May 21, 2006
Crag Hill & mARK oWEns
Sunday, May 21st
7:30 pm
New American Art Union
922 SE Ankeny Street
$5 suggested donation
For eight years Mark Owens has been playing with concepts of language through the means of visual poetry, sound poetry, mail art, installation, performance, video, and photography.
Last year his visual poems were exhibited in the SoundVision / VisionSound III show at the Nave Gallery in Somerset, Massachusetts, and in the Land and Language exhibition at The Land/An Art Site in Mountainair, New Mexico, and he performed his “Sign Event” in NYC at Times Square.
He participated in the Fluxus Festival in Nice, France, in 2003, and had a solo show at the Casa de La Palabra in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2001.
Curator of Spare Room's Sound Poetry Festivals in 2003 and 2004, his work has been published recently in the periodicals envelope, fo_a_rm, Ferrum Wheel, flim, and Take Out.
For this reading, his poems will be presented via video projection and performance.
Say this. There is a sentence
in my mouth.
–Michel Palmer
So his speaking is a loop. Of
interior and outside.
–Leslie Scalapino
Language does what it does most eloquently and least destructively when we let go the reins and give it its head . . . . it is a matter of feeling our way into the tiniest crevices of that language wants to do . . . a surrender . . . in which we can resonate.
–Donnel Stern
Thought is made in the mouth.
–Tristan Tzara
Crag Hill is a mountain in the North Western part of the English Lake District.
Crag Hill lives at 1015 NW Clifford Street, Pullman WA 99163.
It was formerly known as Eel Crag; however, the Ordnance Survey now mark Eel Crag as referring to the northern crags of the fell. It overlooks the valleys of Rannerdale on the west, and Coledale on the east.
Coeditor and publisher of Score (now Spore) magazine since 1983, and coeditor of /Writing to Be Seen/ (the first U.S. anthology of visual poetry in thirty years), Hill's books include /Another Switch/ (Norton Coker Press), /Yes James, Yes Joyce/ (Loose Gravel Press), /Dict: A Bridge/ (Xexoxial Endarchy), /The Week/ (Runaway Spoon Press), /American Standard/ (Runaway Spoon Press), and /Sixixix/ (Xexoxial Endarchy).
It is the second highest fell in the area of high ground between Whinlatter and Newlands, second to Grasmoor. It is 839 m (2753 feet) high, and has a relative height of 117 m.
Hill's tastes in poetry are eclectic, "ranging from expansive Walt Whitman to microscopic P. Inman, from traditional lyric technique embodied by James Galvin, Louise Gluck, through Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Eigner, Blackburn, Ginsberg, Snyder to the exploratory Coolidge, Silliman, Jake Berry, and others."
It is usually ascended as the highest point of the Coledale Horseshoe, a circuit of Coledale which takes in Causey Pike, Scar Crags, Sail and Grisedale Pike; other ascents are from Braithwaite, Stair or Buttermere.
mostly standing water
small but necessary
each time with concomitant space
nuclear comedy
remembering to excavate
yawn of trapeze
now seems more evident
sundry
delay of synapse
book slid across carpeted floor
native tongues
slow and seemingly random
absolutes
—Crag Hill