Saturday, April 23, 2011

Tip of the Knife, Issue 4


shed everyone, the entrance to the burial chamber, hands, feet, falling away from us behind the wall.  the devil eternal is felt  the keys but never seen.  courtyards embraces the dead perfume pool of cold.

top half of the sleepers.  warm flesh, pearl, the glowing orange trees bloom while walking.  extend the moment, we there combining  smoke they float toward us.  henri michaux, peyote, and the hall of bulls. old fable mountain about us, before us.  pavilions.  staircase.  cupid. of the cupid.  coyote in dark water, different veils that open charcoal, ochre, white spaces between words, and light, light with letters.  the illumination of dismemberment.

                                                           does dust have a soul?



__________________________________________________________
DRAW BLOOD OR GO HOME
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Contributors
Carlyle Baker
Mike Basinski
John Barry
Maria Damon
Steve Perkins
John Moore Williams
Spencer Selby
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Carlyle Baker


AtoZetc> 
my work is graphical, textual, impossible.
some of these began as pen or pencil drawings
&were manipulated, altered w/ a paint program.
member at spidertangle group, have appeared recently
at otoliths, newpostliterate, nod etc.


free jazz







 gasoline








N[2] 







 nnbook1







under review






Mike Basinski

Elelaphabets bridge

Meant:
The poetries are juxtaposed fragments composed to conceal and reveal by focus and out of focus musical constellations. There is rhythm first rather than the arrogance of meaning.  They are to be ancient.
Elelaphabets bridge. Primarry, as in wed, milkwed, milkweed, gifts an exposing of the most intimate as in what we wear as definition of the disguised uniVERSE a filaments of fungi as primates, the missing links. So avoid: poetry weaves constellations of letters defined by limiting definitions, e. g., words. This remains in mind as a premise, as Ʌlappears.  Anything with a rigid endpoint extends the control of the writer over the hapless reader. The complete must be rejected. Only the amazing. Disrupt. In aisle 6 someone dropped a jar of spaghetti. In favor of imagination that has a purpose to gift one new to another. Poem is a jar of sperm and eggs waiting for improvisation so the must is derived from the your nets.
























John Barry

My objective in Visual Verbiage is to represent wordplay through the arrangement of objects or paint on a plane or in a sculptural form. I call these arrangements “visual puns,”™ or “pictographic paronomasia.”®


Blue Period. . . . Picasso’s Blue Period spanned 1900 and 1904. During that time he painted essentially monochromatic works in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. My “Blue Period” seizes on one of many meanings of the wordperiod. The period punctuation mark in this piece is blue, followed by a reddish brown colon, a beige semicolon, and a green comma.


Punctuation

What is a painting,
other than a plane
punctuated by
applications of pigments?
To take a case in point,
Picasso.
Seurat, too, had his periods. . .
a case in Pointillism 







 Picture of Dorian Gray (a.k.a. Gray Scale). The title of this work is a musical play on the title of Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray. In music, a major scale is also a mode, the Ionian. The G Major scale, for example has one sharp, F#. The Ionian mode is the notes in that scale from G to G. Dorian mode is that scale’s notes A to A; Phrygian, B to B; Lydian, C to C; Mixolydian, D to D; Aeolean, E to E; Locrian, F# to F#. Specifically, the Dorian mode in the key of G Major is A-B-C-D-E-F#-G-A, as painted in gray on this keyboard.


Wilde Thing

It’s as if
Oscar [Levant] sat
at the keyboard
to play Oscar.
Oscar sits,
yet levant means
“getting up”
in French.
Wild!







 NarchisSchism







 Pentitude. Phil Hellsten, a Danville, CA, artist, was a voluminous reader and note-taker. He used one kind of pen and kept all his expended writing implements. He probably had something in mind to do with them, but he died prematurely at age 57. As a tribute to Phil, I used some of his hundreds of used pens to create this pen-pun paean.


Plethora of Pens

Had there been more pen area,
There could have been pen plethora:

Penumbra
Pentecost, pentangle, pentagram, Pentateuch. . . .
Pent up
Pendulous, pending, penchant, pendulum, pennant, pendant, pendent. . .
Penal, penance, penitent. . . .
Penile
Pension. . .
Penguin
Penna, pennate. . . .
Penury. . . .
Penetrate
Penny

Etcetera







Alphabet Soupçon. Thanks in large part to William the Conqueror, English is half French, lending a certain je ne s’ai quoi to the mother tongue, giving me joie de vivre, a raison d’être for double entendre as I munch on hors d’oeuvre, hors de combat. I could continue in my pensées, but I think you get my idée fixe.

Soupçon is one such parole that has crossed the eau [minéral, de toilette, de vie] and landed in our langue. It means “a slight trace [of a particular taste or flavor].” Although soupçon has no etymological link to soup (soupe), the orthographic similarities enable me to “faire un jeu de mots” (make a pun) that I might flatter myself into thinking is a bon mot.

Behind a grisaille (see “Chiaroscuro”) scrim is faintly visible a trace of the English alphabet.


Alpha Bête Grise

A B C D
E F G
H I J K
L M N O P
Q R S T U V
W X Y Z

Though I’ve said my ABC’s
they are very hard to see






Maria Damon

These x-stitch vispos are tokens, gifts that circulate in an alternative economy. I make them for people who inspire me: friends, colleagues, family and artists.


 Asemic City







 Flaxen







 Kill City-Raw Power: for James Williamson in honor of his rejoining Iggy and the Stooges







 Text, Textile, Exile







Thou Shalt Not






Steve Perkins

MuseumLies







MuseumLust







MuseumSecrets







MuseumSleights







MuseumFailures






John Moore Williams

"Vispo is language engaged in space, writhing and contorting, letting slip a glimpse of its own agony, borne from the speakers'."


 face2







modulations







rorschachabet_manipulated







vida







xit






Spencer Selby


 hub-n







juiced-i







oberla-5







oberla-6







ouvre




Submissions are closed for TOK #5.  Open for TOK #6 on June 18th.

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