Saturday, April 30, 2011

TRACERY--Dusie Kollectiv 5 by Jennifer K Dick: Alsace poems...

I have been sewing, collaging covers and gluing transparency papers onto covers this weekend as the first of what will be 200 chapbooks entitled TRACERY for my Dusie's Kollectiv #5 get underway!


100 are for the Kollectiv, and some others will be for sale--for example at my reading in Paris on the 10th of May, 2011 at 19h15 at Carr's Pub & Restaurant, 1 rue Mont-Thabor, M° Tuileries see Poets-Live for more on that event: http://poets-live.com/). In TRACERY, the texts--more shards perhaps than poems--are the first I have written about my new home in Mulhouse--in the Alsace region of France. Here, we have a lot of old industry, but the town was built on wild patterns and bright colors--like the buildings which are themselves a sort of basket of Easter eggs (see here 2 photos from the not-too-far-away village of Riquewihr in Les Vosges moutains that Lisa & I visited together)!


Printing fabric (as seen at the Musée de l'impression sur Etoffes, Mulhouse: http://www.musee-impression.com/gb/musee/default.html) dominated commerce here, as did the fashion of wallpapering.

In fact, one of the nearby villages (Rixheim) still houses one of the most famous, elaborate wallpaper makers in the world--Zuber & Cie. Recently, Lisa Pasold (Canadian author, of novel Rats of Las Vegas, & the poetry collections A Bad Year for Journalists and Weave (both from Frontenac Press, Canada)) visited & we went over to Rixheim and the old Zuber & Cie grounds to see the Musée du Papier Peint: http://www.museepapierpeint.org/. The wallpaper museum is an environment that still feels linked to attentive artisan's work--the museum is human-sized and comfortable to move through, like a private showcasing of the papers. It is hard to believe, in fact, that some of the papers on the walls cost upwards of $30,000 to print, using hundreds of hand-made wood blocks. See the website for some images of this, or the site Articles & Texticles below which features some of the larger mural paper images.

Thus, seeing this work, and helping some friends rip down old paper in their new house in Brunstatt (paper that even coated the ceiling in massive floral designs--quite dizzying! See my use of it on the collaged covers of my chapbooks here--and imagine yourself inside a room of it!) I decided to use that paper as my recycled material in the making of my Dusie Chap. Here, some of the photos show me and my apartment cluttered with papers and materials as I am in the process of the making of the book (note the progression in the corner of my apartment! Good think I have all this Mulhousien space and am no longer crammed in a Paris closet, eh?:)).











And there are a few images also of collage-like poems and the covers of N° 1 and 2. Each of the books will have an individually-made cover collage. Some of the collages will hang out over the 15x15cm book's edges, and others will be cropped to match the regular book size. The cover of the book is a papier calque (a sort of dense tracing paper) on which I printed not only my title and name, but also an image once used to stamp on the back of Wallpaper from the UK sent over to the colonies in the US, at a point in time when the British were trying to levy a paper tax. I found this image on http://www.historicnewengland.org/collections-archives-exhibitions/online-exhibitions/wallpaper/history/1750.htm/?searchterm=wallpaper%20stamp which is Historic New England's fabulously extensive database of wallpaper history and of shards of used and bits of unused wallpaper from homes on the East coast of the United States of America. What's amusing (or at least it is to me) is that I have been teaching a US Civ course where we discussed the stamping and taxing of papers, and then I ended up writing this chapbook.

Places, histories, times, interests collide! Anyway, here are a few sample pages for your delight, with hopes that you might decide to order your own copy (by emailing me) or come and purchase on at the Poets-Live reading, May 10th 2011 in Paris!
Also, for anyone interested--Here are links to some of the cool Wallpaper sites out there in cyberspace (some I discovered during and some that I am only just discovering post-writing this chapbook). For example:

**The UK site for the Wallpaper History Society: http://wallpaperhistorysociety.org.uk/

**Zuber & Cie's fabulous site with many examples of their current, gorgeous "products" such as the image of the rose paper seen on the above sample page from the chapbook: http://www.zuber.fr/ Zuber's site of course names all the major metropolitain areas in the world where they have their showrooms, but its home base, Rixheim, is in small letters at the top of the site's pages! The image on their home page is one of the many "factories" that populated this area, so many of this style at the height of the fabric and paper industrial age.

**Wallpaper at Historic New England: http://www.historicnewengland.org/collections-archives-exhibitions/online-exhibitions/wallpaper

**Roland Piquepaille’s story “Wall to Wall Wallpaper” on his site: Articles & Texticles comparing Wallpaper and Animation techniques: http://www.articlesandtexticles.co.uk/2009/01/10/wall-to-wall-wallpaper/


And, certainly, no blog post about this area would be complete without a little photo of vinyards--so, voilà, from Lisa and my drive down Les Vosges from Riquewihr then over via Kaysersburg to Katzenthal where my current favorite place to purchase wine is--Michèle et Jean-Luc Stoeklé where the daugher of the family now works and is also very nice. But GOOOOD wine, and great prices, too! Worth stopping by!

Betwixt from Corrupt Press: a new chapbook!

This has been a productive spring--writing, reading, finally getting work into the mail & thus off towards YOU, the world! And now the joy of having two new chapbooks!!!


The first out is BETWIXT (out in May 2011, from Corrupt Press, Paris--see blurbs at bottom of this post).

LAUNCH EVENT:

I am thrilled to be part of the launch for GEORGE VANCE's full-length book A SHORT CIRCUIT (Corrupt, 2011) at the reading where I will also launch BETWIXT. May 10th 2011 at 19h15, downstairs at Carr's Pub & Restaurant, Paris M° Tuileries. With readings of new works by Greg Santos, George Vance & Jennifer K Dick. See more info below as well as a link to Carr's.




Concerning BETWIXT, the cover image for is by Michele Winkler, an artist currently residing in LA & who I met in Colorado a few years ago when speaking at the Boulder Conference on World Affairs. She & I have been planning to collaborate for awhile now. I am really touched by work she did following the publication of Fluorescence (U of GA Press, 2004). I was really lucky to be able to benefit from some of her current work to use it on the cover pictured here: The cover image is “Mirror Mirror”, a two plate solar etching by Michele Winkler: see a bio at http://www.lessedra.com/artistinfo.php?artistid=306 or visit her site by clicking on her name. Certainly, poems after her works are being worked on--so keep your eyes peeled for future collaborations between us!!!

I would also like to thank Amanda Deutch on this blog. It is she who proposed we develop a series of back & forth poems from which this selection is taken. She was the New York to my Paris, the sometimes Orpheus to my Eurydice, & the othertimes Eurydice to my Orpheus! I look forward to the day when our collaborative collection, including her poems alongside these,finds its way into print! Her energy & our dialogues constantly enriched this work.


As for the new books, both Geroge Vance's book & my new chap are coming out from a brand, spani' new Paris-based anglophone press, CORRUPT PRESS run by UK poet DYLAN HARRIS, (click his name or go to http://dylanharris.org/index.php to see more on Dylan). Their first book was the chapbook pictured at the right--by Nina Karacosta.

Dylan also organizes Poets-Live where George & I will read alongside Greg Santos on MAY 10th 2011 at 19h15, downstairs at CARR's PUB, 1 rue Mont Tabor, M° Tuileries . There is an event to launch Rufo Quintavalle's chapbook June 4th as well, and I hear rumor that another, later June event is getting planned!


Books will be on sale & beer & spring fun will be able to be had. Hope you can make it: see the Poets-Live site for more on that: http://poets-live.com/content/may-10th-jennifer-k-dick-greg-santos-and-george-vance


As for CORRUPT PRESS, they have already put out the abovementioned chapbook by NINA KARACOSTA entitled PREVIOUS VERTIGOS which will be on sale, & in June the new chapbook, DOG, COCK, APE and VIPER--a sneak peek into a soon forthcoming Corrput Press full length book by this local poet & Nth position poetry editor, RUFO QUINTAVALLE, will be launched.

I gather many exciting publication projects are en route from Corrupt Press, and am personally really excited to be part of Dylan's new projects. DO help him keep this up by buying a book for yourself and your friends: all of them will be on sale at the POETS-LIVE event May 10th, the 2 events in June and also soon via the corrupt press website: http://corruptpress.net/ Corrupt press is also new on Facebook--so feel free to go to their FB page and "LIKE" them!: http://www.facebook.com/reqs.php#!/pages/Corrupt-Press/193677043997117 They are only up to an overwhelming 24 last count, so check them out and do that liking thing FB has us all into. But Betwixt is only one of the two chaps that I will have with me May 10th in Paris, so come along to also get your hands on TRACERY, my Dusie Kollectiv 5 chapbook. More on that later!


Last (first) words on BETWIXT?

Well, I am pretty excited by the beautiful blurbs I received from poets and editors I admire:


"‘Betwixt’ penetrates deeply beneath and betwixt the narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice. These intermediate and indeterminate spin-offs from the motif are set in a stuttering, probing movement that is ever present in an ongoing gaze that is both backward and forward-looking. The transformative registers and play that Dick draws upon incites the reader through linguistic and sonic verve to question the framework and creases of male and female identity and to see the fragility of pastoral stability and the proximity of loss. Her voice is unerring and unmasking. I love it."

--David Caddy, editor of Tears in the Fence

"“In the ec-, ec- ectoplasm of the echo,” Jennifer K Dick’s new concerto sings vibrato, rocking us boldly into shadowscape of the serpentine underworld of starboard saints the order of Orpheus and Eurydice, those Hansels and Gretels. Lushly and lavishly into the underworld we descend to look and to never look back, to forage forward and toward her lyrical horizon, sinking cock-eared and then tipping into her dreamscapes, begging, “make it double,” please."
--Sandy Florian, author of The Tree of No


"In the sinuous descents of Jennifer K Dick’s Betwixt, we are among the debris of doxa not left to lie around an ailing modernist Thames or Rhime, but rather bound up again in the fascicle of a deeper myth-going gauntlet. Eurydice is the by-proxy birth of the lyric, of both its sad and smiling aspects (the marriage ceremony and the broken quest), two divided faces which both promise never to look back. Sex and scalpel, fusion and fissuring, no identity is left unknit in this astonishing revival. So we too may go deeper, into the passages of our choosing: “just follow the tracks in the dark, steady, steadying.”"
--Nicholas Manning, author of Novaless

"In Jennifer K Dick’s wonderful rewinding of “loosely wound” myth, Orpheus and Eurydice are strung out on contemporary anxieties and pulled through the compelling lines of a tensely rhythmic language, an element at once familiar and strange. Description is unsteady, under revision, and flatness and depth make sudden shifts the characters (including reader and writer) negotiate, making forward movement exciting: the stakes are still high, even as we’re reminded the game is lost. Meanwhile the field of the author’s attention is mobile, errant, including the frame or what takes place elsewhere, beyond (around, askew to) a “story.” The subject of this splendid collection is the texture of understanding in its uneasy motion through the “sonorous dark”—in other words, the work of love."

--Laura Mullen, author of Dark Archive & Murmur


"Jennifer K Dick’s Betwixt occurs at intermission—the point at which one act is made historical even as another supplants it. Inside this book, Eurydice and Orpheus wander the streets of Paris (which is also New York), Hades looks strangely like the Metro, and everything pickpockets the attributes of everything else. “Already what’s awaiting is rerouted,” Dick writes, as the tectonics of identity shift, destabilize and reconstitute, ushering forth a postmodern noir that sizzles with cosmopolitan smarts. Just further proof that poetry, like life, brooks no stasis: all is syncopation."
--Chris Pusateri, author of Anon


"Betwixt is a contemporary myth. It’s a “gaze cast,” where the unseenare momentarily seen—within shadow, under the pale light. It’s a diceygame of chance, in which time folds in on itself. Intimacy is heldcaptive and released: “To: think only of her. Not to forget: she is.To: know this.” The impulse to turn leaves us standing still. In awe.Marveling at Jennifer K Dick’s “condensation of meaning.”"

—Michelle Naka Pierce, author of Beloved Integer

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Versal Magazine Special Pre-Order Offer!

As many of you know, I work with the wonderful staff on VERSAL MAGAZINE out of Amsterdam. This literary review is jam packed with amazing writing, but is also a fabulous example of lit mag design, with artwork and also excellent layout throughout. An object to delight the eye and mind!! (see our website for lots of info: http://www.wordsinhere.com/)

So, I am writing a little post here to ask that you consider preordering the next issue and thus both supporting the continuation of the review while also getting for yourself a great book of prose, poetry and artwork!!!! What's more, your order gets you TWO copies--the newest issue plus a backissue!

Click here to order your 2 issues!:

http://www.wordsinhere.com/preorder.html

The issue launches at the end of April, so do ORDER NOW to benefit from this fab offer, and to help us with the costs of the future issue.

Also, if anyone is in Amsterdam at the end of April, do attend the newest issue's launch!
Which is LITERARY DEATH MATCH, AMSTERDAM with Opium

http://www.literarydeathmatch.com/upcoming-events/april-28-2011.html

See the website for full info on that! April 28th 2011!!!

Feel free to pass this info on to everyone you know!!!

Also, for those of you who have yet to submit work to Versal, we will be accepting new work next fall! So get your copies now to get an idea of what we are looking for, then send us work next fall!!!!