what it means to be on the board of directors.. especially the chair of the board
it’s not like any other nonprofit structure.. it’s completly organic
in and not based on a model. so, you make it up and the “policy” from
the past are just GUIDELINES because ed is free to evolve as it will.
this is not anarchy…
this is semi-intelligent artists working together to create an
organizational structure that is unique to the entire US. ok. . .
feel free to ponder, as i do…
few points on what it means to be chair of the board by advisory board
member nisa asokan::
the chair represents the collective board of directors, while keeping
personal agenda aside
makes decisions by listening and paying attention to what is happening
.. the chair’s agenda does not take precedence over the boards
facilitate meetings that are communicative in nature, not top down,
but ground up
bring on board members who will support the mission of ed as well as
foster artistic creativity in the community, people who are interested
in working, not pontificating on policy and what “should” happen.
keep eyedrum out of debt.. this is not the same as fundraising..
eyedrum doesn’t need a ton of money.. just enough to stay afloat..
capital is not the goal.. the idea is to survive not consume.. once
the focus shifts from programming to capital, ed gets eaten up by the
big bubble of normalcy and same old same old. of course try to write
grants. get a grant writer on board.
programming comes first. if the programming is on point, the rest ($,
volunteers, members) will happen.
chair encourages individual accountability and responsibility,
encourages proactive actions from all volunteers including the board
of directors… does not assign duties or tasks, ever.
the chair of the board is simply another volunteer w/ the same, one,
vote. it doesn’t make u an AUTHORITY. you don’t have to have a ton of
experience at eyedrum to be board chair.. just have a love and respect
for the space. there is no WE in eyedrum.
keeps an eye out for integrity in programming, never cater to a crowd
or scene, and stays close to the mission of the organization.
the strangest creatures call eyedrum home
I saw one.
I’m mean that way
- priscilla godzilla
listening practice reading
h o t literary incubation
Statistics:
POETRY in various styles:
1 or 2 or maybe 3 depending on your dfinitions: experimental (non-linear,)
1 epic/saga (in cantos)
1 contemporary popular-style
1 performance of contemporary screaming poem by that Canadian guy (wasn’t he from Canada, Jeff)
3 visual poetry–drawings on bar napkins and coaster with words
*
1 young adult novel, approx 2 chapters
1 complete play
LIGHTNING BOLT /`/`/`/`/`
4TH OF JULY sounds out of visualz made of two skin jobs . a wreck a mess that came together crashed perfection in an onslaught. they’ve crafted it into the fleshy center of a nucleus. throbs the audience around them always threatening to burst. Lightning Bolt tore eyedrum a nice sweaty gash that it’d been needing.
so i missed blondie at eyedrum
i dont even know
if blondie herself was there. and
i could easily find out and
that’s kind of the point. i confess to not really caring.
granted, my experience with blondie is limited. geez. what was i doing there.funk night
in the
late
90′s. ive seen her
rub her breasts on heads.
and crush beer cans with
them-heard about her readings. never caught one.
and then what happens
when you dont feel like writing about the Kirkwood Ballerz Club? Here you are on a saturday morning with coffee and other inspirations abound. Via the network, the radiating “don’t look over yr shoulder” set of perspectives, so delicious and oblivious. Examine wires and skin.
That night . Look at these ideas walking around, the weight of thoughts looking to get washed away with the making of other sounds. Shadows and a warm sort of peach lighting comes out of darkness, wrapping performers on the stage. Shifting around through whatever brought you here. Bare potential in plaid shirts and odd and common audible instruments, from simply trance hand-held devices to foot stompin’ acoustic and sweat rockin freeform -whoever you thought you were at the time and maybe with some of your own ideas.
QUHP
quhp image taken by paul thatcher.
eyedrum now hosts Kirkwood ballerz club.
A Live Reading with Zachary Schomburg & Ann Stephenson
Bare naked and unleashed , a high chair with flowers and sagging a sort of crayola tragedy. Alien pale flesh’s length strewn across a space, infinite and without sentient awareness of its blind truth. It just is and does. Unstoppable. Familial carnage and laughter drinks to wisdom and ideas. I lingered into the day fuzzed out and anxious. But not too anxious. It was going to be hosted by Blake Butler. Ann Stephenson, who hosts the reading series at Whitespace, “Ready Set Reading”, was going to read. I had seen her introduce other poets and found her candor and sense of stage presence solid and intriguing. Inadvertently, it was tested tonight. For almost two poems she endured a kind of warehouse awkward night watch security barren lighting – while projecting her mic-less voice to the echo of the room. As adeptly as blunt an error could be assuaged, it was.
A wash and a sigh. Awareness of the film featuring 60 writers reading in 60 different places. In front of churches. Laundromats. Subways. Backyards. Name it…each writer began with a nice pause to consider their image in their environment. Characters with personas came through often, coffees ready.
A guy under a Gothic arch punched my gut for one long mezmorish 45 seconds. A single punch- with a withdrawal like a longing as much as it trailed an emotional version of my intestines.He loomed down with a shadowy and puffy jowl,words verbalized about dark and morbid notions that often have trouble even solidifying just in thought. Very repugnant and in being so, delicious and blunt. I asked Blake his name and he told me but now I’ve forgotten. I promise to update. I will find out.
Then navel-bloated me, my thoughts drift inside and into analysis of recent and current events. processing and contemplating and imagining possible scenarios. from benign to strange behavior that communicated without use of spoken words. Jamie Iredell was out there. I admitted to him in the middle of a conversation that I was filling blank space with words. It later occurred to me that I could have been re-referring to the fact that I brought up the vispo show repeatedly out of reacti0n to a vague conversational anxiety. Or- it cld’ve been further attempting to address the vispo show itself and its curatorial approach, as if I was uber-obliviously pushy about what he didn’t have time to viddie in that bloody moment.
Self-Involved, Self-Indulgent, and demanding a white card on no premise definable. I fumbled with my camera and my keys and my other belongings, randomly losing one or the other in the building. Sitting in the back of the gallery. Something wasn’t right at all. Then it washed in with static. Tingles and the mind’s grey electric fuzz. Rabid sea lynched weedling minnows, razors against cerebellum shriveled labia-like uvulas of self-consciousness, exposed in a humid breeze of knived eyes and time. Alone and whispered about negatively, I saw it all unravel. Mirrored versions of careworn lines became crevasses for crows to fall into. Rooms vibrated against jagged stabbing knuckles and bloody drywall thoughts. Sickness and stinging, he bit back and meandered through so many thoughts about Eyedrum. Washed in phantom counterparts, the vindictive bizzaro world, a palindrome with something beneath it out of synch and screaming. Anxious bright lights and a loudness of nothing all around. Truth and practical things on ends of forks, rotten and unattended to, they finally go in yr mouth and good lord it tastes like shit. The reading had begun, and i slithered over into a seat next to Blake going oh shit they arent mic’d. “i’m going to get a mic.” i think was the upshot. and I had dashed for Mandie to help set up a bloody microphone -and then it was good.
Her words, Ann Stephenson’s were properly fluid in their organized elegance. So keenly beautiful, memory-driven associations of my childhood visits to rural areas came to mind. I sifted across the surface and dove in and out of her reading pattern, feeling what was said as much as literally processing.
I really enjoyed Zach Schomburg. He had himself introduced by what I could only gather had to be his girlfriend. She went for the endearing awkward and its cute and goofy/timid confidence. Honest admiration and soft sales. When Zach took the stage, he continued the same immediacy desire, the sensation that he is being somewhat improvisational as a sort of bare and raw honesty. The intent was to communicate warmly and with a closeness. He even began things by inviting people to be closer to the stage. It worked well into his reading because the pieces he wrote were all so smart and slightly dark and in cases without adornments in their intimate language. Sometimes comfortable enough to risk tipping a hat to sarcasm with strangers. Sometimes sneaky in their manner of engaging, the way he ends poems often utilized a sort of abruptness that forces personal closure in a solving satisfaction way. Smart plays into concepts. “Invisible, Not invisible”, I believe was a title- about brothers with misleading names, sets up and flips the path of thought on itself, he leads the poem with a performative technique that reinforces words that stand well on their own. A playful manner worked its way through very thought out notions turned into poems. I tried to buy his book but the motherfucker sold out pretty quick. There are worse problems to have, for both myself and the poet.
Almost forgot: I dorked out and asked Blake Butler to sign my copy of Scorch Atlas. I’m glad I did because what he wrote was suprisingly inspiring.
(Thanks to Ed Hall, Mandie Turner Mitchell, and Laura Hennighausen for being there for whatever and then some.)
-eggtooth
Zach Schomburg reads a scary satanic poem with i think satan floating over him during it
VISUAL POETRY in small gallery
a message from the curator of the visual poetry show at eyedrum
brought to you in part by:
The eyedrum literary committee
Conclusion: Positioned properly, pretty much anything can be a visual poem.
When I first considered the idea of creating a visual poem, I was unable to approach it. Annoyed, I dismissed it. It always fascinated me,tho. When shown something bearing that title, that specific categorization, I felt left in a lurch. A sort of pulling or nagging. I wanted to come to what I was looking at from between spaces. There was a need to blur notions that I wasn’t even sure unto themselves I could define. I thought perhaps what I looked for came from a place beneath or in the bedding of the very desire to make a mark. The act of creating a visual poem for me became a thing that quickly became functional or not. Very pass/fail. Very cool or very cheesy. The gray area (the liminal space-that maxed-out edge of sensory perception) it suggested was something that it clearly did not allow for in the actual manifestations of a visual poem. The results I found tiresome or obvious tended towards what was consider the obvious answers : Creating visuals with text or creating text with visuals. History shows explorations of this kind of work and while, yes, it is “visual poetry”, there seemed a need to be open to my internal reactions. Regardless of names like concrete or asemic , I sensed that it intended to point to something more fully encompassing, revealing by some unforced release a place of perception that is very fundamental.
Just saying “visual poetry” in itself has implications that begin and end with it. The rest is in the experience, or felt in the moment the work is glanced, or read, or perused. I found myself thinking of how the muscle of the iris defines a pupil, the infinite curiosity of black holes, the old joke about ” losing a buttonhole “, or even the gratification felt in apologizing for something that is not your fault. I also was reminded of a game I used to play where I would go to choose not what music I wanted to hear the most, but the music I wished to hear the least. It is an entirely different process that explores a strange conundrum of honesty in the final decision.
In the end, it seemed the show wanted no title. No big nicely rendered name welcoming guests to the beginning of their experience. The entry had only a strangely crass visual poem to guide viewers in. Ambiguous and crude, the intent- that I am sure failed-was in itself a self-serving act, a gesture to the notion that this experience was entirely yours. You were on your own more than respect would even indicate. I had applied my narrow idea of what classified as appropriate.
In this process of presenting visual poetry, I was reminded of Dubuffet remarking about his process of collecting art made by insane poeple. He said (and im paraphrasing): It makes as much sense to keep all of it as it does to throw it all away.
The acute awareness of process in pulling this show together seemed to run in tandem with the theme of the show itself (as well as the name of the gallery it was shown in). Visual poetry: Where does it begin and where does it end…when does it start being one thing or the other? And why the hell is this question even necessary??? I carried the show on and over into the bathroom, where it can exist in yet another place that publicly questions where an art experience begins. The phases this beast went thru (is now forever going thru) to properly present itself were funny. I can’t say I enjoyed them entirely. The left wall of the show is highly self-referential, ambiguous, and maybe even a bit selfish. It vaguely addresses the process itself, the act of doing an art show. The pieces are technically visual poems, charged with a sort of awareness that is almost awkward.
Work from visual poets all over the world were featured in this exhibition. All of them were respected. Their work in each case shows an ability to process and create in a way that endlessly baffles and intrigues me. I am happy to say that this experience blurred many edges and tapped into much that is at the core of why people create.
-words by eggtooth
das auge der kunst (in dah chit uh kin knee)
Levity. And no obligations to one phase or the other. In between and frisky. A sort of fade into what others say. A texture separating flesh. That sound of a voice. The comfort, but without it.
In the bathroom, the thickness in the air is a brown tinged yellow. Musty and rain rotted seeming. Swelling of wet drywall is implied, the fungal sporadic and creative depths.
(andrew topel’s work is in this picture)
Where the nourishment ferments before being polished into points.
