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

BlazeVOX14 Fall 2014

Hello and welcome to the Fall issue of BlazeVOX 14. Presenting fine works of poetry, fiction, text art, visual poetry and arresting works of creative non-fiction written by authors from around world. Also presented are previews of our newly released books of poetry and fiction. Do have a look through the links below or browse through the whole issue in our Scribd embedded PDF, which you can download for free and take it with you anywhere on any device. Hurray!

>Fall Matters:

Health Update: In case you did not know I recently had a major health scare. I developed a severe case of pneumonia in the late spring. In the summer it bloomed into a full lung abscess, which hospitalized me for a short while. I have been recovering nicely at home and even though I am still being treated by very capable doctors, I will be better in about two or three months. However, do know that I am back to work and it has been a real pleasure to be working on this issue of BlazeVOX. I think you will enjoy it too. So hurray!

Thanksgiving Menu-Poem: Dedicated to You, the reader of BlazeVOX Beginning in 2002 with a Menu-Poem to honor Charles Bernstein, I have continued this series of texts using a menu as the basis to honor prominent poets. Being a trained professional chef I wanted to blend my love of food and poetry into a book-length work that would fit within the ideas of Thanksgiving. In a feast of words, I wanted to honor poets who have meant many things to many readers in a form that could be presented to everyone. Over the years we have honored many fine poets, but last year we had a bit of a fiasco, a wonderful poet declined the Menu-Poem for very fine reasons. So to pick things back up, we decided it was best to dedicate this poem to you, the reader, and bring you in on all the fun. Hurray! I would also like to take this opportunity, on a day of giving thanks, to say a special thank you to everyone who was kind enough to be there for me during this tumultuous year. The outpouring of support was something that made my wife Donna and I feel just grand. So to say ‘Hurray, I am still alive’ and to say thank you all, this Menu-Poem is dedicated to you. So save the date, I’ll be sure to send you a link to this year’s menu-poem. But also have a look at our previous year’s menu-poems in case you are eager to see what this is all about.

Rockets! Geoffrey Gatza, editor

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

Previous

BlazeVOX15 Spring 2015
Next

BlazeVOX14 Spring 2014