IT'S a FAMILY AFFAIR: Get to Know Exit Strata's Poetry Festival Team
FIELD NOTES: Architectural Uncanny :: Poetics and the Built Environment with Martin Byrne
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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.
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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.
FIELD NOTES : Interrogating Truth:: Poetry and Journalism with Andre Bagoo in Trinidad and Tobago
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.
AWESOME CREATORS: The Poetry Society of New York Builds a Festival (and a Dream)
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....
Spoken Word / Music, Underground: Penny's Open Mic in NYC – Douglas Wright
Every Tuesday night for the past five years, Penny Pollak (playwright and contributor to Exit Strata: Print! No. #1) has hosted Penny's Open Mic in the East Village. And every week, a freak scene of musicians, storytellers, comedians, and performance
FIELD NOTES: Jacob Perkins, From the Cannery : Pt 4 :: Lost and Found
The crew just left after a week of touring through Valdez and the kenai peninsula. Joyous time, a little relieved to rest, but of course we're about to jump into a month straight of intense fishing with absolutely no breaks or
Friday, July 13th at the Bell House, BKNY: DEBO BAND record release show!
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.
FIELD NOTES: Jacob Perkins, From the Cannery : Pt 3 :: Exxon Oil Spill
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.
ART: "Meet Miss Subways!" Photography, History and Identity :: Fiona Gardner
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If you're not from around here, you may not know that Meet Miss Subways is more than a Ferlinghetti poem.
And, as such, you may not know that
"Miss Subways was a title accorded to individual New York City women between 1941 and 1976. The woman who was "Miss Subways" at any one time appeared on posters placed on New York City Subway trains, along with a brief description of her. The program was run by the ad agency "New York Subways Advertising".
To be eligible, a woman had to be a New York City resident and herself use the subway. Winners were usually chosen by telephone-based voting, from among a group of contenders whose photos were all placed on the subways; the nominees were chosen by John Robert Powers, a modelling agent."
{thank you, Wikipedia!}
I'm a sucker for New York memorabilia, and photographic projects examining identity, place, and culture, so when I happened upon Fiona Gardner's series -- in which she documents, via striking, technicolor-esque present day portraits and tells the stories of former "Miss Subways," alongside the now-dated newspaper clippings introducing these "girls" to an adoring city -- I immediately rang her (um, or, since it's not 1960, I messaged her on facebook, where I found her through our mutual friend, painter and herbalist Michael Viola).
EDITORIAL :: FIELD NOTES and the RHIZOME : the series grows wild and free
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"from the seemingly random the rhizome develops" - Bob Holman, June 23rd, 2012 @ Naropa SWP | intuitive responsive visualised field notes by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson[/caption]
Since the inauguration of the Field Notes series there has been a great rumbling -- not only of interest in the project [on deck: filmmakers, musicians, programmers, visual artists, activists...!] but also in the expansion of its attentions.
Given our proclivity towards community collaboration we eagerly sop up the runoff of creative juices that gathers like dew on you all in the morning! So, naturally, to the question, "could we also include ____?" the answer is, why NOT?
If you're new to Exit Strata, this is a good time to introduce you to our commitment to PROCESS: as much or more than we are excited to share and celebrate the products we create, we thrive and exist around the notion of creating community together via an intentional desire to the work of art. That is to say the WORK that is art, and the collaborative acts of craft across many disciplines that make this work so rich. We are not interested in what is NOT. We are interested in IS. Human attention, human questioning, universal energetic wanderings, coding, mathematical formulation, scientific inquiry, yoga, chanting, dance, film, music, sound, translation, fiction, poetry, prose, aphorism. Is it ART? is it art? is it Art? This is an interesting question for another time, but also a different question than it may appear to be. For our purposes, we are more interested in "does it inspire? does it help me and my community grow/think/learn/be better?" and to look at how the creative people (which doesn't necessarily mean "artists") in our midst use their notes to grow themselves and their work.
Above, you see a responsive notebook page of mine that ebbed and flowed, responding to the rhythms of a poetry reading that was introduced by Bob Holman, who spoke the words above: "from the seemingly random the rhizome develops." Something perhaps I never would have shared before this series, which brings some questions to the fore, for all of us:
What does your field-note-book look like?
