Natalie Czech, Aram Saroyan and Jason Simon “Sought Poems”

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poster for Natalie Czech, Aram Saroyan and Jason Simon “Sought Poems”

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Co-curated with Convolution, a journal of conceptual criticism, Sought Poems considers the legacy of minimal and found poetry in new work by Natalie Czech, Aram Saroyan, and Jason Simon. The poet K. Silem Mohammad, in a 2005 essay considering then-recent poetic movements that challenged the notion of authorship, writes that the “sought poem” is extrapolated from the “found poem”:

“Whereas the idea behind found poems is that they’re just something you stumble upon and say hey, that’s poetry, I’m thinking of a process of aggressively looking for something, with the intent of enlisting it in some capacity. Sought poems come about as the result of invasive surgeries performed on already-mangled bodies. The poet knows those happy—or unhappy, as the case may be—accidents of language are out there, but it may take repeated sallies into the underbrush before they are flushed out. The sought poem is not passively awaited, but teased, prodded, hectored into existence. The poet thus assumes a level of involvement that in many ways is very old-school: She once again puts her manipulative ego into full gear, and becomes responsible for aggressively intentional structures.”

This search into the underbrush often brings the poet—or artist—into an unequal collaboration with known or unknown but often unwitting collaborators, a relationship that becomes especially true in the work of Natalie Czech, who often appropriates the language of poets and machines (as in the case with the photographs presented here), and Jason Simon, whose work for Sought Poems draws both its imagery and language from Jean-Luc Godard’s film Numéro Deux (1975). For this exhibition, Aram Saroyan, the legendary minimalist poet (best known, perhaps, for his controversial “lighght” poem), has revisited his early photographic work, undertaken when he was the assistant to Richard Avedon in the 1960s and first collected in his book, Words & Photographs (1970). Additionally, Convolution and We Have Photoshop have curated a selection of books and ephemera related to minimal poetry, with an emphasis on Saroyan and the influential Language poet Robert Grenier, whose poetry has been integral to Czech and which is considered in the most recent issue of Convolution.

In conjunction with Sought Poems, Convolution has released its fourth issue as an accompanying catalogue, featuring work by Etel Adnan, Chris Alexander, Harry Burke, Natalie Czech, Craig Dworkin, Kristen Gallagher, Robert Grenier, Diana Hamilton, Forsyth Harmon, Karl Holmqvist, Juliana Huxtable, Josef Kaplan, Shiv Kotecha, Sophia Le Fraga, Astrid Lorange, Holly Melgard, Nick Montfort, Kim Rosenfield, Aram Saroyan, Jacolby Satterwhite, Kit Schluter, Jason Simon, Carlos Soto Román, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Steve Zultanski, and We Have Photoshop. In the back of the gallery, Convolution has also curated a pop-up bookstore featuring publications by the contributors.

EVENTS
September 10
Convolution 4 Launch
One minute readings by Chris Alexander, Harry Burke, Kristen Gallagher, Diana Hamilton, Josef Kaplan, Shiv Kotecha, Nick Montfort, and Steve Zultanski.
7:30pm

September 18
Sought Criticism: Duration and Poetics
Panel discussion with Shiv Kotecha, Holly Melgard, and Steve Zultanski.
Moderated by Paul Stephens
4:30pm

September 21
Lecture on the work of Natalie Czech
Paul Stephens
7:00pm

Media

Schedule

from September 10, 2016 to October 16, 2016

Opening Reception on 2016-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:00
Convolution 4 launch at 7:30pm, with one minute readings by contributors

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