Tag Archives: glass

Laura Moriarty

Posted on by

from rapt glass (detail)

Which Walk 0

re:assemblance

“Take a walk”
—Yoko Ono, WALK PIECE

and look out
as the broken world

breaks again
drawn to bits (I am)

deranged           iota              jot

flakes                 of fixed

whatnot

mechanisms meant
to broach when and where

to find or feel
a finite set with infinite

limitations as when
feast, fetish, or metonymic

gesture connects a personal
system with reference

to civic locality as
streets’ vocal

versions of themselves,
when what is heard

is seen, gleaned,
recollected, and erected,

luck, self-
defined, becomes us,

bent into position feeling to find

beads           balls           brass           steel

nailed                      screwed

scaled up                          run out

resurrected, inwardly

directed to
arrange and play
as we (rapt)
are carried off,

untroubled by resemblance,
guiding principle, or epistemic

framework, though having those,
while making these directed

acts of storage strutted,
glutted, taken up, as I/we

reaching back
to owned devices,

feel free, imaginary,
and tactile as the shudder

of daily acquisition,
domestic, timebound,

vexed by practitioners,
whose practice

like ours,
a consummation,

is thrown up and out
as the poison

presence of each entrance
of nonlife into life

twists            loops                  moves

circles         spits         and splits

giving                                       into

walking while

compromised by things
aging in place

as matter hardened to its
constituents is what

we find when we amass and
detach the past of an object
from its fate creating
an elegy for each fact,

used or not, whose provenance,
always one of loss,

rejection, and subsequent
stooping to find (oneself) with

items grounded by chance, labor
or the erasure of same

becomes stuff subject
to words like reality

adding up
to what we want:

an engine of past time,
creation, and abstraction

whose apparatus
reflects the precision of

wrapped          glass

collapsed         threading         through

the fastness

of everything as everything
found or findable

resolves into action

 

from rapt glass

 

Which Walk 5

the maid real

“Old Woman, your eye searches the field like a scythe!”
—Robert Duncan, “The Structure of Rime VI”

like a sigh, permitted or not,
these visits to Mira Vista

Field            fair            farm            (or look see

place)            which            with

walking               later

renounces            renunciation

the better to incantate as
phrase after praise betrays
the visible day to the visible

night today singing what can you say,
moment by movement, or see

worried, wise, amazed—
heard, herded, heralded, crazed

by this old epithet, rule, and designation

of hags for which read old
women whose presence
absent to some,

purely physical to others, despite being where
and what they/I, are required to be, go, say,

and know            noting            how

dreamed of            mental            meeting

protocols in the form of songs and knowledge
combine the known with the read, said,
intoned, and suggested,

along with the berries there, also
red, thorns with which to be bled,
leave one stepping out attired

with gown, crown, and scythe
clearing what has died into

what is born by the poem of the mind
including words not me but mine

while I, menaced by remembered threats,
summon my ways and those of my actual

mother, Mae Belle Reynolds,
to push in and back out while
hatted, masked, cloaked, fraught

being with her (withered) wrought

where            belief            relief

knowing            & going            are brought

along with these steps at the feet of which lay

we, reconfigured into us, who
write what is read, said, and

displayed, resolving the “made place”
into the made real day

 

from rapt glass (sketch)

Which Walk 6

problem of reversible time

“. . . which am I?”
—Rumi, The Essential Rumi

who (exigene)
portends to redeem

exigencies of a woman
and man in a van when

our names meant light, knight, air, and ones who fly (are flown) when you,
Sufi, carpenter, botanist, and me, writer, waitress, artist of cards and
fortunes, later lose our clothes on the way to losing our minds and hearts
(mine) in a known place where written as played

a woman much withered, a maid
a maiden with a wand a handsome
maid, a white wand with a peacock of
solid gold on its tip

(we) submit
to the reversible fortunes

of muscle memory and the
illusive person in the poem

including types of knowing as when

The Land That Time Forgot
or trip into symbolic space

whose            trace            discloses

beauty            at intervals            as            (not)

lucid            eyes

of mind remain blind to the
inevitable arrangement’s

transformation of attitude,
and altitude calculable only from

the surface or search image
of a specific person

whose comparative anatomy
comes into play when the algorithm

leads us farther into the past—
but if this is the solution

please explain the bones
in the ghost story of the other
lover or the card games there.

Bring in Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale

and other extinction events.
It was crazy for anyone to try

to cross the Sierras in October.
What happens next as we

decohere among the hominins (despite
the abstraction, attraction, and object lessons)

is anybody’s guess.

 

untitled

Which Walk 7

what and who

A dark day finds
heart’s head hatted

and masked with crime
being read into its head

as descent into the local hell

means taking in the ashy
remains of everything with

each breath a reckoning, each step
the mistake of not sheltering in place

while            elsewhere            breath

taken            fills

the same head with fresh despair
of the deadly situation where seconds

become minutes then
centuries where the dead lay
with vast fires closing in

but not here or not yet as
trying for a semblance

of thought            as active            leveraged

expression            of fair

weather’s            familiar

talk while reassembling the same
everything in head’s heart

of later air clear for now

though nothing is better
except if it is when

kinds of crime rhyme
what is wrong (but present)

with what (and who) are gone

 

untitled

symmetry
  

Are there two lines because there are two feet, hands, eyes? Maybe. This walking and making is a process, a procession. When she called an earlier book Symmetry she meant to dismantle this concept with each gesture. Is this that? she wonders, but suspects it is not—as, falling endlessly forward, she moves through space like a sound or a bird. A need for trust occurs. Balance. Emptiness. You can’t think about every step, but you should, she worries. Situational awareness. A military term. A thing is exact. Or exactly not. Intentional. Intended. Once her project was something like courtly love but now she feels betrothed to her work.

The woman stares at herself in the mirror. She makes self-portraits less because of an interest in self than because she is her only model. She enjoys drawing her wrinkles because they add texture. Me and not me, she is simply a thoughtful arrangement of phrases, lines, and planes—scribbled hair.

—from Which Walks

Laura Moriarty was born in St. Paul, MN, and grew up in Cape Cod and Northern California. She attended the University of California at Berkeley. She was the Director of the American Poetry Archives at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University for many years. She has taught at Naropa University and Mills College. She was Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution for two decades. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature in 1998, and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. Her most recent book is Personal Volcano from Nightboat. Which Walks is forthcoming from Nightboat. She lives in Richmond, CA.

Editors’ notes

Posted on by

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

Michael Janis

Posted on by

Artist Statement

My work, like the world and people that inhabit it, is multifaceted. Social, political, and introspective psychological dramas are played out within layers of glass. In the process of creating, I learn more about myself, and search for insight into what motivated those around me.

Delving into the psyche and physical appearance of the subject being represented, I examine them up close, and then expose them for everyone to examine for themselves. There is the facet that is voyeuristic. I intrude and invite the viewer to intrude as well. I peek behind closed doors, into the hidden lives and private moments of my subjects.

My work is figurative. It is accessible and facilitates communication. It’s an understandable language, and like dance, a narrative is created without words. Anatomical distortions emerge at the earliest stages in my glass process, separating the figures from the photographic ideal. The abstraction allows me to get up close and create my own reality. Without the distractions of perfect anatomy, I explore the figure, shape and light on my own terms. The distortions I apply to the figures are recognizable, but more familiar in a different context.

The stories told in the infinite number of faces, gestures, and bodies I see around me are inspiring and provide me with an endless supply of source material to work from. Through my work I strive to understand and create a dialogue with the world around me. I present to the viewer my interpretations of what I see and understand as truthful.

After a 20 year career as an architect in the United States and Australia, Michael Janis returned to the US with a focus on working with glass. In 2005, Janis became the Co-Director of the Washington Glass School in Washington, D.C. Janis has received numerous awards for his artwork, including the Florida Art Glass Alliance’s Emerging Artist Award 2009, the Bay Area Glass Institute’s 2010 Saxe Fellowship and he was named a “Rising Star” at Wheaton Arts 2011. His glass artwork was twice featured in Corning Museum of Glass’ publication of international glass design, “New Glass Review.” The Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts mounted a solo show of Janis’ glass panels and sculpture in 2011. His artwork is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2012, Janis went to England’s University of Sunderland and taught at the UK’s National Glass Centre, where he became an Artist-in-Residence at the Institute for International Research in Glass (IIRG).

Recently, American Craft Magazine featured an extensive profile on Janis’ work in their April/May 2013 issue. In the following issue (June/July), the magazine interviewed him on the process his studio undertook to create the cast glass panels for the U.S. Library of Congress’ new entry doors.

The James Renwick Alliance has named him Distinguished Glass Artist for 2013/2014, and he will be having a presentation and talk about his work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in May 2014.