On the street I thought, “My life is sort of like that smelly guy’s life in that there is something definitely wrong with me but I don’t know how to fix it and people are moving away from me so I am just going to keep moving towards them until I figure out what is wrong, hopefully I get fixed soon.
— from Bad Smelling Person In Nautica by Miles Ross (via muumuuhouse)
(Source: theredbackpack, via muumuuhouse)
twitter feed.
Neon Glittery’s New Chapbook
Glit is about to hit the fan. Prepare yourselves for this onslaught of Neon Glittery material. For on September 1st, 2011 your life will change forever. Bits and pieces of glitter will get stuck in your head. Experimental poetry and design is coming to decorate the inner most workings of your mind. Simply put, let it happen. You can’t fight this glitter based life form. Accept it and watch your life sparkle and shine with the power of billions of pieces of decoration.
Neon Glittery is a rare thing indeed: the first entirely glitter-based life form. Born Elizabeth Ashley Arnold she eventually evolved into a higher life form. For whatever reason, that happens to be glitter held together by strong, artistically inclined neon molecules. Or something, I don’t know, I’m not a scientist, I’m just a blogging sloth. This neon-glittery creature creates some unique art so who am I to speculate about its origins.
The chapbook is called “nEonsense”. Neon has begun to create it with her sweet style. You’ll notice for the teaser image (above) she uses the affectionate phrase “bb” meaning “baby”. What I like about Neon’s work is the affection and attention to aesthetics. Poetry by Neon includes a certain amount of particular spacing or symbols. Obviously for this one she goes for the poem taking up every possible inch to imply space. Usually people ignore those margins. Neon hugs them, showing space to be part of the poem too.
Hype is strong with this one. A basic “this is happening” post on Facebook caught a couple of passers-by, including the head of the infinitely prestigious “Hot-Lit Gossip” blog, a world famous chair, and Steve Roggenbuck. I saw it too and freaked out. Finally the rumors from twitter that Neon sent herself were finally confirmed on the infinitely believable Facebook. Over 98 comments for a single photo (the one you see above you) only confirm this rabid neon-based fan base.
What do you get along with your book of poetry? As Neon’s work is extremely visual, you can pay the $9 for epic bright pages and wordscapes (is wordscapes a word? Do I care if it isn’t?). The bonuses are pretty damn excellent. For $2 extra dollars (that’s $11 for the mathematically challenged poetry fans) you get a bird print and surprise watercolors. Neon often lives off of eating the prints of her bird pictures (see here) so that’s a steal. Her deluxe package includes a mix tape of her music, which is similar to her visual output: bright, shiny, and emotionally charged. You’d be a fool not to get the plush $13 mix tape deal. I live in music though so keep that in mind. Besides, you get your own personalized item. Already some famous net-citizens have ‘liked’ her offering.
You can taste the relevancy. With Neon Glittery, if you like relevancy, try her!
(via lit-gossip-deactivated20110913)
from my facebook feed.
On The Naming Of Things
This is just a discussion on the subjective nature of titles.
Recently, a poem of mine, “Festival Henna Tattoo”, was featured on Internet Poetry. What was featured, exactly, was a photograph of an arm (my arm) lying out on some grass, and on the arm is a henna tattoo that says “ADD ME ON FRIENDSTER” with a little bit of charmingly amateurish calligraphic inflection (I had asked the young Philippino lady who did the tattoo to try and make it “as artsy as possible”).
But so a friend of mine made a comment re: this poem evaluating the “corpse-like quality possessed by the arm” as a visual device of the poem, which I though was really interesting and insightful because when I took the picture I wasn’t even really concerning myself with how the arm looked (in fact, my main concern was somehow trying to hold my other arm (i.e. the one holding the camera) far enough from my person to get the whole tattoo in frame). For me, at least, the photograph was the proverbial Middle Man: it was simply a means to get a picture of my dumb tattoo onto the internet somehow. The poem (i.e. the poem for me) was the arm itself (viz. This is a photograph of a poem).
So, this raised kind of an interesting question; was this friend of mine ‘wrong’? I mean, obviously the easiest response is ‘who cares Dave, it’s a dumb poem, it was reblogged on Tumblr ~2 times and cast into the electronic abyss of Internet Poetry’s archives. Deal with it dot gif.’ But let’s just concern ourselves with the principle of the thing. What I am proposing is simply some options.
For one, we could say that all poetry is strictly subjective, and what is a poem to one person is not a poem to another person, and whatever. But this is somewhat vague and unsatisfying, is it not? I mean, I fully endorse the idea that ‘everything can be a poem’, and pushing the poetic envelope is one of the things that attracts me to the Internet Poetry scene in the first place, but just saying ‘Everything is poetry’ is so abstract and unfathomable that it almost becomes grotesquely mundane. There needs to be some kind of finite definition, right?
Webster’s defines ‘poem’ as “a composition in verse” which is fairly straightforward and neat/tidy. It also offers this, which is, if nothing else, more fun:
‘something suggesting a poem (as in expressiveness, lyricism, or formal grace) <the house we stayed in … was itself a poem — H. J. Laski>’
So, poems need to simply be something that ‘suggests’ a poem. which, for the sake of an argument, I would like to read as ‘some person with some agency must actively suggest that something is a “poem”, thus rendering it a “poem”’. This kind of squares things away a bit. If someone, anyone, actively acknowledges something specific (i.e. not ‘everything’ collectively, but ‘anything’ individually) it ‘becomes’ (for serious lack of a better term) a poem. I know this doesn’t really clear anything up in any significant way, and I feel like the discourse here has way more potential than I’m willing to exert, but I think it’d be better handled by someone smarter than I.
So, By way of conclusion, this friend of mine can’t be wrong, he simply acknowledged a wholly different poem than the one I had intended to create.
-Dave Shaw
I don't know what I liked about rubber, but I did a fair bit. But now that I read your review, I feel like an idiot.
hah well now i feel like an asshole, so we both need to try harder.
do you think maybe you could try to explain what you liked about it? (and i’m asking this totally honestly; i am curious where the appeal is. I did like parts of it, I’m just better at articulating the parts i don’t like.)
no i mean i did, but not in the same way that I like “films”. do you know what i mean? ODDSAC is, at least in my opinion, a kind of epic music video. Or like, the world’s trippiest windows media player visualization.
