it's worth unpacking what else is in play with them. The prefix "epi" of "epiimproper" carries the multiple senses (from the Greek) of on, upon, after, towards, against, etc., but also, as my cheap student lexicon tells me, that of accumulation, extension, even of monetary interest. Anyone who's had even a passing acquaintance with James' poetry will know that he often works with the lattice--basically, these "word-webs" that defy traditional poetic lineation and can generate an infinite number of free-flowing,open-ended readings as you follow their lines--but the epi aspect is fairly new to his work. I first became familiar with it at a reading the APG did in Atlanta a few years ago. Calling the text as an "epiphyte" (literally, a plant that grows upon another plant), James handed me a page like this and told me to listen, as he read from another text, for the words in the gray areas and to treat them like "cue words" that would launch my own reading around the lattice, effectively letting my reading/performance grow upon, from, against (etc.) his own. This was fun to do, incidentally, while sitting in the audience at a fairly polite poetry reading sited in an art gallery. The attendees who didn't know we collaborated (or weren't hip to John Cage) just figured I was some asshole out to interrupt James' reading.

Iteration #10 of "Epiimproper"

So, as the Andrews Twitter project gained momentum through the day, James devised a series--eighteen, by the project's end--of these iterative epi-lattices that spun out from the sporadic Tweets of Bruce's "Improper." Andrews' words hover in the gray or black clouds; James' proceed from these to congeal as lattices over the white space. If you run their images in sequence as a photo-slideshow, as I've done, you get a sense of the series' evolution over the 25-hour period that can often seem like a time-lapse view of the action in some kind of dynamically verbal petri dish. Words and phrases assemble themselves together like the proto-organs of a microbe. They cohere or spin out, hold complementary or oppositely charged phonemic valences. New parts emerge and protrude productively while others drop off and die, become erased. Not to get too carried away here waxing on about the properties and potential of the lattice...we've already done so elsewhere.

In any case, what's motivated this post--just as much as our post-game enthusiasm and gratitude about getting to play productively with Bruce and his fellow travelers--has been the opportunity to make public some of the recordings the group has done in bringing the "Epiimproper" series from the mute page into vocal performance. I've provided several recordings below, paired with the pages of James' work they bring into sonic action. The ones I did are fairly straight-ahead, hewing pretty closely to the formal line of the epiphyte since I generally wait for Andrews' voice (lifted from SoundCloud) to "activate" my reading and send me spinning around the lattice. But they're conservative next to Austin-area performance artist/poet and APG alumnus Jeff Dahlgren's takes on the material, which incorporate a lot of digital effects and get especially awesome when other Austin-based performers sit in with him. I don't know who these other guys are, but, hey, that's what blog comments are for, I guess. Anyway, it's been absolutely fun remixing Bruce with this crew. Hope you enjoy listening!

Epiimproper #1

jselv's reading: "premale stars hide"
jeff's reading: "kleptoseeplatform"

Epiimproper #2

jselv's reading:"mundo el mundo retailing"

Epiimproper #3

jeff's reading: "uglier website"

Epiimproper #5

jeff's reading: "worrycute"
jeff &co.'s reading: "is alive"
jeff &co.'s reading: "andyjeffbruce"

Epiimproper # 8

jselv's reading: "privately pink post-talk" (sans Bruce)

Epiimproper #11

jeff's reading: "to the stroke"

Epiimproper #12

jselv's reading: "guy-namics kool aid"

Epiimproper #13

jeff's reading: "aftercloning"
jeff & co.'s reading: "emily"

Epiimproper #17

jeff's reading (untitled)

jeff & co.'s recording (untitled)

Epiimproper #18

jselv's reading: "ku klux klan sleeper miscast again"

D'Agostino's BLUBBERLAND to open in Denver

Just received word that frequent Atlanta Poets Group collaborator David D'Agostino's exhibition BLUBBERLAND: Colorless Colorado will open next Friday, April 25 at the Edge Gallery in Denver. A collaboration with Mickie Boyd, David's exhibition features the contribution of many other artistic players as well, including the APG this time around. Ever since David moved to Colorado, we've enjoyed throwing in bits of text from time to time in support of his inter-medial, often site-specific extravanganzas.

From the event invite:  BLUBBERLAND is...

an "intermedia carnival composed of wood constructions, burnt panels , tar, oil, animal tails, claws, lard, bones, sewn forms, crystals, rubber, rocks, sand, salt, homemade candies, fermented fruits, and poetry shards.

"Blubberland displays the iridescent and opaque character of the Colorado landscape—an historic territory mythologized as the  ‘Colorful’ state, yet imminently devolving as an epicenter of climatic disaster pivoted by endemic pine beetle kill, massive forest fires, mountain traffic coagulation, and REI fashion schemed athleticism."

What?? Poetry shards...like maybe somebody took a hammer to Keats' urn? Who would do such a thing? My stars. Otherwise, since I know next to nothing about D'Ag's latest beyond what I just cut & pasted here, I'll shut up. Not much I can say beyond, "hells yeah, David!" But I plan on following up, so if recordings or pics from this event surface, I'll make sure to repost them here.

Poet X : a treatise re: verse(d)

 essay 368

western odd is sling fest untuned maybe

is there someone there i can speak to about

the complete lack of positive direction in this universe?

not even uni, more a partisan gang in filtration

particulate removed blinkerdom    look away

the urban south   ain’t got stars

red carpet drenched fulla fueled re-get   lacking its R

 & backed up @ rush (our)

long to the slip grits maybe time happens

a loudshouter irrit-hacker quick-marching thru marshes

a thrower gets flamed

   right in the middle of alt fingering,

or scoop slips on table-ratted slope grouting

.... if cling, then sing,  or Macedon,

outa which Alex whined about worlds—

bawl yer multiverse out:

just one verse being worth an anapest twist-tie

for taking out the prosed rash ..

sadness ain’t worth it,  it’s

   over in the content we vend

(words needing kithara strum replacement therapy ..)

then  if ya get too upper case,

the lowing classes with cud syllabic

just might nick verbs

from out of this 2-year sentence, &

give ya a slight

re-naming procedure ....

like snoring with yer windows open & seeing grey

mushy things go slanking around

the rough tree leans

Mark reading, i thought thought was overreacting

This Mark reading his poem "i thought thought was overreacting,"  at the January 15 meeting...

i thought thought was overreacting

APG at Sci-Fest

Hey Atlanta people. The Atlanta Science Festival starts March 22. During that week there are some cool art-science events around town. One of those takes place at the Fusion Gallery on Monday, March 24 from 6-9. It's the kickoff for an exhibition by Craig Dongoski called "The Sound of Art". The APG (well Zac and James anyway) will be performing with Craig as part of that event. Zac will be playing violin and James will be playing language. There will be also be brain waves playing. So stop by and watch us do our thing.

Here is a little more info: http://www.atlantasciencefestival.org/events/event/525.

sordid sonnet 23

Gets angry     whips around, assembles

not quite dispensables    anchored w flip oxy—

cold fish call for slap-yappy newsprint:

agency breaks in    to Sir Veil our you;

all across flip lash scurries dim hint..

cereal killer chokes her wheat e’s with moxie !

being camera’d,  yr nod grumbles:

just a season since a minute grew

Then the ents get formidable by burning

a nonbreaking space as the cone re-enters

our altered atmosphere;

weapons will always be with you—churning

of course,  & renting the centers...

A shrugging life-history, flat/clear

sonnetinho: smolder

disarticulation involves the writing of new smiting-systems

a dark just as there are no more stars scrutinizes

light pollution (which is a heavy pollution)

which is lost if it’s pulled apart but this is primarily

the result of and the novas are tamed

embark on a culture moving thru the undergrowth

except that’s an image,  an approach to dissection

or to desiccation something you can attach

even though these things are all said in Caesar’s dialect

interesting dark,  too,  not that there is any longer,  and this

and the archeologists who study it they study morning