Merzwalk08

Instructions: Walk completely around the place you live. The path you follow can be any shape or size. You may walk counterclockwise or clockwise, fast or slow, alone or within a group, or holding the hand of someone you love. You can do it during the night or day, barefoot or shod. But you must go out and come back in through the same door (or window, if that's your pleasure). During your walk, be mindful of the ground under your feet, watch the sidewalk, pay attention to the street, be conscious of the dirt and the pavement. Also, during your walk, pick up a piece of litter* or trash, preferably made from paper or any other flat material that can fit into an envelope. Use the found item in a work of art. Or designate the item a ready-made. In either case, put your art in an envelope, or, if you'd like, affix it to a postcard. Alternatively: describe your merzwalk using words or pictures. After it has dried, send it to Merzwalk08.

Only three submissions to Merzwalk08 per artist. But you may make as many merzwalks for yourself as you want and do it as frequently as you like.

Documentation will include a catalogue that will be sent to all Merzwalk08 participants.

Deadline: January 3, 2009

Merzwalk08
1620 North Richmond Street
Chicago, IL 60647
USA

*Note: "Litter is a waste type consisting of any tangible personal property which has been unlawfully scattered and or abandoned in a public place (usually outdoors)." Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litter

This a Osel 6.

The Osel poems started out as three (Osel 1, 2 and 3) 'zine style chapbooks that were circulated via postal art networks. Osel 4, a collage of serial poems of an elegiac nature, was written before, during, and after Osel 5 and Osel 6.

Osel 5 was an early (1998) piece of hypertext poetry, illustrated with Tantric line drawings made by a doctor in India. A few months later, the files were deleted from my site because the drawings were considered pornographic by AOL. I canceled my AOL account shortly after this. A bad hard drive and my move from my old apartment to my house resulted in the loss of the hyperlinked Osel 5, including all the pictures. I am planning on reissuing Osel 5 in a new, non-internet form. Meanwhile, Osel 6 is now a film.

Osel 7 is a short personal poem that will be skipped for now.

Osel 8 (Retro-Osel, a light shined back) is planned as a limited art-book with individual hand-drawn collages and illustrations. I think I will make 8 copies.

At one time I was posting a working version of the pomes, Osel of My Eye, but I now think that the internet is the worse place to work on art- it's like taking a shower in public.

Enjoy Osel 6.

(Osel 1 was distributed far and wide thru mail-art networks and was inspired by my military service in the mideast)

http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/public/read/poetry/30

Peacock (Found Poem)

A peacock roamed
into a Burger King parking lot
in New York City
and was beaten
by a man
who insisted it was a vampire.

Staten Island animal control officials
are saying
the bird
was beaten
with such fierceness
that most of its tail feathers
fell out
and it had to be euthanized.

The seven-year-old male peacock
wandered into the restaurant's parking lot
then perched on a car's hood last week.

Charmed

employees had been feeding it bread
when the fierce man appeared,
grabbed the bird by the neck,
hurled it to the ground
and started stomping it.

"I'm killing a vampire!“'

The expanding body make a guttural sound
hiding the mechanisms of thought behind the skin of visibility
like waking ancestors at the point of contact
here where the behavior is interrupted
we all close in from the sea to a welcoming bay
well lighted by the secret routine of morning's
dull effort to rise without truly getting up.

The seconds are counted by the extremes
of the engineer's clock building time into a defenseless
second body and extra shadow
that walks like the notes of a guitar
on an old second-hand LP.

The three Johns of the Old Testament:
He waits for his brother.
He waits for the light.
And he awaits The Dragon.

The perfect square is lighted now
between the male and the female
between the guttural sound of the holy body
and the sudden waking of ghosts
slipping into a beat of redemption that comes like
lightning's fractures at the end of a field.

-- tonguing the buildings growing from the rocks like salt crystals
that core out from inside the mystical rose,
and these words help midnight, a starry escutcheon
springing from the hollow earth,
deflecting the mundane.

Thus heaven and earth are finished
with a shell of paranoia and a protective skin of our space brothers
stretched taut by the turns of the Ghost Dance.

Hello, Mr. Spam-Detection-Bot. Please don't shoot-- I'm human. Check out the Buddhist-inspired translation of a Catullus poem (June 11), Mr. Bot. You machines aren't up to something like that yet, are you?

Recently, a machine determined that my human-generated writing resembles machine-generated writing and locked me out of my blog for a while as part of some sort of War on Spam. I had no idea that I'd spent a couple of weeks in the mountains manually generating spam by shuffling around colored peices of paper (September 25).

I'm not sure if I hope it doesn't happen again because it's so funny.

New drawing called "Spam in the Garden of Eden".

The Dreamed Alphabet

a work esteemed in all ages
pleasant and profitable to peruse
for all conditons of people whatsoever
being a rendering of the true meaning
of letters
as expressed by their essences
with a short description
of the nature
of each essence

and afterwards a discussion of other writing systems.

in the snowstorm
i wanted to be photographed
again

but
this time
with emblems
of power,
a toy gun
and
an old train engine

KAFKA POEM ONE:

"It was late in the evening when K arrived."
----------------------------------------------------
chin
nipples
navel
crotch

nipples
chin
floor
bottom of knees

floors

top
of
skull

readings
on
the
right


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