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SOME BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS, Clockwise from center: David Gibson, Mary Ann Strandell, Ruth Waldman, Drew Shiflett, Tara Giannini, Mark Power, Karen Marston, Leemour Pelli, and Conrad Vogel Elizabeth Huey: The Cyclothmic Forest , 2005, Courtesy Feigen Contemporary, New York Catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition "Beautiful Dreamer" at SPACES, 2220 Superior Viaduct, Cleveland, Ohio, September 9 to October 23, 2005 The purpose of Beautiful Dreamer is to discover the inherent truths contained in art work that explores the fantastic, the ambiguous, the obscure, and the fanciful in order to gain perspective on agendas of contemporary art production and the contingencies of meaning which they share. This exhibition explores the context of romanticism in the situation of contemporary art, its roots in certain historical tendencies, its cultivation of a genre of inspiration, and the resulting variety of forms which emerge from it. A nearly paradigmatic sensibility serves not only as ...

In old movies, a cut to pounding waves means Sex. I've been looking through Next Generation poetry to see what images represent Ideas. "Show not Tell" seems the order of the day. Emotion-related concepts like (e.g.) "Longing" can be depicted by a stare, and even some rather abstract notions can be illustrated by Escher. But anyone who's played party games like Pictionary or Rapidough will appreciate that some concepts are harder than others to depict, which is why a vocabulary has been developed over millennia to discuss Ideas. Of Stand magazine in about 1997, Andrew Duncan wrote "A phobia about ideas leads to unnatural numbers of Things held to embody virtue, a kind of gift shop at the folk museum poetry". Carlos Williams said "No Ideas but in Things" and wheeled on his Red Wheelbarrow. Since then the stage becomes crowded with props and teaching aids. "Things" have become imbued with significance, overloaded with inexpressib...

One model of personality proposes that a mental chairperson is in control, calling upon specialist sub-modules to fill in the details. An alternative suggested by Dening et al is that the chairperson is just another sub-module - a spokesperson or facililator - the various sub-modules able to initiate events and determine how decisions are to be made. This makes a personality more akin to a society where the status quo might be overturned by mass-revolt, media pressure or terrorism. Poetry (moreso than prose) can be seen to exhibit both traits. Sometimes a presiding unified voice (if not of the poet then at least of a persona) marshals the imagery, but it's been suggested that "poetic effect [is] the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures." [1]. This effect can be achieved by having many secondary meanings and by disrupting the usually foregrounded vehicles of sense (syntax, meaning, etc), making cr...

In this age of short attention spans when anything that doesn't fit onto a single screen is considered tediously protracted, "Flash Fiction" might bring readers back to short prose. But there are many types of short prose, some of which may merit greater attention. Here I'll try to disentangle a few of the types. Categorisation For a while the only category for short prose was "Prose Poem". The Prose Poem has been tried by many French poets. For the most part the pieces are (as Baudelaire described them) "poetic prose, without rhythm and without rhyme. ..". They are sometimes descriptive or anecdotal snapshots of a situation or event. More recently the form has been used in the US. When the genre was out of fashion authors who wanted their short texts published either had to make them fit the expectations of the poetic "prose poem" or, more often, add line-breaks and call their work a poem. Now that the term "Flash" has ...

Why Forms? Several reasons, some merely historical Sound is considered an important component of language and hence of poetry. To some it has a visceral effect. So it's natural to exploit patterns of sound and their interaction with meaning. Much poetry works by expectation/surprise or tension/release - in the plot, but also in the form. A regular form offers more chances to surprise the reader Sound-patterned verse is easier to remember Sound-patterned verse is easier to set to music The use of a form is an allusion to earlier uses of the form. Writers can expressively follow (or react against) the tradition Sounds are a structuring device that can relate distant words or hold semantically unrelated words close together Forms provide a technical challenge for the poet Readers like a mix of familiarity and novelty. Using forms one can give readers their dose of familiarity without having to compromise the content. On the minus side, some say that forms are artificial, interfering w...

Layers in literature Texts can be seen as having layers. From low to high these layers comprise The physical medium - atoms, molecules, chemicals (screen/paper). Note that these can change while level 2 remains the same (or at least irrelevantly different) to the reader, just as chessplayers rarely care whether the pieces are resin or wood. Letters - fonts, color and the quality of the handwriting can matter Units of meaning - words, phrases, sentences or lines. In a piece like Finnegan's Wake the letter->word phase is non-trivial Interpretation - which in turn is multi-level Reading through layers Upper layers can have emergent features absent from lower ones (and vice versa). For example Emotions only exist at higher levels A story full of jokes can be sad Interpretation is not a straightforward progression from lowest to highest level. A higher level interpretation can provoke a re-interpretation of a lower level. Often the lower levels (the choice of font, color...

Here's the first of 4 stanzas from "The Butterfly Farm" by Medbh McGuickian. The film of a butterfly ensures that it is dead: Its silence like the green cocoon of the car-wash, Its passion for water to uncloud The poem is discussed in Ruth Padel's "52 ways of looking at a poem" whose description of McGuickian's poetry makes it sound rather like mine. I can see resemblances in the way that we use unstated analogies to bind images together - I've written Critics wind up their gramophones for icing cakes, lift doors off their hinges to sleigh through slush But I've rather turned away from this style of writing. In poetry it's easy for the meaning of words to ramify. What's harder is selectively amplifying some meanings and muffling others. This is done by the control of context. Take as an example the isolated word "flower". It could mean many things though the reader may need to be provoked into thinking of many. In the context of...