Material Poetics

A referential revisit of the online evocation of a collaborative project way back in 2008 at the San Francisco Waste Dump.

It was a concrete act of research in the moment, and involved the creation of an assemblage of consumable, consumed and consumptive objects made from waste by academics at SCRAP studio.  A set of found objects gathered according to one’s own sense of their value: expressive, monetary, moral, or otherwise. Bird cages, alternative Christmas trees and dead fish provided the condensation in material poetics of the aesthetic values of consumption, a microcosm of metaphors, an existential labyrinth of semiotic oppositions.

As a rendition in stuffness, it serves as reminder for this project, that the return of ‘poetics’ is not confined to words and lines!

Worth Fighting For

people look at me
weird with envy
sometimes fear

not so much when informed
that I used to fight
rather when they realize
that I really did
that I loved it
that it was worth it
to be cut and broken up and down
to be scarred
to hear the ancient voices

defend yourself at all times
he hits hard
it’s like hitting a brick wall
get your ass back out there
hey champ

the same thing happens
with no less damage
with no less pain
with poets

Terrance Gabel

Credits

As an itinerant multi-media adventure, the expressions in the project will not be limited to the infatuations of academic poets that shape the final tangible volume.

This is the early list of singers, rhythm makers and candy -eyed impressionists from the darker underworld, and from the gothic location of Dunedin, New Zealand. The list will grow, hopefully in weird and unexpected ways :

Professor Alistair Fox – voice and narrator

Rebekah McNutt – scenography

Haunted Love – Into the Night – theme music

Roel Wijland – concept, design, poems