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

BlazeVOX11 Winter 2011

Welcome to Winter! The snow is falling, finally, now in Buffalo. It is a beautiful scene of December. And so with the late date of publishing this issue, we are titling our Late Fall issue the more apt, Winter 2011. It has been a wonderful year and so to cap it off, it is with great honor and pleasure we present great selections from writers from around America and the world. As the snow falls we writers persist, keep on working our poetry and our stories and continue to read our poems and it is all rather exciting. There is a lot of work out there for poetry and in this issue we present a glimmering sliver of that shining potential. So get ready we have 60 authors from around the globe, including fifty-three poets and seven prose pieces. So hurray! Get Reading

Also in BlazeVOX [books] news:

On November 10th 2011 we held an extravagant BlazeVOX [books] event at a new large art gallery in Buffalo, The Burchfield Penny. We were unable to record the reading, so we decided to put together a small packet that captured the fun of the whole event. Featuring the work of Michael Basinski, Wade Stevenson, Robin Brox, Geoffrey Gatza and Michael Kelleher. Portrait Drawings by artist Peter Fowler, Self Portraits of Poets and Book People (As a fund raising idea, we asked local and international poets and book people to send us a self-portrait) We received work from all around North America, including National Book Award winner Keith Waldrop and the first Canadian Poet Laureate, George Bowering. In total we received 30 pieces of artwork, and we sold a great deal of it at the show. We also have an online shop where we will have for sale, the remaining pieces. So if you want to help out the press while taking home a self-portrait of a favorite poet, here is your chance!

Again, thank you for all of your kind support and allowing BlazeVOX [books] to continue on! Also, this years Thanksgiving Menu-Poem, a book length poetry dinner, now in it's tenth year, celebrates Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. Do stop on by the page to share in a moment of poetry.

BlazeVOX @ Burchfield Penney 2011

Thanksgiving Menu Poem

Rockets, Geoffrey

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

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BlazeVOX @ Burchfield Penney 2011