by Virginia Konchan

One must soberly ask, in light of the enthusiastic rhetoric that surrounds new forms of postmodern audience participation: are these forms of “agency” designed to empower the listener, creatively or critically, or merely offer the simulated (“technical”) illusion thereof? The mimetic replication of urban and post-industrial noises reinscribes the very determinisms that all art forms both inherit and strive to overcome, and while on a neurological level the ear enjoys assimilating unfamiliar sounds, and harsh noises generated from dissonance, punk, heavy metal or electronic music, can induce an “unpleasing” cerebral pleasure, the sustained withholding of aural pleasure from the listener may be the last insidiously lingering form of 21st century authoritarian “control” of all.

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by Virginia Konchan

“Urban poetics” takes place at the ripped seam of these intersecting discourses of inside/outside, self/other, “objective”/”subjective” realities, which adhere on the level of individual cognition, spatial orientation, sensation, and judgment, and therefore can’t be codified or defined. It can, however, be reintroduced into poetic discourse, as a bridge to begin the work of looking “outward,” in terms of praxis or politics, rather than just “inward,” in terms of theory and aesthetics, again.

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by Virginia Konchan

The assemblage of the following thirteen texts, poems, and videos was inspired by Paul Gauguin’s painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts entitled “D’ou Venons Nous/Que Sommes Nous/Ou Allons Nous” (“Where Do We Come From/ What Are We/ Where Are We Going?”), and also by Brigitte Schuster’s photo-documentary project objet d’ailleurs. In this project, Brigitte, a graphic designer specializing in typography and type design, asks émigrés about objects that recall them to their past or places of origin, and photographs the “subtle beyond” of what Roland Barthes calls, in Camera Lucida, the punctum.

An excerpt:

“I tell myself that my conscious and unconscious attempts to forget my past have made me a better poet because I’m used to jumping over huge swaths of thought in order to avoid the things I can’t look at directly, which means I come at them sideways, which means metaphor, simile, investigating, and testing. I wouldn’t argue for a moment that it makes me a better person to know or to love. But it might not be a bad way to write.”

–Rebecca Hazelton

Enjoy this ever-brightening window into the vast and miniature rooms of the ever-receding, and ever-present, past.

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by Virginia Konchan

“I’m trying to think in circles, in Venn diagrams. Or to erase all my conceptual geometry and encounter poems one at a time. I know this is basically impossible.” —Heather Christle

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by Virginia Konchan

“A blank sheet is full of paths. It must each time be discovered.”

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