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

S T R E E T C O R N E R

Forgetting what meant, of that, and this is, beyond discolouration, recognising

around - mouth

coming out of, from simplism described

inability to, and at times never seeking

when said, felt and whispering minutiae. Board, such with insides and having the, and critical, of

when said, were and not to do this since, desire is finding / shivering with life

becoming streets, bodies - sounded

patience

saw planar refusal - bitten wives and we left, to left untouched round in sculpt

Wanting speech to movement, dreamt light on connected surfaces and not back to that

dove broke birth pulsing and wet and wanting to movement

pointing birth realised having edification

against is lies calling, so far gentleness

development cured, drawing on the walls and the liking to be away

looking at the pages wrote on the walls and of the liking to be

footed, highly suspicious of activity.

I have been interested in Stefanie Schneider's photographic projects for a while now and frequently use them for inspiration in writing. The use of long expired polaroid stock offers evidence of chemical photographic process that is typically disguised. This enables Schneider to layer blemishes and imperfections, in what some critics describe as a painterly fashion, over narrative potentialities. I think perhaps what I most enjoy about these photographs is their lack of specificity. There is something troubling about these images, and the unsettled feeling experienced when I view them spurrs such writing, that which is similarly unsettling and meandering, in its syntactic arrangement and vague preoccupation with narrative.

I HEART POLYSYLLABICS - a promise to come back to you...

In my first blog entry I published a sample of writing that was to be part of a book length poem, a forthcoming Winterling Press publication. This publication is still coming. I have not, until very recently, continued to work on these sequences. I guess this is due to the fact I have been extremely busy, having little time to work on any writing (unrelated to university) and when I have been doing writing unrelated to university I have been preoccupied with other projects.

I have made some progress - established a working title, Anathema, and not deflagrations or associations with length and completed the first three sequences for the publication which I have posted below. (However I think this will be subject to future alteration and change, and to what extent I cannot say at this stage - so if you find what I write in the chapbook radically different to what I have posted here you will know why).

Anathema, and not deflagrations or associations with length

1.

The influence of eaves, and from, movements of – and sounded in my bedroom. Alight and this kind of becoming, uttering like word, between swollen seeds from grasses that numb your lashes – though not, we.
At the bowl’s lip.
I write, “Welcome home”, this, contained to and looking up from low pictures, are seen in light, a light, in front.
From the side. You – and it is cardboard, and down from, stretched.
Pacing kitted bone and on the boardeon, lying flat on your stomach and on your back.
We stayed in there for some time and no one wanted to come in, too, though this could never be inisolable, like bending a leaf.
Extending far beyond the captions to not a picture, so connected at once suspended and moving, like the clutter of day, around.
It could be pointed out anywhere, a row of sounds, like scales.


2.

Bodies and not parts or them, is lifted and not to be a face. More simply oblique enabling such, we drift through the front.
Wrist on window tactility, I write, “On your lip”, although constructions do not produce. Something spoken of, semi-solidity nothing meant glass or flesh.
Unveiled by the movement of fluids, water is where you collected various fluids. The place, but water is not the substance.
This is unveiled by water.
It is where you collected various fluids.
You found a deepening, an assimilated inurement.
Boned skies, a weighted throat.
Cephalic programming becomes the task of weighing up and relating the difference between what is imagined as seeing, and what is said to be seen.
Salts on paper edge along watery, the place, but water is not the substance.
This is unveiled, is where you collected various fluids, now opening.
Scoring membrane is invasion. In real-time, but water is not cut over, you should, closer up. And come back – so that down at the sides, come away from.
Without the flexing side, come away from the side.




3.

Not everything seen, where every sky is produced singly, and thought.
Could, and no cutting, not a passage through.
Without warning, it is gone. Withheld to the base of the spine, there are some spaces that enclose borders.
Losing stability, this interpretation extends away from the sound, come away from the side. I saw staying flatness, spilt out on the floor.
A voice’s resin, columnar. Traveling toward,
toward the miser trading materials ( ) for another’s thought. Boned skies, where every sky is produced singly, and they thought they could, turnings, not excitable or turning into, not of a floating. I write, “Play a game with me”, though I fail to see it is where you collected the meanings of glass or flesh.

Plans for Winterling Press

I am concurrently working on my first two Winterling Press chapbook series - each series will be made up of three chapbooks. Eventually (yes eventually, press activity is not an easy solo gig when you are attempting to do all the writing and publishing - and yes, eventually I hope to expand and get other writers on board), I hope to make these chapbooks available (for trade with other artwork, chapbooks, writing & or interesting collected/found materials or alternatively for a very small cost, but hope to make the exchanges mostly trade based). I will give more detail of this soon. X

Hot Pants in a Cold Cold World

Hot Pants in a Cold Cold World is a beautiful catalogue published by ARTSPACE and Clouds on the ocassion of the exhibition The Pleasures of Obvious Problems: Meg Cranston 1987-2007, organised by ARTSPACE and curated by Brian Butler and exhibited at ARTSPACE, Auckland last year. I was lucky enough to have Meg sign my copy. I am really interested in her inter-art-writing practice.

As I Told You and Keep Same Over have inspired two writing projects of mine. A fluxus type-performance art piece I scripted last year, ‘Everything Everybody Owns’: A Script for Performance, There are No surprises: Eliminate the Possibility for Surprise, some of which I will include in another post.

The other project was an inventory/list poem, titled Pertaining to; some little things kept. This poem constructs a list of ingredients found on the packaging/label of everyday household items found in the bathroom and kitchen. The ingredients are copied directly down, in the list format as they actually appear on the label, and each item is listed in the poem by way of cataloguing the ingredients the item contains rather than the item itself. When these ingredients are decontextualised and brought into a poetic space they take on a different meaning, becoming strange and unfamiliar, even puzzling, despite the list consisting of nothing more than banal household items.

Working Notes: Thoughts on extending this piece further, have been to divide the poem into different areas of the household – kitchen, bathroom, laundry, etc. I would like to go to great lengths and create a full inventory of all the items in each of those spaces, retaining the format of listing the individuated ingredients of each item and without naming what that item is.

I will include the current version of this project in another post aswell.

But there is nothing like that, a voice – you expect it,

and that couldn't be anything other than what it becomes to us and as a sound it wills to me, not frightened, soft. “I love you”, seems to smooth for you and without expectation, this breeze is lit. Drooping, idler, made by dropping and next to you and out and under you. I can feel it more, now, and it comes to me like a memory, and more strongly still. I’m not of the details, correct temporal sequencing is beguiling and not because you are we and them and they feel certain about such things. I would give you more but I can only offer more than I would have given back, moving back to then and the concept of the “same time” and keeping time. We are not sure of the size of boats and the withering reigns that may be holding, and at certain times we may feel the inches and the cool growth of plants and long before that, and the presence of other people, their weathered hands and they have heads with faces and it spreads more quickly than this written creature.

This sequence will be part of a book length poem, that is currently untitled, a forthcoming Winterling Press publication.

Working Notes: This piece of writing is the seventh (I think it will be the seventh) sequence in a long series of sequences that will make up a book length poem. I am really excited about this current project as I feel that it is, so far, a cumulative project and I have imagined myself using a kind of cumulative process for writing for about two years but have not started to write it until quite recently. Sentences are often repeated in later sequences, but return conflated or altered in some way. But in saying this, I cannot claim this work as a procedural piece as I have not always been working progressively in the sense you would expect for a procedural piece of writing. I am not writing the sequences or the sentences within the sequences in order. Some of the later sequences are already written and some earlier sequences are not yet begun. I guess the writing appears quite organic, (I have so far the title pieces for all the sequences, from which my sentences will stem) but it feels to me like "progression" is in fact a result of synthetic decisions I make, at the level of a sentence or a sequence, after having written a particular sentence or sequence.