Rauan Klassnik
http://rauanklassnik.blogspot.com
author of three collections: Sky Rat (Spork, 2014), The Moon's Jaw (Black Ocean, 2013) and Holy Land (Black Ocean, 2008) ... ----- @klassnik ------
……Kevin Sampsell’s Paper Trumpets…..
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In late April I read with Kevin Sampsell and Jay Ponteri in Nathan Curtis Warner’s LYE:WORDS at Pond Gallery.
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Kevin had a projector set up and interrupted reading from his book to show his Collages. Sometimes they contained text, and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes Kevin read the Collage text. . .Regardless, I was quite taken by them. . .And so I asked Kevin if I could feature some of them here on htmlgiant.
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What follows, then is a Q & A we did with Kevin’s Collages interspersed.
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And for more Collages check out this special section of Kevin Sampsell’s website. And starting June 10th Kevin will be doing a Collage column, called Paper Trumpets, for The Rumpus!!
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Rauan: How did you get started doing Collages ??
Kevin: I was inspired by the cut-up experiments of William S. Burroughs and actually started doing word collages, mostly from newspaper headlines, about twenty years ago. I put out a weird little chapbook called Children’s Book in 1996 and I’ve always wanted to make a follow-up book. I’ve kept this big manila envelope of words ever since then, occasionally pulling it out and making funny cards and pictures with them and giving them to friends.
But those were more about wordplay and odd language. At the beginning of this year, I decided I’d pull out that envelope and start making more collages, kind of as a break from writing. I started to look around at other collage stuff on-line and discovered this whole big vibrant world of collage artists and, more importantly, I started to seriously consider the use of altered images to play off the words. I discovered this book called The Age of Collage and it included profiles and work by a bunch of great artists doing amazing work with collage. This page on the publisher’s web site included videos of John Stezaker and Linder Sterling and I became hooked. Stezaker’s video was especially influential. I started to look at collage every moment that I could and I joined a bunch of collage groups on Facebook too. I started to put more importance on how the images in the collage were presented. Words are still important, but the images are equally so now. Something clicked in my brain and I’m starting to figure out things with images. How to play with them and make them do strange things. Making collages is like creating optical illusions sometimes. Like with writing fiction or poems, pretty much anything can happen.
RK: Can you tell us a bit about yr Collage process??
For me, collage is all about seeing, as opposed to writing READ MORE >
…..POEM-A-DAY from THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN LUNATICS (#18)…………
I wrote the first 16 lines of Viewer’s Guide last November in Mexico after revisiting Ionesco. Flash forward to March 2014: I’m hanging at Manitoba’s in NYC and meet Handsome Dick and get myself drunk.
I start thinking about those lines again. I start thinking about Cioran and getting laid. All thought fails and soon enough I’m on the train back to NJ, secretly snapping photos of unsuspecting passengers. I awake hours later with my phone in my pants and pull it out and scroll through pics. I focus on one where a beauty is exploited by three brains. My head is an air of gray next so I continue the 4-month-old poem. For another 4 lines my violence prevails. The poem then shifts to scenes that are invisible to every brain I’m aware of. I cut that off prematurely. I smile for a while and see my observations fade into nothin
g.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .RC Miller lives in Metuchen, NJ. He is creator of Mask With Sausage, Pussy Guerilla Face Banana Fuck Nut & Demon Drawings, all published (or soon to be) by gobbet press. Miller maintains an art blog via WIGFUCKER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DJ Gay Gravy was born into a religious family. Later, he read Richard Rorty and learned to love again. Now, he spends 98% of his free time watching battle rap. More videos here. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible Academy of American Poets. …(JaJaJaJaJa)…
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May 23rd, 2014 / 5:20 pm
May 23rd, 2014 / 5:20 pm
5 Points: Boo, The Life of The World’s Cutest Dog
1) The first thing that blew me away when I returned home from Brooklyn and greedily opened my Boo (which was waiting for me along side biographies of Shakespeare and Jonson) was the sheer Whitmanesque charisma and scintillation of it all: the big-heated spirit, the boundless energy , the Joie-De-Vivre. And yet, also, I was amazed by a stealthy and shrewd persona. A veritable host of personas! But, all in all, loveable. Absolutely loveable.
I had to rub my eyes once or twice, I admit, and scratch my ass, pensively, and then return to the bounties of the book to see if it was all for real. I mean, how could it be ?? … But, Yes! Yes! Yes! … Look, for example, at how Whitman’s “I lean and loaf at my ease” translates, and upgrades even, so seamlessly, to Boo’s elegant and contemporary “I like to lounge around the house.”
And, delightfully, also, there is something tremendously naughty in the way Boo enchants us with his insouciance. His lazy wisdom. His casual control of self and universe. It is indeed impressive. And quite enchanting. Intoxicating. And heady…..Yes, folks hungry for the “real deal”, Boo is here. And he is a game changer. One for the cannon. Or one, really, round which the cannon rebuilds and redefines itself.
2) The most important question the serious student or master of literature must ask when measuring a candidate up against Walt Whitman, the Titan and father of American Literature, is “Does the subject contains multitudes??”
And indeed Boo proves over and over to be multitudinous READ MORE >
14 Comments
May 15th, 2014 / 9:00 am
May 15th, 2014 / 9:00 am
SONG 14 — POEM-A-DAY from THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN LUNATICS (#17)
I’ve been working on a number of “song” poems, as in songs that are sung under one’s breath, never really meant to be listened to. The songs are often unkempt, ancient and embarrassing. The identity of the original singer is unknown and unimportant, as these songs are constantly getting sung somewhere.
Ryan MacDonald is a lecturer in the Studio Art Department at UMass, Amherst. He is the 2012 winner of the American Short(er) Fiction award. His collection of stories, The Observable Characteristics of Organisms will be released from FC2 in August 2014.
Jordan Stempleman’s collections include No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press 2012) and the forthcoming Wallop (Magic Helicopter Press 2014). He edits The Continental Review, runs the Common Sense Reading Series, & teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. Find out more here.
a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing.
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May 1st, 2014 / 9:05 am
May 1st, 2014 / 9:05 am
……National Poetry Month Death Match #2……
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April is winding down and I’m not really sure how much was settled with the first National Poetry Death Match (ie, my soul is still soooooo confused) so in order to settle things I’ve decided to bring out two more big, passionate and extremely eloquent mercenary lovers for a second “Death Match” where I hope the “disturbing contraries of my soul” can be brought into line, can be made to heal, can be brought into a beautiful, “poetic” harmony.
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And, so, the second National Poetry Month death match is between Russell Jaffe and Seth(x) AbraHaM$on. And, no, this is not Seth Abramson, it is, instead, a well known writer who has chosen, here for the ring of this Death Match, to be know as Seth(x) AbraHam$on.
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National Poetry Month: More poems for more people sounds good to me
by Russell Jaffe
Look: Poetry can be a real distance READ MORE >
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April 29th, 2014 / 9:00 am
April 29th, 2014 / 9:00 am
……National Poetry Month Death Match #1……
April, because of National Poetry Month, is a traumatic ordeal of a time for me.
A prevailing, I guess, part of me thinks “What a total bunch of fucking bullshit”– and for the past few years all April long I’m in a grouchy stupor-rage making snide and mean remarks, pissing on anything even remotely “poetry,” and relentlessly posting up pictures of beached whale carcasses.
And yet–a part of me identifies with this impressive cadre and camaraderie of poetry munchkins gathered squawking and encouraging and reassuring each other on the cliffs of poetry each April because, well, it must be a good thing. It must be, right?
And so this year I’ve decided to face the disturbing contraries of my soul and the way they bristle and soft-feather up at National Poetry Month by setting up, as any good Caesar of the soul, some death matches. And in each case the death match will consist of a “for” and “against” stance fought out between two of my friend surrogates. And in each case I’ll stand up above the fray with thumb at the ready.
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And, the first death match is between Reb Livingston and Jereme Dean.
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NaPoWriMoHoHoHo
by Reb Livingston
What’s ruining/killing poetry this month? Well, it’s April so that must mean the culprit is National Poetry Month. Or so claims my anti-NaPoMo poet pals on social media.
41 Comments
April 21st, 2014 / 3:10 pm
April 21st, 2014 / 3:10 pm
Rauan Klassnik—
video trailer for
SORROWTOOTHPASTE MIRRORCREAM
A collection of poems from Kim Hyesoon.
Translated by Don Mee Choi.
(video by The Viper, Paul Cunningham)
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and “Filthy filthy filthy I’m so filthy” reminds me I’ve been dreaming Ron Silliman again
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Rauan Klassnik—
……………….Am I right in thinking that Under The Skin is a kind of beautiful, thought-provoking movie that’s worth seeing, hypnotic, etc, etc…?? But just not quite right??…(I mean that can be a good thing)…But maybe it could have benefited from more terrifying “baby alone on the beach” kind of stuff?? I dunno. Watcha think ??…………..
5 Points: Negative Spaces
Negative Spaces by Nate Liederbach (elik press, salt lake city, 2014)
1) Besides the negatives spaces of time, sex, burial, vague gender and religious horror-what binds the three “stories” of Negative Spaces is the rich and thrusting prose, constantly churning, that made me think, variously, of McCarthy, Thom Jones and Faulkner.
On a language level, of course, but something also about the feel and swirling perspectives/impressions in Negative Spaces’ first piece, “Genghis’ Knoll“, made me think, many times of the blurrings, incest, etc, of The Sound & The Fury.
2)Liederbach has, most obviously in the collection’s 3rd and closing piece, used Tim O’Brien as a kind of model (“Is there any waste of time greater than retrospection?”). But it’s like Tim O’Brien, as a child, had been kicked in the head, repeatedly, and then became and grew up increasingly more and more brain interesting. Liederbach is, for sure, far more complicated, mud-splashed, textured, wily and rambunctious than O’Brien. And I mean both with respect to language and story-telling structure.
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But good old Hahn, front-and-center, calms the fracas. She declares Neil’s on the money. “Amen! Mr. Neil, release the tenuously tenored woman long-swallowed by that punitive girl. Butterfly bursts its cocoon. Aphrodite squirms loose of dissected genitals. Or is it to conquer, to cannibalize? Artemis, Hippolytus staying chaste? Eve snatches the Knobbed Russet, fists it out on display for Adam—choiceless chump—to indulge her fruity proxy with brand-new front fangs of youcharist. Amen! A sudden understanding of binary and binary collapsed. Me, man. You, woman. Adult versus child. Whoa Nelly . . . ‘Pop the cherry, release the scary.’” READ MORE >
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April 2nd, 2014 / 10:00 am
April 2nd, 2014 / 10:00 am
Rauan Klassnik—
The debut issue of Plinth (edited by Tyann Prentice and former HTMLGIANT contributor Garett Strickland) contains work by Gary J. Shipley, Janice Lee (in collaboration with Michael Du Plessis), M. Kitchell, and others.
It also has really interesting images and layout. And you can check it all out here.