BlazeVOX21 Spring 2021

IntroductionIntroduction

Hello and welcome to the Spring 2021 issue of BlazeVOX! Presenting fine works of poetry, fiction, text art, visual poetry and arresting works of creative non-fiction written by authors from around world. Do have a look through the links below or browse through the whole issue in our Scribd embedded PDF, which you can download for free and take it with you anywhere on any device. Hurray!

In this issue we seek to avoid answers but rather to ask questions. With a subtle minimalistic approach, this issue of BlazeVOX focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting. The works collected feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections, which make it possible to revise literary history and, even, better, to complement it.

Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies these piece appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, the texts reference post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.

Many of the works are about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes develop in absurd ways. By creating situations and breaking the passivity of the spectator, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations. These pieces demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. Enjoy!

BlazeVOX21 Spring 21 by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd

New & Forthcoming from BlazeVOX books

SMEAR by Andrew Brenza

Orchid Tierney, author of Ocean Plastic: Andrew Brenza is an inventive visual architect of the English language. His collection Smearbrings to the fore a literal and figurative smudging of classification and sharply smashes the received assumptions of the naturalness of American political rhetoric. Whether it is in the manipulations of inaugural presidential speeches or the anagrammatic torqueing of Trumpian tweets, these visual poems mobilize the materiality of linguistic resistance and wit. I love the transmutability of his poetic language and the entrancing forms he generates. This collection is a bold delight!

The Thirteenth Studebaker by Robert Wexelblatt

Wexelblatt’s book is laden with wit, with wry observations, gentle sarcasm, and wicked ironies. It always has just enough laughter to keep its characters (and the reader) from spinning off into the abysses.  Fred Marchant, review of Life in the Temperate Zone in Harvard Book Review

Poetic Realism by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Poetic Realism by Rachel Blau DuPlessis is the fourth episode of the on-going work Traces, with Days. It is both a committed poetry looking out at the world in witness, resistance, and with a fervent vow to find “incantatory information” in an account of what is seen, felt, and thought. This is a responsive book, mixing the tiny person and the cosmos, entering a dialogue about the body politic, presenting commentary with a dissolve into uncertainty. She mixes the starkness of disaster with strange dreams of being and loss, and she negotiates inside the real with the tools of irreverence–and poetry. The book, deploying some odd genres, reveals DuPlessis’s  characteristically serious wit and the challenge of her mix: “poetic realism.”

Robert Creeley on the Poet’s Work in conversation with and photographs by Bruce Jackson

This is an edited transcript of a conversation about the work poets do that Robert Creeley and Bruce Jackson held in Robert Creeley’s home—a converted firehouse in Buffalo’s Black Rock district— the morning of September 6, 2001. One of Bob’s favorite words was “company.” He was always talking about being part of a company—a company of family, of poets, of artists, of deep connections going anywhere in the world, of this group here on this night around this table, eating and drinking and talking, always talking.

Derrida’s In/Voice by Chris Tysh

There is immense talent here — Chris Tysh just gets better and better. With multiple registers and citational energy, the archive is exploded and transformed: we find references to poetry, film, revolution, politics, and philosophy, all effortlessly braided and made dynamic as they speak to one another. With perfectly pitched music, and impeccable form, Derrida’s In/Voice discloses and complicates the knotted conversation between hard and soft power. It’s an awesome book. — Peter Gizzi

POEMS: now and then by Edric Mesmer

These poems fall all too neatly into two sections, the eponymous “now” and “then.” I feel the “now” poems, all from the early months of 2020, share a returning-to with the “then” poems, some of which were written as long as 20 years ago. That they have come together so squarely—so circularly—(at least to me), speaks to a sympathy between then and now. I hope that the reader will also find this to be true.

—Edric Mesmer, May 2020

How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays by Gloria Frym

In this wonderful assemblage of essays, Gloria Frym liberates the act of reading from the confines of the page. She leads us into the open air where the personal and the public intersect and create a new avenue of possibilities: the book in the hand, the world outside your window. Especially memorable are the probing essays on Jean Toomer and Lorine Niedecker, and her homage to David Meltzer. How Proust Ruined My Life is a timeless book and deserves a wide audience. –Lewis Warsh

For Love (the order of the echoes) by Jared Schickling

How refreshing and enlightening to read a poet who is close reading another poet through the art of poetry (as opposed to commentary, its inverse). There is no greater homage to a great teacher than to take what he held most dear—assonance, sibilance, language, and love—and elevate it into a new consciousness: one that dives deeply into a great poet’s failures in order to reverberate his echoing prosody into new form. Like Creeley—who could turn an angel on a pin by writing tiny poems, or expand a field into a universe by drawing out long ones—Schickling’s poems eschew easy images by making metaphors move the mind into a composted groundlessness. Here, the particulars of daily life are the rich material which Schickling’s poems order into such eloquent echoes. —Kristin Prevallet

Two Dreams of the Afterlife by Kelly Bancroft

The poems in Kelly Bancroft’s Two Dreams of the Afterlife are wild and beautiful as they create worlds from the ordinary made strange, and from the strange made predictable. The materials are everyday objects and events, especially our unavoidable deep connection to figures of popular culture (the Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, Hal the computer, and John Boy Walton). —Maggie Anderson

Endless Spectator by The Screens Suite

Is it such an impossible idea to ascribe placehood to a typographic symbol? In the same way that half a dozen “picture elements” (aka “pixels”) convened at specific coordinates on a screen can indicate the end of a sequence of words in order to afford the reader’s mind a moment to digest what it just read, why can’t the period act as a linguistic watering hole for parched eyeballs?