Heather Corley's starving spirit is fed upon the heart

We are lucky to have Heather Corley in a Poetry Scores Art Invitational this year for the first time. Here is her piece, "The starving spirit is fed upon the heart".

I like how it combines her characteristic image of the heart with a gridlike pattern suggestive of an urban grid. This year's Invitational is devoted to a great poem of cities, The Sydney Highrise Variations, so this is very fitting.

Corley went along with our suggested bargain basement $50 opening bid for tonight's silent auction.

Robert Longyear stills the city's conversation

At the last minute, longtime Poetry Scores supporter Alicia LaChance recruited fellow artist Robert Longyear to show in this year's Art Invitational.

This is his remarkable piece, and two details from it. Its starting bid at the silent auction is a measly $50.

Robert chose from the poem The Sydney Highrise Variations the following title: “They rose like nouveaux accents and stilled, for a time, the city’s conversation.”

Robert told me, when he dropped it off, "I don't usually contribute to benefits, but the poem really seduced me".

Here is the part of the score that incorporates this line: "The starving spirit is fed upon the heart" by Robert Goetz.

Here is how the silent auction works.

Kim's and Dana's "Freud's cobwebbed poem"

Here are two completely different takes on the same phrase from Les Murray's poem The Sydney Highrise Variations: "Freud's cobwebbed poem".

Kim Richardson uses the urban context as backdrop and foregrounds the psychobiographic connotations evoked by the name of Sigmund Freud.

Dana Smith does a bit of research and depicts the part of the Sydney (Australia) business district that is specifically referenced in this line, albeit obliquely.

Kim did her piece all in one day on Wednesday after struggling for a long time with a poem she found "too male" to approach in her typically instinctive, soulful ways. Interesting, then, that she chose the most directly phallic phrase in the poem!

Dana - who is a man - worked for months at his piece, without mention of the poem's alleged masculity.

Their paintings will hang side by side at the show tonight at The Luminary Center for the Arts (Reber Place at Kingshighway, on the southwestern corner of Tower Grove Park) once I get down there and hang Kim's paintings. It's sitting in my kitchen right now.

Both will be on silent auction, with opening bids of a measly $50.

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Here is the part of the score that sets this phrase to music: "Hot air money driers" by Three Fried Men.

Here is how the silent auction works: How a Poetry Scores Art Invitational works.

From below, Cindy Tower's ponderous grotto

The other day, I saw Cindy Tower walking down the street near my job carrying a painting, when I realized it must be the painting she made for our show.

Indeed, it was. And it is a beauty. Here is an image of the piece, and a detail. It's titled "From below, a ponderous grotto". I find the use of religious iconography in this squalid industrial scene ingenious and moving.

Like the other pieces in the 2009 Poetry Scores Art Invitational, this piece is titled from the poem The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray. The art will hang Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts as a CD release party of our score to the poem.

Here is the part of the score that covers the same lines Cindy painted: "Inked in by scaffolding and workers" by Three Fried Men.

The art will be sold on silent auction. We begged the artsts to set their opening bids low. Cindy's opening bid is $50. It won't stay in two figures long - and I, for one, will be in on the bidding war.

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News you can use:
How a Poetry Scores Art Invitational works

How a Poetry Scores Art Invitational works

I've been fielding questions about how a Poetry Scores Art Invitational works, which is fair enough, it's evolved into its own thing.

It's a silent auction. There will be 50 works of art in the space that all respond to the same long poem. Somewhere near each piece will be a bid sheet for it listing the starting bid price. In almost all cases, that's a crazy cheap $50.

You like a piece, you bid by writing your bid on the bid sheet. You really like it, you keep an eye on the bid sheet and compete - you keep bidding higher.

So, it's this Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts (Reber at Kingshighway facing Tower Grove Park). It's listed for 6-10 p.m. We'll probably close some of the bidding for some of the pieces every hour on the hour, with the last announcement being near 9 p.m. In each case, we'll make an announcement that there are 10 or 15 minutes left to bid on a set of pieces before we close them out.

We need to close bidding in stages to make the sales logistics doable. All sales will be handled that night - cash, check, PayPal or (last resort) credit card number.

Also, if there are early bidding wars, we will want to be able to announce a winner for those pieces before the end of the night, so those who don't win know they still have some money to spend if other pieces look good. I've seen almost all of the show, and most people will want to bid on more than one of these pieces.

Like I say, all sales are final that night and people will be expected to take their new art home. I haven't seen a piece yet that isn't portable. As we are wrapping up the final set of sales about 9:30 p.m., people can start packing up their acquisitions to be out of there by 10 p.m. - and on to The Royale for the afterparty.

Proceeds from the art auction are split evenly between artist, venue and Poetry Scores.

In case you wondered, Poetry Scores is a Missouri non-profit arts organization dedicated to translating poetry into other media. The Art Invitational is one of our two annual fundraisers and the occasion for releasing our poetry score CD for the year - which is the same poem the artists responded to, set to music.

This year, we scored - and artists responded to - The Sydney Highrise Variations, by the Australian poet Les Murray.

The new Poetry Scores CD (and select archival works) will be on sale at the event. All contributing artists get a free copy (and two free drink tickets). We will be playing the new CD, and previous poetry scores, on The Luminary's excellent sound system throughout the show.

The Luminary also will run a bar (cash/tips). John Eiler of Poetry Scores will provide food (free). Senor Pique of Mexico City/Ballwin will provide homemade chips & salsa for 300 (free).

Any questions? Email Chris King at brodog [that there @ sign] hotmail.com.

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The image is John Minkoff's contribution to the show, "Transients at speed," a line from early in the poem. John is a Chicago artist who also plays electric guitar in Three Fried Men, which performs much of the score.

Here is "Transients at speed" by Three Fried Men, from the score, with John on electric guitar.

Other contributors to the score include Middle Sleep (Los Angeles), Robert Goetz, Frank Heyer, Thom Fletcher, Stefene Russell and the poet. Joining Three Fried Men here and there are Christopher Y. Voelker, Carl Pandolfi and Roger Moutenot, who produces Yo La Tengo.

Three Fried Men is a St. Louis-based indie rock band that gew out of Eleanor Roosevelt, which grew out of Enormous Richard, which was a weird contemporary of Uncle Tupelo (and Chicken Truck and Bob Reuter and The Lettuceheads and ...) in the early St. Louis indie rock scene.

RFT preview from this week.

On the summit that exhilarates sick beloved engines

The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray begins from the perspective of a motorist whose car has died atop a bridge, and as a poem that pointedly addresses the mentality of the 20th century, it is appropriately an automotive poem (and a poem of planes and spaceships).

Two artists contributing to our Sydney Highrise Variations Art Invitational have taken on this automotive imagery head-on. This is Greg Edmondson's piece, "Sick beloved engine", a modified Pinewood Derby car.

Greg's piece is unique among this year's contributions for being a commission. We were yukking it up at The Tap Room one night when he said he was making a Pinewood Derby car for the Pierogi show in Brooklyn.

Greg has shown all over the world, and got stuck in something of a backwaters art market as a parent with a child here. He is none too enthusiastic about showing in St. Louis, but I figured I could get him to make another Pinewood Derby car for our Invitational. And I was right!

The poem begins, "So we're sitting over our sick beloved engine," and we hang art in our shows depending on where in the flow of the poem the quote chosen for the title of the art appears. No one made art for the show titled "So we're sitting," so Greg's "Sick beloved engine" will be the first piece in the show. This piece will be the second: “On the summit that exhilarates cars” by Andrew Torch.

Andy is taking a quite literal approach to the opening images of the poem, since the "sick beloved engine" is stalled atop a bridge over Sydney Harbour and he has depicted the harbour-side Sydney Opera House.

Torch is a card-carrying Surrealist, and he has done magnificent Surrealist paintings for past Poetry Scores Art Invitationals. So it is quite a departure for him to depict such a literal scene. Of course, the architecture of the Opera House (by the late Jorn Utzon) has a Surrealist tinge, so this is in some sense a realist take on a scene with Surrealist elements. Andy might not have to tender his card.

Andy also is an antque toy merchant, and we can see his dayjob making a cameo in this marvelous piece, which he inscribed "For Les," for the poet. I intend to seek permission from the Poetry Scores board to bid on this with house money at the silent auction, and buy the box as a gift for the poet.

What is this chiseller doing in here?

It so happens my daughter Leyla Fern was playing art director to her daddy, instructing me how to carve a wardrobe box into a convertible for jer while we putative grownups had our heads under the hoods of our own imaginary cars ...

I hope Leyla will attend the Invitational on Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary (4900 Reber Pl. at Kingshighway, just across the street from Tower Grove Park); and if so, perhaps we'll bring her car and some markers, to give her something to do with all the inspiration she will be absorbing.

"The Cantilevered Behometh" by Stefene Russell

This is a working draft toward Stefene Russell's contribution to the 2009 Poetry Scores Art Invitational, The Cantilevered Behometh.

The title is chosen from The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray, and the work responds to the poem. The piece will be hung in the show depending on where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears.

The Invitational/silent auction will be held at The Luminary Center for the Arts (located at 4900 Reber Pl. at Kingshighway, just across the street from Tower Grove Park) 6-10 p.m. Friday, Nov. 13, with an after-party following just down the block at The Royale.

I asked Stef how she made this and what she was thinking.

I scanned in pages from an old British Xmas catalog, Gamage's - it had that old-school Brit feeling that lurks in a lot of the corners of the poem. At first I was thinking those "archaic spirits" Les mentions were Aboriginal, since he writes about that a lot, but when I really got to thinking about Modernist architecture, it seemed like a direct reaction to that sort of dark, wooden, repressed Victorian thing, the sort of world that the Xmas catalog represented.

This could just be my wingnut theory, but seems to me the Industrial Revolution in Europe, when it squashed this whole old Celtic world of nature spirits & tribes but it soaked some of it up at the same time, or at least its shadow (e.g. Blake's "Satanic Mills"). & that those white boxes, and high-rises, were sort of an attempt to scrape off that creepy Victorian darkness that still had in it elements of the old, old world, or at least a very enraged & pushed-underground aspect of it (in Australia too, not just England - that Crown exerts a heavy influence).

Like building closer to heaven to get away from the cthonic, in a way. But there it is, flying around like a kite ... it shows up anyway. If that makes any sense! Anyway, it'll get printed & mounted & painted, but pretty subtly. I am excited about it.

I thought that improvised email had so many varied insights into Les' poem that I printed it out for him, along with this image, and will post it to him in Australila tomorrow, along with a long hand-written letter from me.

My band, Three Fried Men, set this part of the poem to music for the poetry score - we even used this phrase for the song title.

mp3

"The cantilevered behometh"
(Matt Fuller, Chris King, Les Murray)

Three Fried Men

Recorded by Lij at The Toy Boy

Mixed by Adam Long