Zeitgeist Spam

The Strip Hay(na)ku Project. A collaborative experiment in sequential graphic poetics

Edited Ernesto Priego, with contributions by John Bloomberg-Rissman, Sam Bloomberg-Rissman, Amy Bernier, lola bola (Jane Ogilvie), Horacio Castillo, Ira Franco, Ernesto Priego, and Ginger Stickney.

 

Foreword by Eileen R. Tabios

Introduction by Ernesto Priego

 

ISBN 978-1-934299-13-5

 

April 2019

 

48 pages, full colour. 

 

Price: US$14.00 or equivalent 

 

Distributors: Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ernesto-priego/the-strip-haynaku-project/paperback/product-24042202.html  

 

For more information: johnkathybr at gmail dot com.

 

Meritage Press and Laughing/Ouch/Cube/Publications are pleased to announce the release of The Strip Hay(na)ku Project, a collection of hay(na)ku poems in comic strip form, edited and co-created by Ernesto Priego with contributors John Bloomberg-Rissman, Sam Bloomberg-Rissman, Amy Bernier, lola bola (Jane Ogilvie), Horacio Castillo, Ira Franco, Ernesto Priego, and Ginger Stickney.

 

"Hay naku" is a common Filipino expression covering a variety of contexts—like the word "Oh." The "hay(na)ku" is a 21st century poetic form invented by Eileen R. Tabios. It is a six-word tercet with the first line being one word, the second line being two words, and the third line being three words. Poets around the world have used the form and have created text and visual variations of the form, including the “chained hay(na)ku” which strings together more than one tercet as well as the reverse hay(na)ku where the word count is reversed. Ernesto Priego started co-creating "strip hay(na)ku" poems in 2008, inspired by examples of Slovenian "strip haiku".

 

About The Strip Hay(na)ku Project:

 

"Hay(na)ku, a 21st century fixed verse form, has inherited haiku-sensibility (with its caesuras or paradigm shifts) and added to it a new kind of game, with 1, 2, and 3 words, perfect for the special needs of alphabetical writings. The inventive collaborators of this book successfully transplanted hay(na)ku – not only its basic form but its spirit as well – into the field of visual writing, and what we get is new and exciting. The book contains real comic strips but almost as soon as I started reading/watching the panels I had the strong impression that instead of the usual multitude of voices, speakers, actors etc. we have only two "heroes", so to speak, inside and outside, and even they are not so different, to say the least. There is no comic strip without a story, and this time we are told and shown (but the texts and images don’t explain each other, their connection is inspiringly dissociative), how those heroes or perspectives keep changing places. It happens gently, almost invisibly…"

 

-Márton Koppány

 

 

BIOS

 

Ernesto Priego is a lecturer at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London. He is the founder and editor in chief of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. He co-curated, with Ivy Alvarez, John Bloomberg-Rissman and Eileen R. Tabios, The Chained Hay(na)ku Project (Meritage Press and xPress(ed) 2010). He is also the author of Not Even Dogs. Hay(na)ku Poems (Meritage Press, 2006); the amazing adventures of Gravity & Grace (Otoliths 2008); The Present Day. The Mañana Poems (Leafe Press 2010); Ahí donde no estás. De nombres propios y otros fantasmas (Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura 2013); and, with Simon Grennan and Peter Wilkins, the non-fiction comic Parables of Care. Creative Responses to Dementia Care (City, University of London, University of Chester and Douglas College, 2017). He posts things online whenever he is able to at his blog, epriego.blog, and on Twitter @ernestopriego.


Eileen R. Tabios has released over 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Her 2018 poetry collections include HIRAETH: Tercets From the Last Archipelago, MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION: A Poetry Generator, TANKA: Vol. 1, and ONE TWO THREE: Selected Hay(na)ku Poems which is a bilingual English-Spanish edition with translator Rebeka Lembo. Forthcoming is WITNESS IN A CONVEX MIRROR which will inaugurate Tinfish Press’s ”Pacific response to John Ashbery.” She also invented the poetry form “hay(na)ku” whose 15-year anniversary in 2018 is celebrated at the San Francisco and Saint Helena Public Libraries. More information about her works is available at http://eileenrtabios.com.

Now Published: The End of the World Project

Thanks to William Allegrezza at  Moria Books, and to over 140 contributors, The End of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall and me) is now published. In two volumes. Two big fat volumes. Copies are available at Moria (scroll all the way down to the very bottom of the page where you will find the book. Click on the cover and download a free pdf. Or buy a copy. It's up to you. 

Here are the pdfs. You can see the list of contributors in the TOC to the first volume. They are the ones who make the book what it is. We are very happy and proud to be part of it. Enjoy. (And may a miracle happen: may humans come to their senses pretty immediately and not turn this place into a catastrophic mess.)

Epigraph to the introduction to Katherine McKitterick, Demonic Grounds

I don’t want no fucking country, here
or there and all the way back, I don’t like it, none of it,
easy as that.

                    —dionne brand

If They Hadn’t Worn White Hoods, 8 Million Would Have Shown Up in the Photographs, by John Bloomberg-Rissman and Eileen R. Tabios

Please check out If They Hadn’t Worn White Hoods, 8 Million Would Have Shown Up in the Photographs, by John Bloomberg-Rissman and Eileen R. Tabios, over at Moria Books. THE LINK SHOULD TAKE YOU TO A FREE PDF, THO I BELIEVE YOU CAN PURCHASE A HARD COPY IF YOU'D LIKE. A copy will be sent to Trump. I doubt he will enjoy the read.

What I fear most is becoming a poet

 

A poem by Katerina Gogou

What I fear most
is becoming "a poet"...
Locking myself in the room
gazing at the sea
and forgetting...
I fear that the stitches over my veins might heal
and, instead of having blur memories about TV news,
I take to scribbling papers and selling "my views"...
I fear that those who stepped over us might accept me 
so that they can use me. 
I fear that my screams might become a murmur
so that to serve putting my people to sleep.
I fear that I might learn to use meter and rhythm
and thus I will be trapped within them
longing for my verses to become popular songs. 
I fear that I might buy binoculars in order to bring closer
the sabotage actions in which I won't be participating.
I fear getting tired - an easy prey for priests and academics - 
and so turn into a "poet" ...
They have their ways ...
They can utilize the routine in which you get used to,
they have turned us into dogs: 
they see to us being ashamed for not working... 
they see to us being proud for being unemployed...
That's how it is.
Keen psychiatrists and lousy policemen 
are waiting for us in the corner.
Marx...
I am afraid of him...
My mind walks past him as well...
Those bastards...they are to blame...
I cannot -fuck it- even finish this writing...
Maybe...eh?...maybe some other day...

Translated by G.Chalkiadakis (slightly modified, tho I don't know Greek).

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gehalk/Gogou_transl_poem_2.html

BAALBECK by Etel Adnan (reposted from Pierre J, his pts 3 & 4)

10.

On a wall, a lion
was sculpted

the first animal I loved
was cold

the second unveiled
the incredible depth of
the flesh

the stone
was from the
Orient,

love,
elsewhere.

11.

Watch out
for the past,
a poison for our
fields,

for these columns
which are trees,
regardless of spring
or winter.

12.

There, abroad,
centuries-old oaks
have heard Napoleon’s steps
climbing the
Rhone Valley,

to fall,
further North,  on
enemy territory

all defeat
is the end
of a life.

13.

Stones resume their conversations
to make us admit that
materiality bewilders
us, 

objects being the children
of their own shadows.

Play in the infernal
jungles as monkeys do, 

enter the
labyrinth that
you are.

14.

Theseus tried to kill
the Minotaur
with whom his wife had
deceived him

but the string
broke,

and his anger fell
on his son.

Since, someone may
remember him, but
that ascertains
his death. 

15.

There’s in Baalbeck a temple dedicated
to Bacchus, and in
Bolinas a Night Palace
that Joanne Kyger
protects with her
poems

from under our
footsteps rises a phantom
which quickly
evaporates,

because our countries don’t
cease going up in
smoke.

16.

Work is an
incurable
architecture
practiced on
ourselves…

I would like to be within
an insanity that will work like
a sky above my
head,

possessed by a nameless
acceleration.

17.

I am hungry for the ruins
where I was running
in prehistory,

I will travel,
motionless.

18.

When I went up the pink granite
toward the summit
I saw the beginning
of Asia,

the intemporal rejoined
us.

There’s nothing closer
to the sacred than
nothingness.

19.

The days are enclosed in
a bottle of aspirins

I tell you, I’m in the
process of dying

the path is not
spectacular

the sun is lying on
the tides of the
century,

that’s called eternity
in the calendar of
Being

… and, in my eyes,
a faded rose.

20.

I will not come back
to hear Ella Fitzgerald
sing over the columns.
Neither will
she.

21.

Clouds pile up,
turn into human
forms

on the bed of rivers
an inscription always dissolves,
then appears again,

as the sky has already
told me.

22.

When no one is waiting for us
any longer, there’s
death,
so faithful.

23.

Broken souls are not
anonymous,
no more than the
geometry reserved
for my naked feet.

24.

There are moments when
the past ceases to be a form
of the present.

Rain and tears
resemble each other.

25.

Syria has always been the mother
of chaos. A land parallel to
all the others. In the epiphany
of a sun to come,
breathless.

26.

The olive tree in Delphi,
next to the temple of Sikiyon,
remembers the oracle
saying that
somewhere in the plain
linking the Red Sea
to the Dead Sea,
music will
displace the sky.

27.

Ruins are relics.
The ligneage being of
little importance,
we’re related to them.

28.

Talal Haydar is closer to the
truth than I am, being  of this
place.
He used to pick up
the moon between the stones
and take her to his bed…
These days, he bends to
pick up a flower,
finds traces of blood.

BAALBECK by Etel Adnan (2) (again, from Pierre J's blog)

6.

The stream of water
running under Ariadne’s
temple is the thread
leading to the
Minotaur
– before getting lost
in the cotton
plantations

in the airless labyrinth
a living mass is
crying,
day and night

the goddess has left him.

I  bring him
olives and wine

but the god has
aged.

Aside from me,
only the wind knows the
way

which links Arabia to
Greece,
and our thoughts to
this place.

7.

Here, the air
is dry

the living escapes in
the form of impeccable horses
which run – there,
between the Lebanon and
the anti-Lebanon
the world is of a perfect
intelligence.

We own all the columns,
wherever they are,
being the only ones
to care.

The Mediterranean
spreads from the other side of
the mountain

it suffers from the boats
that cross its body,
but has survived
Carthage, Plato or
Mutanabbi
    – like us

(are they each alone,
or talking together,
how to know?).

What’s Memory doing
among these stones that
keep returning,
she, older than Creation,
– and anxious to say it?

Orpheus walks
in the center of
the village

while the wind
rushes the setting suns
to carry us
to places where
History and Nothingness
mix their
great waters.

8.

We’re sitting under
pomegranates that
came from
Persia to these harsh
lands
– when the voyage was
granted

on the roads,
passengers speak  of
the Aegean Sea as if
she were a person

for them, angels are
too many…

better not to remember.

9.

There’s something funereal
about orgies,

the time to
say it, the earth
has already traveled
enormous distances.

Where, then, is
joy?:

to me enchained,
an horizon
too close,
blinding.

(…)

BAALBECK by Etel Adnan (tr. Etel Adnan and Sarah Riggs) (reposted from Pierre Joris's Nomadics) (for Deb Poe)

Pierre writes: It is a pleasure & an honor for Nomadics blog to publish BAALBECK, a sequence of poems by Etel Adnan translated by Sarah Riggs over the next 4 or 5 days. Below, the opening sections of the poem & a note by Etel Adnan concerning the circumstances of the work.

Etel Adnan & Sarah Riggs by Simone Fattal

Last year (2015) there was in Aix en Provence and in Baalbek itself an event concerning the Baalbek festival of pre-war Lebanon. A few poets were asked to write for the occasion. The roman-era ruins of that place in the Bekaa Valley which is a high plateau of some 1200 meters highth (more at its Northern end) are extraordinary and I was taken there first when I was 9 years old, and then often, and it made an impression still with me  (it became the seat of a festival from about 1955 and on until the civil war interrupted it … it’s coming back and hopefully will be as remarkable.  — Etel Adnan

B A A L B E C K

Etel Adnan

translated by Sarah Riggs with Etel Adnan

1.

From Orpheus to Mayakovsky
the sun turned around
my head
its mass of gold
and of light,

first divinity
to have visited me
– and for sure
the last –
for which temples
of stone
have risen

It’s among monoliths
and columns
that I understood,
as a child,
that my kingdom would be
made of these rocks
and of their night.

2.

A dryness settled
my throat,

I am not going to
sing.

A temple existed for
real,
its stairs are solid

the gods, not willing
to leave,
danced,
then decided to die…

leaving behind,
even if barbaric,
a sun which we have
loved.

In the sealed obscurity
of the brain
plants grow
and fish swim,
while we believe  seeing
landscapes, and looking  at the
sea.

We will not know if
life is reversible,
but in pain is written
a joy which hurts even
more,

as in the desertification of hearts
memory’s fingerprint
is found.

3.

Around here
rain is made
neither
of water,
nor of angels.

The fields show
the color of
blood

but the sky is closed

the youth
of the single blade of
grass trying to split
this wall
keeps vibrations of
Orpheus,
he, mirror of my
soul.

4.

With bare hands
I knocked on mobile
forces,
arrived at some
likenesses of shades,
all substance having
fled

we live
in waves
and wind

Following the gods,
we have abandoned
an earth
heavier
than bunches of grapes
like we close the
eyelids of the dead.

5

The sea is
far away,
an horizon of
fever agitated
in its sleep

by the dream of its
own splendor.

It’s not there
where I am.

The seasons
contemplate the light’s
confusion in the arid
zones of our
thoughts

riddled
with bullets.

On these stretches,
the mind holds
its breath

like a child
who has lost his
mother.

I’m going to spend
the night stretched on
the heat which they
have kept.

‘Without your pain, you're nothing!’ - How I learned to read Georges Bataille

For a long time, I had trouble reading Bataille. I couldn’t figure out what troubled him. I have that problem with many people I read. Then I read this:

Pain shaped my character. In school, with my frostbitten fingers - pain is the teacher. ‘Without your pain, you're nothing!’

Tears in my eyes at this idea of being waste! I’m whining, ready to pray, but just can't make myself.

A moment later I'm clenching and unclenching my teeth, and drowsiness sets in.

A toothache strikes, my brain turns to mush.

I'm writing and appealing - but hoping for relief from the pain makes me feel that much worse.

Knowing nothing about the creature I am or what kind of thing I am - is there anything I do know? At night not being able to go on and banging my head against the wall, trying to find a way, not from self-confidence but because of being sentenced to search, bumping into things, bleeding, falling down, not getting up . . . Feeling I can’t go on, aware of pincers torturing my fingers, of red-hot branding irons burning the soles of my feet. Where is the way out, except for pincers and branding irons! No compromise and no escape. In actuality I’m safe from them?! At least they’d confer legitimacy on my body. Which can’t in truth be separated from them. Which can't be separated from them in truth. (You can't separate the body from the head either.)

What if this urgent pain finally didn't matter? At least I'd have some hope of rest. Thinking stops for me, I'm in sunlight, no more worry. How is it possible that earlier I had moments of total well-being on the banks of rivers, in woods, gardens, cafes, in my room? (Leaving aside the darker joys.)

A slipping, glance down, the molar's extracted, but the anaesthetic isn't working? What an awful experience!

What would it be like, how big a coward would I have been, without the hope the cocaine gave? When I get home, I bleed profusely. I stick my tongue in the hole . . . there’s a piece of meat there, a blood clot getting larger, starting to protrude. I spit it out - another follows. The clots have the consistency of snot, taste like food gone bad. They’re plugging up my mouth. I decide that by falling asleep I’ll get over my disgust, won’t be tempted to fuss with them or spit them out. I drift off and wake up at the end of an hour . . . Blood streamed from my mouth in my sleep, stained the pillow and sheet, and there are clots stuck in the sheet-folds, almost dry, some black like snot. I'm still upset and exhausted. I'm picturing an incident of haemophilia, maybe followed by death (is that so impossible?). I don’t want to die. Or maybe what I mean is - to hell with death. My disgust grows. I put a basin at the foot of the bed to avoid getting up during the night to spit in the toilet. In the coal stove, the fire’s gone out and the thought of having to start it again depresses me. I can’t get back to sleep . . . Time drags on. Sometimes I get drowsy. At 5 or 6 in the morning I decide to light the fire. I might as well make some use of this insomnia and get a thankless job out of the way. The ashes from the stove have to be taken out. I do the job badly, and soon the room’s strewn with pieces of coal, clinkers and ashes. The enamel basin is filled with blood, it’s dirty with it, and with clots, the blood has made puddles on my filthy sheets. Exhausted by insomnia, I’m still bleeding and the snotty taste of the clots gets more and more disgusting all the time. Finally the fire catches. My hands black with coal and dirty with blood. Blood-caked lips. A thick coal smoke fills the room; as usual, it takes a huge effort to get the resistant coal to catch fire. I'm not impatient, and no more anguished than other days. There's a nagging need in me . . . to rest.

[...]

Now, I don’t want to reduce Bataille, who was a complicated man. Nevertheless, as soon as I read ‘Without your pain, you're nothing!’ and these few paragraphs, a great deal fell into place. I could finally feel him as a fellow human. How many of us say on some level, ‘Without your pain, you're nothing!’ Judging by behavior, I’d guess the vast vast vast majority. I include myself, which should be needless to say.

[Note: I found this in The Bataille Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, which includes this note: “The text is taken from the ‘Games of chance’ chapter of Guilty, tr. Bruce Boone (The Lapis Press, San Francisco, CA, 1988), pp. 69-86. Originally published in French by Editions Gallimard in 1944 as ‘Coupable’, the manuscript was produced between 1939 and 1944. Re-edited, it appeared in 1961 as the second volume to the Somme atheologique. See Georges Bataille: Oeuvres completes, V (Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1973), pp. 310-29. [...]”]

EILEEN TABIOS engages A Picture of Everyone I Love Passes Through Me / with collages by Lynn Behrendt and text mixed by John Bloomberg-Rissman and remixed by Lynn Behrendt

Please see Galatea Resurrects for the images to which Eileen refers below.

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

 

A Picture of Everyone I Love Passes Through Me with collages by Lynn Behrendt and text mixed by John Bloomberg-Rissman and remixed by Lynn Behrendt

(Lunar Chandelier Press, Brooklyn & Chicago, 2016)

 

Words exist. Do we write or re-arrange what already exists?

 

One can create new words, new vocabulary. But letters already exist—are we still just rearranging?

 

Is this when we might lapse to the image for at least covering more territory—the picture as a thousand words?

 

Yet, images pre-exist before our presence, too.  Do we create or re-arrange...?

 

Nonetheless, A Picture of Everyone I Love Passes Through Me presents two authors, with one also acting visually as a collagist, who create meanings that would not exist without their input. Hence, we go back to poetry and literature not being simply of arrangement but a manifestation somehow of the particular writer’s/artist’s imagination and intelligence to offer a message. (This may seem basic but, recently, I’ve been looking at how letters are transformed into images of silent shapes, curves, lines… and how much I admire the poet-artist Nico Vassilakis' presence or subjectivity amidst iconic material.)

 

That’s the way it should be, and I’m glad to have reached that conclusion from this collaboration by Lynn Behrendt and John Bloomberg-Rissman. For any binary that erases authorial subjectivity is a false binary—subjectivity is part of being human. Indeed, the existence of the Introductions on their process attest to the significance of their roles: the reader learns that Behrendt’s collage approach reflects her efforts to understand the world; Bloomberg-Rissman collages to see the ruins among which he says he tries to exist (because the ruins exist).

 

Relatedly, among the collaged pieces are cut-outs, in whole or in fragments, of Behrendt’s face. I find this a source of strength to the work, in part because it emphasizes that the resulting images (and text) are due to somebody’s vision, which is to say, somebody’s existence. This is collage as inclusion while acknowledging that inclusion cannot occur without someone desiring and acting out the inclusion. Combined with the variety of collaged fragments that disrupt linear logic in the connection of such pieces, grammatical tenses—which is to say, time—is even disrupted. Behrendtsaw, is seeing, will see.  Here’s a collage that’s effective—indeed, seeing it made me wish something I wish about works I most admire: “I wish I’d done that!” In this case, I think this collage also says something about lucidity:

(Click on all images to enlarge)

 

 

The eyes are not necessarily the first detail one notices in the above collage. But, for me, once I noticed the eyes they held my attention longer than the other details.  Behrendt saw, is seeing, will see.  The disruption of time is also interesting for evoking what I know of as specifically “indigenous time”—a time I’ve described elsewhere as where there is no past, present or future and all is one and one is all.

 

***

 

I am a long-time admirer and supporter of John Bloomberg-Rissman’s work (I published his Flux, Clot & Froth about which was said, “Truman Capote once famously said of Jack Kerouac’s work, ‘This isn’t writing, it’s typing.’ Had he lived he would have said of Flux, Clot & Froth, ‘This isn’t typing, it’s cutnpaste.’”)  The texts in A Picture of Everyone I Love Passes Through Me are indubitably Behrendt’s. That’s the way it should be as she gets the last word in remixing. But one can discern Bloomberg-Rissman, for instance, these words whose topic is familiar to me from other past conversations with and works by this poet—

 

So the biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality where violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. So what does it mean to say, “I will build things anew…”

 

—which reflects Bloomberg-Rissman’s intention (elsewhere in his Introduction) of “trying to exist in the ruins.” Bloomberg-Rissman—or Behrendt—are not being fatalistic, per se, by acknowledging our doomed times. They still desire to make efforts in their lives rather than just passively accept the effect of larger forces like war, power, pollution, economic monopolies and so on. I admire the desire to do “the hard work of adapting” to these forces. We live in the macro (the larger world) but we also live in the micro (our individual lives).

 

***

 

In a work like A Picture of Everyone I Love Passes Through Me, one logically considers whether it succeeded on its own terms—does the text resonate against the image (and vice versa)? So, does it work? Sure! And it doesn’t just do so because there’s the occasional discernible text as a reference to an image, e.g. “songbirds in Germany” being partnered with a collage containing birds. Text and image relate to each other in tone, mood, palette … here’s a sample pairing:

 

 

 

It’s a testimony to both Behrendt’s and Bloomberg-Rissman’s remixing capabilities that a poem succeeds when it begins with the title “VOLKSWAGEN RECOMMENDS,” cites Miss Piggy, and then ends with the powerful line “We are all Palestinians now.” Against this narrative, it’s appropriate for Behrendt’s face to be big (rather than, as in other artworks, be tiny and not immediately discernible) for her “I”—as with all “I’s—are implicated.

 

An interesting irony—which is also a strength—to this text/image collaboration is how the texts and images work effectively on a stand-alone basis. This is important because the relationship between text and image may be clearer in some pairings than other such couplings. What then would move the viewer/reader to connect the presented combinations? Well, it can be the individual power of the works. If one of the text/image diptych is weak, I, for one, would not be (as) compelled to continue pondering the relationship between the two. Thus, each work together results in 1 + 1 > 2; there is the result of reading text, looking at image, then considering both in relation to each other for an enhanced (third, thus > 2) response.

 

Here’s another image that attests to Behrendt’s strength as a visual collagist:

 

 

 

The face takes up so much space and yet it doesn’t aggressively leap out ahead of the other details so that the surface impression is at balance—this may be another way of noting how seamlessly or logically the collaged details combine together, even when the elements individually may be more at odds. (Unexpectedly, I feel the face leaps out more boldly in this reproduced version for this review, versus as an image in the book—which is to say the reproduction never reproduces 100% actually.)

 

As for Behrendt’s remixed text, her text-poems, I open the book at random to choose an example of her deft intelligence and witty imagination; you’ll see here as well the resonance—and music—that coheres the fragments into an organic whole to manifest an open-ended story, a mystery leaning on the edge of something delicious and/or horrifying:

Indeed, while I’ve read other poems by Behrendt in the past, her remixed words make me want to return or explore anew her other works—a response that says something positive about the strength of the works.

 

***

 

It’s also worth noting that this book is yet another fabulous production from the publisher, Lunar Chandelier Press, which is helpful for enhancing the impact of the work.

 

***

 

Ultimately, the power of these works rely on how masterfully Behrendt accomplishes her collages and remixings. I use the term “master…” because I make this conclusion, too, as a practitioner. I know the difficulty of creating visual collage that offers a sense of organic wholeness precisely because I’ve mostly failed to effect that result.

 

As an aside, I feel I’ve been more successful when I use text to collage. I am currently writing a novel and, as a result of a trip to New Orleans, wanted to incorporate in this novel (that has nothing to do with New Orleans) a hilarious sign I spotted on one of the balconies in the city’s French Quarter—

 

TCHOUPITOULAS IS MY SAFE WORD

 

It wasn’t easy, but I managed to use the phrase … because I had the faith or choose to have the faith, and it seems to me (and this is why I raise it in this review) so do Behrendt and Bloomberg-Rissman, that words can work together in any combination for such is the power of art and poetry. This book, for one, so testifies eloquently … and beautifully.  Perhaps the world would not be in such a dire state if its creatures, too, chose to work together positively in any combination with each other.