the pressure of inspiration (where's that piece about those apples)
BY Edwin Torres
I am participating in an art event which neccesitates a newly created PO-EM-PI-ECE based on the art being celebrated at the event…now, it's one thing to be inspired by art to create a piece and have it exist as the piece you wrote inspired by the art...to then possibly be heard at a reading among other pieces…or published somewhere years later, far removed from its source, wearing its distance in comfort…but there's an extra dollop of vanity when the piece knows it's going to be performed FOR the art it was written for somewhat immediately…a private audience projecting light on a large sheet of past and present tenses…a commissioned bit of mystery that needs to retain its perceived wisdom gained after years of collecting dust…a string drawing that wants to be a voiceover…some prerecorded cassettes…broken rectangles as body geo…body hero...too direct to the subject?...thinking outloud here…maybe too much…I don't want to tell you who the artist is…let you form your puppet…but suffice to say there is abstraction involved…maybe even some minimalism…
let's work this out...if I circle the stage with projections of…circle the sage with protection…do I write the piece as minimal theater evoking the implied removal of void as experiential reverie…mimicing the art exactly through the structure of words for an audience to connect the dots…or honor the art exactly to let them imagine where connection turned its back on them and let them down…or mirror the art inexactly to just invent unconnectable dots…so the effort opens up in two planes: when writing for a specific presentation…like a beginning with an end in mind…a commisioned elevation…how much of the room (the environment where the revelation is to appear) needs to appear in the piece…how much of the poet enhances the artist before the ego…the open page of Mallarme's Un Coup, posted earlier this week by Mr. Bök, was a revelation for me…visually active as I am (I never practice safe sight) (sorry) this is a new turn for me…thrilled to discover another, dead, soulmate visually intact with where my head has been lately…as in…spatial dissonance vis a vis human bug…gets back to the problem of two planes: skull or rectum…sliced evenly, we would take one over the other depending on where the lights have been affixed to the microphone…if I train my body to hold perfectly still…as if I were the canvas…while a sea of words spewed forth…from skull or rectum…well, I'd pay to see that...hmmm...and on cue, the chart explaining perception as tribute shows up…
easy to follow if you let yourself preoccupy the occipital shore…with a basic proposition…if the inspiration of a piece is not rooted in the linear…how angular do I get with the story if, attached to my feet as cigars, is a glass alphabet…while an audience cheers dirty chasms of luck-fisting second-looks…chanting for an empty stage…nothing being an obvious homage to said, unmentioned, artist…which leads to a second warning: the problem with meaning is it gets in the way of language…and where is that piece you wrote inspired by that moustache...
A self-proclaimed “lingualisualist” rooted in the languages of sight and sound, Edwin Torres was born…
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