Brian Dettmer (born 1974) is an American contemporary artist. He is noted for his alteration of preexisting media—such as old books, maps, record albums, and cassette tapes—to create new, transformed works of visual fine art.

Check out more of his pieces by clicking here. Also, check out the comments on Digg.

Ekleksographia is an independent international poetry magazine edited, produced and published by Jesse Glass, Daniel Sendecki and a revolving panel of editors. The publication revolves completely around their efforts and therefore maintains a somewhat irregular publication schedule, averaging about 2 issues a year. Ekleksographia employs a ‘revolving editor’ system—the magazine retains a panel of editors, each of which edits one issue every so often.

Ekleksographia is published as an Ahadada Books cooperative publication. Editors and contributors will therefore be asked actively to contribute both their talents and their time to the publication.

As a cooperative Ahadada Books asks for help in selling, promoting, publishing, and distributing the work. If that means helping Ahadada Books with library sales, or building websites, or even printing manuscripts using appropriate technology and resources open to the author(s), then we are happy to encourage that process, to publicize and distribute the effort.

Ekleksographia is an exercise in asymmetrical publishing, and is a shoe (or even two!) thrown at the spotlit shrug and yawn. Please contact Jesse Glass and/or Daniel Sendecki for queries or further information. Or check out more links here.

Jesse tells me that Amy King, Vivian Shipley, and T. A. Noonan are all in line for the curatorship of a future Ekleksos. Exciting times are upon us—indeed!

   ’Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance
        from Them, the people, does not also increase’
   I know, of course I know, I can enter on other place

   Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of
        thought and one of his dialects and what has happened
        to me
   Have made poetry

   To dream of that beach
   For the sake of an instant in the eyes

   The absolute singular

   The unearthly bonds
   Of the singular

   Which is the bright light of shipwreck

     —George Oppen (1908–84),
      Of Being Numerous (1968), 9.1-13

While readying some files for a project at Penn Sound for my buddy, Jess, I came accross a piece by Charles Bernstein on Oppen (originally appearing in Ironwood 26 (1985), and later revised for Bernstein’s My Way: Speeches & Poems.

Writes Bernstein:

Oppen’s syntax is fashioned on constructive, rather than mimetic, principles. He is quite explicit about this. Carpentry is a recurring image of poem-making. His poems, as he tells it, were created by a sort of collage or cut-up technique involving innumerable substitutions and permutations for every word and line choice. The method here is paratactic, even if often used for hypotactic ends. This tension, which can produce the kinetic, stuttering vibrancy of some of Oppen’s most intense poems, is at the heart of his use of the line break as hinge. In contrast to both enjambment and disjunction – as well, of course, as more conventional static techniques – Oppen’s hinging allows for a measure of intervallic “widths” of connection/disconnection between lines. The typical Oppen hinge is made by starting a line with a preposition, commonly “Of”). At its most riveting, this hinging taps into a horizontally moving synaptic/syntactic energy at the point of line transition.

Bernstein pretty much nails why I love Oppen’s work. What he describes as “intervallic widths” of connection and disconnection create spaces in Oppen’s poetry—in his lines—that my mind races to fill. I rarely read a piece of his the same way twice.