About
1,000 Views of “Girl Singing”
John Bloomberg-Rissman (ed.)
ISBN: 978-0-9561919-1-5
Here’s the story: I had come to #200 in a project called Autopoiesis and thought: time for a break, a new direction for a while. What to do, what to do? I’d been thinking about bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire project, and about Oulipo, especially Queneau’s Exercises in Style. And I’d been reading (with great pleasure) David Cameron’s Flowers of Bad. So I thought I’d take a poem, and translate it (so to speak) using every algorithm I could find. Next step: find a poem. I was reading Eileen Tabios, and came across her “The Secret Life of an Angel”; this appealed to me vis-à-vis my project, because it is already one step removed from a Jose Garcia Villa poem, “Girl Singing”, to which it is a response. So I had the poem, and the title, which, to please myself, was 1000 Views of ‘Girl Singing’, the Garcia Villa poem from which I would not work, but which was waving from the distance …
So far, so good. Now, here’s where it gets interesting – to me, at least. I thought I’d do most of the work, while calling for a bit of input from others, à la a couple of Nichol’s “algorithms”. Well, it turned out that responses to my call for the memory translation and the homolinguistic translation were WAY more interesting than I had imagined, and WAY more plentiful. People sent text, vispo, other visuals, audio, video … So I said hmmmm, I’m now editing an anthology. And my principle for compiling it will be: every time I encounter a “likely suspect” (and I wanted some who were not “professional” artistes) I’ll ask her/him/whatever if they’d like to play. I’d do this til 2008 runs out.
Contributors:
Eileen R Tabios
John Bloomberg-Rissman
Geof Huth
Rebeka Lembo
Lolabola
Mark Young
Ernesto Priego
Sam Bloomberg-Rissman
Robert Rissman
Sheila E. Murphy
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Rebekah May
Jean Vengua
Lucy Morris/Ernesto Priego
Alan Baker
Franek Wygoda
harry k stammer
Kuei Chiu
Claire Rissman-Sherr
Rupert M Loydell
Ivy Alvarez
Ed Baker
Giles Goodland
Jared Schickling
Mike Cannell
Yichen Chiu
Steve Mitchell
Cecilia Sophia Ibardaloza
Rolly delos Santos
Tim Gaze
Cralan Kelder
Aileen Ibardaloza
Anny Ballardini
Lida Bushloper
John M. Bennett
C. J. Allen
Sasha Steensen
