This two-volume set, Poesy Matters and Other Matters, presents selected texts by the Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix. Volume one, Poesy Matters, is divided into two sections: poetry and drama, with each section also containing pieces of commentary by Hennix or her longtime collaborator Henry Flynt. Volume two, Other Matters, is divided into two sections: first, program notes and essays about a wide range of topics (including music, psychoanalysis, and mathematics), and second, a reproduction of Hennix's 1989 work The Yellow Book. The first comprehensive publication of Hennix's written work, Poesy Matters and Other Matters illustrates the singular depth and variety of her contributions to contemporary music, art, literature, and mathematics. Best known as a composer, Catherine Christer Hennix has, throughout her fifty-plus-year career, produced innovative work in the fields of not just minimal and computer music, but psychoanalytic theory, intuition mathematics, poetry, and prose as well. The texts in Poesy Matters and Other Matters reflect Hennix's diverse training as well as her long-standing personal interests in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Japanese and Middle Eastern poetic forms, resulting in a rich, diffuse collection of writings that reveal one of the avant-garde's most implacable, not to mention overlooked, creative minds.

Poësy Matters & Other Matters

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Blank Forms Editions

Taking its name from Maryanne Amacher's visionary, unrealized opera, the fourth issue of Blank Forms' journal,Intelligent Life, features a select group of unpublished, newly translated, or otherwise rare texts that augment our orga-nization's concerts, publications, exhibitions, and archival initiatives.

Blank Forms, vol. 4: Intelligent Life

Arts & Photography

Music

One of the world's most singular guitarists, Loren Connors has wrung distinct shades of ephemeral blues from his guitar, its sound ever-shifting while remaining unmistakably his own in more than 100 records across almost four decades. In the mid-80s, Connors took a partial break from music and focused instead on the art of haiku, for which he received the Lafcadio Hearn Award in 1987. With his wife Suzanne Langille he also co-wrote an article on blues and haiku, "The Dancing Ear," published in the Haiku Society of America's journal. It was during this period that Connors penned the material that appears in Autumn's Sun, a chapbook first published by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley's Glass Eye in 1999. The text features diary excerpts from 1987, lyrically fragmented observations interspersed with haiku-like poems that paint an idyllic impression of the passing seasons in his home of New Haven, Connecticut. With synesthetic perception, Connors gazes from tranquil domestic streets. Sycamore, elm, and catalpa trees are activated by the breeze and made to rustle in unison with their natural and artificial surroundings, including the howling dogs from which Connors derived his 'Mazzacane' moniker. As summer fades to winter, Connors portrays death as an undramatic certitude, the flux of his own maturation reflected in musings on his son's. Like his music, Autumn's Sun is tender without being sentimental, conjuring those rare, delicate moments when time stands still. This edition includes "The Dancing Ear" and an introduction by Lawrence Kumpf.

Autumn's Sun

Poetry

In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman's Black Case , a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman's flowing, fiery free verse--influenced by Amus Mor, Henry Dumas, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka--the book also features a manifesto for "GREAT BLACK MUSIC," notated songs, concert program notes, Jarman's photos, and impressions of a play by Muhal Richard Abrams. Jarman writes poetry of personal revolutionary intent, aimed at routing his audience's consciousness towards growth and communication. He speaks with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago's South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. A practicing Buddhist and proponent of Aikido since a 1958 awakening saved him from the traumatic mental isolation of his time dropped by the US army into southeast Asia, Jarman sings praise for the self-awareness realization possible through the martial arts. With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego. While some of the poems contained within Black Case have already been immortalized via performances on classic records by Jarman and Art Ensemble of Chicago, its republication in print form breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.

Black Case Volume I & II: Return From Exile

Aspirations of Madness, Blank Forms' fifth collection of archival, unpublished, or newly translated texts, takes its title from a series of interviews with Japanese free jazz pioneer Masayuki Takayangi that were published in Japanese in 1975-76 and are published here in English for the first time. The interviews provide a rare look at Takayanagi's eccentric practice and personality, both long under-recognized by audiences outside (and often, inside) of Japan. The postwar Japanese history that Takayanagi describes also surfaces in this publication's opening piece, a poetic tribute by the writer and artist Louise Landes Levi to one of Takayanagi's contemporaries, the poet Kazuko Shiraishi. Aspirations of Madness includes a second Levi poem as well, "A Deep River," written while at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House in 2003. Complementing this tradition of Japanese free improvisation and poetry is the republication of a 1977 interview with Joseph Jarman, the great composer, poet, and multi-instrumentalist. We also feature Charles Stein's introduction to Being = Space x Action. Further along, Aspirations of Madness features an excerpt from The Tree of Music, a cross-cultural treatise by the Russian musicologist Genrich "Henry" Orlov, the English translation of which has never been published before. Aspirations of Madness closes with one of Maryanne Amacher's final pieces of writing, "The Agreement," from 2009. The text takes the form of a letter between Amacher and the Open Ended Group, with whom she had planned to collaborate on her final, unfinished project, Lagrange: A Four Part Mini Series.

Blank Forms: Aspirations of Madness

Essays & Correspondence

Thulani Davis' synesthetic documentary poems breathe impressionistic life into the sonic-social history of East Coast avant-garde jazz, soul and punk Written between 1974 and 1985, these are Davis' most anthologized works. Featured musicians and dancers include Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bad Brains, Henry Threadgill, Thelonious Monk, the Revolutionary Ensemble, the Commodores, Ishmael Houston-Jones and many more, in performances at historic venues such as the Five Spot, the Village Vanguard and the Apollo. Nothing but the Music is further proof of Davis' place as a crucial figure, alongside poets Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez and Ntozake Shange, in the cultural landscape surrounding the Black Arts Movement. Thulani Davis (born 1949) is the author of the novels 1959 and Maker of Saints, several works of poetry and the forthcoming book The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke University Press). She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

Nothing but the Music: Documentaries from Nightclubs, Lofts, Dance Halls & a Tailor’s Shop in Dakar

DAVIS, Thulani

Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews

The first ever book on American composer and sound-art pioneer Maryanne Amacher, with letters, manifestos, notes and more elucidating her eclectic thinking on sound and perception Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art," although her thought and work challenges assumptions about the limitations of that genre. Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews represents the first ever book-length collection devoted to the composer, whose life and work are as vast as they are as yet unknown. From personal notes and letters to program notes, manifestos and unrealized project proposals, the documents are framed by longer interviews with Amacher that discuss corresponding periods of her life. Because Amacher worked across nearly every imaginable media format, this book will be of tremendous interest to theorists and practitioners in media and communications, urban design, contemporary art history, music studies, sound studies, film, radio, art criticism and performance studies.

Amacher, Maryanne

Individual Artists

Archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry Don Cherry and Moki Karlsson met in Sweden in the late '60s. They married and began to perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmental activism, children's education and pan-ethnic expression "Organic Music." Their home in Tågarp became a locus of artistic production, attracting free-spirited musicians, poets, actors and artists with the promise of collective life. There, Keith Knox assembled Tågarp Publication Number One to document the collectivistic practices blooming under the Cherrys' guidance. Reproduced here, the text includes interviews with Terry Riley and Cherry, a piece on Pandit Pran Nath, a report on the Bombay Free School and a survey of the esoteric Forest University by Bengt af Kintberg. This book explores Don Cherry's work of the period through additional interviews by Knox, a piece on his Relativity Suite and an essay by Fumi Okiji. Moki's writings on her workshops are featured alongside full-color reproductions of her tapestries, used as performance environments by Don's ensembles. Cherry collaborators Bengt Berger and Christer Bothén contribute travelogues from the era.

Organic Music Societies

Kumpf, Lawrence

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Writings and interviews engaging the artists and themes from Blank Forms’ public programming, from Thulani Davis to Charles Curtis 
This iteration privileges new texts produced for the publication. These include an interview with the idiosyncratic Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen, conducted by curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between writers―and longtime friends―Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn, on the occasion of Davis’ poetry collection Nothing But the Music; a discussion between composer Sarah Hennies and cellist Judith Hamann; and a conversation with composer-performers Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, on the heels of a recent compilation of Curtis’ work, Performances & Recordings 1998–2018, produced by Wada.\nAlso featured are reflections on legendary jazz percussionist and healer Milford Graves, by Ciarán Finlayson; English multimedia artist Graham Lambkin’s beguiling 2011 album Amateur Doubles, by Alan Licht; and the UK-based experimental music trio Still House Plants, by Joe Bucciero. The interviews and essays are complemented by three poets, René Daumal, Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn.

The Cowboy's Dreams of Home: Blank Forms 7

Now in paperback, the first ever book on American composer and sound-art pioneer Maryanne Amacher, with letters, manifestos, notes and more elucidating her eclectic thinking on sound and perception 
Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and work challenges assumptions about the limitations of that genre. 
Now in paperback, Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews represents the first ever book-length collection devoted to the composer, whose life and work are as vast as they are as yet unknown. From personal notes and letters to program notes, manifestos and unrealized project proposals, the documents are framed by longer interviews with Amacher that discuss corresponding periods of her life. Because Amacher worked across nearly every imaginable media format, this book will be of tremendous interest to theorists and practitioners in media and communications, urban design, contemporary art history, music studies, sound studies, film, radio, art criticism and performance studies.

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Blank Forms Editions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Blank Forms Editions

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Blank Forms Editions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Poësy Matters & Other Matters

Blank Forms, vol. 4: Intelligent Life

Autumn's Sun

Black Case Volume I & II: Return From Exile

Blank Forms: Aspirations of Madness

Nothing but the Music: Documentaries from Nightclubs, Lofts, Dance Halls & a Tailor’s Shop in Dakar

Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews

Organic Music Societies

The Cowboy's Dreams of Home: Blank Forms 7

Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews