Category Archives: Intermedia

A HISTORY OF ANYWAY

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A HISTORY OF ANYWAY
Intermedia
by Nance Van Winckel

Sad lad of the far north, you with no means and no true lassie, with no way home and no home anyway, you voyage on.

And yes, as per usual, just when the key to all seems within reach, the dreaded forever descends.

[click images to enlarge]

Three feminine figures in white dresses and ornate orange headpieces speaking to someone dressed as a servant or clown, against a mountain backdrop. Text: A History of Anyway, The degradations happen, In poor light. In the meantime. Found poetry on the page of an ancient book, which reads: ASS AND MOTHER. far, far was the babe for fees; no one thought himself home. Next to the text, an angelic figure speaking to a cloaked figure. Found poetry on a yellowed page, which reads: lad stretched then went not for her. Next to the words is an image of a royal figure holding a bird, next to a warrior holding a sword.Found poetry on a book page with a floral border. Text reads: given ths no, all high up fixed, with A.K.A in the corner. An image on the page shows a royal figure wearing a large gown, with the words "A.K.A.," "Clouded Thoughts," and "hidden tail" next to them.Found poetry on a page surrounded by a floral design, which reads: big white rooms ran to one edge. his bear dared not look He left afraid it danced. In the top right corner is an image of a bear laying on it back in chain and a cloaked figure standing over the bear.Found poetry on a stained book page. Title: THE KEY TO FOREVER LOST FOREVER. Text: her eyes begged but you your world, and dumb she went. Image of feminine figure looking into sun next to tall object with closed eye on it. Ornate art piece depicting animal-like royal figure wearing coat, accessories, and head gear. Stands against blue starry sky with black birds flying above and large colorful birds flying adjacent to the royal figure. Ghostly figure on top right. Text: To welcome what arrives to blacken the flowered fields.

Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016), and Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2014). She’s also published five books of fiction, including Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014), and Boneland: Linked Stories (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2013). She teaches in the MFA programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Read more at her website. 

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ACTIVE CONFLICT ZONES by Francesco Levato

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ACTIVE CONFLICT ZONES
by Francesco Levato

My visual and textual work tends to be palimpsestic; layered, erased, meaning bleeding between frames and lines. I am interested in what is left unseen or unsaid, hidden in the density of image and language. I am also interested in construction and deconstruction as methods of visual and textual composition. I build from found audio, video, objects, and texts; disassembling and recontextualizing them, often using appropriation to resist or subvert asymmetrical power structures.

Active Conflict Zones is one such project, a series of visual poems constructed with language appropriated from Executive Order 13780, Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States, and screen captures of digital video compression artifacts found between frames in Battle Beyond the Sun, an Americanized, English-dubbed, version of the 1959 Soviet science fiction film Nebo Zovyot.

I found hidden within the language of security in Executive Order 13780 the underpinnings of a xenophobic worldview that simultaneously aspires toward empire. In the text of the poems I sought to lay bare the underlying mechanics of power inherent such colonial impulses, and in the visuals I sought to subvert the legitimacy of claims to security from an administration compromised by foreign power. In attempting to hide the Soviet origins of the film Nebo Zovyot the American director of the retitled Battle Beyond the Sun replaced Soviet spacecraft with U.S. ones, obscured all text that appeared in Russian, and replaced the names of Soviet actors with those of English voiceover actors in the film’s credits; the screen-captured compression artifacts, the bleed through of data between the video’s keyframes and the P and B frames (usually hidden and containing only partial information from the surrounding frames), for me served as visual metaphor. —Francesco Levato, June 2018

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Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos (forthcoming 2018, Clash Books); Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug, a book length documentary poem; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He founded the Chicago School of Poetics, holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

THE BROWNIES AT WORK by Nance Van Winckel

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THE BROWNIES AT WORK
by Nance Van Winckel

Welcome to Cleaver’s brand new genre, INTERMEDIA, where word and image intersect to create newly mediated spaces between the literal and the figurative—part word, part image, and deviantly part-way! And what better way to start off than with “Brownies,” those there-but-not-there creations that inhabit the virtual terrains and ordinary realms of our creative lives. —Ed.

Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016), and Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2014). She’s also published five books of fiction, including Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014), and Boneland: Linked Stories (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2013). She teaches in the MFA programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Read more at her website.