We would like to start an Ahadada Editions Drama Series and open our e-chaps up to one acts and performance texts. In addition we’re planning a contest for experimental work starting in 2010.
Our printer put the wrong ISBN number on the cover of Elizabeth Smither’s Horse Playing the Accordion and we’ve finally gotten the mistake fixed. Happy to say that the horse is now swiming in the direction of Ahadada/ West and Small Press Distribution. Expect to hear more about this fine volume in a few more weeks.
Finished watching an inspiring video on YouTube of a “Peternera”: a Flamenco performace that combines dance and an intense, but short, sung lyric accompanied by guitar. The power of this combination–but especially of the singing– almost lifted me from my seat. It also suggested to me possibilities of spoken poetry accompanied by dance. A search under “Peternera, Carlos Saura” will show you exactly what I’m talking about.
Once again, I rarely comment on politics, but after reading the latest New Yorker article on Bill Clinton’s extended, and often bizarre outbursts of non-reasoning or flawed-reasoning anger, I can think of one possible explanation, and that’s the open-heart surgery that the former president endured a few years back. During the process the heart is stopped and the level of oxygen traveling to the brain is often greatly reduced, which can cause subtle shifts in thinking ability and personality from the resulting damage to the cells. From what I understand the results in this regard are something of a crap shoot, with some patients who have gone through the procedure exhibiting little to no damage, and others clearly showing a change after recovery. Of course, it’s obvious that Bill Clinton has aged since he left the White House, and perhaps some of this inability to manage anger is the simple result of a decreased ability to manage stress (not uncommon among A-Type males as they get older); on the other hand, after watching some of the confrontations on television and on the net, and reading of others, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the anger first arises from a lesion or series of lesions buried deep within the neurological components of Bill Clinton’s brain, and the reasons for it are consequently arrived at and applied in an increasingly bizarre and haphazard manner by the former President.
Just watching these people work on YouTube last night made me grin. We love them–especially when they mix up humor with revolution as in “Renegades of Funk.” What fearless energy! Where did those guys go?
We’re pleased to present a fine poem by another expatriate poet who washed up on the shores of Meikai University after gaining a degree from Warren Wilson College (where he studied with Heather McHugh). Adam Halbur hails from La Crosse, Wisconsin and is tasked with taming our fiercest listening students. Though he’s a married man with a child and a resident of Japan for more than a few years, it’s obvious to your humble correspondent that he’s still haunted by the prairies of the American midwest.
Groundhog,
bridegroom of Earth, priest of
the prairie parish, paunchy
monk cloistered in dirt-
packed den, traveling
minister to the ditches
of daisies and black-eyed
Susans, saint of the interstate
sunned in all God’s glory,
martyr of the tractor trailer,
woodchuck and whistlepig,
humor us in this hour of need.
Adam Halbur tells us that he’s working on his first book. We’d love to see it when it’s finished.
With Endgames, Marton Koppany seems to be attempting to step beyond his trademark “poor” or minimalist work, which I think is his source of strength. This is indeed a difficult proposition for originals like M.K. who arrive at a form that seems perfectly to fit what they have to say. Where to go next? Armand Schwerner was in a similar situation with his “Tablets,” I think and he eventually arrived at a complicated, totally self-self-self-conscious articulation for his series that–I have to admit–disenchanted me. Marton also takes one or two steps in that direction with his “Graffiti 1-12″ series in which he riffs on his trademark empty frames and cryptic statements, by adding seemingly personal, perhaps even autobiographical, annotations. And this is the point: to anyone who knows the previous work, “Graffiti” comes across as a step toward the self-involved, the more easily indentifiable, even the cute. The genuine shock, the metaphysical humor, of the older work is replaced here with a commentary on the autobiographical narrative that we’ve encountered before.
Finally–a note on my own publishing philosophy for Ahadada books. In 2003 I published a fine little collection of Marton Koppany’s work, which is still available through SPD. I do believe that this book presents some of the best and most brilliant of Marton’s work. We worked hard to produce and promote this book and we find that we still have quite a few copies left. Although I would love to continue to publish Marton Koppany’s work, which I genuinely admire, I’ve decided to forego the pleasure until we’ve sold all we have of Marton’s books. That policy will apply across the board to most of our authors. So if my friend Marton Koppany would like to help us move some of our stock of his books we’d love to see another manuscript. It’s just business.
The kind folks from Otoliths sent me a copy of Endgames by my friend Marton Koppany. In this print on demand volume, graced with two solid paragraphs of observations from Karl Young on the back, Marton collects some of his color work. Though, as Young observes, color has the capacity to communicate more information, it also complicates the field aesthetically when one is creating. The old questions of which color goes best with which, which color compliments the piece and which doesn’t, etc., come in to play. The problem is further complicated when color matching is not carefully monitored at the level of image and ink processing and ultimately book production. Some of the pieces in this 76 page book suffer from what appear to be Marton’s own limitations in his understanding of what makes good graphic art (”Colon No. 2,” for instance) , while most highlight the short-comings of Lulu’s production standards. One of Marton’s best color works, “Forecast,”–with its balance of green, yellow, white and gray,–is simply not served well by the printer. “Poem,” “Click Poem,” and others that rely on subtle contrasts within the same color field clearly do not work because the printing process was not up to the task. Of course, better production standards would have meant a more expensive book, both in its initial setting up and in its ultimate price, but still one hopes that the best of these creations will find a better vehicle in the future. Young also mentions that Marton leaves some of his black and white austerity behind with the poems in this volume, but it is when he returns to austere black and white that he gives us some of the most successful pieces in the book. “Reverberations (Endgame No. 1)” is brilliant in its minimalism and its subtle grays. And there are others. I’ll have more to say about Endgames in a future posting.
A few years back Marton was kind enough to translate two of my poems into Hungarian for his “Institute of Broken and Reduced Languages.” These found their way to Karl Young’s wonderful “Light and Dust” site, for which I thank Marton and Karl. Earlier this morning I was delighted to find that Ville-Juhani had translated these two poems from Hungarian into Finnish and had posted them on this blog “Susi rajolla-merkkeja mielesta & maailmasta” for which I thank Marton, Karl and Mr. Ville-Juhani!
I’m happy to report that my late afternoon reading of the Earl of Rochester’s “Upon Nothing” was interrupted by a phone call from a truly unique poet and thinker. I’ve commented on David Jaffin’s work on this blog before, and now I’m happy to say that perhaps we’ll be adding a volume of this “post-modern metaphysical” to our catalogue in the near future. The longer I spoke with Jaffin the more I wished that he was a neighbor here in Shin-Urayasu and not a resident of far-off Germany. We still have a tape of David reading his work, and I hope to have it up as part of Radio Ahadada sometime soon.
Blog 