Author: Abbey

It is a sad testimony to unlucky scheduling that tonight’s “Mark Webster Reading” is the first reading of any kind that I’ve been able to attend this semester. The reading featured two second-year MFA students, Alex Johnson and Nick Gaudio, who read selections from their work in poetry and fiction respectively. I really enjoyed this reading. Both authors brought their unique personalities to the reading and kept the audience engaged and entertained.

Johnson was introduced by a fellow MFA student who described his poetry as being “totally badass” in that it is “plain spoken and fearless.” I loved this description, because it was both personal and descriptive at the same time, plus it made the whole audience laugh.

Johnson began his reading by thanking several people who have influenced his life and work, then moved on to reading selections from a book, based on Charles Shulz’s “Peanuts” comic, that he is working on. The first poem he read was called “Charlie’s Blues in E Major.” This poem did a good job of establishing Johnson’s style. His poetry is written almost like prose, though more melodic, and his imagery is very direct and specific. His next poem was titled “Remnants,” and contained my favorite line from the reading: “They make the rooms swell with breath.” The imagery used in this line really reveals and embodies the emptiness being described in the poem.  Johnson then recited some poems that he vaguely categorized as being about death with a couple about his father. These poems held Spanish influences, both in the language and imagery, that I didn’t expect. It was a pleasant surprise to hear another element of his poetic style that his first few poems of the evening didn’t exhibit. He then recited a couple poems that he described as being about relationships, a poem dedicated to William Carlos Williams, and ended with a poem entitled “Tailpipe Blues.” Johnson didn’t just read “Tailpipe Blues,” he recited it almost like a song with influences of rap, hip-hop, and blues in his recitation. The way he ended his reading was totally unexpected, at least to me, and it was fun to hear a poet bring music so literally into his poem.

Nick Gaudio also began his reading with thanks (some of his thank-yous were quite humorous) to several people, and ended his acknowledgments by jokingly saying, “Thank you Alex Johnson for reading with me, but fuck you for giving me this cold.” Today was Gaudio’s birthday, so he chose to begin his reading with a couple poems that he wrote in the past. The first was called “How to Sell a Rocketship to a Feminist,” and the second was a prose poem. The bulk of his reading was from a story he began this week called “One Hundred Days of Thunder.” The story was split into “books,” and each of the books was like a vignette of a scene. The books worked together, and several of them picked up at about the same place that the one before had left off, but the breaks seemed to give each scene and interaction more space to play out – they emphasized the importance of what was happening at each moment in the story. In total, Gaudio read nine “books” from “One Hundred Days of Thunder.”

This was an extremely enjoyable reading. Each author presented his work with confidence and punctuated the serious with humor and surprise. Anyone interested can attend the next reading in the “Mark Webster Reading” series on Friday, December 3 at 7:00 pm in the U of M Museum of Art’s Helmut Stern Auditorium.

“No pun intended,” and  “Pardon the pun” are two phrases that most of us have heard several times. Why do we apologize for making puns? There seems to be a general, vague impression that puns are a low and unintelligent type of humor, but I cannot help but disagree with this assessment.  Rather than lending a sense of foolishness to a sentence, a well used pun gives a delightful mental burst of simultaneous complexity and understanding.

Recently, thanks to a friend, I was introduced to the Pillsbury Doughboy’s obituary. This little work of fiction is a pun filled piece of writing that can’t help but put a smile on it’s readers’ faces. If you feel like being amused at the expense of the poor Pillsbury Doughboy’s untimely demise, I encourage you to click on the link above and read his obituary.

Music and poetry are two different art forms that share an undeniable bond. In both of these mediums, some form of story is being told, but, in the best examples of each, never in an obvious or unoriginal way. In poetry, words are used to give some kind of impression to readers. The connotations of the words chosen, the images described, and the sounds of the language all combine to create not only a logical sense of what a poem is saying, but also a general “feeling” of what kind of emotion that poem is trying to convey. In classical instrumental music, sound – it’s tone, volume, and intensity – is used in a similar way as poetry to invoke some kind of impression on listeners. Of course vocal music takes this all a step further, in that it contains both music and lyrics, which can be considered to be a type of poetry.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a few different songs that are a unique hybrid in music and poetry.  These songs take poems that were originally written simply to be read and put them to music.  Here is a short list of a few of these songs that I’ve found and think are particularly interesting:

• “12 Poems of Emily Dickinson” by Aaron Copeland and Emily Dickinson
• “The Bells” by Phil Ochs and Edgar Allen Poe
• “The Lady of Shalott” by Loreena McKennitt and Lord Alfred Tennyson
• “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by Cherish the Ladies and William Butler Yeats

I’m intrigued by this mixing of artistic forms and what it does to both mediums. When the poetry and the music complement each other well, the result is a beautiful and unique reinterpretation of the boundaries between music and poetry. Loreena McKennitt’s “The Lady of Shalott” and Cherish the Ladies’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” both achieve this delicate balance in matching the tone of the music and the poetry. Ochs’ “The Bells” and Copeland’s “12 Poems of Emily Dickinson” however are, in my opinion, less successful at achieving this balance. “The Bells” is done to a kind of happy, countryish tune which fits well with the first two stanzas of the poem, but then at the end of the song, Ochs’ combines a few lines from the last two stanzas, which are much darker and don’t really match with the happy sounding tune. “12 Poems of Emily Dickinson” sounds completely wrong. The vocals are sung in opera style, and the music is mostly nondescript. When I imagine a musical version of Dickinson’s poems, I hear music that is mysterious and playful, like the writing style in many of her poems, and I do not imagine operatic vocals.  I love opera, but Dickinson’s poems just don’t sound natural sung that way.

I can’t help  but wonder why these musicians have chosen to take the work of poets and put it to music. Are they trying to promote good poetry, did they just like the words in the poems they chose, or is there some other reason? Whatever their reasons, I love listening to these poems put to music. Even the ones that make me cringe mentally are enjoyable in the sense that they are an interesting, if somewhat dubiously successful, experiment in the combination of two of my favorite things – music and poetry.  Happy listening!

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays.  At what other time of year can you see a hippie, a whack-a-mole, and the jolly green giant proudly walking down the street together?  I love seeing the clever costume ideas people come up with at Halloween, and all of my favorites have been homemade.

In Target’s Iron Man costume Halloween commercial, which can be watched here, we’re shown a kid in an Iron Man costume his mom made.  The premise is that the costume is much less cool than the store-bought version.  As much as I love Target, I just don’t “get” this ad; I thought the kid’s homemade costume was awesome!  Sure, the push light on his shirt fell off part way through the commercial, but with a little ingenuity, that could easily be fixed.  The homemade costume may not have been the most accurate representation of Iron Man ever, but it was cute, clever, and 100% unique.

I just don’t think you can beat a homemade costume.  Not only does making your own costume force you to be creative in bringing a costume idea into reality, but it also gives you so much more freedom in deciding what you want to be for Halloween.  Anyone can walk into the store and pick up the latest witch’s hat, but when is the last time you saw a whack-a-mole costume hanging on the supermarkets’ shelves.  Most costumes are fun, but homemade, super-creative costumes will always be the best.

Sometimes the best way to be introduced to something new is by accident. I arrived at the Dude early for a meeting today, and on my way to the escalators, with twenty minutes to spare, I walked past the Dude’s gallery. Seeing bright colors and walls full of pictures, I of course had to walk in. “Affinity of Form,” Stanford Lipsey’s exhibit of forty-five digital images is currently on display in the gallery at the Dude, and it is an eye catching mix of nature and architecture juxtaposed against each other to create a unique sense of the similarities between the shapes and colors found in nature and man-made constructions.

The thing that I found most fascinating about Lipsey’s photography was the way he made photographs of the natural world and architecture compliment each other so well. The way he finds similarities and highlights them in his photography is very cleverly done. One image in the gallery that particularly exhibited his eye for natural elements in architecture is entitled “Like an Eagle.” In this photo Lipsey captures an image of the Milwaukee Art Museum, which has large wing-like structures on the sides of the building. In “Like an Eagle,” Lipsey captured one of these structures from the base of the building so it looks like the wing of an eagle. He took a man-made architectural element and highlighted its similarity to natural shapes by capturing the image from a specific angle. In another image, “Spokes of a Tropical Circle,” Lipsey does the opposite – takes a natural object and makes it appear manmade. In this image, Lipsey took a picture of a palm tree from the base, and made the trees canopy look almost like some sort of ceiling. Specifically, it reminded me of a ceiling in a cathedral. Lipsey’s color combinations are very appealing to the eye as well. Some of his images are very bright, while some are lacking in color. The contrasting colors create a striking visual interest in his exhibit.

Lipsey’s “Affinity of Form” exhibit will be open through Tuesday, November 2, 2010 in the gallery in the Duderstadt Center. It’s a beautiful exhibit, and I encourage you to stop in and look around.

The image of Don Quixote charging towards a group of windmills, lance at the ready, for a jousting match is one that most of us are probably familiar with. Russian-born artist, Vladimir Kush, has reimagined this scene in his painting “Fauna in La Mancha.” In this painting, the windmills’ blades have been replaced with butterflies, and Don Quixote’s lance has been exchanged for a butterfly net. On his Facebook page, Kush encourages us to metaphorically follow in Don Quixote’s footsteps, saying in his description of the painting, “Let us follow [Don Quixote’s] noble example and stretch the net of our imaginations in search for beauty!”

Much of Kush’s art relies heavily on metaphor. He has released a book of his work entitled Metaphorical Journey as well as a dvd of music and images of his paintings entitled Metaphorical Voyage. On his Facebook page, Kush has uploaded images of many of his paintings and with each, he has included a description with explanations of the metaphors in his work. These descriptions are fascinating to read; they give insights into Kush’s work that may not be immediately apparent and allow one to truly appreciate the full complexity of his work.

Kush’s paintings are so much more than a collection of pretty images – each painting contains a miniature story told through metaphor and refined through the talent of a brilliant painter. His paintings are like visual poems, each containing an overlying image with layers of meaning and nuance waiting to be discovered.