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Celebrating Bad Poetry

February 12, 2013 by utpress Leave a Comment

The Vogons, of course, are a particularly nasty race from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. “The series tells that, far back in prehistory, when the first primeval Vogons crawled out of the sea, the forces of evolution were so disgusted with them that they never allowed them to evolve again,” says Wikipedia. It makes sense then that these lowly forms favor poetry and use their particularly poor poetic skills (3rd worst in the universe) as torture. As such, the livejournal profile for the Vogon Poet’s Society reads as follows:

The Society is centred upon the desire to write Painful Poesy: Poems so horribly bad that they cause cancer in lab rats, crippling pain and terror, and publication in MLA poetry anthologies…Please do not post mediocre poetry. And please do not post light-hearted poetry. We only want the worst. The absolute bottom-of-the-barrel sludge of modern poetry. Scrape it up, chip it off, and throw it at this community.

The concept is laughable, and truly there are terrible poems. Here’s one entitled “Belgium!”

Ah! my smelly jelly!
How fishy of you to have noticed
Your quotas are teminally deficient
It reminded me of summer
I hated it/you/life...

And another, entitled “A Cold Vogon Heart.”

...My car starts up like a horse with TB
and my glasses are so fogged I cannot see
I ponder wearing grandpa wear 
So that I can scoot through the day without a care...

Learning Chinese

February 7, 2013 by utpress Leave a Comment

I happened upon this essay on The Paris Review Tumblr page — happened upon it courtesy of Facebook power-user and UT classmate D.A. Hosek (subscribe to his Facebook feed if you, dear reader, can). Anyway, so here I was, all happened upon this essay by Roberto Balaño — “Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories” — and two things occurred to me:

A) To write, you must read. But it is impossible to read everything.

The majority of Balaño’s advice concerns reading suggestions. I have read much of some of the suggested authors; I have read a little of some of the others; I have read none of a few as well.

We want to read great writers. It is just as much a component of learning writing as the writing itself. Just as when learning a foreign language, we must listen to a native speak Chinese just as much as we must practice 你好 ourselves; there must be input and output.

B) But we must stop reading and start writing at some indeterminate point. Or maybe a point determined by inspiration.

Which is why Mr. Balaño’s point the second resounded so well with myself and several other MFA students:

(Pardon me as I snip the image rather than transcribe.)

Balaño’s advice to write more than one story at a time is a freeing concept. Write as inspiration leads you, at least when it comes to short-form writing (there’s little choice when it comes to a novel or epic; revision is the space for inspiration in that medium).

And rather than wait for inspiration to hammer away at the same story, let new inspiration create new rivulets of writing. It is potent advice from Balaño, and we are wise when we follow it.

A Medium Reimagined

February 5, 2013 by utpress Leave a Comment

A filmmaker and close friend of mine, Ford Seeuws, shared this Verge article Tuesday morning. It introduces the video game Proteus, which offers little action, little storyline, little graphical innovation. In fact, the game looks and plays much like a game we might expect released in 1998:

But here is where it differs:

It may sound boring, as these kinds of games so often do, but Proteus is a surprisingly enjoyable way to spend an hour, and that’s mainly due to the music. Trekking across the island will cue different sounds — from the soft tinkling of rainfall to the excited hops of pixelated rabbits — but unlike more obvious music-focused games like, say, Wave Trip, you can’t use Proteus to craft an inventive new song; it’s much more passive than that. “We didn’t want to make a literal musical instrument,” says Ed Key, who developed the game alongside composer David Kanaga. “It’s more about the world as a piece of music that you can go through and explore in different ways.”

It is a game that focuses on the experiential — the emotional and intellectual — reactions to basic sensory data. It reminds me, in a way, of the brilliant TED Talk from Neil Harbisson, a colorblind man who listens to colors — and encourages other to join him.

What I like most is how the creators of Proteus re-invented their medium. In the past, artistic expression in video games came most often through expensive graphics or complex, orchestrated soundtracks or bizarre, far-flung worlds — think the epic RPGs of Square Enix or the vivid realism and creative worlds of Bioshock. But, the Proteus creators have found an almost impressionist, almost modernist means of creative video game art.

Writers and artists of all brands and genre should aspire to that ingenuity.

An Interview with Featured Artist Deon Blackwell

February 4, 2013 by utpress Leave a Comment

By Andi Tomassi and Deon Blackwell

Salt: A Study of Decay and Stasis

TROn: Would you please talk a little bit about the conception of the chandelier pieces, and also about the process that you go through to make them?

Deon Blackwell: The chandeliers came during my first years of grad school. At that time, I lost several members of my family to cancer and suicide within a few months of each other. I was fascinated by the process of cancer and chemotherapy and what they do to the body. My aunt had lung cancer and I watched her hair fall out and skin change colors, but her hair came back softer and more fine than before.

Their bodies were eroding and changing and people that I had known all of my life were changed dramatically in front of my eyes. I experimented with many mediums to try to find something that could be used to replicate that experience in my art work. I came across salt as a material. Salt was very destructive to my tools, to [my work] environment, and especially to me. It was difficult to work with and painful most of the time. I was also working with ceramics in my practices and found a common ground. Each chandelier is based on body parts or the process of a person breaking down. But in that destructive process is a sort of rebirth. Salt destroys the ceramic structure but also grows beautiful crystals in the process.

TROn: I know that there was a lot of experimenting in terms of creating each piece (salt concentration, application of color). What would you say made the biggest impact on you, or surprised you the most?

Deon: Each piece is completely different in how it responds to the process. I believe that it mimics the way people deal with adversity as well: I can watch the pieces dying over several weeks or months but each regrow in a unique way. It helped me to understand what was happening to the members of my family.

TROn: One of the things I love about these chandeliers is that they are the perfect visual metaphor for your concept. The chandeliers are both beautiful and delicate, and they become even more so as the salt begins to deteriorate the clay body. What do you do with one of these pieces as it begins to deteriorate? And do you record the changes throughout as time passes?

Deon: At first I felt too awkward to document anything within the process. Imagine taking photos of your aunt losing weight on chemotherapy. But after time, I realized that it is very beneficial to be able to document the process and see what you are too emotionally attached to at the time of the process. If that makes sense. I go back to images and remember the time that I spent with each piece and that gives me more of an appreciation.

TROn: What is the average life span of your chandeliers and what factors contribute to either their health or more rapid deterioration?

Deon: Average life span is about a year. I can’t control exactly what will happen, but I really don’t want to either. I can speed up the process by salting more often, being more aggressive with it, or I can slow it down to grow larger crystals, but either way, once the process starts there will be an end.

TROn: When I heard you speak about these, you mentioned trying to save one by flushing it with water. Can you describe that experience to our readers and tell us a little about the outcome of that process and your reaction to it?

Deon: My original chandelier always felt more precious to me than some of the others in the beginning, so I decided to try to save it. I would wash the ceramic clean every day for about six months, but to no avail. The salt was so saturated in the clay that every day the salt would recrystallize on the surface for me to try to remove again. I think that is the point of the entire body of work. We try so hard to stop these things when they are happening that we don’t just slow down and try to appreciate the time we have with them. In the end, it is out of your hands.

TROn: I appreciate the catharsis that is inherent in any creation process. Your project may be even more cathartic than most, as it is simultaneously a building up and a breaking down of the medium. Can you tell our readers about your experience and personal journey that this process and these chandeliers have ultimately taken you on?

Deon: It has really taken about seven years to get to the point that I am at now, where I can look back with a critical eye as an artist. The works feel different now, and they touch on different topics that I hadn’t even worried about while I was creating some of them. Time heals most wounds, but not all. I constantly find myself seeking the purity of moments that I shared with the Chandeliers that I made around the time of the deaths. I seem to be trying to relive some of those moments, but in a very self-serving way. The work was charged, powerful, and from an exact point. I sometimes catch myself trying to control too much. But I think that is the evolution of dealing with death. I mean, after all, the process will eventually catch everyone.

White Chandelier

Red Chandelier

Esophagus Chandelier

Medusa Chandelier

Installation View

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Deon Blackwell is an artist and teacher currently working and living in Tampa Florida. Blackwell received his undergrad degree in Painting from Delta State University in Mississippi. He then moved to Florida and studied mixed media sculpture and ceramics at the University of South Florida where he received his MFA in studio art. He has taught Art Foundations at USF since 2007. His private studio is in Lutz, FL and his work can be seen at deonblackwell.com.

Andi Tomassi graduated from the University of South Florida with a dual-major BA in Visual & Performing Arts and Art Education. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Tampa.

David Rigsbee

February 4, 2013 by utpress Leave a Comment

TALKING POINTS

by David Rigsbee

Reading the autobiography of her
ex-husband, my now-distant friend choked
with sarcasm at the omission of herself
and the children, seeing that as conclusive
evidence of a man, not self-promoting,
but self-erased. During the dinner
at which he had proposed more than
seventy years ago, he kept a cheat sheet
of talking points underneath his napkin
in case the conversation lagged. Thus no
one was surprised when, at his death,
he had left nothing of his estate
to his forbearing survivors, but divided
the dragon’s hoard between the library
and parks, and his late-life, buxom
caretaker spouse. It was pure Groucho
in the obviousness of it, but disbelief,
like belief, boils the frog slowly. At the end,
his sixty-year-old children still craved
love’s table crumbs, but he who had made
of himself the exception was scarcely
inconvenienced by his own demise.
Surrounded by the attentions of children
still starving for a nod or a touch, he
waved them away to stare at the sea
where he experienced a warm, valedictory fog,
his body released in its brittle turn, showing,
how even at the brink, one could be both
immersed in the wretched longings of others
and blessedly devoid of empathy too.

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David Rigsbee is the author of 19 books and chapbooks, including his new book, School of the Americas, just out from Black Lawrence Press. His work has appeared in APR, Georgia Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Southern Review, and many others. He is a Pushcart Prize winner for 2012, and earned an NEA Fellowship for Poetry for 2013.