<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-family:times new roman,serif">Hello empyre community,</span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-family:times new roman,serif"><br></span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-family:times new roman,serif">Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. In 2014, Queens Poet Laureate Paolo Javier invited me to create a short film that would speak to one of the poems in his newly published collection <i>Court of the Dragon</i> (Nightboat Books). I chose the poem "Starfish Aorta Colossus" and interwove text from Stanza 10 with my own images. In my film of the same name, I travel through 25 years of my own unsplit Regular 8 mm film -- including footage of the A.I.D.S. Quilt from the late 1980s, a drive from Florida to San Francisco, and a journey into a very un-touristed part of Puerto Rico. Paolo’s poem became the catalyst for my digital sculpting of a five minute Kodachrome canvas. His syntactical ruptures and his celebration of nouns that moved without the assistance of verbs pushed me to illuminate twenty-five years of my own rediscovered cinema archive. You can see the film here: <a href="https://vimeo.com/124461098">https://vimeo.com/124461098</a><br><br>Poets and experimental filmmakers share an obsession with / repulsion for grammar. When we decide that we want to break the rules of common syntax, we are freed to make the work that we love and - to use the word of the day in empyre-land - we begin to <i>play</i>. A few weeks ago, Tender Buttons Press published my first book of poetry <i>Year by Year Poems </i><a href="(https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780927920209/year-by-year-poems.aspx)">(https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780927920209/year-by-year-poems.aspx)</a>. While writing poetry has been at the foundation of so much of my work as an experimental filmmaker for the last 30 years, this is the first time that my writing has appeared on a published page. I did a reading at Penn Book Center in Philadelphia recently. The very first person to buy my book was none other than beloved science fiction author and literary critic Samuel Delany. Immediately after his purchase, he explained to me that he was a prose writer – only – as much as he appreciated poetry. I asked him why “prose” had gotten such a bad name for itself when turned into its adjective “prosaic,” and he immediately followed the etymological root to “prosa” or “everyday, straightforward”. In contrast, poetry begins with “piling up, building, making” and has, somehow attained a kind of elevated stature. Then Delany quoted a character in Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme.<br><br>Monsieur Jordain: Oh, really? So when I say: Nicole bring me my slippers and fetch my nightcap,” is that prose?<br>Philosophy Master: Most clearly.<br>Monsieur Jordain: Well, what do you know about that! These forty years now I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it!<br><br>In my collaboration with Javier and in my conversation with Delany, I discovered an irreverence for any form of rigid differentiation between forms of expression. Whether I am making a film, writing a poem, or “speaking” in prose, I try to bask in the inchoate evolution of form.</span><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Geneva"> </span><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Geneva"><span></span></span>
</div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 1:45 PM Margaret Rhee <<a href="mailto:mrheeloy@gmail.com">mrheeloy@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><font face="times new roman, serif">Hi everyone, </font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif">Writing again to start a new thread for this week on Poetry and Play. Honored to introduce the following poets to this week who play across poetry and other artforms; such as the visual art of Truong Tran, textiles work of Maria Damon, graphic design interventions of Kenji Liu and experimental films by Lynne Sachs and her new collection <span style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">YEAR BY YEAR POEMS</span> just released by Tender Buttons Poetry. </font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br>The artists this week express a range of practices in conversation with poetry. Building upon this notion of play, and other issues that emerged such as logics and academic capitalism for example, we’re honored to hear further from this week’s participants to share about their work and practices of play in multiple genres and poetics. I placed their bios below, and the description of the forum. It would be great to hear further about your poetry practice and as it intersects with other art forms. Thank you Truong, Lynne, Kenji, and Maria for joining us. <br><br><b>Bios</b><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">Truong Tran is a poet and visual artist. He received his MFA from San Francisco State University in 1995 in the field of writing. He is the author numerous volumes of poetry. He is a self taught visual artist whose work has been exhibited in venues including the California Historical Society, California Institute of Integral Studies, SOMArts Gallery, Telegraph Hill Gallery and The San Francisco International Art Market Art Fair, Avenue 12 Gallery and The Peninsula</span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"> Museum of Art. Truong lives in San Francisco and teaches at Mills College.</span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"></span><br></font></div><div><span style="color:rgb(68,73,80);white-space:pre-wrap;background-color:rgb(241,240,240)"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></span></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">Lynne</span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"> </span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">Sachs</span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"> makes films and writes poems that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Her work embraces hybrid form and combines memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include live performance with moving image. </span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">Lynne</span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"> was first exposed to poetry by her great aunt as a child in Memphis, Tennessee. Soon she was frequenting workshops at the local library and getting a chance to learn from poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Ethridge Knight. As an active member of Brown University’s undergraduate poetry community, she shared her early poems with fellow poet Stacy Doris. </span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">Lynne</span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"> later discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneeman, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. </span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">Lynne</span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"> has made thirty-five films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Festivals in Buenos Aires, Beijing and Havana have presented retrospectives of her work. </span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">Lynne</span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"> received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn. In October, Tender Buttons Press, which publishes experimental women's and gender-expansive poetry, is releasing </span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">Lynne</span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">'s book YEAR BY YEAR POEMS (2019) which is now available through Small Press Distribution.</span><br style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"></font></div><div><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></span></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">Kenji C. Liu is a visual artist and author of </font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><i>Monsters I Have Been</i></font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"> (Alice James Books, 2019) and </font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><i>Map of an Onion</i></font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">, national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize (Inlandia Institute). His poetry is in numerous journals, anthologies, magazines, and two chapbooks, </font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><i>Craters: A Field Guide</i></font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"> (2017) and </font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><i>You Left Without Your Shoes</i></font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"> (2009). An alumnus of Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Community of Writers, he lives in occupied Tongva land, where he lectures in Asian American Studies </font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">at UCLA,</font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"> Art at Occidental College, and manages </font><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">creative place-keeping initiatives in Little Tokyo.</font><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"><br></span></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font face="times new roman, serif"><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">Maria Damon teaches in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies and in the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute of Art. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and a B.A. from Hampshire College, and taught for many years in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of <i>The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry</i>(University of Minnesota Press, 1994) and <i>Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries</i>(University of Iowa Press, 2011), both of which explored the edges of “poetry” from alternative canons to subcultural imaginative verbal practices. She co-edited (with Ira Livingston) <i>Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader</i>(University of Illinois Press, 2009). She has published a number of online multi-media/poetry projects with mIEKAL aND, which have also been published as print books: <i>Literature Nation</i>(Potes & Poets), which was the first full-length hypertext poem online; <i>pleasureTEXTpossession</i>(Xexoxial Editions); and <i>eros/ion</i>(Ntamo) –all of which (and a few more) can be found at </span><a href="http://joglars.org/multidex.html" style="color:rgb(149,79,114)" target="_blank">http://joglars.org/multidex.html</a><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">. She has also collaborated with Adeena Karasick, Alan Sondheim, Michelle Goldblatt, and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen. Her scholarship has been published in <i>American Literary History</i>, <i>SAQ</i>, <i>Cultural Studies</i>, <i>Cultural Critique</i>, <i>Postmodern Culture</i>, <i>Modern Fiction Studies</i>, <i>jacket2</i>, <i>Xcp: Cross-cultural Poetics</i>, <i>Cybertext Yearbook</i>, <i>Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies</i>, <i>Electronic Book Review</i>, etc., as well as in a number of books of essays on subjects such as performed poetry, cultural Jewishness, modernist American poetry, queer beat poetry, diasporic avant-gardes, and individual writers such as Bob Kaufman, Jack Spicer, Gertrude Stein and (forthcoming) Nathaniel Mackey. She edited a special section (focused on the work of Bob Kaufman) for a special issue on jazz poetics of <i>Callaloo</i>.</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"><font face="times new roman, serif"> </font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font face="times new roman, serif"><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">She also has a practice as a textile worker in weaving and counted cross-stitch, and has produced two chapbooks of “x-stitch vispo” (cross-stitch visual poetry): <i>meshwards</i>(Dusie Kollektiv, 2011 and </span><a href="http://www.dusie.org/Damon%20Meshwards.pdf" style="color:rgb(149,79,114)" target="_blank">http://www.dusie.org/Damon%20Meshwards.pdf</a><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)">) and <i>XXX</i>(nous-zot, 2015). Her work has been exhibited in various visual poetry and/or text/textile shows.</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></span></p><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"><div><font face="times new roman, serif" color="black">On Practice and Play: Gestures Across Genres </font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif" color="black"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif" color="black">In this month's -empyre- forum, we take up the question of productivity and and the politics of play, and how playing across genres, mediums, forms, disciplines, and departments, etc. makes for new kinds of innovative art, thinking, and community; and in doing so, better intervenes and gestures toward transformative futures. The current conspiracy-us versus them- culture perhaps exemplifies the problem of singular thinking and the need for creative, eclectic, and innovative practices more than ever. We’re interested in artists, thinkers, and activists with practices that cross over boundaries and intervene in dichotomous logics. With attention to justice, we explore how multiple forms of art practices prompt us to reimagine different kind of worlds, as strategy and survival. Initially inspired by Tony Conrad's work, his practice spans across film, music, writing, and sculptures, we playfully ask how play lends itself to more libratory ways of creation and practice. </font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif" color="black"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif" color="black">We begin with the first week on media and new media art in conversation. with Tony Conrad's playful work across mediums, we then move into a second week asking questions on poetry and playing across the visual, cinematic, and theoretical, the third week is dedicated to the theme of ethnography across forms such as photography, film, and poetry, the forth week focuses on the ways artists advocate for decolonial and racial resistance through playing across genres and forms. While seemingly diverse, we hope the loosely organized topics will lend itself to connections between the weeks, and across the genres and themes presented. With attention to questions such as capital, creativity, institutional critique, and justice, we’re honored to have the following artists and thinkers join us for this conversation and reflect on the possibilities of practice, gestures, and play.</font></div></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"><font face="times new roman, serif" color="black"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"><font face="times new roman, serif" color="black">We also invite our -empyre- subscribers, whose own work broadly resonates with the themes of practice and play, to join the conversation. What are the ways your practice has played or plays across genres? Have you faced institutional challenges in crossing disciplinary divides, and if so, how did you overcome them? Is play and practice productive? We explore this topic of play through four loose themes. We welcome our guests and all -empyre- subscribers to actively participate and post this month and share your practices and experiences of playing across genres and any questions that arise. We look forward to the conversation. </font></div></div></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><font face="times new roman, serif">-- <br></font><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div dir="ltr"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div dir="ltr"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div dir="ltr"><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">Margaret Rhee, Ph.D. </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">College Fellow in Digital Practice (2018 - 2019) </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">Department of English </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">Harvard University </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">Assistant Professor in Media Theory (2019) </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">Department of Media Study </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">SUNY Buffalo </font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
</blockquote></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div>Lynne Sachs<br></div><a href="http://www.lynnesachs.com" target="_blank">www.lynnesachs.com</a></div></div></div></div></div></div>