Happy Chinese New Year

At our house
every day is
the year of the dog.

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Searching for Volcanoes

Search for my poem Searching for Volcanoes, recently published in Future Welcome: The Moosehead Anthology X, edited by Todd Swift (Montréal: DC Books, 2005).

Future Welcome comes 50 years after 1955. In his introduction to the anthology editor Todd Swift notes: “1955 saw: the opening of Disneyland; the publication of Lolita; ultra-high frequency waves produced at M.I.T.; Hammer's The Quatermass Xperiment; the introduction of the first fluoride toothpaste, Crest; the International Air Pollution Congress (held in New York City); the debut of Scrabble; B-52s put into service; Ray Kroc's acquisition of McDonald's; Elvis's TV debut; Salk's polio vaccine; a time bomb on United DC-6 flight; Glenn Gould's "Goldberg Variations"; Eisenhower’s upholding of the right to use nuclear weapons in defence; US Congress ordering all American coins to read "In God We Trust"; the deaths of James Dean, Wallace Stevens and Albert Einstein; and the birth of Bill Gates.”

Where are we now? Certainly not where we thought we’d be. Swift writes: “I wanted poems and prose both of our moment, and yet imbued with the same sense of retro-kitsch that popularly defines the 50s–works about the future, robots, space travel, technology, and sci-fi terror.”

Searching for Volcanoes tells the not-quite-sci-fi-terror tale of trying to do Internet research on a dial-up connection. It’s hard to believe that the Internet didn’t exist in 1955 and yet, in 2005, a 56k connection is utterly antiquated. Volcanoes are a good analogy. As my brilliant friend Norman T. White pointed out to me: “Funny thing about erupting lava – it’s brand new, but it’s also ancient.”

Here’s an excerpt from searching for Volcanoes:

56k
takes forever to fill
collapsed craters
with blue-screen-blue
caldera lakes.

Line by line
the sky downloads:
progressive jpeg descends
a strafe of cloud dithers,
geological time passes –
falls toward mountain…



Future Welcome includes new writing from David Wevill, Sina Queyras, Raymond Hsu, Robert Minhinnick, Annie Freud, bill bissett, Patrick Chapman, Meredith Quartermain, Jason Camlot, Liane Strauss, Todd Colby, Jennifer K. Dick, John Hartley Williams, Louise Bak, Hal Sirowitz, Adeena Karasick, Mike Marqusee, Kavita Joshi, Stan Rogal, Tammy Armstrong, Richard Peabody, Jenna Butler, Ali Riley, Jon Paul Fiorentino, David Prater, J. R. Carpenter, David McGimpsey–plus many more.

For more information on or to order Future Welcome vist DC Books

For more information on editior Todd Swift visit his web sites: http://www.toddswift.com/ and http://toddswift.blogspot.com/
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Con-Textilizing Critical Language

My essay, Con-Textilizing Critical Language, appears in the winter 2006 issue of Surfacing Journal, a publication of the Textile Artists & Designers Association.

In this essay I suggest that less time be spent worrying about what does or does not pass for criticism, and much more time be spent on thinking about what to say, where and how to say it, and to whom. I contend that the critical decisions made by fibre artists in their work that more than qualifies them as critical voices:

High art, low art, craft or trade – the artist’s ontological position is established through the active generation of “material” language. The choices made – between riotously sexy velvet, florid fuchsia fun fur or deliberately domestic damask – speak volumes. If the vernacular is not official, or correct, or refined, or even immediately recognizably critical – so much the better, I say. Content is more critical than criticism. If the story is a good one, it will get read. So let’s focus on deciding what story to tell and how best to tell it – in fluid script discharged from printed fabric, in re-programmable circuits woven into cloth, in loaded statements laboriously crocheted from continuous thread – and forget for a while about what is or is not said about the story after the fact. Fibre Art, adept as it already is at working in the margins, has its very elusiveness at its disposal in its quest for critical language... the language of Fibre Arts can choose to include the fragmentary, the inconclusive and the digressive. It can be interlaced with texts. It can be something you can’t quite put your finger on, like the tip of a needle. It can also be as cerebral as the head of a needle. Head and point and eye, looking for just the right place to push the point… out, and out loud.

J. R. Carpenter, Con-Textilizing Critical Language, Surfacing Journal, Toronto, WInter 2006.

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Jumping to Conclusions

Oh, she said.
God, she thought.
Why, she wondered.
Me, she concluded.
. . . . .