That Country Music

The good folks (Scott Abel) at Country Music published a poem of mine in the new issue and Ashleigh has a poem in there too and the whole issue is wonderful and I'm sharing it because it's totally worth reading.

Thanks Scott.

Gallery Opening at Vis Arts with the Washington Project for the Arts

I have some video in the Washington Project for the Arts' "Strange Bedfellows" gallery at Vis Arts in Washington DC (Rockville, MD) tomorrow night. If you're in the area, the opening is at 7pm and should be pretty great.

The exhibition is curated by Blair Murphy and also features work from Ingrid Burrington (Brooklyn, NY), Bean Gilsdorf (San Francisco, CA), Katie Hargrave (Chattanooga, TN), Leslie Holt (Hyattsville, MD), Benjamin Kelley (Baltimore, MD), Jennifer Levonian (Philadelphia, PA), A. Moon (Silver Spring, MD), Sebastian Martorana (Baltimore, MD), Jacob Rhodes (Brooklyn, NY), Stephanie Williams (Alexandria, VA), and Jenny Walton (Washington, DC).

The opening is from 7-9pm and I'll be around hanging out, having some form of liquid refreshment, probably carrying a bag with more pieces of loose paper than I know what to do with even though I'm carrying them around and calling it a "to read" pile. Details on that here.

It, Collected

Many thanks to The Economy Journal for publishing a long poem of mine from a series of poems that partially function as theater. The poem they published is called "It, Collected" and it's a part of Issue 15 over there, which also features work by Kathy Fish and Brandon Alvendia.

They publish really wonderful work there and I recommend checking out pretty much everything they've published. Their issues are well-curated and very manageable size-wise (you might even say it's economical).

Revolver Bombs

The good people of Revolver published this poem called "Bombs." It's from an unpublished chapbook of poems about the film Speed.

Revolver is great. Look at it. Love its two uncle jobs.

Bits, Collected // Claude Shannon

Very excited to have an excerpt from a long poem called "Bits, Collected" in The Nervous Breakdown. It's the first piece of this that's out there in the world, besides at a couple of readings with projections.

The poem begins with the coining of the term bit by Claude Shannon (who is a weird, fascinating person and was the father of electronic communication) in 1948. He did that in a paper that founded the notion of information theory that year. (He called it communication theory.)

That 1948 paper was arguably the first time that someone attempted to quantify the idea of information. Weird, right? There was a point in time when information was not something you could quantify...

He was also super into cryptography, was instrumental in the development of binary code as a way to transmit information, built chess playing machines, attempted to build an electronic mouse that could navigate mazes...he's fascinating.

He didn't die until 2001. He died of Alzheimer's and never saw how everything he did in the 30s, 40s, and 50s laid the groundwork for us all to catch up to him a half century later.

Swoon's "Today I will be a compensated spokesperson"

The wonderful Marc Neys, aka Swoon, has posted a new videopoem that uses, as text, a poem of mine that was originally published in Opium titled "Today I will be a compensated spokesperson."

I really like what he did with it. It's a beautiful collage and soundscape that makes me think about the poem a little differently.

That's the scary thing about posting work to the Poetry Storehouse (see below) for anyone to remix. You don't know what will emerge from their work. It's out of your hands. You hope that it goes well, but passing off something you care about make you (read: me) instinctively believe that things will go terribly awry. This piece, for me, represents one of the great potentials that exists in that Not-Knowing: it might produces new associations, new juxtapositions to tease something different out of the text than how it existed on the page/screen. You might find something unexpected in your own work.

My poem was taken from The Poetry Storehouse, an platform for multi-media artists to find poems for raw material and remixing. I donea couple videos with other poets' work from there as well. It's a good place with good poems and good videos.

Today I will be a compensated spokesperson from Marc Neys (aka Swoon) on Vimeo.

i was distracted

On June 28 I'll be at the Arlington Hills Community Center and Library in St. Paul for a project where I'm giving people free postcards and postage to send a postcard to a stranger. The project is called I Was Distracted. I'll be there from 11am-4pm if you want to send a postcard to a stranger, share a secret, or just get distracted from your phone and your to do list.

Or if you want to get a postcard you can email me your address. Your name won't be included with your address. Email me at dlukenelson@gmail.com.

APPLAUSE

On June 26 we will break the world record for longest continual applause by a group. We will clap for two hours at the Walker Art Center's Open Field. You are invited to join in the applause, watch, be applauded, pass by, pass through, applaud us, applaud yourself, applaud anything or nothing.

Join in for as little or as long as you'd like.

5:30pm at the Walker's Open Field.

More info here.

Do you live in Milwaukee and like poetry? I have a flier for you!

Maybe you live in Milwaukee and like poetry? If that's true, then have I ever got a flier that you should see.

I will be reading in Milwaukee this coming Sunday, June 1 at Microlights with Ashleigh Lambert and Adam Fell.

The reading is at 7pm, the address is on the flier. Ashleigh and Adam are awesome. Poetry.

More details here.

Osterhout, What's Up?

"Osterhout, What's Up?" Hilarious video by Sam Osterhout, Theo Sena, and Dave Park that is related to a project we're working on.

My childhood isn't for sale.

Three Poems at Paper Darts

I've got three new poems — "Harry Houdini," "Michael Applebaum," and "Jon DiSalvatore" — up with Paper Darts with three illustrations by Dan Forke. (That's one of them above.)

These are from a series of poems that I'm maybe calling Person of the Day poems. Michael Applebaum is a Canadian mayor. He's probably better than Rob Ford by default. Jon DiSalvatore is a minor league hockey player. Last season he was the captain of the Houston Aeros. I started that poem while he was still playing for them.

I had a dream last night that I was hanging out with friends in a roller skating arcade and no one wanted to play a game with me where the arcade machine was in the water and you had to roller skate in the water. I was pretty disappointed. You needed two people to play, so I didn't get to play.

Two pieces from "in the office hours of the polar vortex" in The Newer York

I've got a pair of new pieces in The Newer York's Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature. They're both from a collection in progress called "in the office hours of the polar vortex."

Here's one and here's another.

Tuba Player

Here's a new videopoem using the poem "Tuba Player" by Robert Wood, read by Nic Sebastian, all taken from the Poetry Storehouse. Archival footage taken from the Prelinger Archive.

I had five poems up with the Poetry Storehouse recently. They post poems that are available for remix, interpretation, and mutilation by video and sound artists working with poetry as raw material.

The Poetry Storehouse

The good people at The Poetry Storehouse have shared five poems of mine, with audio, at their site. It's an interesting project where the poet must give up control of their work for others to reinterpret through video or audio work. (Or other things that I have not heard of or do not yet exist.) These poems are there for other artists to mold to their own designs, which is a weird (read: valuable) experience, realizing that you've crafted these words and you're going to let others mess with their balance and meaning.

They've have some great "re-mixes" of poems up there now from other video artists and poets that are worth checking out. Excited to see what happens with this little bunch of poems.

Thanks to Nic and the folks who run and commune on the Poetry Storehouse for letting me be a part of the project.