Two Poems

Someone wanted to dig a hole as deep as the Towers were tall

There were sunsets and spots in the flames no one would have believed
There were shadows like the sky doesn’t usually make them
Upwards they seemed to be falling in the play-back of all things the bodies
No one could tell what real time was or if it were a simpler distance than this
Only place was important, “always and only place,” in that motion
The auto-industries, who were largely to blame, didn’t flinch if not for oil
Democracy kept flowing and flowing channeled by our distance from history
Undulated on those tubes where its hero voice kept hailing me
Even those who should have been that event’s truth got sutured.

*

Anti Gone

The disgrace
Destroy
My sister
heard nothing

Nothing
Not a word
Not since
We lost

Our world
A double breath
A double
Death left

No further
Neither nor
Bad
In the air

Troubled trouble
A sad dead body
None can bury
Bereft bereft

Who know nothing
Condemn to death
I will never
Forsake him

Unloved
I have no power
Nothing of you
I would not permit

Not the living
But the dead
For I will
Forever

Dishonor no one
Nothing but terror
No fear
Tell no one

No scream
Denounce me
Your love
Is impossible

To seek what
Cannot be done
Will hate
No one.

Crayon 5 Subscribe (Ad)

Dear Crayon Subscriber,
Support Crayon! The Crayon coffer is near empty. There is too little money to cover the expense of printing what will be a 350+ page issue. Yeah, it’s gonna be BIG! Crayon 5 elucidates the diffi culties of refl ecting on beauty and the limits of presenting in language beauty and ugliness. Its dialogue of twenty-fi ve essays is accompanied by sixteen brilliantly complementary and contradictory book reviews, creating an intensively complex provocation and irreducible call for continuing discussion on what the art of poetry and of community will be. Crayon has succeeded due solely to the generosity and interest of its readers. We believe that the widest distribution of the 5th issue will occur if all participants, including authors, readers, and their institutions, fi nancially support the journal. Crayon 5 is scheduled for publication September 2007 – it will knock your socks off!

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Essays on Beauty:

Beauty:
Another Reading
Beverly Dahlen

Some Limits of Ratio;
or, Aesthetic Has No Goal
Kristen Gallagher

Cardinal Numbers, Ordinal Beauties
by Joe Amato

porous, nomadic (or, para encontrar o
acontecimento impalávrel:)
Chris Daniels

K’isa/alangó
C. Vicuna

Beauty
Nicole Brossard

from Music For Porn
Rob Halpern

Using Blue To Get Black
Julie Patton

Prosodic Body
Robert Kocik

Ants on a String
Sawako Nakayasu

What Logic in a State of Insanity;
Or, Essay on the Dislogics of Beauty
Kristin Prevallet

Beauty’s Interrelation
Brenda Iijima

Beauty Note
Steve Benson

Gouging Beauty Standing
Nearer To an Action
Laynie Browne

3 Images:
* 21st Century Narrative:
Diagnostic Beauty Quilt
* 1980s Narrative:
Beauty is Perfection
* Afterlife Narrative:
Commodifi ed Love Object
Diane Ward

What Beauty after The Brothers Quay
Thom Donovan

bites from THIS IS THINKING
Alan Davies

Gentle Exfoliations /
for Andrew & Roberto
Alan Davies

A Cuff
Lisa Robertson

The Container for the Thing Contained
Michal Lando

With the Oldest Cherubim of Knowledge
Peter O’Leary

Some starts
Peter Inman

In the Planned Community,
& Stopping off at the Wetlands
Jonathan Skinner

Terrifying Angels: Aesthetics,
Digital Writing and Use
Andrew Klobucar

FORM AND STRUCTURE Reframed
A NEW “ON THE CULT OF THE ‘NEW’
IN OUR CENTURY”
Alan Prohm ‘07 translating Asger Jorn 1956
excerpting from Henry Van de Velde 1941

Poetry
A Reading: “...the Beautiful”
Beverly Dahlen

12 Poems
Linh Dinh

subliminal city
Belle Gironda

from Bicycle
Roberto Harrison

from Scratch Space
Andrew Levy

3 Poems
Corey Mead

5 Poems
David Pavelich

Ghastly Dew and Itasca (with glosses)
John Shoptaw

Those not worthy are scattered wide
Laura Sims

7 poems
Sally Van Doren


Book Reviews:
Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a
Mobile Culture Joe Amato
Dan Machlin

Liar by Michael Amnasan
Robin Tremblay-McGaw

The Hermeneutics of Rupture:
Baraka’s Somebody Blew Up America
and Other Poems by Amiri Baraka
Tom Hibbard

Assertions for Steve Benson on Steve
Benson’s Open Clothes
Alan Davies

Open Clothes by Steve Benson
Brenda Iijima

“This is Abigail Child Moving”
This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics
of Film by Abigail Child
Kristen Gallagher

A Reading 18 – 20 by Beverly Dahlen
Stephen Vincent

Enthusiasm by Jean Day
Martine Bellen

Accidental Species by Kass Fleischer
Belle Gironda

Petroleum Hat by Drew Gardner
Kass Fleisher

The Destiny You Reverse May Be Your
Own – Making Dying Illegal by Madeline
Gins and Arakawa
Alan Prohm

Repression & Remnant:
Lola Ridge’s The Ghetto
Thom Donovan

Who Opens by Jesse Seldess
David Pavelich

Walking Theory by Stephen Vincent
Pat Reed

Hannah Weiner’s Open House
(& Interview with Patrick Durgin)
Judith Goldman

Nonsite at Wordpress : Halpern on Brady/Donovan, "Presencing the Disaster"

Rob Halpern and Jocelyn Saidenberg have provided some overview of the talk I gave this past Saturday, and the very rich discussion that followed among myself, Halpern, Saidenberg, Bruce Boone, Beverly Dahlen, Taylor Brady, Tanya Hollis, Brandon Brown, Lee Azus, Miranda Mellis, Brian Whitener, and Stephen Vincent:

http://nonsitecollective.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/report-a-nonsite-talk-w-thom-donovan/

You may also find at the blog Halpern's extremely generous and thorough introduction for my reading with Taylor Brady this past Wednesday at Cameraworks Gallery in San Francisco:

http://nonsitecollective.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/taylor-bradys-and-thom-donovans-nonsites-introductory-comments-camerawork-725/

Gam no. 5/summer 2007

Stacy Szymaszek's *gam* has resurfaced in NYC with sumptuous cover art by Etel Adnan. One of the great ongoing magazine cultures as far as I'm concerned...

I HAVE IMAGINED A CENTER // WILDER THAN THIS REGION (Ad)

Now out with Cuneiform Press...

I HAVE IMAGINED A CENTER // WILDER THAN THIS REGION: A TRIBUTE TO SUSAN HOWE
Edited by Sarah Campbell

With the intent of marking and celebrating Howe's years of teaching, the contributors to this volume were asked specifically to comment on her pedagogy and their experience of being her student at the State University of New York at Buffalo where she taught from 1988-2007.

Contributors include: Nathan Austin, Sarah Campbell, Barbara Cole, Richard Deming, Thom Donovan, Logan Esdale, Zack Finch, Graham Foust, Benjamin Friedlander, Peter Gizzi, Jena Osman, Kyle Schlesinger, Jonathan Skinner, Juliana Spahr, Sasha Steensen, and Elizabeth Willis. Edited by Sarah Campbell with an introduction by Neil Schmitz.

120 pp. 23x 13 cm. (2007) 250 copies. $10.

Die Back

~ after Rebecca Solnit,
composed on Cape Cod, July 2007

Die back to what you weren't
But always were "wetback"
An architect of green space
If cement was flexible the social

Density of forgetting was
All we were the bodies inter-
Action convulsively came
Back to life jumped that fence--

Leaving you leaving me
For this grace in horizons notes
World becomes the eyes
All dunes commence

Miss all targets like a tern
Falling to rock rests here--
Not no one is them not the
Dead the invisible water

Tables what lies deeper
Beneath or their instruments
History's us and not us--
Consequence cuts like "a line

of synchronicity" size and
Quality quality and size
Consequence cuts us but
The synchronous sing not

Of synchronicity only or
Fundament all of a sudden--
No one is them and this is
Feedback a percept tucks

Folds what other sound we
Were filled with holes with
Other arrows signs take-in
This air which made a difference

The discontinuous flight
Of all eyes unjoined--
Of bodies or a whirl of green
The sight cleaved what

Heart once my body under
Yours the flow of which
Throws me grows to a price
Too great or pitch to place

Each last sense none hero
To the other thus sunburns
Address responsibility--
Shorelines process the bodies.

Moby Dick as an Original Text of Total Process / Gam 5 (Note)*

Herman Melville’s *Moby Dick* means a variety of things to a variety of people. Such is its richness as a text forming a discourse. For myself, as perhaps also for F.O. Matthiessen, Charles Olson, C.L.R. James, Susan Howe and others before me, I would like the book to remain irreducible, and to merely make that text meaningful for my own life and culture in relation to Melville’s own as I best understand them.

*Moby Dick* is so many things, and yet it may broach all things insofar as it is a book of what I am calling *total process*—an intertextuality describing a complete process of whaling more or less as it occurred until the period of the 1840’s and 50’s when Melville composed the book.

Reading *Moby Dick* these past months I have not turned to favorite passages—“The Whiteness of the Whale,” the speeches of Ahab, Starbuck and Stubbs, the Shakespearian tragedy comprising much of the later book. Instead of attending *Moby Dick* as a work of “literature,” I have looked to that which may be considered most banal about the book’s contents: the details of a culture and of a labor process as they are fastidiously, if not completely, described by Melville’s text. It is perhaps only by citing whaling in its minute particulars that Melville may express profound things about the world, his society, and so encounter the general and “universal”. Through “the whale” and whaling one proceeds to dilemmas of ontological proportion as they presuppose ones of production, craft, labor, identity, history, etc.

*Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together.* ~ Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 29th, 1951

Encountering Melville again, “ontological heroics” antedate the facts of whaling as they alone may fathom a speculative aether—compose imagination, proposition, allegory and critique. Preceding William James’ *Principles of Psychology* by numerous decades there is Melville, that proto-Radical Empiricist, encyclopedically documenting whaling through research, perception, insight, and experience. That Melville could get down as much as he does about whaling is extraordinary considering his brief stint as a mariner, and that much of his information was culled from research in books—a fact the chapter on cetology underscores, as well as the “Extracts” prefacing the book.

Melville should be placed beside the most radical and thorough documentarians of the 20th century, and especially cinematic radicals like Dziga Vertov and Chris Marker, inasmuch as his book is organized through a method of narrative parataxis anticipating cinematic montage and radical collage. In this regard Melville, and not Whitman—whom Sergei Eisenstein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Vertov all admired tremendously—may be the true predecessor of early Soviet Realism and French Cine Verité. Beyond documentary practices, we should also consider Melville an original ethnographer in his dramatic recording of the speech and behavior of whalers in the mid-19th century. Since I’m not a scholar of the 19th century whaling industry, nor of Melville per se, the “reality” of this ethnographic practice is, for me, unverifiable. Yet I continue to be interested in Melville’s *Moby Dick* as an ethnographic-documentary method: choose a particular field of inquiry and gather the facts about it allowing much else (everything?) must follow. It is likely Charles Olson cites this epistemological movement in the following selection from his “A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn”:

*And to hook on here is a lifetime of assiduity. Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it.

And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years). And you’re in, forever.* (*Collected Prose*, 307)

Whaling was Melville’s “saturation job,” the thing he dug most intensely, and through this thing he got to more difficult truths about his world than he probably should have otherwise had he continued to write adventure stories like *Mardi* and *Typee*, or pursued strict existential-structuralist tales like “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “I and My Chimney”. The “second book” of the two comprising *Moby Dick*—that book Olson famously argues Melville writes after reading Shakespeare closely, marking-up the margins of the *Works*—arguably grows out of the first book being a “job” for total process. Through the deliberate mediation of a total process recording many facts the world should be converted—imaginatively, allegorically, propositionally, alchemically:

*There was only one thing in the spring of 1850 which he did not feel he could afford to do: “So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail.’”

In the end, in *Moby Dick*, he did. Within three months he took his head again. Why?

Through May he tried to do a quick book for the market: “all my books are botches.” Into June he fought his materials: “blubber is blubber.” Then something happened. What, Melville tells:*

I somehow clung to the strange fancy, that, in all men hiddenly reside certain wondrous, occult, properties—as in plants and minerals—which by some happy but rare accident (as bronze was discovered by the melting of the iron and brass at the building of Corinth) may chance to be called forth here on earth. (*Call Me Ishmael*, 37-38)

What “wondrous, occult properties” are called forth “in all men” by an effort of total process?

Works Cited:
Melville, Herman. *Moby Dick*. Oxford World’s Classics, 1988.
Olson, Charles. *Call Me Ishmael*. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
______. *Collected Prose*. ed. Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander. intro Robert Creeley. University of California Press, 1997.

*"Moby Dick as an Original Text of Total Process" appears in Gam 5, edited by Stacy Szymaszek with contributions by Etel Adnan, E. Tracy Grinnell, Deborah Meadows, Jane Sprague, Rob Halpern and numerous others.

Peace On A presents: Urayoán Noel & special guests (Ad)

Peace On A

presents

Urayoán Noel & special guests

Sunday, July 8th 2007 4PM
recommended donation: $5

curated by Paolo Javier & Thom Donovan at:

6th & B Garden
@ 6th St. and Avenue B
http://www.6bgarden.org/july2007.htm

about the presenters:

Urayoán Noel is the author of *Kool Logic* / *La Lógica Kool* (Bilingual Press)—a “books of 2006” selection by the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día—as well as two volumes of poetry in Spanish: the post-industrial object-book *Las Flores del Mall* (2000) and *Boringkén*, which is forthcoming with spoken-word cd from Ediciones Callejón. He has performed throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico, as well as in the Dominican Republic and Perú, and his rock/ spoken-word collaborations with composer Monxo López are featured on the dvd *Kool Logic* sessions. His essays, articles, interviews, reviews, and translations of Latin American and Latino poets have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattapallax; Rain Taxi; Mandorla; Teachers and Writers; and Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, and he is currently completing, with Guillermo Rebollo-Gil, a bilingual anthology of Puerto Rican poetry since the 1960’s for Terranova Editores. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, he is a doctoral candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at NYU and lives in the South Bronx, where he co-directs the arts organization ‘spanic Attack and fronts the sometimes rock band El Objeto (Opa, Objet Petit A).

Double (Consciousness) Dactyl

Higgledy Piggledy
Booker T. Washington
Screamed “Up from Slavery!”
Making some noise
Wrote a polemical
Autobiography
Dog-eared by W.
E.B. DuBois.

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and scholars. Past presenters at Peace on A include Alan Gilbert, E. Tracy Grinnell, Cathy Park Hong, Paolo Javier, Robert Kocik, Wayne Koestenbaum, Douglas Martin, Eléna Rivera, David Levi Strauss, Andrew Levy, Kyle Schlesinger, Jonathan Skinner, Sasha Steensen & Charles Valle. Scroll down Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

“*Here*, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
*us*, and nowhere but you to be.”
~ Robert Creeley

photos*:




*photos courtesy Bill Coffel

America

America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

*People* are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

*Here*, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
*us*, and nowhere but you to be.

--Robert Creeley

Unliving Democracy

"I" wants such little
--Distance to lay waste
To "me" again and touch--
The bodies I am not

The bodies I have been
--And those a mind
Has sacrificied like--
Soldiers we will never see

The guns of those
--Who'll never understand
My "self" but the desert--
Goes on in *strength*

And thus a politicking
--A policing and this "a"...
Not breaking its trances--
Not for *me* or for *I*

A greener world waits
--For no one but for here
So polluted by the voices--
Unraised by cash money

A simple tomb goes thru
--All the words of prosody
Green and yet fulfilled--
When they are spoken

A mile's nothing except
--Immeasurable 'stead of us
Negative experience suffices--
For worlds never been

Black ice or white lists
--Who go enlisted and site
Destiny like a voice--
Authority gains in aether

The little ones go and give
--Their lives away like big ones
The big ones go among them--
Susceptible to Democracy.

Demonstrations

"that which presents itself in the appearing of a situation"
~ Alain Badiou

Demonstrations are the ey
es of the mind the law of
these cannons subtracted
from our organization Spin-

oza watching a spider fight
the Left upward 70,000
dead completes the excepted
subject of the Commune


what's integral weak under
standing strong imaginati
on my lover aims names
found which formed fog of

war weapons of principle
contemplative verbs the vio
lence of all things that mo
ve somewhere in history.

Peace On A Presents: Sasha Steensen & Charles Valle*

Peace On A

presents

Sasha Steensen & Charles Valle

Tuesday, June 12th 2007 8PM
BYOB & recommended donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Sasha Steensen is the author of *A Magic Book* (Fence Books) and *correspondence* (with Gordon Hadfield, Handwritten Press). Her new manuscript, *The Method*, is forthcoming from Fence Books. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Aufgabe, Denver Quarterly, Shiny, Shearsman, and the anthology *Not For Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing* (Fence Books). She is one of the poetry editors of Colorado Review and a co-editor of Bonfire Press. She teaches Creative Writing at Colorado State University.

THIS PLAIN PLACE

Nothing has happened in this place
and it happened forever
until recently.
It was forever happening
amid Method's fluctuating vision.
He heard rustling in the bushes,
the bandicoot poking around in its pouch,
to pull finally nothing
out.

He understood the animal's sorrow
to find plainly and without denial
emptiness where a relation ought to be
a deep and majestic blue
into which one carefully
places
a heart,
plainly
steps back,
places
a body around
a heart,
steps back
into a past place where
only the monks,
deathly afraid of nothing,
turn the deaf
away.


Charles Valle works in educational publishing. His works have appeared in various literary journals-- most recently,2ndavepoetry.com. He sleeps, spins records, and eats pupusas in Brooklyn.

SKEIN

She will read your arterial
curves pressed flat—gathered in a box,

she will imagine a language
for your seasons—she, who only

translates fall as the ending
of monsoons—she will create

your branch, your roots digging down…

What do you say to someone

who cannot name new worlds?

find the green one with five fingers on fire


Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and scholars. Past presenters at Peace on A include Alan Gilbert, E.Tracy Grinnell, Cathy Park Hong, Paolo Javier, Robert Kocik, Wayne Koestenbaum, Douglas Martin, Eléna Rivera, David Levi Strauss, Andrew Levy, Kyle Schlesinger, & Jonathan Skinner. Scroll down Wild Horses of Fire weblog(whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

“demonstrations are ‘the eyes of the mind’”
~ Gilles Deleuze quoting Baruch Spinoza

*the above image is of Anton Van Dalen's "Migratory Dwelling".

Turning

I was when I turned when you

Turned from me believing nothing else

True a silence of all thoughts on

Your lips the truer test of which

Is for every refusal.

Despairing

~ after Kafka

All hell is hearing
Especially the way the head
Is not so alienated
That it can't diasppear

Her hand went here and
So it was bound made
Us and the gaze it was
Something different
Than all despair touched.

For Felt Necessity

Her face stuck like
A fact to the wall

Of that the wind
The televised light

Picks up and we are
Hard sometimes the

Facts of light the
Facts just the facts

Divide me time as
If I am memory

Perfumed so there
Or enfolded to

The primitive there is
What is said we are

Only this so don't
Overproduce you are

Only as good as what
Remembers you only

Acts against this
Gravity are god.

The Whale As Event

This crisis for another
Bubble tumbled in your breath
We saw it down as real

Blubber insisting memory
Is action, action is
Engenderment the all-

Chaos all the time
A holey space singular in
Which journey number had only

This sinking

Body with which to see
Felt movement to hear
Chases with the Open--another

Horizon here confusing
Seizure with action, thought
With will haste with

Being slow--the broken
Ship becomes a promise--
Floating back to fathom each.

Parsing

Possibly, in earlier pieces, I used the body as a proof that "I" was there -- the way a person might talk to himself in the dark. So, with that assumption -- that the body was analogous to a word-system as a placement device -- there was an attempt made to "parse" the body: it could be the subject of an action, or it could be the receiver, the object (it should be noted that most of the earlier pieces were kinds of reflexive sentences: "I" acted on "me."
~ Vito Acconci

This vol-ume, turns up in-to, the art-il-lery, a wak-ing
From sense, no one wants, pri-va-tion to be blown
Up, or the bo-dy's "ar-mor," so we don't stop for, his-tory
This is the, his-tory of an e-mo-tion, pan-to-mim-ing,

Pars-ing, in the ring, a per-son, moves, move-ment,
Is this one, a one, for im-a-ges, of the mak-ing,
Bod-i-ly, not when-ever, where, a per-son, was,
"I" pauses, is, is not a con-cept, but in think-ing, I wish-es
To mark, a thick of the street, thicker glimpse, sound

Sounds ap-pa-rent, a pa-rent fre-quen-cy, all bright of
Each in, trans-i-gence, here was called, to, switch,
Space, that, one called, a-round all, en-dan-gered,
Lis-ten-ing, the twist, is, where we are, the ex-tra sun,

Not eats, think-ing to its, lapse, lips or of this one,
Idea, of out-ward, fold a cone, folds, a koan, the
Bo-dy, what was, the bo-dy, once, "I" sang, it-self in-to
Be-ing, by, mak-ing com-mon, here, by mak-ing, the only
Rule, when-ever one, is there, or here hur-ries, a-ler-ter,

With light by, wri-ting falls, from all, by the world is
Lan-guage, is not the only world, such joints, for being this
Bo-dy in space, be-com-ing, hes-i-tat-ed, which-ever
Is when, in move-ment fall-ing, in cam-er-a to grass.

If that fire would burn...

If that fire would burn
Or if we were ignited
To that place over your head
No longer forced to rule

Where no rocks are this is
Not a game or no one was
That any one could come
Back these images flood me

A body there in certain
Selves I heard your voice
At once so there was
No more world to tell about.

Elka Krajewska and Alan Licht's *Plany Mela* (Review)

To See 360 Degrees: Elka Krajewska and Alan Licht’s Plany Mela

Anyway, we used their equipment, but not the way they originally intended, and the star projector was the least of it.
~ Jordan Belsen in conversation with Scott MacDonald

On April 21st, 2007 Elka Krajewska premiered her collaboration with Alan Licht, *Plany Mela*, at the Bristol IMAX Dome Theatre at the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology in Syracuse for the Syracuse International Film and Video Festival. As the lights went down in the hemispheric theater, a theater specified to show films in the 70 x 15mm corporate IMAX format, appeared a large pink wheel abuzz with shapes and iconic images steadily rotating as it also quivered. *Plany Mela’s* audience encountered this sphere as a dazzling abstraction the very antithesis of what one normally sees in IMAX theaters—those flight simulators for the virtual civilian, vision machines for titillating spectacle and representative information. After a mere ninety seconds Krajewska’s IMAX film concluded. At the center where the pink wheel was one now saw a sparse black and white video projection of simple moving shapes (squares, rectangles, circles, etc.) and the letters “I” and “N”. The film would only play again twice—a fleeting hijack of high-end corporate media spectacle by avant garde experimentalism.

Informing this dramatic movement between IMAX format and black and white video are the experiments of Mikhail Matiushin (1866-1934), a Russian artist nearly lost to our attention if not for a handful of paintings and the artist’s famous collaboration with Malevitch, Khlebnikov and others, *Victory Over the Sun*, for which he composed the music. In his work, Matiushin explored perceptual and sensual experience combining spiritual exercise and scientific experiment. Through this exploration Matiushin would train the sensorium and subtle faculties to experience synaesthesia and other super-sensory phenomena by effort, technique, practice and study: that is, voluntarily. Says Margaretta Tillberg, a Matiushin scholar: *the fundamental concepts of Matiushin's worldview were called "Organic Culture" and "Spatial Realism", which were also the names of the workshops he supervised as a "red professor". Here Matiushin developed a training programme together with his students, including yoga, meditation and various exercises conceived to "create and develop the artist". These new physical possibilities of perception were called "extended" or "amplified vision" which did not only include the eyes, but was expanded to involve hearing, tactility, and thinking - in short, a kind of conscious synaesthesia.*

Two projects I understand to inform Krajewska’s and Licht’s *Plany Mela* are Matiushin’s experiments in synaesthesia, as well as on central and peripheral visual phenomena. In their coordination of visual-acoustic elements Krajewska and Licht induce seeing as hearing and hearing as seeing where Licht’s use of “reverb” and other effects provide for a tonal afterimage the counterpart of afterimages one may attain through Krajewska’s thrice shown hallucinatory film (once at the beginning, a second in the middle interposed video, once in conclusion). Likewise, in the alternation between peripheral IMAX film and centered black and white video the viewer is faced with a perceptual dilemma of how one should simultaneously attend focus and blur, moving and inanimate elements, color and shape. Here a chiasmus is constituted whereby center may become peripheral, motion stagnant, focus deformational, spatial objects time-based and vibratory—i.e., qualities their inverse. This chiasmus locates the viewer-initiate at the limits of sense experience where sense gives way to subtler faculties. *With a panoramic visual angle of 360° producing a new spatial reality of the fourth dimension, colours would emerge more intensely than in our normal, physical world. With untrained eyes a stone, for example, would seem 'dead', immobile, static. In the fourth dimension, however, it should be possible to see the low frequency waves of solid materials such as stones and minerals. With cars at one speed, people at another, trees growing at yet a third speed, to the untrained eye, the world seems scattered and fragmented. For those who could apply the extended vision however, the whole world would, from an ontological perspective, appear completely different, with all links and connections organically unified.* (Tillberg)

If there is a central movement in the visual portion of *Plany Mela* it is between center and periphery where video attempts to shape the vision, to *in*-form it after one’s recent memory of the film. That the film should play three times makes the audience adjust their reception of the film in relation to the video and soundtrack. Here video should assist the memory being reorganized after the intense actuality of the original film stimulus. Significantly, the premiere of the film at the Syracuse International Film and Video Festival should also be the first time Krajewska would view the film she had been crafting with digital animation software for months, as though she would like to remember her own film for the first time before her audience, thus perform memory as it was occurring. She would attempt this performance twice amidst the film’s audience on a platform in the center of the unlit theater by arranging a series of shapes and stencil letters upon a masque while controlling a mixer, blending video triggered by Licht’s instruments and programmed elements with her improvisation upon the masque.

In the fall of 2006, before she was to make *Plany Mela*, Krajewska traveled for ninety days along the Polish border presenting to strangers her initial perceptual experiments for what would become the film and in turn collecting video footage of the people she would meet and interview during her travels. Having seen some of this footage it is astonishing how open complete strangers are to Krajewska as they dress her in family heirlooms they’ve fitted for her, share their artwork, poems, and birdcalls, and most of all tell their stories for her camera. Such footage is a testimony to Krajewska’s own openness and spontaneous generosity as it gathers the actualities of others, involving them in what she has cited alongside *Plany Mela* as a larger work of “structured abandoned” and “exposure”. This work that traverses stimulation and response, memory and percept, reflection and action, encounter and account, here and elsewhere, I and you is a glass for our attempts to regard ourselves while maintaining a world in movement.

Works Cited:
Jordon Belsen and Scott MacDonald. MacDonald, Scott ed. *A Critical Cinema 3*. University of California Press, 1998.
Tillberg, Margaretta. “The Russian Avant-Garde and Colour as Worldview”. http://www.iscc.org/aic2001/abstracts/oral/Tillberg.doc.

Fake Talking Real Talking (Listening to Steve Benson)*

Repudiation of the morning. The innuendo of slight grand. Why I might be tall and. I think about things with. The eyes holding a book to. Not break them to generate. Our ability to be written in. Advance ankle movement. Positing a challenge between. The body acting it out I. Am thinking aloud anywhere. The body on the page. How are you I'm tortured. The revelry of doldrums as. A species on the whole. I can't see each other. To think speaking the. Northern coast of Maine. Not to the body we don't. Use those words to think. A prosthesis to your nervous. System such writing is. An extension or as I imagine. It surfaces a prosodic membrane. More on that later. I couldn't quite hear if. We didn't have a body we. Would not have to exist. Out of balance relaxing it. Let's it's a nervous lace. That's how I think with. Other people's experiences yet. Porous there is an exchange. Of the body becoming what. It isn't of looking going in. Parts that are coordinated. Into which things come reading. Matter always in some slow. Motion everywhere at different. Times in projections skin. Boundaries up there in motion. Again and again and again. Preoccupied we are thinking. Make it successful sensory. Danger semblance there used. To be an idea of the then. Collapsing limited now. The body everywhere the. Body is exhausted it doesn't. Know to focus on poetry. In question the wind's intraceable.

*composed during the Segue series panel, "Language Poetry and the Body"