prose poem

Stéphane Mallarmé's “Demon of Analogy” is a prose poem about demonic nature of mishearing. Francis Ford Coppola's “The Conversation” is about the demonic technologies that allow us to hear all-too-well. Joe Milutis' “Stéphane Mallarmé's 'The Conversation,'” with little to no editing mashes up these classic texts, to suggest that one may be a mishearing (or spooky translation) of the other. In addition, the original text of the Mallarmé poem is translated by way of a number of bending techniques that, while getting back to the original sound and meaning of the French, bend, distort and remix the original. This project is part of a larger scholarly and creative exploration of experimental translation as an extension of remix and appropriation practices. A number of chapbooks, videos, lectures and performances have emerged from this project, including Monkey pOm! (a translation of Hanuman Chalisa), Mao Vincit Omnia (a translation of Mao's Little Red Book), The Numbers (a translation of a German translation of Robert Creeley's number poems), and Twenty Beloved French Poems, Treated Poorly (a translation of 19th-century French poetry, of which “Stéphane Mallarmé's 'The Conversation'” is a part). (Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

Les huit quartiers du sommeil was written in January-February 2007 during a six-week residency at Yaddo, where I didn't sleep at all. Thanks everyone at the Yaddo dinner table, for listening to thunks and rattlings of this text coming to life. And thanks CALQ, for helping me get to Yaddo.

The web-iteration of Les huit quartiers du sommeil was created in Montreal in July-August 2007. Thanks Sandra Dametto for the brilliant Google Maps idea. Thanks in advance Google Maps, for having a sense of humour - all the satellite photos are totally copyright you. Thanks Google Images for finding all the other images and thanks photoshop filters for making them look like something I would do. The tapestry obscuring the left side of the main map is lifted from Vermeer's The Art of Painting.

Les huit quartiers du sommeil was published in print in French translation in Le Livre de chevet, an anthology edited by Daniel Canty, published by Le Quartanier, Montreal, QC, Fall 2009. Thanks most of all to Daniel Canty for sending me stumbling into the theme of sleep in the first place.

A poem where each line is superimposed on a video of a man putting an oddly shaped box on a table and slowly unpacking it. The poem describes the box as containing chaos, bought at a shop and well packaged. The work is entirely linear, but after a few lines of poem and 10-15 seconds of video the image pauses and darkens until the reader touches the screen and thus makes the poem continue. A certain momentum is achieved simply because the reader does not know what is in the box until the end of the poem.

A short story told from the perspective of a young girl named Stella, who is lying in the grass in the summer sunshine when she realises that she cannot move. She finds that in order to escape from this immobility she can change herself into a series of other things and creatures: a stone, a fish, a house - and she finally finds that she in fact wants to be herself again. This is a lyrical story raising questions of identity and the transition from child to adult.

The story is displayed as a series of pages with a paragraph on each page and graphical elements beneath. It is entirely linear, but designed to be read on an iPad.

This exquisitely designed site contains poetry in several modes: in lines of verse, as visual poetry, and as an e-poem that responds to the reader’s symbolic presence in the text: the pointer. The site is conceptualized “as a grave” made of [web] pages, words “flung to the far corners / of the earth” (quoted from the site manifesto). Each page consists of images and words arranged and offer the reader two ways of viewing the composition: discover (which keeps links hidden for reader to explore the surface of the image for them) and unearth (which provides a sepia tone for the background and reveals the links in the text, along with useful labels for them). Verbally it is also a collage of voices: from the victims to the pilot of the Enola Gay, who delivered the bomb in Hiroshima. This work is a powerful memorial to those lost in Hiroshima (and by extension Nagasaki). Simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, factual and ironic, the work reminds us of the very human side to the event and its aftermath.

(Source: Leonardo Flores)

A mash up of Orson Welles reading Moby Dick drawn in the pages of Moby Dick with Led Zep and John Bonham playing "Moby Dick"... with some Champagne thrown in for good measure.

(Author's description)

This subtly haunting poem tells the story of how each letter from the alphabet disappeared, or was made to disappear, by corporations obeying a secret agenda. The conspiracy theory overtones are underscored by the use of sound, a short loop of metallic whispering wind or water and a handful of soft musical notes. Clicking on each letter on the left hand column will take you to the corresponding letter and narrative of its disappearance, with the large letter disappearing as you read the accompanying text, but it also starts a slower, almost imperceptible, fading process of those letters in the entire work. If you click through quickly and read the whole poem you may not even notice, but step away for a minute and you’ll find that the letters you have read have disappeared from all the language in the poem and the result may be challenging to read (see image below). This more than anything provides a visceral impact, as we try to read a barely functional language mutilated by loss of letters.

(Source: Leonardo Flores)

The story of a poet sent to Alpha Centauri to test a nuclear bomb that can destroy a planet, who returns to Earth to discover that Earth has a ring instead of a moon and that there is - perhaps - no longer life there. The narrative is told linearly and lasts for about 20 minutes, with no opportunity to rewind  - it’s worth watching in a single setting though, both for the story itself and for the grungy space visuals created by Travis Alber: a scratched metal background with a window through which to watch the stars passing by, and dream images superimposed on or maybe reflected in the dull, stained metal.