Sunset Debris, Icebergs Off Fogo

Turn your iPad into an avant gallery/library/listening station via UbuWeb, where you can watch experimental films, like Annika Ström's "All My Dreams Have Come True" (2004), above, in which her mother and uncle discuss how to say "all my dreams have come true" in English; and download super poetry, like Ron Silliman's "Sunset Debris." May all your electronic devices stimulate versus sedate (except when you are preparing for sleep, coming down from an anxiety attack, and other exceptions).

Recently saw Ron Silliman read at the Poetry Foundation. Best for hearing Ron read from "Sunset Debris," a long poem in questions. I went home thinking about crafting questions, and thinking about what happens in juxtaposing questions. "Sunset Debris" deftly had Kennedy and I in stitches, then pensive, inward-turning, then pulled us back out again, rolling us through a nuanced, diverse gamut of emotions and considerations, love, trash pick-up, sexual function and dysfunction, and other topics popularly and unpopularly handled via language.

I wish everyone in the world could write/dictate a poem in questions, and then all the questions could be compiled, into the longest poem in the world. What a collaboration. It would take a while to catch up with everyone, prioritizing folks on their deathbeds, so that their questions can be included, and finishing up with advanced and post-toddlers, whose iterations could provide crucial sub-volumes' worth of "why." (A real planning problem: where and when to end?) Even if the world population's contributions ran a single page per individual versus Mr. Silliman's fifty we would end up with a massively cool, endlessly intriguing document of human awareness in time and space. And someone or some people could spend the rest of their lives reading the global magnum opus.

"Sunset Debris" also got me thinking about blindness, blind poets, blind poetics. Wondering what the title would mean/feel to a blind reader/listener; and about the experiences of the blind reading/hearing poetry, sightless relationships with literary imagery, "Sunset Debris" relying less on imagery than many types of poems, but the magic of the title occurs in a brainswirl that includes visuals for me.

Devices==Desires. I borrow Alice Fulton's stitchwork in type to lace together post parts A and B.

Thank you, Frame, for introducing me to one of the four corners of the earth, Fogo Island, and the Fogo Island Arts Corporation. The Arts Corp commissioned studios to house artists in residence and Norway-based architect Todd Saunders is doing a bang up job, perching mind-blowing little livables within Fogo's intimidating natural beauty. (If you enjoy architecture at all, be sure to check Saunders' other work on his website.)

The Bridge Studio, Long Studio and
Bridge Studio interior are pictured above.
Check the Arts Corp website to see more studios
and past and current artists in residence.

Awe-inspiring, craggy, coastal, surreality-in-reality landscape? Check. Shelter as work of art? Check. Solitude? Remote-a-tude? Check. Unique local/international community arts interaction/collaboration? Check. Within hours of my first encounter, I started working on a project I hope to complete during a residency on Fogo. . . Poems about a place I have not visited, a series which I hope to complete by marrying them to poems written from that place at a later date. . .


In conclusion, I had to include "Parasitic Mind Control," as recommended by YouTube at the top of my search list of Annika Ström vids.