July 2012

[caption id="attachment_1780" align="alignleft" width="640"] Byrne's installation, the "Occupiable Sculpture" Digilog Futures, at 83 Gallery (Columbus, OH) http://www.architizer.com/en_us/projects/view/digilog-futures/40226/[/caption] Day # 5 (1.5)  Wake feeling strangely ok. This does not last. ___ ___ Where do poetics and the built environment overlap? What do we take in, what do we observe? Where are the boundaries where we end and our context begin? Or are these boundaries illusory? What of these questions when you engage with and build this environment? When the city, the block, the structure, the wall, all that recedes as existent, is your medium? In this mini-series of FIELDNOTES, architect and poet Martin Byrne lets us peek into his mind/journal.

A Note on Notebooks

Andre Bagoo

AT FIRST, I wanted to keep them separate. After all, they could not be more different. One, plain blue with the words ‘REPORTERS NOTEBOOK’ written on its thin cover. The other, a fancy Italian notebook with a hard cover that looks like brown marble; the kind of pattern you used to find on the insides of old books thrown out by the library. For a long time I walked with the reporters’ notebook on work assignments and saved the other notebook for home; for later; for after the real work of the day was done. Somehow they conspired to get together.

In truth, they were meant for each other.

The poetry landscape in New York City can be confusing to navigate, especially given its ever growing diaspora of splinter cells. Despite the density and scale of creative energy feeding this array, the experience of this fragmentation is often that of participation in one or a number of small groups, working in isolation. Sustaining these communities takes constant effort and commitment on the part of not only those who choose to plant the seed of reading series, magazine, or so on, but also from those who support and participate in these efforts -- and in many cases there is a fine line between success and utter exhaustion, the point at which sustenance seems too dear a price, and in which community feels like a utopian fantasy.

Sometimes, it takes a certain kind of vision -- one that steps back, out away from these stands of trees, to see the verdant, expansive forest -- to help empower a return to joy and belief in our work, and in the strength of our creative community.

If you're here, you know this is a mission near and dear to our hearts. That we exist primarily as a creators community, a network, and a platform for mutual expression, appreciation, collaboration, dialogue, interdisciplinary exploration. Our work is, ultimately, an exercise in the self-actualization of a viable cooperative for growing value. But we know we cannot do this alone, and so we are always searching for allies, comrades in the fight for viable abundance....

Enter The Poetry Society of New York.

How grateful we are for the overflowing cup of talent in our community! I've known the incredibly talented Marié Abe for 15 years -- she is a virtuoso: player of many instruments, and now professor of musicology at Boston University, who has been focused on making amazing music on the accordion for some time now ... and she just happens to be one of the musicians in the outstanding DEBO BAND, gracing the stage at Bell House for one night only! to celebrate the release of their new album. Prepare to fall in love with this band, with its sound, with its explorations, and with its grinning, energetic, joyful musicians.

Pushing off the dock in Kodiak with a solid three weeks of work behind us, the small cannery we called (temporary) home, Alitak, lies behind a hundred miles of fog and snowcovered peaks. We set off on a thirty hour run north, to an equally small town, Kenai, for the salmon season on the Cook Inlet. I'd like to tell you about jigging for cod over this time, on a small boat in high wind and waves, but I find myself interested in showers, and their locations, scarcity.

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