Editors’ notes

Welcome to Posit 1!

It is with the greatest pleasure that I present this inaugural issue. From now on, whenever I am asked what kind of writing Posit is looking for, I will point to the work in this volume, which shares a quality I hope to make Posit’s hallmark: its combination of homo- and heterogeneity. Homogeneously excellent, by which I mean both original and accomplished. Yet heterogeneous in form and style. Diverse, as well, in origin, harking from Ottawa, Toronto, Rockhampton, Australia, New York, Kentucky, California, San Antonio, and Olympia, Washington. I believe that re-contextualization gives rise to re-conception – that a luminous energy emerges from the cross-talk sparked by the juxtaposition of voices as divergent as the ones assembled here.

I hope you agree, and that you enjoy the great Michael Boughn’s Whitmanesque “City II.2.iv – Flirtations of light,” singing the promise and dread of urban life in this masterful and tantalizing excerpt; Mary Kasimor’s dazzling sampler of rigorous, lapidary explorations of lyric’s cerebral and aesthetic potential, crafted and turned to frameworks of implication as sharp and graceful as razor-wire lace; the grave entertainment of Amy King’s intellectual joy-ride of verbal pyrotechnics, warning and pleasing us at once, offering treats and lifelines to help “make sense of the contagion/we call today;” Travis and JenMarie MacDonald’s playful yet probing lyric departures from Dr. Who, as grave and light of touch as the Doctor himself, and, like the Tardis, improbably expansive; rob mclennan’s entries from his Glossary of Musical Terms, whose intensity of encapsulation and fragmentation shatters preconceived ideas of word and note, generating an energetic lexicon for new connections; Bernd Sauermann’s compressed, delicate, chiseled blocks of verbal and intellectual alchemy, as quietly shocking as a “revelation making its way like mad current up my arm;” R.L. Swihart’s spare, incantatory, verbal fragments taken up and dropped like stitches connecting our shared experience of the dread unspoken; Rob Talbert’s deceptively plain-spoken, unflinching perspicacity, hiding twist after brilliant turn in plain sight, working the seam between heart and mind, lament and appreciation, elegy and critique; Brad Vogler’s meditations on what cannot, will not, or need not be said, magically drawing our quieted attention to the syntax and typography of stillness itself; Mark Young’s deliciously understated verbal artifacts, turning our expectations of allusion and ekphrasis, realism and surrealism, artifice and nature, art and commerce on their heads via splashes of “Frankendolling,” the “sonnets of Michelangelo,” and other inversions; and finally, Joanna Fuhrman and Toni Simon’s spare, precise, and gravely playful “The Ruler of Rusted Knees,” deftly uniting the verbal and the visual.

Finally, a few appreciations.

To the accomplished and celebrated contributors who so generously entrusted their work to this fledgling publication: my deepest gratitude.

To those contributors who are editors as well: Joanna Fuhrman (Ping Pong), Travis and JenMarie MacDonald (Fact-Simile), rob mclennan (Chaudiere Books, above/ground books,etc.),  Brad Vogler (Opon), and Mark Young (Otoliths): the excellence you bring to both endeavors is my inspiration for this undertaking.

To the talented artist and website designer Nathan Gwirtz: thank you for converting my ideas into (virtual) reality.

And to my friend and collaborator, Arts Editor Melissa Stern, thank you for joining me in this venture!

But perhaps most importantly, to you, dear reader: thank you for visiting Posit 1. I hope you are glad you did.

Prosit!

Susan Lewis

* * * * *

Beginning with this, our inaugural issue, Posit will showcase a variety of visual artists working in all mediums, whose work we find thoughtful, provocative, funny, dangerous, or just plain beautiful. Each issue will bring together galleries by three to six artists whose work presents a vision that is both individually and collectively unique.

I am honored that Susan Lewis has chosen me to accompany her on this voyage, and hope that you will join us from issue to issue.

For Posit 1, it is my pleasure to present the work of three artists whose work shares a sense of elegance and grace. In these galleries, Michael Janis creates sublime narratives of extraordinary depth and dimensionality through the laborious fusing of layer upon layer of laminated glass, bringing precision and construct to a parallel universe where science and reason adhere to their own logic; while Leah Oates’ gentle layers of image and tone build mysterious photographic journeys through countryside and city; a theme taken up by Kyle Gallup’s celebration of the past and possibility of New York, from Coney Island to old theater marquees, alternately documenting a world long-gone and fashioning a fantasy of what it might have been.

Happy viewing!

Melissa Stern

Brad Vogler

Six Poems from my radius, a small stone

:

here device wants for sure(ness)

footed

contain/ed/able

                                     map/ped/able

this                                                       leads                                                       there

a line

where want want(s) goes/                                         to go
go to

this broken rush
          I broken
                  this rushed
              on/over

some called way

:

:

this learning/re
                                    learning

an otter came before others (hedgehog)
                                                                in your liking/looking

an order of sorts

other of place today

haunts

mudded boots
                           the earth does/holds

boot direction
       and desire

depth of such words

:

:

too much to hold/

a want for telling
some uncontained way/s
                                                 /word/s

saying dear is not enough

dear become [ ] (not erasure)

mapped and
                                 uncontained/able

too afraid of/
                                 too quiet of

attempt/s
                                              naming

a vocabulary
sings
                [ ]

:

:

surfac(ing)
 re              ing

urge              shore      ward

shore/coast          shift

ed/ing
                                                              ground
                                                                           /coast     ing
                                                                           re          worded

line:
                                                                           [ ]
                                                                           intricate ship
                                                                           thing well
                                                                           in my heart

:

:

an unsteady mapping
           the inevitable surrounds

it’s easy to consider destination
           a desired pointplace

but [ ]
                      unsteady as water/
                                                      \
sea
                            an endless movement of record

recorded

[ ]       outlined/
                     not empty

name of all the words I’d write

:

:

sounds a closeness/
                                 closing

hold
there are problems

a spelling implies stasis

a voicing fluidity

[ ] name/s/d
    one spells stillness

sounds
                surprised each after and other

time

[ ]

:

Author’s note:

The poems here are from a project called my radius, a small stone. The [ ] appears in Kate Greenstreet’s “case sensitive,” and as she notes is from the correspondence between Zukofsky and Niedecker and indicates “…a signal of deep caring for which words dare not and need not be found.” The italicized “intricate ship / thing well / in my heart,” is from Alice Notley’s “Alice Ordered Me to be Made.”

Brad Vogler’s poems have appeared in places which include: Free Verse, Versal, Barzakh, and Word for/Word, and he has work forthcoming in Volt, Jacket2, Dear Sir, and Bestoned. He builds and maintains the website for Delete Press, and is the editor/web designer of Opon. His first chapbook, “Fascicle 30,” was recently released from Little Red Leaves Textile Series.