an online Compendium of Musings & Considerations ascribed to various & sundry Associates & Friends of the right & trusty H_NGM_N interactive Poetry journal.

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::10/18/2009 :: #9 & Books ::

H_NGM_N #9 is about 2 weeks away.  Everybody get happy.

Also, we’ll be publishing full-length books next year.  Read about it.

::10/05/2009 :: Standing in a Meadow ::

Nate Pritts via The Incliner blog:

Robert Duncan’s work hit me square in the head but left me with an ache in my heart. The first poem in his book The Opening of the Field is “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” a breathless rush of a poem that, to me, seems spoken directly from the brain without the muddying influence of a mouth. Where Coleridge seemed always to need to mediate his impulses & ideas & big concepts through some kind of physical, objective articulation, Duncan had the bravery (it seemed brave to me when I first read it & still does now) to simply & directly & powerfully assert his thoughts as important enough to carry the poem:

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought […]

Click here to continue reading.

 

:: 9/28/2009 :: Gabrielle Bell is sooo lucky ::

Gabrielle Bell has a blog where she posts up some new stories/strips/sequences she’s working on.  It’s here.

She had some great stuff in H_NGM_N #7, here.

You know you want to know everything about her, so visit her studio at Drawn & Quarterly.

:: 9/21/2009 :: John Dermot Woods on Hayashi ::

Seiichi Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy is melodramatic, but in a very true way. It may be more fair to say that Ichiro and Sachiko, the central characters, are melodramtic, and even maudlin, in the way that they live their young and severe lives. And there is something very accurate and moving in their earnestness; you believe in their tragedy as surely as they do.
 
Hayahsi’s debt to French Nouvelle Vague cinema is obvious, with stark panels of storms and beaches interspersed among the regular marking the conventional pace of comic narrative that tell us the story of Ichiro and Sachiko’s relationship. But to see this trope used in the comics form is stunning. The comics page invites you to linger and stare at these panels; the interruption is more substantial than in film, which pulls you forward automatically. The chorus of interrupting images has as much presence in Red Colored Elegy as the central narrative itself.
 
Hayashi takes advantage of the levels of abstraction that he mastered as a professional animator himself (much like Ichiro). While his simple, cartoonish figures describe the actions of the couple’s story, complex, photographically inspired images punctuate the narrative, tapping into the world of the sublime. (The detailed drawings focus on subjects ranging from broad landscapes in the rain to a moth resting on a light bulb; they highlight the face of a far-off relative who is suffering, as well as the left side of Sachiko’s face, a face portrayed simpler than Mickey Mouse’s in the panels directly before and after.) Hayashi understands how to pace his reader, when to slow them down, when to move them along.
 
This book was hugely influential when it was released in Japan in the early 1970’s (according the jacket copy in Drawn & Quarterly’s English translation), but the English-speaking world had to wait almost thirty years to read it. And despite some attention when D&Q released it last year, the book was largely overlooked. But this is a comic that breaks rules of regularity and consistency, that offers creators license in a way that today’s comics are only beginning to (and rarely). It offers a particular realization of the medium’s potential that we’ve waiting for, and that has, apparently, been waiting for us to notice for three decades.

 

:: 9/17/2009 :: Aaron Tieger on Caddel ::

Aaron Tieger

 

In Quiet Music of Words, a series of conversations with the painter Anthony Flowers, British poet Richard Caddel provides a list of ten favorite poems, “of this moment.” The list includes poems by Basil Bunting, Joseph Ceravolo, John Clare, Lorine Niedecker, Ezra Pound, Christopher Smart, and Gilbert Sorrentino. These influences and resonances are indicative of Ric’s concerns with music, location, and nature; Objectivism runs through the filter of the British pastoral.

Addressing the dual role of poet and publisher, Ric says:

… so much of the best poetry in this country exists on a self-help basis, I think it’s important that participants in such a process do their bit - join in the table-laying and washing up around the meal. I’m generally impatient of people who sit back and wait for it all to happen to them.

It is this integration of life and work that is at the heart of Ric Caddel’s poetry. I should think any small press poet, publisher, or reader can get behind this sentiment, and get into the work itself.

 

Click here to continue reading.

 
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