Commentaries - February 2015

Locality: When you're here.

For the last six months, I have been living in Singapore, a City-State affectionately called The Little Red Dot.

I could tell you that I am 85 miles north of the equator on a diamond shaped land mass, much of which has been reclaimed palm by muddy palm from the sea, studded by sixty islets like tiny emeralds emerging from the blue-gray straits.

I could tell you how I came here to join those who came here before me— those who came here to join those before them. I could tell you of the people who were here before all of them came. I could tell you of the shards of clay or carvings from the 4th century, or the boats that arrived carrying slaves and the boats that left carrying rubber in the 19th, or the bombs that came from East and West in the 20th.

A short interview with Mark Goldstein

Mark Goldstein is the author of three books of poetry published by the award-winning BookThug: Form of Forms (2012); Tracelanguage (2010); and After Rilke (2008).

Depending

At Heaney's grave

Over the weekend, I was north of Belfast visiting a friend in the Glens of Antrim. She took me to see the grave of Seamus Heaney, who died in fall 2013. Those are snowdrops in the picture. The grave is in the corner of the graveyard, with a stone wall on two sides. The sign on the road for it is far more elaborate than the grave itself, which is a simple wooden cross. Not pictured here: the fake plastic roses tumbling on the other side of the wall; the discarded headstones piled against the wall. Some hooved animal had made a print in the earth of the grave.

Avant-Garde, I: Dada Conquers!

Raoul Hausmann, ABCD 1923–24
Raoul Hausmann, ABCD 1923–24

Visual forms of knowledge production and representation — examples of the practice Johanna Drucker calls graphesis — appear in the work of almost every important twentieth-century avant-garde movement.  Many of the most compelling compositions of Italian Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, Situationist and Concrete poetics, and Pop and Conceptual Art throw maps and counter-maps into their multimedia mix.