Dusie: Kollektiv Participation, My Next Big Project...

Illustration from Dusie : 3

Dusie du...

The wonderful Susana Gardner who facilitates Dusie, the journal, press & many other writing projects, kindly invited me to participate in the Dusie Kollektiv Chapbook Project for this year. I'm so greatful to be a part of this and really excited about this project!

How it works... Susana has divided the group into partners, or rather created a kind of chain where, for instance, I will be giving writing to another in the Kollektiv for them to publish, and someone else will be giving me their writing to publish. Things are very much in beginning/organising stages at the moment, but I will keep you updated on the project here. I can say at this stage that I am so lucky to be paired up with such inspiring, experienced, wonderfully supportive writers...

Winterling and other things...

I originally had plans to make more chapbooks of my own writing this year (self-publication was a good place to begin and test things out), but now I can see that is probably not going to happen - not only because I realised how long it takes to make a chapbook, but also because I want to work on other writing projects, i.e. I do not think everything I write has to be "chapped" necessarily and I have also realised that would love to publish others' writing. So Winterling Press as a chapbook series will include my own writing but I am hoping to mostly publish others' work.

So... I think I will make some more copies of there is always the impossibility of being able to move sideways and As For We Who Love, At the Instant As Being Entirely Different From It for more chapbook swaps and art trades this year. Writing that I have done for the forthcoming Anathema ... chapbook, is no longer going to be "chapped" (well not by Winterling anyway) - I think it will be reworked into more self-contained sequences - which I then plan to send out into the world - my first time submitting for publication in journals. I have decided I will make two new chapbooks at the end of the year, after Dusie, over the summer - and I will be publishing another's writing for each, I am very excited about this - such a great way to diversify and move Winterling along.

Emma X

"Generosity As Method"

I am so overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity I have experienced conducting chapbook swaps so far - the giving and gifting that occurs is productive on both distributive and communicative levels. Not only has this given me a chance to expand my "readership" (or rather start), swapping has allowed me to share in the creative processes and publishing activities of many wonderful writing communities and independent presses, here in Auckland and on the other side of the world. I often experience a lot of anxiety, as a beginner - writer and publisher - so being in contact with very inspiring, experienced and dedicated people has alleviated much of this. I feel chapbook swapping will positively influence, open up and diversify my practice more - not only as others support my activity through the exchanges, but as they share their own writing and publishing experiences with me. Thank you! I hope to continue to do more swapping.

I also would like to take the opportunity to showcase such wonderful gifts - from three wonderful wee presses:

Michael Steven's Soapbox Press

Click here to be directed to Michael's wonderful poetry blog

Lovely to find other small press activity right here in Auckland... Soapbox publications are stocked at Parsons and Jason Books, or alternatively you could email Michael (you can find his contact email on his blogger profile).

Carrie Hunter's ypolita press

Carrie sent me two beautiful chapbooks - Gothenburg from Three Geogaophies: A Milkmaid’s Grimoire by Arielle Guy ...

... and ypolita's latest chapbook, Easter Sunday by Barbara Jane Reyes.

I love the beautifully illustrated covers.

... take a look inside Easter Sunday.

Juliet Cook's Blood Pudding Press

to be administered in spoonfuls...

Juliet, also very kindly, sent me two chaps! Ectoplasmic Necropolis - great title! Love the binding - making use of different kinds of ribbon-ish materials - and the brightly coloured paper too ...

... back cover illustration surprise!

... and The Laura Poems - am looking forward to reading this very much...

... Twin Peaks is such a great series, and as Juliet's poems are, I'm sure.

If anyone would like to do a chapbook swap - and remember I am keen to trade for any other lovely bits - please be in touch!

More soon! X

"It Must Be Free & Downloadable": Internet Art Communities As Flourishing Gift Economies

Art constitutes a non-rival material good if it is shared - the giver and the receiver would enhance the welfare of the artistic or creative community they both are a part of. This idea of sharing / gifting art would expand and diversify sites of access, collection and dissemination of art and associated writing or reponses. The web with its potentiality to circulate art works, projects and texts (widely and quickly) can massively expand artistic and creative communities.

Members of these online creative communities are producers (creating internet art or contributing to its creation in some way) as well as consumers (people are able to access the art works easily), as this system is about open, fluid and reciprocal gifting and exchange. It offers us an alternative to the prevailing art market or dealer economy (characterized by the impersonal exchange of commodities, or more specficially art, for money) as it is based on sharing and community building.

A gift economy is defined as “an economic system in which the prevalent mode of exchange for goods and services is to be given without an explicit agreement upon a quid pro quo.” It is distinct from the market economy in that it does not exchange commodities, the PennSound project is a good example. The mp3 sound files available at PennSound are not commodities that can be exchanged for money. Bernstein asserts that their will be no problems with rights (all are given to the poet) and there is no profit to be gained - because they can be accessed and downloaded by anyone who has been granted access to the Internet for free. They are gifts given by the poets to PennSound (given permission to use the sound material), an organization that then gifts to the Internet - using public free and downloadable poetry sound files. The site asks its users to reciprocate by way of providing any bibliographical information they might have about the material – a request for direct reader input. This idea of reciprocity in part relies on users to proliferate the ‘message’ and disseminate the concept of poetry readings as a social enterprise as widely as possible.

The gift economy will flourish in a cultural context where there is an expectation of reciprocity, in this sense the gift is always moving. This creates a ‘feeling bond’ which works to establish a community. The gift economy that is fuelling an internet art or web-based art community is built upon the very notion of trying to create community, an environment where ideas may be freely expressed and shared.

Harrison’s essay, which particularly focuses on the emergence of web poetry communities, demonstrates how the internet allows for a successful operation of the gift economy, and illuminates the potentiality of creating an interconnected community where the act of writing is no longer isolated to the individual. Art can be continuously disseminated if we take advantage of the technology the web offers, in terms of it being widely and easily accessible (although there are still issues of the Digital Divide that may render this piece somewhat utopian) and offering creative potential. Hopefully the resistance to commodification will keep the goals of the community at the forefront and combat any issues regarding sustainability that may arise.

References: Joel Harrison 'Web Poetics & the Gift Economy'

Winterling Activity: A Project Completed & A Call To (Writerly) Arms...

Determined to publish ten copies of two different chapbooks ... Winterling Chapbook Project One is finally complete! Check out those lovely sewn signatures... After endlessly long and busy days at university sitting in front of a computer and/books working hard, meant any time I could squeeze in for chapbook making was always a happy and welcome change. I particularly enjoyed repeating a set of delightfully creative but methodical actions - the book making process has been certainly rewardingly relaxing for me these past few weeks.


Chapbooks one and two from Winterling Series One, are As For We Love, At The Instant As Being Entirely Different From It. & there is always the impossibility of being able to move sideways. Thank you to Campbell for single-handedly taking the printing task on board, I am sending you my love here. (We are using an ink-jet to print these, and for anyone who prints books like this will understand the initial trials and tribulations that accompany this process and the difficulties in trying to explain it to someone else - perhaps this should be limited to the extremely patient, but I must say, a great way to start making your own chaps).

I have posted about there is always the impossibility of being able to move sideways chap - in case you missed it, click here.

The other chap ...

... takes a line from Lyn Hejinian's My Life ("As for we who love to be astonished") as the starting point.

This chapbook, is self-assuredly a poem (different, however related to, much of the loose form/method/style of poetic prose, or the faux genre of prose-poems, I tend to use mostly for writing). It is concerned with pushing sentimentality to its limit, or outer-edge but also simultaneously constantly, almost exhaustively, reduces all to sentimentality. This poem was also written for someone, I had a particular recipient in mind and consequently I certainly feel something shifts or is shifting in the writing as it is read.

Plans for Winterling

I would love to hear from, firstly, anyone interested in participating in Winterling in any way, shape or form - I am hungry for writing (I want to make it clear I am just as much interested in publishing others), or anyone with an interest in book arts, making, crafting, illustrating or being part of this new-ling poetics community. However I should mention that I will be one hundred percent focused on the five University projects that I must finish over the next four weeks and am then going overseas for four weeks after that - so I will not be starting anything in terms of production or meeting with interested folk until after that - and it also unfortunately means that all my other writing projects are currently on hold, not that they haven't been stagnant for awhile now :-( However, I would still love to talk plans, potentialities and speculations via email, so please get in touch as soon as you wish to!

And secondly, anyone interested in receiving one of these chapbooks as part of a gift exchange - please email me! I am interested in trading my chapbooks for other chapbooks, materials, paper supplies, interesting ephemera, random collected things, with others - any artists, poets, writers, crafters, or anyone who wants to be a part of this ....

More soon! X

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS

SIDELINING INTERACTIVITY,

ILLUSTRATION & COLOUR

THE USER FOLLOWS A KINETIC

TEXT / CONCRETE NARRATIVE

WHICH RHYTHMICALLY

NEGOTIATES DIGITAL SPACE.

~

WE FIND,

AND WHILE THERE IS A

DISTINCT FOCUS ON

THE PRESENCE & EXPERIENCE

OF SOUND & TYPOGRAPHY/TEXT,

ACHIEVED BY EMPLOYING

A SIMPLE FORMAT,

COMPLEXLY EVOCATIVE &

IMAGINATIVELY LAYERED

NARRATIVES ARE ESTABLISHED.

~

UTILISING FLASH,

AND CREATE FAST-MOVING,
TEXT-BASED WORKS THAT
ARE SYNCHRONISED TO
SHORT ACOUSTIC LOOPS.

RIFFING OFF FAMILIAR
JAZZ SEQUENCES
TO CREATE ORIGINAL SCORES,
HEAVY INDUSTRIES
ALSO REUSES A
SOMEWHAT UNIFORM
TEMPORAL SEQUENCING &
ICONIC MONANCO FONT AND

All the above images are stills from YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING, 2007 part of their project for the New Museum, New York. HEAVY INDUSTRIES have expanded their usual single-channel format to create an unprecedented seven-channel installation that tells a chilling story of abduction and assassination from seven separate points of view, set to an eerily laid-back bossa nova score. The installation is at once as nostalgic as a 1960s suspense film and as current as the daily headlines.

Links to: Rhizome & NewMuseum.org for more details about the particular project mentioned above, to the YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES site for access to their artworks and an interview with the collective.

Wee-Gifts from Dusie

The package finally arrived...

... oh look! Darling reproductions of miniature Continental antique jumping jacks! I will have fun assembling these... a sweet thank you note on a gorgeous postcard... I love these touches and attention to detail... Can't wait to open up ...

... and look what's inside! Nine delightful wee chapbooks (I purchased the first three sets of the WEE CHAPS series - each set has three chapbooks) - I cannot wait to read these. Thank you dusie! X

dusie shop at Etsy

(chapbooks, collage, packettes, ephemera, artful objects and assemblages).

Dusie - Giving and Sharing Poetry

Many might recognise Dusie as Mina Loy's student nickname, it is also, quite fittingly, a name that encompasses the concepts, creative ouput, poetic projects and collaborative activity, instantiated and cultivated by Susana Gardner. The word Dusie has several different personal resonances for Gardener, Dusie projects and press activities are similarly diverse. Dusie exists as an on-line poetry journal, a small press, a website, a series of collective poetics projects, and a community. Although largely based and distributed online, a distinctive handmade aesthetic and craft-ephemera sensibility is carried across to these virtual spaces.

~ Dusie Links ~

Dusie.org operates as the main hub site for Gardner and her collaborators' activity. Note that the link will take you to Dusi/e-chaps Issue Seven but you will find all the other issues archived here and e-chaps that are downloadable and free, easily accessible and printable in pdf format. You will also find information about Dusie, and links to current projects and a wide poetics community.

micawberesque - Dusie blog

How2 A Small Press Feature: Dusie Books

Frances Kruk 'Welcoming Space: Susana Gardner and Dusie Books' - a beautifully written and informative piece about Dusie

An Interview with Gardner

Reference break-up: now enter “ Alakanak or anywhere”

Reference in Berssenbrugge’s ‘Alakanak Break-Up’ is veiled with ambiguity. Reference is full of possibility and potentiality in conjuring up images in the reader’s mind those that we “can see,” and those we cannot which are created through prose language, becoming an image-making operation. Here reference functions dualistically. Impossible worlds may be created. Essentially language can only take us so far in the text’s literal situation. While deictic expression brings us immediately to aspecific moment and situation reference propels us beyond, into a more imaginativeand abstract zone, that can be seen through language or imagined. Reference conveysmeaning about something not present.

Something separate from the immediatelinguistic/ textual situation. Reference language is denotative and descriptive tying usto a physical or metaphysical world. Although it does not, necessarily provide clarity.It rather expresses multiplicity and transports the reader, with fluidity, from the deicticimmediacy, Berssenburgge’s descriptive reference pushes us beyond the specificlinguistic situation we are positioned in, however her poem does not depend upon it.The title ‘Alakanak Break-Up’ has historical and cultural implications of settlementand colonisation. We may bring, or we not may bring, this particular referential“reading of text” forward. The references to ‘frozen’ matter and rocks and silencemay evoke Alaska vividly or obviously, however these references are not used toprevent readers imaging some other place, or if they are to image, anything related tothe reference to Alakanak at all. Allowing us to ‘see’ through the language of the text to create image.

Instances where the language refers to something we cannot see must be imagined, as exemplified in ‘it splays out like contents its occurrence there.’ ‘Splays’, seems problematic and out of place. ‘Contents’ is spilt or poured out, we could imagine rock crumbling, or breaking up then imaginethe pieces of rock ‘its insides’ which are now exposed. ‘Splays’creates an image difficult to see, the implications of its use are not particularly clear. It requires, the reader to diverge from seeing the rock to imagining something, which splays outrather than is split, the reader must examine, how reference shifts through at onceimage-making and simile. ‘Splays out contents’ made me think of surgical procedures, incisions-openings-autopsy. The image of medical surgery does not see to belong in the setting of Alakanak similarly the word ‘splays’ disrupts a cohesive image. That of a broken rock. The image of human organs being splayed to be examined surfaces for me however it does not displace other images that could arise.

Ultimately the reader determines the image. This does not erase the landscape.Reference to landscape creates the space for image associations. Counter-intuitive it may seem. This idea of splaying the contents of the landscape as a referential moment is extremely dense, it may be read in conjunction with the social, cultural and historical readings of this poem. Moving from the specific situation to a space wheredifferent readings proliferate. To follow this progressing idea further, focusing on reference as mobilising language, we see ‘splays’ disrupting the image, but also allowing us to unravel them.

Alliance, between image and the words of images, is established so language is mobilised. ‘With silence as a material’. Like a material silence becomes pliable and shapely matter. This is at odds with our understanding of silence, still and empty. Silence as material becomes something we have to imagine a reference we cannot see as given in the language/ text. We may connect to ‘plane itself is silent’, although this intra-textual reference is not necessarily present, there is no origin to find – to give reference meaning. As the doubled reference ‘plane’/ ‘plain’ indicates. We connect these references through their sound.

Berssenburgge is playing with our expectations of referential language. How may we distinguish between ‘plane’ and ‘plain’. There is a disparity between what we see and hear. We may associate many things with these two words. Distinct low relief uniform colour without additions. Surface without slope aircraft level of existence. The reader invests in referential possibilities of the image created or not created through language.

Notes

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge has been a really important poet for me over the last couple of years. Inspired particularly by Empathy (1989) I thought it would post a piece of writing about reference in her poem 'Alakanak Break Up' (I also have a component piece about deixis in the same poem that I will post perhaps another time). Decisions regarding how many words per sentence and the number of sentences were made in advance (closely following another piece of writing as a model). My expression was forced into a particular syntactic arrangement, creating fragmentation and anacoluthon.