Do we think that it is sad and regrettable that such a charming family has to leave their house, but that there is simply nothing to be done?
We do, sadly.
Do we think the memories that a family has of the house they lived in mean nothing?
Of course not.
Do we think that those memories remain in the house, having seeped into the fabric of the building?
We think that probably a bit sentimental.
In the 68th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Michael O’Mahony.
Awoken several times in the night for weeks, I began rising in the dark to write down my dreams. Sometimes it was easier to draw a line instead, to indicate something more of an affect or intensity. Other times the dreams were ripe with narrative. Mostly I was semi-conscious; everything was often a mess. I’d start to write of a moment and find the marks of a previous dream seeping through its surface, the bounds of one dream would bleed into the next. There was often the appearance of memory. I spilled black ink on my sheets, I fell asleep at the curl of an imprecise letter. These are some of the more legible pages.
In the 67th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Maria Sledmere.
While on the surface these might just be abstract poems they are apt and true explorations of my own experience of loss, love, death of relationships, rebirth, objectification, heartbreak and sex work (to name a few). I like to think of them as my own subconscious musing on the concept of family, the idea of marriage, the inevitability of bad luck and the fundamental beauty of the mundane.
The marriage of the books, two of which are my only real physical evidence of a father, excluding my own existence, and the third being a Greek classic bought with my boyfriend, which despite the painfully obvious Freudian undertones also shows the marriage of the two foreign languages together to create something weirder/perhaps more beautiful than themselves.
In the 66th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Kathy Pendrill.
I’m interested in the layers of meaning a found text can yield. Redactions are a way of simultaneously uncovering and creating new meanings. The process also creates a unique tension in that the accidental erasure of the wrong word or phrase cannot be rectified; errors have to be accommodated.
Blackout and the companion piece blue deserted suburbs are redacted from a contemporary thriller. in little scraps of paper is redacted from a lesser-known Victorian novel.
In the 65th edition of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Julie Mellor.
About a year ago I invented a poet called A F Briony who wrote her prose poems on 5″ x 3″ index cards. I wrote some examples, no planning before hand, just write until the card runs out. I did nothing in particular with them, and didn’t plan to. On moving house I rediscovered one of the pieces I had written was still knocking about (the others gone to the bin). The remaining card is clearly caught up with: homogenisation, connection via proximity, loss of difference between people and objects. I cut the card up, rearranged it, folded it, dropped the pieces on the floor – opposing its theme of coming together. Of course, the irregular fragments unavoidably make new associations. Words are made to mean something again. Either/or it’s combining. I particularly like: tence, now disparate / quilt on certain cold.
In the 64th edition of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Oliver Tong.
It is an alphabet I made using a Henry Hanson Steel Alphabet Stamp Set.
I tried to catch the character of the letter in each diagram.
In the 63rd edition of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Susan Connolly.
I discovered these images while “reading” newsprint sources using cello tape, thus collecting ink residue in a kind of analog sampling process. Maybe this evidence confirms the unfathomable world hidden behind the clutter of advertising and news reports with their nakedly cynical purposes. I’m always searching for these alternate spaces; I find them reassuring.
In the 62nd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Jeff Bagato.
The acronyms in the images (paintings) I sent you are all of organisations that have some form of control over us: Property companies (Estate), state surveillance (Look Out), government ministries (Office) and big banks (Bank).
In the 61st edition of The Poem Brut series, new poetry by Tony Rickaby.
The pieces are dedicated, individually, to experimental musicians I admire working in jazz, musique concrete, noise, and avant punk. I was interested, in some ways, in the relationship between abstraction in music and abstraction in painting, and developing the latter in a manner that would draw closer to musicality, explicitly in its relationship to time, using the grammar of comics grid to encourage the reader to animate the transitions from panel to panel (in comics, “closure”). The 4-panel brevity of each piece feels related to the truncated form of an animated GIF (if we’re relying on ‘animation’ as the verb for mediated visual works operating in time), and introduced the mashing together of visual and verbal signifiers, and the HTML engine that produces animated. All the language is drawn from song titles used by the musicians referenced.
In the 60th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Nick Francis Potter.
‘Forever Now’, named after the residency I was involved in at the time of making. Very nearly thrown out with the rubbish by one of the curatorial team (an apt illustration of my residency experience), the poem comments as much on my time as a young writer among more established visual and performance artists as the discussions throughout the residency, which focused on space exploration, cultural value, humanity and reconfiguring the contents of NASA’s 1977 Golden Record for the 21st century.
At the time I made the poem, I was staying at home in Adelaide, Australia–all the while pining to get back to India and my then partner. It’s a subjective view, but I can in retrospect discern this strand too.
In the 59th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Kathryn Hummel.
Contacts | Submissions | Buzzwords | Twitter | Facebook
© 2000-2019 3:AM Magazine | Design & build by Rhys Tranter, Florian Kräutli and STML