Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
synaesthetic
Welcome to the abbreviated, electronic version of SYNAESTHETIC,
a Journal of Poetry, Prose and Media Arts.
Issue One, "Found Forms, Found Texts", is 80 pages, 8 1/2 x 11, on 60lb.
book natural, with 10 pt. glossy cover and award-winning B&W photography.
The division of literature into distinct types has not served poetry well;
the common assumption that poetry is difficult stems directly from the
conclusion that it is different. The materials in SYNAESTHETIC are based on
such unlikely sources as travel, fashion, sports and other news writing,
science texts, cookbooks, diaries, dictionaries, encyclopedia, radio
broadcasts, or are in media forms: letters, postcads, instructions, flyers,
reports, and so on. This is poetry that represents our shared knowledge,
that documents and informs. We also publish artwork that illustrates the
cutting edge between media and academic fields. Our mission is to extend
the audience for poetry, to serve the community of artists as a forum for
the discussion of process and form.
Subscriptions are $13 for two issues; $7 for single issue.
Make checks payable to Alex Cigale.
Address submissions, inquiries, subscription requests, and donations to:
SYNAESTHETIC, 178-10 Wexford Terrace, Apt. 3D, Jamaica, NY 11432.
SYNAESTHETIC is currently accepting poetry, prose, translations, essays,
interviews, and art submissions for Issue Three, "True Stories".
"Is there anything whereof it may be said, See this is new? It hath been
already of old time, which was before us." - Ecclesiastes.
EDITOR'S NOTE
All poetry is found poetry; some poems are more found than others.
The enigmatic title of "India Widow's Death at...", for example, consists
simply of the first seven syllables of a New York Times headline from an
article on the Hindu custom of sati, about the ritual self-immolation of a
widow on her husband's funeral pyre.
Found art has been with us since Marcel Duchamp scandalized
aesthetisticians by attempting to exhibit in New York a porcelain urinal
titled Fountain (1917). Duchamp's Readymade objects, whether framed or not,
made the act of selection itself an artistic virtue. His recourse to
mechanical reproduction of his own works also brought into question the
privileged position of "uniqueness" and "originality" as essential
attributes of western art. The poet Jerome Rothenberg, in his anthology of
experimental poetry, Revolution of the Word, described Duchamp's method as a
"withdrawal from art."
One may point to an earlier influence and argue that our arrival at
found art proceeds logically from Aristotle's proposition in Poetics, that
the object of art is an imitation of life. In Eastern thought, art and life
were more intimately linked; the distinction between subject and object was
recognized not at all. Daily rituals like the tea ceremony, flower
arranging, the cultivation of bonsai trees and rock gardens, as well as the
practice of the martial arts (karate, archery, etc.), were all forms of
artistic expression. Similarly, African and "primitive" art was but an
extension of ritual and function. In part as a product of the 20th century
synthesis of Eastern, Western and "primitive" thought, a concern with the
thing itself has become preeminent in contemporary visual and literary
efforts.
If no less an authority than T.S. Eliot avered, a full half-century
ago, "immature poets imitate, mature poets steal," why is it that we poets
are the last to feel the unremitting obligation to be "original" that Harold
Bloom, in his book of the same title, calls "the anxiety of influence"? To
answer this question is to resolve a key creative conflict, the issue of
"authority," literally the sense of being in full possession of one's
material that is the mark of a mature artist.
And yet a nagging doubt persists: "But you didn't write this! And, i
anyone could have written it, there is nothing 'artistic' about the method."
I can only conclude with the following set of observations. The selection
of material is of itself a valid, and creative, expression of personal
aesthetics. In our technological, informational age an author is neither
creator nor proprietor of the information contained (no more so than in the
earliest literatures arising from the oral tradition.) Who "owns" or has a
right to exploit, a story or event, a sequence of words, or the words
themselves? There is, for all practical purposes, an infinite number of
poems or fictions that can result from a reconstituted text or a tale
retold. Identical material used in an entirely different context
constitutes a new identity. Finally, found poems are essentially voice
poems; it is narrative that serves to unify the disjointed syntax, images,
and voices of the original text. The narrative voice is, of course, the
empathic voice of the writer.
Found poetry as a format for a literary journal interested me for a
number of reasons. First, the incorporation of source material represents a
body of shared knowledge and carries with it a potential to inform. My
instinct tells me that this may offer an opportunity to extend poetry to an
audience it would not otherwise reach. Conversely, the found represents an
essential part of the creative process, the struggle to make personal the
public and the received. The possibility that Synaesthetic may serve the
community of artists as a forum for an ongoing discussion of process and
form is truly exhilarating.
Contemporary art owes so much to the aesthetics of synthesis that
perhaps the most apt manifesto for a modern aesthetic, to restate Marx's
paraphrase of the Hegelian dialectic, "All art is found art! Artists of the
world unite! We have nothing to lose but our conceptual chains."
Editor: Alex Cigale
Art Director: Hugh Gilmore
Cover: "Show Us" by Hugh Gilmore
Back cover: "House" by Nadya Nilin
GEORGIA O'KEEFE by Lyn Lifshin
So I said to myself
I'll paint what
I see what
the flower is
to me but
I'll paint it
big they will
be surprised into
taking time to
look at its
enormous petals
it will make
even busy New Yorkers
take time to see
what I see
It was as if my
mind made up shapes
sometimes I know
where they come from
but often, I donUt
The bones let me
dream bones but
it never occurs to
me they have anything
to do with death
WOLF by John Gilgun
for Barry Lopez
The ghost of the wolf moves among odors
through the interior of the supermarket.
He scent-marks a can of Folger's coffee,
then trots to the frozen foods.
Suddenly he stops in mid-stride.
His ears are rammed forward,
and he pounces like a cat,
bringing down
a package of Stouffer's Swedish Meatballs
in gravy with parsley noodles.
The ghost of the wolf
has evolved for this task.
He moves on through my neighborhood
where dozens of his kind where murdered
a century ago.
His complex brain absorbs
lawn mowers, charcoal briquettes, Toyotas
and small yapping dogs he holds beneath contempt.
He howls for his brothers and sisters.
His reply is Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto
played by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra
with Vladimir Ashkenazy on piano.
I turn down the volume
and raise my window.
He leaps in at me,
his eyes jade-cold,
his body jeweled with dew.
DRAWN BUT NOT SKINNED; A Cento by Jeff McMillian
Tonight the mean winds of November
have begun to blow Indian Summer away,
pointing you north and north against your will.
North is easy. North is never love.
Without a shield of hills, a barricade of elms,
one resorts to magic. It is called breaking out
of the ground and it is done by force.
On the wind like something out of Leviticus,
a bat quivers across the porcelain of evening,
deep horror of eyes and of wings;
more come in watery flocks,
each one woven to the other like bubbles
in a frozen pond.
The dance winds through the windless woods.
Fires started by lightning make up the telling
of men: we were the fine shavings of sheepskin
mercy and love were not.
We for whom grief is so often the source
of our spirit's growth, whose veins Death
the gardener twists into a different pattern,
wonder, "Out of such numbers how will I be noticed?"
Whether caring accomplishes anything is irrelevant.
Every angel is terrifying.
It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life,
and this is the key to it all. There is a wisdom
that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
It is all you have and all your father had
and all your brothers. We live in
an old chaos of the sun, one sun,
one journey here and everywhere,
of that wide water, inescapable.
At evening the diminishing of the dance,
no, not night but death, makes constant cry:
Disturb even a seed sleeping and you harvest stones.
It is called breaking out of the ground and
it is done by force.
PASTICHE; CLUB QUAKE by Edward A. Dougherty
There's no guarantee the predictions
are right, but there was an opportunity
to turn a dead night into a big one.
Yeah, I'm profiting from impending doom.
"Club Quake." From the Ural Mountains
to the Atlantic shores: sixteen hundred
armored troop carriers, offensive
military equipment - "smash," she said,
"blow up, or otherwise destroy these weapons."
As she walked around Japan, all my mother
could think of was her sisterUs miscarriages.
She's got babies all over there, in the ground
all over Japan, and the State Department said,
"The suffering is massive." Another official:
"Unless the war is stopped, the famine
averted, the country will be displaced
or die." I hope it doesn't happen, but
what am I going to do?
The first time
she flew home; my mother was pregnant.
A celebration between two sisters. In Bethlehem,
soldiers gathered around outside
just before the second bomb went off.
Her first child came out - breach -
dead. I'm a business man. Refugees
streamed across the border and relief workers
were awed by the open-armed generosity
of the villagers.
INDIA WIDOWUS DEATH AT ... by Alex Cigale
Just as we bathe in water
she bathed in fire.
Sati is not possible
for all women, only
those who are very blessed.
The flames kept alive twelve days
were doused with milk,
her favorite scarlet shawl
draped over the ashes.
Your husband a sort of god
sati is the ultimate
achievement for a woman.
The marriage ceremony
last January: he wore
a gray suit; her face was draped
with gold, a lot of flowers.
Now there may be miracles,
many good big things will come to us.
Tribal Zambia
custom of cleansing
the brother of the dead man
must sleep with the widow
to free her to remarry.
"It is like someone
bringing an open
coffin and saying
get in this coffin.
HOMEOPATHIC POEM I by Gary Aspenberg
Do you have any peculiar sensation in or on your head? e.g. as if you were
wearing a hat; as if air was passing through your head; as if there was a
current of air above your eyes; as if there was something alive in your
head; as if your brain was an anthill; as if there was a worm crawling in
your forehead; as if everything in the head was alive; as if the head was
asleep; as if water was boiling inside the head; as if there was a band or
a hoop tied around the head; as if the head had contracted or enlarged; as
if the head was heavy and falling forward/backwards/sideways; as if you
were intoxicated; etc., etc. If you have any peculiar sensation in the
head, please tell me.
HOMEOPATHIC POEM II by Gary Aspenberg
What type of stool do you have? Does it have air bubbles, is it like balls,
is it bloody, chalky, like clay, like coffeegrounds, crumbling, curdled,
dry, difficult to expel, fatty, fermented, fetid, foul, flaky, flat, fluid,
foamy, forcibly expelled, frothy, glassy, like glue, granular, greasy, like
green scum, gritty, gushing out, hard, full of holes, hot, burning the
parts, insufficient, involuntary, irregular, jelly-like, too large in size,
with undigested food, liquid, long (like the stool of a dog), loose, lumpy,
membranous, mixed, with mucus, mushy, thin in form, noisy (passed along with
loud passage of wind), odorless, oily, painful, pappy, pasty, like pea soup,
pouring out, receding (tends to come out but slip back), retarded, like rice
water, rough, like small globules (sago), like sheep dung, comes out very
slowly, passes better when leaning back, starchy, square in shape, sticky,
stringy, like a sudden explosion, tar-like, triangular in shape, watery,
white, full of worms, etc. Please describe what type of stools you have?
WHAT I DO by John Bradley
We risk our lives.
We could be vegetables.
Sometimes I'm so sore
I can't touch my wife;
Sometimes
My wife can't touch me.
I'm not saying people
Shouldn't play football.
We're like stunt
People; we do crazy things.
It excites us. This
Excites me.
I'm out here doing it
Because I like it.
I risk my life
Every day.
That's
What I do.
(New York Jet player
Mario Johnson, a teammate,
on Dennis Byrd's neck injury.)
FROM THE SWOPPER'S COLUMN by David Elliott
Will swop hand-crocheted baby afghan for live Maine lobsters.
Will swop hundreds of 1940's and 50's poultry and farm
magazines for Ingrid Bergman memorabilia.
Will swop one ounce pure silver bars for stuffed and mounted
members of the weasel family.
Will swop colorful, humorous folk/primitive painting of your
life story for lake or seaside property in Maine.
Will swop hardbound National Geographics, 1916 and 1917, for
10 pounds of moose meat.
Will swop WWI bayonets for large Hav-a-Hart trap.
Will swop and old wooden coffin box for a large bell, Mercury
statue, or library-size globe.
Will swop registered Morgan stud colt for Jacuzzi.
Will swop Texas pecans for chromo-illustrated Lord's Prayer.
Will swop anything within reason that is mailable from
Europe for your hatpins
from Yankee magazine
WANTED by Linda Nemec Foster
A lyric poem in any form,
20 lines limit,
on the subject of Springtime.
Originality and depth
of emotion essential.
An ode (a lengthy,
dignified poem of exaltation
or praise about someone
or something worthy of esteem.)
Not more than 16 lines.
A poem on "The Winter of '77."
Only stipulation - the word
"snow" must not appear
anywhere in the poem.
A terse, metaphorical, introspective
poem using the tangible
to allegorize the substance of being
beyond what is materially
manifested. Use of dynamic
language, multi-level implication,
and climax. Max. 40 lines.
A poem comparing a mythical god
to Senator Hubert Humphrey.
No free verse,
not less than 12 lines.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
Gary Aspenberg's first collection, Bus Poems, is available from Broken Moon
Press in Seattle. " 'Homeopathic Poems' are presented with minor
alterations from a questionnaire prepared by a homeopathic physician and
designed to elicit symptoms from patients."
John Bradley's work has appeared in The Bellingham Review, Bloomsbury
Review, High Plains Literary Review, Ironwood, Mid-American Review, The
Prose Poem, Puerto Del Sol, Rolling Stone, and Yellow Silk. He has received
a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship and won the 1989 Washington
Prize. He teaches composition and creative writing at Northern Illinois
University. " 'What I do' struck me as a poem as soon as I read it. There
are many pieces in the newspaper that canUt be written about; they must be
presented just as they are, as the poems they are."
Alex Cigale is the editor of Synaesthetic. He has an MFA from the
University of Michigan. His found poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse,
Gypsy: Earth Tones, Kiosk: Interstates, Poetry in Performance (CUNY), and
Poetry New York. He was born in Chernovtsy, the Ukraine, and grew up in
Leningrad, Tel Aviv, and Rome, before coming to the U.S. in 1975. " 'India
Widow's Death at ...' is pastiched from two New York Times articles."
Edward A. Dougherty, a former editor at the Mid-American Review, and his
spouse are now volunteer directors of the World Friendship Center in
Hiroshima. R 'Pastiche: Club Quake' is from news reports and an associated
(though I don't know how) memory."
David Elliott teaches English at Keystone Junior College in LaPlume, PA.
His work has appeared in Passages North, Creeping Bent, Northeast, and
Modern Haiku. "I must admit that 'From the Swopper's Column' is not a
purely found poem but a pastiche from many issues of the magazine [Yankee.]
My sense of the poetic leads me in several directions .... Haiku too are
found poems of a sort - records of encounters with bits of non-verbal data
the world presents passed on through words with as little interference of
the ego as possible."
Linda Nemec Foster has an MFA from Goddard College. Her poetry has appeared
in Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Nimrod, Puerto Del Sol, and Passages
North. Her translations from the Polish have been published in Artful Dodge
and International Poetry Review. She has received two Creative Artists
grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts, and has been nominated for
nine Pushcart Prizes.
John Gilgun teaches writing at Missouri Western College and uses found
poetry in his classes. Of Gilgun's first novel, Music I Never Dreamed Of,
Richard Hall wrote in The James White Review, "We have a quietly brilliant,
flawlessly executed account of growing up gay in South Boston in the 1950Us.
We are back in the golden age of gay literature, where the basic truth about
each adolescent's outcast status is expounded once again - in this case by a
master spirit whose words devastate us with laughter, hurt and recognition.S
"Wolf" takes its start from a short story by Barry Lopez.
Lyn Lifshin has given more than 700 readings across the country. She has
been a Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch and
Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the Jack
Kerouac Award, she is the subject of the documentary film, Lyn Lifshin: Not
Made of Glass. The poems printed here were abstracted from the diaries of
Georgia O'Keefe. "Poetry makes one so much more aware of, increases,
sensual appreciation, helps one discover the magical in the ordinary, gives
one power, a way to shape, transform, rediscover, catch and hold and, as
with dance, a way to feel alive, connected"
Jeff McMillian is working on a Doctorate and teaching at the University of
Kansas, Lawrence. He has an MFA from Bowling Green. His work has appeared
in The Sucarnochee Review, Poets On: Arrivals, ONTHEBUS and other
publications. "I learned about found poetry from John Gilgun (a writer whom
you are also publishing!) who learned the same from Mark Strand. We used to
pull cards which we composed from words and phrases we found in books. The
poem "Drawn But Not Skinned" is composed entirely of others' words (a
cento,) and the sources vary from Rilke's elegies to Rombauer's cookbook. I
am attracted to this style of writing (although it usually amounts to little
more than a "way in") because whenever I find those words or lines which
leap out of the poem and off the page, I want to grab them and shape them to
my own world. It gives me pleasure to pay tribute to writers I love by
enshrining pieces of their work in my own. I live for those moments when a
line or phrase blows open my consciousness so that in a moment I am reborn
and the phrase is reborn in the context of my life."
