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j4j4 is a collective of four persons, all given names beginning with j, who are compelled to explore transindividual composition.
We’re serious about “transindividual composition.” Everything we do, whether overtly or not, eschews the voice of the single authorial POV. We operate using a sort of distributed model of aesthetic production and evaluation. All of this is reflected in the choice of being “j4” rather than any list of names. About our cards project in general: It began in January 2015 and sort of ended at the close of 2016, at least officially in that it has been pushed on to a back burner while j4 reorients toward four new textual poetry projects. But the cards suit us and will be an ongoing part of j4 practice. All of the cards are 4” x 6” and the majority of are executed on unlined index cards, but there are some on other materials cut to size. We circulate these cards amongst ourselves, everyones works on them, and passes them along, or snaps a pic and nominates as done. If everyone agrees, great, otherwise whoever demurred gets the card to work on. As of this moment, 18 Jan 2017 — we have 178 cards that are done, and 45 of these are published or forthcoming. Nearly 600 draft cards are in circulation right now. We do have some cards that make for easy reading or at least a quicker grasp of some statement or slogan, but on the whole we prefer not to make the meanings and messages that impact the process so overt. About these three cards in particular: — How to Map a Ring System — Maybe the various connotations and extension of the idea of a “ring” are sufficiently present here that commentary is superfluous? — Housework and a House in Virginia — In case you don’t know, to have a “house in Virginia” is/was a quasi-polite quasi-covert way of referring to HIV within queer communities. — Expectation Gray — Here the reduced palette, the overlay, the “background” of digitalization and the muted title combine for a rather bleak, possibly realistic, mood. How to map a ring system
Housework and a house in Virginia Expectation gray |
Marcus MilanMarcus Milan is a scientist at Yale University. He write poems, novels and short stories. These poems are about identity conflict and the boundaries of our shared humanity, exploring the legacy of war crimes at the end of the 20th century and the rise of neofascism is contemporary America.
Elements/Time
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Christine M. HopkinsChristine M. Hopkins is a writer and journalist living in Des Moines, Iowa. Her work appears or is forthcoming in and/or, tiny poetry: macropoetics, and the Dubuque Area Writers Guild’s 2016 and 2017 galleries. Follow her on Twitter @christineiniowa.
Christine says about her work, This piece came mainly out of frustration from attempting and failing to write sonnets. I responded by trying to write the least sonnet-like poem I could, using the visual form to force the idea that there's no volte, no love, no strict meter here: all these platitudes are going to the same place on rejecting the sonnet form
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Jayne GuertinJayne Guertin is a Rhode Island-based writer and photographer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, [PANK] Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, The Tishman Review, *82 Review, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College, and is currently at work on a hybrid collection inspired by van Gogh's letters.
Jayne says, These erasure poems are part of a hybrid collection (poems, essays, images) on which I've been working for the last few years. The poems, inspired by van Gogh's letters written while in Arles, France (the most productive time of his life) hint at my relationship with the artist, art, aging, and the idea of transcendence. Crime of Passion
A Vague State |
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Doug BollingDoug Bolling's poems have appeared in Posit, BlazeVOX, Indefinite Space, Niche, Redactions, and The Missing Slate (with interview) among others. His poetry has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and, most recently, the Mathiasen Award from Harmony Magazine. He is working on a collection and lives in the greater Chicago area.
Doug says, I'm very interested in the poetry of boundary breaking, extending the genre outward & away from most of the current practices of weaving metaphor and line about a central thematic, etc. Some of my values are asymmetry, dislocation, distortion, and renewed emphasis on space as a dynamic in the poetic fabric Materality
Stria 41 Boneworks |
Joanna ThomasJoanna Thomas lives in a tin house on the wrong side of the railroad tracks in a small university town. She is the founder of the Inland Poetry Prowl, a day-long celebration of poetry held on the first Saturday of April, in Ellensburg, WA <www.inlandpoetry.com>. Her poems have appeared in Ekphrasis, Picture Sentence, and Found Poetry Review.
Joanna says, I'm a collage artist, I often write poems about art, and I also enjoy the meditative process of finding small poems lost amid vast oceans of prose. The attached poems were found in the International Library of Technology, published in 1927. CLAM
LIPS WATER |
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Adam HamptonAdam Hampton is a poet and doctoral student at Edge Hill University. A former Royal Marine, his work concentrates on the evocation of a tacit knowledge of warfare via innovative forms. His work has been published by 'Blackbox Manifold', 'M58', 'Pages', 'Ikleftiko' and 'Three and a half point 9'.
Adam says about his work, The three poems are built from the euphemisms of war. The euphemisms are re-appropriated by the poet and new language is produced via anagrammatic techniques. The resultant poem is contained within a restricted field of space as a representation of the monopolisation of language. The poet amalgamates linear techniques with the immanence apparent in concrete poetry to produce an assimilated work with both visual and figurative characteristics. Collateral Damage
Displaced People The War on Terror |
Ali ZnaidiAli Znaidi (b.1977) lives in Redeyef, Tunisia. He is the author of several chapbooks, including Experimental Ruminations (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems (Origami Poems Project, 2012), Bye, Donna Summer! (Fowlpox Press, 2014), Taste of the Edge (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014), and Mathemaku x5 (Spacecraft Press, 2015). For more, visit aliznaidi.blogspot.com.
[sonnet]: liberal lust
[sonnet]: everything is architectural euphemism [sonnet]: sonnet in which adumbrated moonlights are trying to extricate themselves from the shackles of |
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Sue BirchenoughSue Birchenough lives in Buxton, and is a regular visitor to Manchester poetry events. She has been published in English PEN anthology 'Catechism', PBS press anthology 'No Spy Zone', Like This Press anthology 'Austin Bronte Shakespeare' and in the Knives forks and spoons anthology 'Yesterday's Music Today'; in Red ceilings, Street cake, Ink sweat and tears, m58, zimZalla, and B S Johnson journal. Her pamphlet 'housework' is about to be published by Kfs press. She was Highly Commended in 2014 Erbacce poetry competition. Her avant object 'takeaway britain' was exhibited at the Saison Poetry Library in London over summer 2016.
She says I'm primarily a word poet. But certain poems will express themselves as word images - words alone just won't do it, and sometimes the concept of a poem expressed visually has the impact I'm seeking. I like playing at the edge where word and image overlap. ping pong
soundbites |
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Tom DaleyTom Daley’s poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, 32 Poems, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere. Recipient of the Dana Award in Poetry and the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Prize from the Academy of American Poets, he is the author of two plays, Every Broom and Bridget—Emily Dickinson and Her Irish Servants and In His Ecstasy—The Passion of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which he performs as one-man shows. FutureCycle Press published his first-full length collection of poetry, House You Cannot Reach—Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems, in the summer of 2015. He leads writing workshops in the Boston area and online for poets and writers working in creative prose.
He says, The piece called “Dinner with Mary at Gene and Karen’s” includes snippets of family lore and random words pulled out of the ether emanating from the dinner table I jotted down in my shaky calligraphy. I realized, too late, that I had misspelled "Appalachia." I keep in mind this about Eudora Welty when I am jotting things down: “She said for a writer, ears were just as important as eyes: ‘Your ears should be like magnets. I used to be able to hear people in back and in front of me and on the street. I don’t hear as much as I used to. It’s so maddening not to overhear remarks’ (More Conversations 86).” Quoted in “Biography of Eudora Welty” by Amy Sickels, from Harold Bloom, editor, Bloom’s BioCritiques: Eudora Welty (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004). Dinner with Mary at Gene and Karen’s
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WIlliam KingWm. Todd King is a found text poet bringing old words to new tongues in the maddening green of North Carolina. His works have appeared in Short Fast & Deadly, STILL, Found Poetry Review, Houseguest, and Potroast.
He says about his work: These blackout poems were a séance with ghosts hiding in Toni Morrison's Beloved. August 2nd
February 10th June 5th |
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Jemshed khanThe author has published poems in Number One Magazine, Wittenberg Review of Literature and Arts, Pharaohs, Unlikely Stories (#BlackArtMatters September, 2016), Read Local (2016), Rigorous (Jan 2017), Rat's Ass Review (Mar 2017) and the chapbooks Paean for Billy Collins (Calliope Club Press, 2017) and NanoText (Medusa's Laugh Press, February 2017). The author is slated for Clockwise Cat, Issue 36 (2017) and I-70 Review (September 2017).
He says about his work: Homan Square in Chicago is a notorious Police facility where over seven thousand Chicago citizens were disappeared by the CPD temporarily, lasted decades, and existed without any official paperwork. It turns out many were tortured to obtain confessions or to get them to snitch. Application of genital electrodes was one method. Please Google if you are unaware as this not a hoax and has resulted in legal settlement and national press coverage. Anyway the poem shows a series of shadowed blue tiles arranged fortress style to represent the blue police colors. Inside this fortress are tan flesh-tone elements - as those detained were mostly minority. The red and green turning arrows represent electrical current applied to the genital area. The recessed tan drain is in contrast to the blue raised elements and symbolizes the disdain for suffering. Finally the white-on-black and black-on-white "7000" is the estimate of the number that went through Homan Square before it was finally shut down. All visual elements were created in docx, and therefore are representative of the modern palette readily available to poets. Homan Square
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Sarah SloatSarah J. Sloat lives in Frankfurt, a stone’s throw from Schopenhauer’s grave. Her poems and prose have appeared in The Offing, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Sixth Finch, among other journals. Sarah’s poetry chapbook on typefaces and texts, ‘Inksuite,’ is available from Dancing Girl Press, which also published ‘Heiress to a Small Ruin’ in 2016.
Sarah says about her work: The poems Eureka, Squall and The Chiming use the source text for the poems is Stephen King's "Misery" are part of a found poetry project I began last fall with a group of poets, each of whom was assigned a Stephen King book. I decided to embellish the pieces with thread or color or collage. Other pieces from this series have so far been published by concis and Sixth Finch. Citation: King, Stephen. Misery. Hodder & Stoughton, 1987 Chiming
Eureka Thou |
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Klara FeenstraKlara Feenstra is a poet from London. Her work is primarily invested with phenomenological concerns, particularly how time and memory is recalled, archived, and how these urgencies manifest themselves in language about the body.
K says, "I will gift you ligaments" is a treatment of the body - a study in objects and subjects, pulling the desire out of every moment, pasting it onto a page. Competing frequencies
Skintight Sunburnt currency |
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Drew DavidDrew B. David is a visual poet from VA, USA. He is originally from Queens, NYC, the benighted borough, backward & still "real" after all these eons. His work has been appeared in Otoliths. He is also the author of The Salad Rhapsodies, an ongoing experiment in long-form visual poetry. He maintains a blog at http://www.wantontextblog.com/ and a website at http://www.wantontext.net/
Drew says about his work, I am into mixed media/collage. I believe the future of poetry/narrative/prose/what have you will be a mixture of the visual and textual, because textual narrative (prose or verse) alone has no (experimental) future; the modernists (and post-modernists) killed off that possibility long ago. Perhaps, then, this hybrid form is a way forward. forget factories (cover)
majordomos |
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Jose Trejo MayaHe was born in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico, where he spent his childhood in the small neighboring rural pueblo of Tarimoró and wherefrom he immigrated in 1988. His inspirations include Netzahualcoyotl, Humberto Ak’abal, Ray A. Young Bear, and James Welch. He has been published in various literary journals in the UK, the US, in India, in Spain and in Australia. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2015 and was awarded Tercer Premio en El Centro Canario Estudios Caribeños El Atlántico en el Certamen Internacional de Poesía en 2016. While in ceremony with Chololo medicine men in the Tule River Reservation, he dreamt the above written prophecy…
Jose says about his work, The poems submitted in the video are from an ms with the same title (Death Throws). The poem Addendum & Storm was published in written form in the literary journal by Acentos Review February 15, 2015, the other two are unpublished. A little bit more about this work; it's a carefully woven mosaic of ethno poetics rooted in a language dexterity captured from images in nature and memory. Here I have chosen death throws from the (i.e. first sun) and the other two poems from the last section (i.e. fifth sun). I am utilizing the sunstone reference of the creation story of the five suns of the tribes of the central plateau of present day Mexico City. In this I am using the primary source of the Tonalpohualli or Count of Days as a motif to give sequence to this series of poems, of which the ms runs 103 pages in its totality. from Death Throws (video)
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