Sneaky Like a Puppy

A young maltese puppy’s owner rushed to the car with her luggage, however, uncharacteristically the puppy did not follow her. After the elevator returned to the garage level, the white, fluffy puppy had already stepped onto another floor, some unknown level above its owner crying. Seeing this neighbors began the sixth floor search for Sapporo so that her owner could make her airplane’s departure time. It seems to me that the puppy knows what the suitcase means and does not like spending the weekend at the kennel no matter how posh because the puppy had gotten off the elevator, walked the four part maze to the business office that includes another elevator bank and two fireproof doors and walked straight up to the concierge with her head cocked requesting a play date.

“Then suddenly electric”: an art review of Sarah Walko’s recent work X-Ray Series and acrylic, collage, ink series

Rarely does an artist capture spirit and intellect, sound and texture, myth and investigation as completely as Sarah Walko. An installation artist, based in New York City, Walko has exhibited work in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Savannah, Pittsburgh, and London.
The pains and joys of life charge and propel us. An electric socket, a book carved into the shape of an ocean wave, and a found book page reading “This is the kind of book—rare in our arid age—which takes root in the heart and grows there for a lifetime” in “X-Ray Series (the contents of our stomachs)(there are two types of electricity, playful static and lightning)(we swallowed them both). 2010.”

Delicately and intricately, “5 Line Staff (fiction of the wide river)” speaks to all levels of human need according Maslow’s hierarchy. A book of matches holds the potential for fulfillment of food, warmth and even love, since a campfire calls for community and conversation. Yet the matches also hold the power to destroy. To ward against such hazards and secure shelter, warmth, and love, “5 Line Staff” shows the intricate urban planning of humans juxtaposed to the community planning also evidenced in nature. The viewer is called to honor the past and continue building toward an enlightened future.

Having the gift of S.Walko’s work in my home affords me the opportunity, in the artist’s own words, to take pause and appreciate the ways in which “One moment is three moments.” Her acrylic, collage, ink on paper paintings, such as “This Land (sails, sailors, begin, how clean the sun)” is but one of the many paintings that inspire the viewer to manifest their dreams. Of the many pieces by contemporary artists in my living room, it is the work of Sarah Walko’s that is by far complimented the most. Many of these admiring guests have purchased their own Sarah Walko piece. Luckily, there are pieces currently on-sale which capture the expansive spirit of Walko’s installation work which have been installed in houses and large scale gallery spaces. Her work captures the essence of the latest in contemporary art being exhibited from Echo Park to SoHo to Shoreditch and beyond.

Work can be purchased at:
http://sarahwalkowork.bigcartel.com/

Artist website:
http://www.sarahwalko.com/index.html

Interview with Poet Stephanie Young Editor of Deep Oakland the Mills College Archival Project

Stephanie Young of the Deep Oakland website and archival project responded generously to my questions about archives, community, and the problematics of representing a sense of place. Firstly, the archival quality of Deep Oakland provides viewers with a variety of access points through which to find projects such as from geographic location/neighborhood, name, medium, etc. The detailed attention to archiving allows viewers to appreciate a wide range of photographs, text and chapbooks. A highly successful application of Young’s efforts is the scanning page by page of TAXT chapbooks allowing for the materiality of the text projects emerging from Oakland, CA to be preserved and accessed internationally.

An map of the Oakland is the homepage. The viewer returns again and again to the image of the neighborhoods, and, by rolling their cursor over specific neighborhood’s, projects from each are listed. The viewer enters the site from the visual and physical representation of the geographic factors of the community. According to Young, the goal of the Deep Oakland Mill’s College archival project is to generate dialogue “among groups of folks who enter the site sharing and some overlapping sets of interests.” While she is working to further develop and “facilitate more viewer participation,” Young is excited about the diversity of the poetry texts, “Deep Oakland Literary Objects” which is a recent reading, and Dan Thomas Glass’s project “880.” A reader may go to the Deep Oakland site for a specific poet’s chapbook and then find work from the women’s press collective, for example. This joining of disparate poetry groups also occurred at the recent reading, “Deep Oakland Literary Objects.” The reader’s ranged from Barbara Jane Reyes to Adam Cornford and Young says that “as someone who attends a lot of poetry readings in the bay area…I was enormously excited to see how this Deep Oakland reading operated totally outside of any one given scene. The crowd felt all over the place. I knew a small group of people there but there were many I had never met. Suddenly it felt like there was a conversation across social groups and poetries and scenes.” Young goes on to explain that the readers found common ground in “concerns about place, language,” and the representation of place. Just as the poetry reading gave a physical space for various poetry scenes to interact, converse and overlap, the Deep Oakland website aims to give a space for the art being created in Oakland to be archived and therefore a physical space for the viewer to go to experience the variety of work coming out of Oakland. Dan Thomas Glass’s “880” “physicalizes or performs or unsettles the way we experience place. These images are loaded randomly onto the main photo page and therefore it is highly unlikely that any one viewer will ever view each picture in the same context twice. That is to say that each photo is randomly sorted so that every time you click on an image the photos are rearranged and thus viewer in an alternate context. This speaks to the ways in which Deep Oakland is showing the physical space while also pointing to the constant evolution of place through community intervention.

In my two-part interview with Young, we also touched upon the problematics of representing a sense of place. Just as Glass’s randomized image collisions evidence, the evolution of place can not be simply linked to the neighborhood names. The privileged position of declaring a name of a place terrifies Young and she is in constant conversation with co-editors and interested participants on how to investigate and trouble the site’s use of neighborhood names. One idea may be to use street corners rather than names, or have several names, or the history of a specific locations past, present and potential future names. Another representational problem of which Young is acutely aware is the ways in which it is very easy to fall into a booster mindset. In a conversation with Brad Flis, a poet living in Detroit, they discussed the importance of place being “saved from the stories that get constructed around it.” Young is “interested in work that thinks critically about constructions of place, and investigates oppositional or hidden narratives to those constructions.” Since discussion and representation of place is never neutral, multiple modalities of representations are very useful in achieving the site’s central mission, without over simplifying, or creating a pep rally for Oakland, CA.

Stephanie Young is a talented poet in her own right; she generously shared her talents by engaging each and every one of my questions and answering generously.

Poems-for-All

Many thanks to Richard Hansen, owner of the bookstore Book Collector in Sacramento, CA, for making the world a better place by publishing enchanting, miniature books. His Poems-for-All series is free for your taking at Book Collector and around Sacramento. Each one and a half by two inch or smaller micro chapbook contains a single poem from Ted Joans, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, Ann Menebroker, or hundreds of other poets on the SacFreePress list.

Poetry opens the reader to a microcosmic universe. It is the opportunity, if only for a moment, to access the eternal calm that spiritualists speak of. It is, as Sara M. Larsen writes, to “show me the room/ with sliding doors/ i am a child.”

“Writing Poems is a Saintly Thing” says Peter Orlovsky “to welcome me/ into your early rise of bacon and / rolls.” Poetry helps people to share in delights, relief, and a sense of humanity. “What good is my room if/ it can’t hold all the people in the world and / chairs lonely because built for only one?” Poetry is the room that allows us to embrace contradiction. Merleau-Ponty tells us we only see these as contradictions and paradoxes because of the blind spots in our perception.

Recently a friend, or to be more honest, a guy looking to set up a third date with me, wrote a list of things he likes about me. He writes, “this whole poetry thing is awesome. It gives you the opportunity to save people like myself from Heidegger's 'everyday world' and to balance out the powers of the 'they.'”

Thank you Richard for helping to save people from the everyday drone that threatens to numb our thinking and block us from moments of calm.

It is of no surprise that Book Collector receives a five star rating on yelp. http://www.sacfreepress.com/poems/blog/2006/05/book-collector.html

And to check out images of these enchanting gifts go to Poems-for-All:
http://www.sacfreepress.com/poems/covers.html

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 7:44 AM, Sarah Walko wrote:

This is the point where the person actually crosses into the field of adventure, leaving the known limits of his or her world and venturing into an unknown and dangerous realm where the rules and limits are not known.

With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the 'threshold guardian' at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world in four directions – also up and down – standing for the limits of the hero's present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant and beyond the protection of his society danger to the members of the tribe. The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored. The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades

- j. campbell

"...she is catalogue busty Oriental or steamy Latina. The girl next door is waiting for you to shoot your load"

“Young Americans birth gang rape over card games,” Barbara Jane Reyes calls out in her chapbook titled, Cherry, published by Portable Press @ Yo Yo Labs. In her opening poem, “Cherry,” Reyes masterfully evokes the ambiguous space of sexual pleasure within sexual violence. “[T]ears tender,” “ingests,” “pump fire,” and “invites entrance tinseled hostess” is experienced amidst the “liquored push,” “he advances inserts into girl,” “unripe cherry bleed/blow her rupture.” This collection is an absolute must read for those interested in gender and ethnic studies and for those wanting to better understand people in their life who have visceral, seemingly extreme reactions to the objectification of women in the mass media.

Ethnic prejudice and sexual violence, specifically against Filipinas, accumulates in Reyes use of a documentary poetics in the poem “E-Dialogue Over Bitter Chocolate.” News quotes discuss the colonization of the Philippines in relationship to contemporary consumerism: Wired News reports that the Spanish division of Nabisco defends the naming of their chocolate-covered cookie, “Filipinos.” A ten-year old male child to his Filipina nursemaid says, “Hey Cookie, I’m eating you!” After which follows statistics from the Centre for Philippine Concerns-Australia, on murders suspected or perpetrated by “the woman’s employer, husband, de-facto partner, ex-partner, or fiancé.” These images and news reports culminate in the poem’s final two stanzas. The reading experience is far too rewarding to ruin: you’ll have to see for yourself.

No aspect of sexualized ethnic abuse goes unexamined in Reyes inventive, fresh work. Every twist and turn in the poems' subjects provides a new way of seeing. Hope is given to the reader in the strength that we hear in the poet’s voice even when the speaker’s experiences, and by extension the readers’ experiences at times, “[become] tears in the wound, liquid, nude-come-shots, and singing, as we.” (Reyes, Cherry, “Selvedge”)

Cherry by Barbara Jane Reyes, published in 2008 by Portable Press @ Yo Yo Labs, Brooklyn, NY, is available for $7.00 at: http://tinyurl.com/yhg6ud2

“Mémoire” by Pierre Reverdy

Memoire is in the French feminine, memory, and in the masculine, memoir and in Reverdy’s poem, the shared experience of two strangers lost in their distinct thoughts and memories. Though this is an isolated state, all humans by virtue of sharing this experience are united in the act. Joined in “un monde plein d’espoir,” a world full of prospect—the potential and constant moment of becoming.
First the speaker is lost in thought with no recognition of what has happened around his body in the tangible world. “Scarcely a minute/And I’ve come back/ Having grasped nothing of all that passed.” We say that we have zoned or spaced out into the “larger sky.” In the last moments of being removed from the physical world, in the mental zone, there always is “The lantern going by/ The footstep overheard” that pulls us out of our mind and back into the material space that we inhabit. The entire world, in the setting of the poem, the zoo, is “in motion” but “someone comes to a stop/ They let go of the world/ And everything in it.” By letting go of the material constraints of our body in the physical world “There’s more space.”
In the open field of thought, imagination and memory we are rewriting our self-narrated autobiography. And as a community of humans, space is one of our largest concerns both personally and politically. Ownership of intellectual property and real estate and personal space and one’s own story is at play in the constant rewriting of history. In the realm of unlimited immaterial space, division of thinking does not prevent the shared human behavior from achieving communion. Each is not alone in the condition of being human that tends toward daydreaming or day-worrying. “All three of us were strangers/ And formed already” finding the potential self and community.