In the late sixties and early seventies, curator Lucy R. Lippard’s exhibitions critiqued the commodification of art by “dematerializing the art object.” The works on display weren’t so much things as they were ideas, events, feelings, and experiences. By the mid-seventies, Lippard realized that conceptualism had also inadvertently signalled to the capitalists of the art world that ideas, events, feelings, experiences, and otherwise “immaterial” phenomena could also be bought and sold, and, even better, because they were immaterial, sold and sold again. Marx and Engel’s comment in 1848 that capitalism’s accelerated pace of production makes it so that “all that is solid melts into air” remained as true in the twentieth century as it did the nineteenth—but now the air had a price tag ... [continue reading]

The concept of “Poetic Systems” as a special issue theme originated as an evocation of resistant practices faced with institutional structures, an alternative to hierarchies and linearities. Soon it developed, however, towards the softening of edges via the medium of poetry, a centering of interconnection, reciprocity, and exchange as form. The print, sound, and video poetry featured in this issue thus intuitively allow systems to expand into ecosystems. They stage organic and collaborative communities of practice ... [continue reading]

Riveted by bones: Hegelian bones. Here, twenty-one poetic voices are seventeen such femurs, coccyges, incudes, ulnas which allow for the spirit’s intelligibility via “hot glittering data” (Banzhaf). Each piece glistens with at least one moment of nineteenth-century German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s three-moment dialectical method. The (fluttering) precarity of definition; the (sore) inward turn of self-sublation—divisive through to the stretchy satisfaction of self-supersession; and determined negation (vanishing acts) wherein negation presences as content intermingled forth from its oppositional progenitors—hermaphroditic leopard slugs to their halogen violet rose—they slough off, as divided phoenixes with their other’s gametes newly enclosed—the lingering suspense of union remembered in singular forms, socially bent forth into the vast perpetuity of continuation. Spirit is slugs’ coitus rose; David Herbert Lawrence’s plasmatic, running flame ‘the perfect rose’ minimally sustained. Such is the ‘reserved power’ of Verdugo Lash’s speaker: a master-subject self-enslaves, baring bone as bated breath to presence spirit’s “feast.” ... [continue reading]

While bringing together the works that became “River of Time,” I’ve been thinking about a news story I saw on TV as a kid: an ancient fish had been caught in the waterway that ran through the city, and was determined to be of a previously extinct species. It was a living fossil, a lazarus creature. The fisherman held it up for the camera, it looked like a rock covered with barnacles and frills. I tried to find that news story, or any record of prehistoric fish found in the Trent Canal, but there was no trace. Either history has swallowed every mention, or time has folded my memory of this story into a new shape for me, aggrandized and specified it, fermented it in a broth of my experiences. At night I still dream of coelacanths leaping over the lift lock, crashing through the frozen waters. When I’m restless, I go out to throw pebbles off the bridge into the South Saskatchewan River and I think about all the stories hidden in the dark water. ... (continue reading)

Translating Language and Sound is a hum, a light drone, a vibrating voice, a Song dynasty poem, an invitation to come on a walk; it’s an A-side, a B-side, it’s underwater. It’s being consumed by the material world, it’s an engagement with capitalist time, it’s the loss of self, it’s coming back to the self. It is waves and wind, a sharp flow, in and out, a black screen typing away, quickly the words fliting on the screen, letter by letter asking, “what takes the island from the girl?” 

I set out, with this issue, to highlight the performance and sound art of writers working both on and off the page, writers who cared about translating their work into a different medium, into music, sound, writers who thought of language as a living, breathing thing.  How does plucking the words off the page transform each pieces’ original intention? ... (continue reading)

We’re living in a time where political and social systems are collapsing, climate catastrophe is accelerating, the pandemic continues, and it’s harder now, more than ever, to imagine a future that is worth living for. But we’re all still here, grasping at life, because we have faith in something beyond us. There is something sacred holding us here. What are we holding on for? What keeps us moving forward?

For this issue of GLYPHÖRIA, I reached out to artists whose work, and determination to continue, I admire. I wanted to know, from each artist, what that abstract, ethereal thing is that keeps them tethered to life and the idea of a life beyond. Whether that be God, love, art, family, community, social systems, religious practice, or a personal relationship with another, I wanted to find work that recognizes that everything is falling apart but there’s something sacred that keeps us moving forward. And I wanted to know in what, exactly, and why, they have faith. ... (continue reading)