Halloween Happening Party @ Victory Hall (Jersey City)

One of the pleasures of being back home is having opportunities to explore and participate in local activities and events. One of the local--very local, as in Jersey City--spaces I have begun to drop by regularly is Victory Hall DRAWING ROOMS, a contemporary art gallery for drawing, painting and print located in downtown Jersey City. Occupying a former convent, DRAWING ROOMS has ten rooms of artist exhibition spaces (the nuns' former monastic cells), as well as a small bookstore that publishes art books, and a tea shop.

They also hold exhibitions throughout the year, and in conjunction with their current exhibit, Raw Drawing, featuring an expansive take on the idea of drawing by area artists, they hosted a Halloween Happening Party, on Halloween night. James Pustorino, the Executive Director, and Anne Trauben, the Assistant Director, both artists in their own right, invited me to participate by coming to view the artwork and reading some poems, old and new, perhaps in collaboration with some of the artifacts on display.

Before I write about my participation, let me note that other participants during the evening included Senegalese artist Ibou N'doye, whose work was on display and who also paired with fellow artist Geraldine Gaines in African Djembe drumming; saxophonist Zach Herchen, the new artistic director of Jersey City’s chamber music group, Con Vivo (a not-for-profit organization that produces free concerts in the diverse neighborhoods of Jersey City), who played a few works, including a stunning piece for solo woodwind by French spectralist composer Gérard Grisey; and artist Margaret Weber, who hosted a Mask Making session; and Maggie Ens, who guided people through Halloween face-painting.

I was drawn to the work of a number of the artists, including Gaines and N'doye, but I especially liked Anne Trauben's wire sculpture-drawings and 2 dimensional drawings, which I immediately felt were in conversation with Chris Stackhouse's "Perpendicular Series" drawings (some of which appeared in Seismosis), and with other works of visual abstraction, so I drafted two short (haiku-like) poems in conversation with them, read a few from Seismosis that I also thought were appropriate, and then ended with one of my favorite personal art poems, "How to Draw a Bunny," invoking two artists, passed and still with us, I deeply admire. One highlight was the presence of a reporter/photographer, Alyssa Ki, from our local paper/website, The Jersey Journal/NJ.com, who wrote up and took some great photos of the event. Attendees were urged to be creative in their costumes, so I came as a visual abstraction--or conceptual performance of--a pumpkin (cf. below). All in all it was a fun evening, and look forward to more projects at and I hope with DRAWING ROOMS.

Me reading, Anne Trauben
and Zach Herchen at right
 (© Alyssa Ki/The Jersey Journal)

Anne Trauben's "Wire 2: Untitled Wire"
(wire sculpture)

Wire 1: Puff 

 after Anne Trauben's sculptural drawings

entering the cloud
of wire, silently drawing
the breath of space


Drawing 2: 19 x 24, Untitled

 after Anne Trauben's sculptural drawings

figure negation:
white on black, back as foreground,
time's shadow, outline


"Wire 1: Puff" and "Drawing 2: 19 x 4, Untitled",

Copyright © John Keene, 2013. All rights reserved.

Anne Trauben's "Drawing 2: 19 x 24" Untitled
(ink on acrylic gesso) 

Me, before the reading
(Alyssa Ki/The Jersey Journal)

Some of the revelers, with Geraldine Gaines
and Ibou N'doye at center

Geraldine Gaines playing
the African Djembe drum

Zach Herchen playing the
piece by Gérard Grisey

Drawings by Greg Brickey

Artists making and trying on masks

Ibou N'doye

Revelers taking in the drawings

In the hallway (someone
is channeling René Magritte,
I think)

Mixed-media works by Jill Scipione

A drawing by Elizabeth Onorato

Drawings by Nguyen E. Smith

Happy Halloween + HUMAN MICROPOEM @ #OccupyChicago

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Be safe and have fun if you trick & treat tonight!

***

(Since Shakespeare didn't create the word and apparently no one else has either*, I am going to: embogment. That is my state these days. In a bog of competing deadlines, responsibilities, layers of materials to read--and thus, the paucity of new blog posts. It's always hard to convey how the quarter system's pace creates ever new layers of tasks more quickly than some of us can tackle them, but so it is. Nevertheless before another week passes, I wanted to post some entries, so here is one, and as I complete the stubs for the prior ones, I'll post those too. - *Of course this word already exists in English, as quick Google search suggests. P. J. O'Rourke of all people has already employed it.)

Yesterday I temporarily broke my weeks-long engagement with (reading and marking up) fiction and joined some local poets who were reading at the Occupy Chicago main site, on the corner of Jackson and LaSalle Streets, across from the Federal Reserve Branch of Chicago. Dubbed The Human Micropoem, after the Human Microphone approach that Occupy Together protesters have adopted across the country, the gathering, organized by Jen Karmin and Laura Goldstein, drew a decent number of participants, among them the longstanding Occupy Chicago resisters, who for over a month now have been standing their ground, leading rallies and marches, and calling attention to the many gross economic and social disparities that the current Global Economic Depression has only magnified.

The organizers invited readers to bring poems to read--and be human miked aloud--of no longer than 5 minutes.  As with any human microphone, the speaker says a line and everyone who can hear it repeats it, roughly in unison. The call and response choral form has the effect of making the words of any statement linger in the mind, and the effect of hearing so many different types of voices speaking- the musical and rhythmic lines of the poems together, sometimes altering based on what was heard and misheard, was multiply resonant for me, not just aurally but at times emotionally. The repetition gave each line weight, but also made the pieces, no matter whether they were prosy or more conventional in their poetic form, comprehensible, and, as I noted, the amplification and harmonization increased their power.

I arrived a little late. Other local writers, artists and activists present, some of whom may or may not have read, included Jen, Laura, Andrew Cantrell, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, John Wilkinson, Kurt Heintz, Braden Coucher, Eric Elshtain, Barbara Barg, Daniel Borzutzky, Larry Sawyer, Chris Gallinari, and Jen Besemer. I was, I believe, the last to read and did not present one of my poems but instead chose Carl Sandburg's "I Am the People, the Mob," because of its appropriateness on many levels. Interestingly even though I mentioned Sandburg before I began, several people afterwards wanted to know about "my poem," so I directed them to the behemoth Google so that they could find it online. I think it, Sandburg, and all the late, past great poets of labor should be invoked as often as contemporary ones are, as often as possible, particularly during rallies and marches. Their words are important and vital today as when they wrote them, and when channeled through human microphones as Human Micropoems, they recapture, even if for a second, the worldly and otherworldly power that words had for our oral ancestors and still have for our mostly oral peers.


Jen Karmin (in the plum cap and coat) beginning to read, as a participant walks to the poem's music

One of the poets reading

Another poet reading

Some of those present

After the reading, the Occupy Chicago announcements
An important message (even though these days it often seems to be a foregone conclusion, to quote Shakespeare)