21.6.15

What Rachel Blau DuPlessis did next ...

Having spent just over a quarter of a century working through a poetic grid, last year Rachel Blau DuPlessis published a book of optimistic yet judicious or canny poems that, as a way to 'unbegin', seemed to emerge from spaces in-between the frames of a grid. It was called Interstices (read my review here). Now she has made GRAPHIC NOVELLA - a big American Quarto sized book of collaged found texts (often news reports), images and poems.

Canadian poet and translator Erin Moure says : In GRAPHIC NOVELLA, Rachel Blau Duplessis goes further than any poet in working with how the brain actually thinks, borrows language as scraps, does not then read them from left to right but upwards or sideways, using language as pictures, words as cartilege, pictures as linguistic ligaments and sinews. And she works always in and through a compelling modesty: it is a novella, not a novel; it is a little theatre, not the internet. It is the street and sign and tree and head. Blau Duplessis, in this latest form and affect, finds a new way to reflect, to let language think us, stare back at its reader, blink. The book is sustenance, a survival manual "acknowledging unpresentable facts," "so naked it was empathy." As she says early on, “this whole book is a detective story on how to write."

GRAPHIC NOVELLA is published by Xexoxial Editions
Visit Rachel Blau DuPlessis' website here



8.6.15

MAC LOW
Saturday 13th June
6-8pm

at 55
55 Sydenham Rd Marrickville Sydney

For information & directions click here

A night dedicated to
the ego-less ethic of poet and artist Jackson Mac Low.

There will be reading
reading through,
reading before
reading after
reading with
reading to
reading on
reading at
reading by

Andrew Brooks
+ Emilia Batchelor
+ Pam Brown
+ A J Carruthers
+ Benjamin Forster
+ Brian Fuata
+ Elena Gomez
+ Astrid Lorange
+ Rhiannon Newton
+ Kailana Sommer
+ more
+ you
= us




5.6.15


FORM GUIDE to ART

The latest volume of Ken Bolton's critical art writing can be found here. Read what he says about recent exhibitions by photographer Trent Parke, video artist Bill Viola, Simon Pericich, Ian North, James Tylor, Lisa Roet, Paul Sloan, Dan McLean, Christian Lock, Nicholas Elliot and Anna Horn.

And for extra material on art, life, culture & poetry in book form check out Ken Bolton's Dark Horsey Bookshop here.