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Why do we have forms? Perhaps they have their origin in song, or at least the oral tradition. Some common reasons given are to control strong emotion - thus making the message more restrained and powerful. Elegies are often in a form. to generate a pattern of expectation/release - once readers have identified the form they will have certain expectations. The writer can exploit these expections, fulfilling them or raising the tension. because form matches the content - Historically, certain forms are considered appropriate for certain types of poetry - a haiku-like experience is best cast as a haiku Some writers use standard forms as templates - starting points from which to wander. For other writers the standard forms are attractors - if a draft is beginning to acquire some sonnet-like features, the poet will steer the poem in a sonnet direction. Either attitude can lead to poems which are loosely formal. Sonnets, like other forms, have definitions that offer some flexibility - f...

2006 HOME BASE 126 GREENPOINT AVE Curated by Anat Litwin, Peter Dudek & David Gibson Featuring Diane Apostolacus, Marcy Brafman Peter Dudek, Merav Ezer, Robert Grant, Anat Litwin Raffael Lomas, Arik Miranda, Mark Power, Shiri Sandler Emily Silver, Monika Sosnowski, Joshua Strauss Shirley Wegner Part of collaborative curatorial project originated by Anat Litwin focusing on themes of nostgalia, domesticity, and origin. Article Projects organized Room #1 with Diane Apostolacus, Marcy Brafman, Robert Grant, and Mark Power. Rooms 2-6, curated by Anat Litwin, with work by Peter Dudek, Merav Ezer, Anat Litwin, Raffael Lomas, Arik Miranda, Shiri Sandler, Emily Silver, Monika Sosnowski, Joshua Strauss, and Shirley Wegner I would like to ask this question: what is home? Home is everything that’s familiar to us, the many little things that arrange themselves in the order of our daily experience, which define the state of domestic bliss, that color our first encounters with life in the family ...

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 ...