Film Poem Published in Barzakh Magazine | With Walden /
My new film poem is in great company in the new alumni issue of Barzakh Magazine! With Walden employs improvised video, field recordings, drawings, and poetry to grapple with the claustrophobic vigor of love in the first months of fatherhood.
Post ALA Panel Notes: Ronald Johnson's Formal, Transgeneric, and Multimedia Innovations /
For the American Literature Association’s 2019 conference, Mark Scroggins organized a panel of wonderful papers that explored Johnson’s monumentalizing urge, gastrophilosophy, and sound art. It was a privilege presenting with…
Sally Connolly: “Formal Innovation and Ergodic Invitation in Ronald Johnson’s ‘Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid: In Memoriam AIDS’.”
Devin King: “The Invisible Spire: Ronald Johnson’s ARK 38 and Bay Area Radio Drama.”
The excellent panel presentations helped me decide to start the book I’ve been toying with, a study of Ronald Johnson’s gastrophilosophy. My panel paper explored taste at the bookends of his publishing career, from his first book of poetry, A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees (1967) to his most comprehensive cookbook, The American Table: More Than 400 Recipes That Make Accessible for the First Time the Full Richness of American Regional Cooking. There is so much more, however, mixed throughout his oeuvre. His monument at the beginning of ARK to the Native staple “Bison Bison Bison,” his comparison of the brain to an orange, a critique of Columbus’s misunderstanding of the variegation of Native Corn, a taste of Thoreau’s “Wild Apples,” and a taste of William Bartram’s bitter orange salad dressings. I’ll explore all of these and more. I’ll let you know when the book is out!
L to R: James, Nathan, Devin, Mark. Disclaimer: The Bukowski Bar choice was not based on the quality of his poetry but of the beer list.
In the orbit of bureaucratic gravity: Empire state plaza /
The Egg and Corning Tower
The Egg and Corning Tower
Agency Building 3
Cultural Education Center
Left to right: Corning Tower, Cultural Education Center, and 2 of the 4 Agency buildings
Left to right: Justice Building, The Egg, Corning Tower, Cultural Education Center, 4 Agency buildings, and the Legislative Office Building
Audio from Performance @ Buffalo Street Books! /
A great time reading with great readers. Thanks to our host Joe Hall and Buffalo Street Books! Thanks to Kina Viola and J. Michael Martinez.
Audio of my performance of a new work for text and electronics titled Techniques for the Oddity.
Upcoming Performance: Techniques for the Oddity | Text and Electronics /
I’ll be in Ithaca performing a new piece for electronics and text titled Techniques for the Oddity. Hope to see you there!
New VR art on Arrhythmicity, grab your goggles! /
I have some new digital art in the VR exhibition at Arrhythmicity. Make sure you have your VR goggles, it's immersive! It runs until 5.15.18 and is made by dalpfozs.
“My digtial collages are done exclusively on the iPhone 6 using apps such as Decim8, Pixel is Data, and Photoshop Mix to glitch, distort, and errorize found text and images.
The excerpts from the series I have attached explore a vocabulary new to me, child rearing. The fragmented, sometimes illegible words floating through these collages speak to the radical transformations to communication that characterize the birth partner experience”
My work appears with Zeppra, Bryan Meador, Sarawut Chutiwongpeti, Momma Tried, Udit Mahajan, and Endam Nihan. And don't forget to check out previous exhibitions!
“arrhythmicity - curatorial statements
eRR0R
an exploration of the fertility of errors, with works by:
15.03.2018 - 15.04.2018: Marcelina Wellmer, Kevin Brophy, osvaldo cibils, Simon Hutchinson, cleo miao, jah justice, Sian Fan, Noah Travis Phillips
15.04.2018 - 15.05.2018: Bryan Meador, Endam Nihan, James Belflower, Momma Tried, Sarawut Chutiwongpeti, Udit Mahajan, Zeppra
15.05.2018 - 15.06.2018: Bianca Hockensmith, Claude Heiland-Allen, David Lisbon, Jonathan Kiritharan, Nick Montfort
the exhibition developed starting from the following open call for very short audio (.mp3 - max. 30s) and images (.jpg - max. 500kb):
in a world that covers its flaws in the blinding light of universal truths and institutionally reinforced regimes of visibility, we are interested in the fertile shades opened up by errors. the antiseptic intellectual environment our societies try to achieve, while arguably “healthy” and “safe” for the established values, has the huge disadvantage of obscuring any fundamentally different modes of existence. we are looking for submissions that explore the fertility of errors and question our inherited worldview.”
Hybrid Poetry and Real Time Collaboration at the New School /
On 2/22/2018 I spoke with students from John Reed's seminar at The New School about Hybrid Poetry. We discussed the difficulties unique to creating hybrid work and the innovations that can result from collaborating with and through different mediums. At the end of our conversation all 10 of us participated in a real time collaboration through Google Docs. The goal was to write a short collection of hybrid work in 15 minutes. No other constraints were established, so if you were inclined to, you could simply delete for the entire time. No one did, but the discussion afterward revealed that the event pushed each one of us to write, collage, and negotiate different mediums in fresh ways. In the poem you'll notice multiple languages, humor, memes, confessional lines, questions, word acrobatics, texts, tonal juxtapositions, and advertising images, all mingled in a communal sense of play.
The experience was stupendous and the results were so irreverent and fun! I've published the pages from the collaboration below. Enjoy!
Canyons: Shout out in At Buffalo /
At Buffalo, the magazine for alumni and friends of SUNY Buffalo gives a shout out to Canyons. Matthew Klane is '03 Buffalo alumni.
Canyons
James Belflower and Matthew Klane (MA ’03)
In this challenging collection of poetry and visual art exploring the legacy of Manifest Destiny, Klane and Belflower blur the boundaries between the two art forms. Each poem is spread over multiple pages—interspersed with topographic map visuals, full-color collages and a series of imagined letters from the wife of William Gilpin (the first governor of the Colorado territory and a businessman of questionable repute)—providing an idiosyncratically layered trip through the history of the American West. (Flimb Press, 2016)
We appreciate the mention, however, the description incorrectly states that the letters in the text were written by Mrs. William Gilpin. In fact, the letters were transcribed by Mrs. William Gilpin, but written by an unknown person.
Fence Digital Book Design /
Recently I launched Fence Digital, the electronic imprint of Fence Books. Working with Rebecca Wolff, we are planning to release as many books as possible as often as possible. We are in the process of looking for new books suited to a digital environment, so find us over at Fence Digital.
If you missed my editorial note that went out a few days ago, here it is.
The idea that we coevolve through intimate interactions with our virtual media is both joyous and terrifying. Here at Fence Books, we choose to bedevil this evolution further by launching Fence Digital, a new electronic publishing imprint that reinserts materiality into the digital.
To that end, our projects reevaluate the boundary between the virtual nature of digital information and the viscerality of text. When designing books, we think of the project in print, but we also consider how digital extra-textual qualities (video, image, animation, hyperlinks, etc.) might contribute to its textualization. In short, we design with attention to how a reader’s swipe interacts with a digital book as something that happens rather than something that exists.
So, with the first three books from Fence Digital, we encourage you to coevolve with us: swipe across the rubber typed pages of Michael Leong’s Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?, the handwritten postcards sent on Brian Young’s road trip in Moonie, and the floating feather through Matthew Klane’s My.
Download all these books and more at Fence Digital or on iBooks.
Enjoy!
James Belflower
Editor
