petals, emblems

Literature & Fiction

Behrendt, Lynn

Poetry

Lunar Chandelier Press

Poetry. "...[F]or Joe Elliot, doubt is a flexible, porous scrim through which the vagaries of human knowing pulse and stretch toward the great quotidian ensemble of unknowns"&mdash;Ann Lauterbach.

Homework

Elliot, Joe

Poetry. "Sam Truitt's unusually sculptural poem is a lockbox of secrets. But each layer of concealment, spun out of language, reveals more insidious truths. The use of Morse code and Shakespearian fragments provides a cool and elusive, but also disturbing, conceptual frame. As in Hannah Weiner's Semaphore and Tom McCarthy's C, the act of coding both enacts and compresses distance. Feminine speech and military speech, ciphers for American life in the mid-20th century, rattle around the edge of a grave or a bomb site. DICK pulsates with violence and mystery."—Chris Kraus

Dick: A Vertical Elegy

Arts & Photography

Truitt, Sam

History & Criticism

Poetry. Art. Collaboration. Text mixed by John Bloomberg-Rissman, remixed by Lynn Behrendt. With 74 color collages by Behrendt. Poets Lynn Behrendt and John Bloomberg- Rissman seem to be "Practicing Hauntology" in a "Cabinet of the solar plexus." The authors/artists have remixed snippets of text from a multitude of diverse sources: Timothy Martin, WB Keckler, Aimé Césaire, Ian Willms (just to name a few). Mina Loy, Phillip Lamantia, Donna Haraway, Samuel Delany, and Bruce Andrews meet amidst the dust of Breton and Soupault's Magnetic Fields as visualized by Charles Kaufman without any corporate controls. In a cosmic, yet earthly co-creational web of interlaced language feeds, mixed by Bloomberg-Rissman, remixed by Behrendt, paired with Behrendt's unforgettable, many worlds, multihued, time-travelled collage works, the readerly consciousness is moved by multiplying destructive and ubertoxic situations in the 21st century debris. "These ponds currently hold enough toxic waste to fill 2.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools." Ecstatic multisourced language within the "Untitled (Grotto with Cow Horn)" and "(a baobab trunk or a bombax buttress)" under "a boiling of loquacious birds and the kisses of meteorites" offers palliative and ecstatic rest in "a bathtub full of gravity and eucalyptus leaves." You won't be able to stop yourself from crying. And laughing. "Feeling blue about our blue planet? Welcome to Pioneer City! Inquiries welcome." "The collage work of Lynn Behrendt is as instantly identifiable as that of Jess or of Joe Brainard—haunted landscapes, autopsied houses, birds &amp; babies &amp; the artist's own visage staring out. With her saturated palette &amp; (winking) nod to Hudson Valley gothic, Behrendt offers an iconography poised midway between Jung &amp; George Romero. I don't think a person dressed in flesh will ever seem nude to me again."—Ron Silliman "The allure in Bloomberg-Rissman's work, which has drawn me to it from the start, is his use of appropriative &amp; conceptual techniques toward the exploration of real if unanticipated meaning—the saying, in other words, of that which is crying to be said. While his work is constructed almost entirely of words appropriated from others, this is done without any sacrfice of coherence or feeling or intelligence in a voice that remains united &amp; 'personal' throughout—a testament to the communal nature of language &amp; thought of which our individualities are a crucial if sometimes questioned part. In this he emerges today as a true master."—Jerome Rothenberg "...the self is various and the mind/heart has many stages, prosceniums, theaters and interweavings, so too the marvelous linguistic visual collaboration of Lynn Behrendt and John Bloomberg- Rissman. What weaves through all the words and images is being-in-the-world, alive and dead at the same time, moving objects by means of creation, as the hands of ghosts, luminosity, and shadows intercede and sometimes overcome the text, changing the collaboration from that of one between two gifed artists/writers to a larger work created by the pressures of being and time (no caps). In a world where the self is inflated and domination too often the medium and form, this democracy of spirit enlightens and opens the reader to another possibility: that art has many doors, all of which are suitable entries to the work. The words are recovered from meaning narrowly by the collages opposing them: naked decomposing humans and incomplete horses stand at a stone wall, whose door leads to darkness while 'Lenin on a bench beside a lake / disturbed / Adrenaline drenched / on a beach at Waikiki / carries a cane' as he wanders into the scene. What more could one want?"—Maxine Chernoff

A Picture of Everyone I Love Passes Through Me

Bloomberg-Rissman, John

Poetry. "Reader, in your hands you hold a culmination: the New American Poetry we were given halfway through the last century is here now fully realized all the way through this gracious instance of open composition by field. UNCREATED MIRROR has a river's resolve, Guadalcabal a pond's deliberation. Tamas Panitz has made in them a Sanskrit from the fluency of our common speech, sinuous, without hesitancy, a language of petition and intention free of declaration or plea."—Thomas Meyer "The poet is an eternal presence in Tamas Panitz's glorious and lyric UNCREATED MIRROR, and we might find the poet under our boot soles or hundreds of years on both sides of the looking glass membrane of the past and present simultaneously. The title suggests an unfixed future or an unmade past. The poet takes us on a journey of our own fixed images, perhaps, allowing us to make our reflections. UNCREATED MIRROR is a brilliant guide to sense-memories and their influence on our potential embrace."—Brenda Coultas "The secret of the alphabet is that the letters are not abstract but are actually pictures—pictographs—se cret hieroglyphics, 'stolen' from Egypt by 'Moses.' To learn this Mystery you could hope for no better guide than Tamas Panitz."—Peter Lamborn Wilson

Uncreated Mirror

Panitz, Tamas

Poetry. Art. FINELY TUNED STATIC by Charles Borkhuis, with paintings by John McCluskey, is a distinctively braided venture: a series of calls and responses between word and image that pairs poet Charles Borkhuis' glyphic, micro- narratives with painter John McCluskey's collaged, abstract surfaces constructed from vinyl paint, torn paper and board and represented in FINELY TUNED STATIC in 12 full- color plates. Charles Borkhuis, author of nine books of poetry and a playwright, engages with painter John McCluskey's scissored abstractions as mirrored planes that calls out the splinters that poetry makes of a tale. The resultant collaboration is a dyad consisting of centrifugal impulses arrayed in language along the torn shards of McCluskey's colors and form: The "...crimson field trembling." Borkhuis declares early on and "the sentence broken off at the lip" which puts the reader/viewer on alert that this is syntax of another order. Its inscribed articulation has arisen so as to "listen for your voice in the static." What proceeds from their discourse is not a set of parallel codes but an exchange of "song of the scissors...across the jagged chasm." The poem observes "tremulous detail" within ".a wound in the pigment." FINELY TUNED STATIC offers a dynamic force and counterforce of evinced vocabularies, each rearing towards a truth, a "body held together by a thousand cuts."

Finely Tuned Static

Borkhuis, Charles

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