Commentaries - January 2015

'Kora in Hell: Improvisations,' the audio

Douglas Storm has made a recording of himself performing William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations. The recording is 1:46:13 in length and has been divided into thirds (LINK). Because Williams republished the book in 1957 without the original preface, Storm begins his reading after the preface. Thus the opening is this: “Fools have big wombs. For the rest? here is pennyroyal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.” The full text of Kora is available here (among other places) at the Internet Archive.

Ted Greenwald's "Voice Truck," part of Gordon Matta-Clark's Open Space (1972)

reconstruction of a related Matta-Clarke's work

In May 1972, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark installed a dumpster in front of 98 Greene Street in Soho (Manhattan). The work was called both "Open Space" and "Dumpster." The Dumpster was filled with construction debris and other material, formed into three corridors. For Ted Greenwald's contribution to the installation, he created a special audio work. Greenwald installed a tape recorder on the delivery truck for the Village Voice, his long-time day job. Six reels were recorded. One of the tapes, featuring the most dramatic action of the day, was stolen from the cab of the truck: in the middle of Times Square, mounted police galloped up to a subway entrance, tied their horses to the entrance, and ran down into the subway.

Chris Turnbull’s endless directions

from "[ untitled ]," reprinted with permission from the author
from "[ untitled ]," reprinted with permission from the author

I recently received a copy of o w n (CUE, 2014), a book of three new works constructed through a variety of text and visuals connected through the suggestion of shared affinities: a sense of collage, disjuncture and ecopoetic.

James Koller: Sioux metamorphoses, transcreation after Frances Densmore

[The death of James Koller in December brought with it the memory of his vigorous presence in the years we knew him — at first in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the initial heady days of ethnopoetics & later with the Franco Beltrametti circle in Switzerland & in his own home & hideaway in the woods of Maine.