3:AM Magazine

These are scanned photocopies from a poetry notebook I kept back in 2003. During that year I wrote five short poems a day; after a while, to spice things up, I developed several codes. I started writing the poems in code and integrating them into drawings. Although I do have a key for the codes somewhere, I don’t actually know what these poems say anymore–they’re mysteries even to me. Aside from the occasional scratch-out, they’re also completely unedited and potentially full of mistakes or spelling errors. I wasn’t planning on doing anything with them, but then I saw your submission call.

In the 110th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Amee Nassrene Broumand.

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I took each of the photos on my iPhone (other than the dog in Seize which is a ‘sticker’). I then applied filters and effects using my phone’s photo apps. In the case of Seize & Ok (the middle two as inserted, below), I printed the landscape photo, cut it up, and re-photographed it incorporating phone screen shots – visibly incorporating the process in the work.
These two are part of the same exploration and so might go together, but that isn’t essential.
I added text to each of the four, using a text app on my phone.

In the 109th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Tasha Haines.

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Four visual poems titled ‘A Case of Hysteria’ (1&2) ‘The Clinical Picture’ and ‘The First Dream’. Made using pages from Sigmund Freud’s 1905 work, A Case of Hysteria, these pieces form part of a series titled ‘Corrections’ in which books published by historically influential authors are creatively reworked into poems that challenge their theories and observations.

In the 108th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Madelaine Culver.

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These images come from a recent series of found pansemic poems, finding markings (be they human-made or natural) that function or can be read as script. In this context, I am attempting to move the emphasis of asemic writing away from the act of mark-making itself and am instead trying to encourage a shift in perception so that almost anything can be read with the attention we would usually reserve for script. I am thus using ‘Pansemic’ with an emphasis on the ‘pan’ and the underlying assumption that ‘everything is readable’. This particular sequence documents pansemic language superseding and obscuring the conventional text of an information board (written in both English and Afrikaans) and creating poems from the hybrid of these fading languages and the unintentional language that will replace and go beyond it.

In the 107th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by James Kearns.

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I remember having remembered – I want and wanted to attempt to find out how much I remember. What I remember, how I shape that memory, etc. The use of the anaphoric unit ‘I remember’ reduces those memories and the act of having remembered something, into a more comfortable or easier state of processing. All manner of things throw up. Nothing is left consciously shadowed.

Epiphany – I remember wanting to create a diagram explaining it all. It resulted in momentary paralysis in St Mary’s aisle, part of a church in Truro, Cornwall. My friend told me it was an epiphany.

In the 106th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by James Kaffenberger.

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All spring, Lisa, you’ve been picking
at the scabs
of the one thing that went right
in your life. All summer

I’ve been watching your calves as they meet
the backs of your knees that you give me to smooth
with cool Noxzema cream from that
blue expired jar.

By Nicholas Rombes.

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These typewritten poems were initially conceived of as a joke (at the expense of the 20th century?) and should probably be considered as such.

They, unadvisedly, wilfully inherit from the theories of Jiří Kolář and Group 42, though to their credit possess little in the way of Habsburgian nostalgia.

Repeatedly hitting the same key on a typewriter over and over is surprisingly dissatisfying as a means of ‘writing’, and in fact starts to hurt, so the author would not recommend it.

In the 105th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ben Britton.

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I am quilting a Grandma’s Flower Garden out of:

Tight fits. Things that just didn’t sit right. That I didn’t know what to do with (rather than call the boss I stashed it). Impulse buys from the market. Gifted fabrics and excesses. Dye tryouts. With paint stains. Some see-through. Ripped robes.

After I finish working, there are still things left over.

In the 104th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Eeva Rönkä.

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I don’t bake or exercise, so this was the most finicky, screen-free lockdown activity I could find. Each line is made with the same nine pieces of metal letterpress type, which meant printing the same sheet seven times, calculating spaces for each line and colour, and praying with every pull of the handle that the alignment was right on my fussy little Adana press. I’m obsessed with printing anagrams, which seem to draw out material traces of the repetitive, bodily-mechanical process and of the type itself. This lovely paper was rescued from a retired printer’s garage, where it sat and faded unevenly for a few decades. The case of type I smuggled home the day before campus closed is 48pt Westminster.

In the 103rd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by JT Welsch.

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to kneel at the Wehrmacht haunt
and vacate all pretence
to uniformity simplicity eternity

to flagrantly defy the
flaktum alpine cottage volkshalle

but brazenly appropriate
the starkness quaintness weight

Enjoy 3 excerpts from Oscar Mardell‘s Housing Haunted Housing, a series of poems inspired by Brutalist architecture.

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