BlazeVOX an.online.journal.of.voice
Presenting fine works of poetry, fiction, text art, visual poetry and arresting works of creative non-fiction written by authors from around world
BlazeVOX 2k7 Spring 2007
New eBooks
L E T T E R S
By Michael Gessner
Bone Cages : A Lyric Memoir
By Donora Hillard
Windshields: a chapbook of playlet-poems
By Benjamin Buchholz
Buffalo Focus
Every issue we will try to explore a new Buffalo writer. There is a lot going on here in Buffalo and I think it is important to engage some of that energy and bring you a sample of our home
IntroductionIntroduction
In this issue we seek to avoid answers but rather to ask questions. With a subtle minimalistic approach, this issue of BlazeVOX focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting. The works collected feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections, which make it possible to revise literary history and, even, better, to complement it.
Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies these piece appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, the texts reference post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Many of the works are about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes develop in absurd ways. By creating situations and breaking the passivity of the spectator, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations. These pieces demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. Enjoy!
Rockets! Geoffrey Gatza, editor