Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Newton Poetics and Beauty Conversations

Come write poems in and for and about a specific place at a specific time and with flesh.
Expand your definition of poetry to include image, visual, local, embodied and tied to a place and time.
Come photograph the poets, poetry and the place
Come make poetry with your presence.
Use found materials to make instant art
Add to your portfolio
Document for your blog, twitter and facebook.
Make mini movies about the importance of art and place.
Write poems on the dropped paper bark.
Use fountain water to make words on the sidewalk. Watch them fade.

In this course fall in love with words.
Words have been often equated with breath, which is the origin of all creation.

“A poem is words infused with breath or spirit. Let me breathe of it, says the poet-maker and then begins: I have put my words in order on the threshold of my tongue” (Carpenter, “Breath”).


The ghostly apparitions, catalogues, mysteries, maps, dialogues, monologues, episodes, topographies, personae as makers, creators that are at once humble before mysteries and humbled by beauty. This beauty is revealed as a dwelling within and between objects that exisit in a specific place and time and people.

The overall aesthetic might be termed neo-baroque: omnivorous and wide-ranging in content, accumulating, recombining, preferring an unfolding and refolding complexity -- performative, dramatic -- NOT beholden to the thin gruel and the effete, bourgeois, Neo-Classical aires of post-avant American poetry.

Life, in confusion, repetition, feedback, sorrow, regret, love, appears in the prose-poems of these four -- a potentially divine mess of death, body, and birth.

We will not become an ideological lobby group. We will not settle for the vanity of kitsch. We will not be confused about what we are doing. We may be doing handicraft, or art, commercial design, advertising art, song or hymn writing, We may be making monuments or painting murals, We may be in propaganda, posters, PR or the media.

Let each one give away whatever kind of gift you have received.
Give it away in a genuine spirit, with a sure skill, as an innocent and wise, faithful, compassionate deed, no matter how imperfect. That is all that is required of you. (Seerveld)

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