THE TRANSLATION TO HEAVEN by Iván Argüelles

THE TRANSLATION TO HEAVEN & Related Poems

Iván Argüelles

Iván Argüelles has been publishing what one might call liberating poetry since 1978. Now over eighty, he gives us "Translation to Heaven":

like the time in the country by the temple

out of the sky fell like a mirror copulating

a message on a paper of water hand held

called the Translation-to-Heaven ineffable

so much that one could no longer behold

things of this earth in the same dimension

The power or intelligence of Argüelles’ work and inspiration has not diminished in the nearly fifty years he has been publishing. Labels fly from his oeuvre like leaves in a windstorm. “Surrealist” is one that has been applied but also dismissed. This brief passage in a monumental work tells us the source of the restlessness and panache of his output. In an irreligious age, in which one believes in chaos but not in inspiration, he affirms the sudden, stunning shift into the infinite: “translation” is the deep experience of the visionary, the transcendence that language (what you do with your langue) allows us to achieve. Not Surrealism, which was fundamentally an attack, but a fierce rising up of mind. - Jack Foley

380 pp.

$29 US

ISBN 9781938521843

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ARTHUR DIES, 1St. CHRONICLE, Vol. 5, By Olchar E. Lindsann

ARTHUR DIES, 1St. CHRONICLE, Vol. 5, By Olchar E. Lindsann

"I am once again staggered at the unique I mean UNIQUE appearance of this absolutely multilayered masterpiece, from its ruminating typographies hand-written maps and scribblings to its simply masterful use of language, orthographic corruption phonetic decay faux archaicisms real archaicisms and just plain philological learning. I love the actual feel you present of that mysterious murky period after the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain to the coming of the Angles and Saxons, and the muttering murmurs of the Celtic indigenous folk ... all too much for the mind to take in at once. I simply have to breathe these pages to realize the enormous modernity in this ver-sion of myth and antiquities. Is this literature or a copy of literature? You have put the torch to anyone who thinks they understand poetry. This is incomprehensible quite simply put, the massive fragment of a Brain part bedlam and part ratio-cination. Seen through a glass darkly and magnified by season of tormented myr-midons trying to deconstruct whatever has ever been read before. Unlike anything in print today. Luna Bisonte Prods has to be praised for putting this massive typographical jigsaw puzzle together!" -from comments made by Iván Argüelles; though comments were made before this 2022 publication of Vol. 5, being the last volume of the First Chronicle of ARTHUR DIES, where Ygraine gives birth to Arthur in Chapter VIII of Vol.5. There are also extensive appendices in Vol.5 which summarize each volume's story line and different characters, or explain medieval terminology used in this epic poem.

$25 US

176 pp.

ISBN  9781938521836

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A FLATTENED FACE FOGS THROUGH

A FLATTENED FACE FOGS THROUGH

John M. Bennett

 https://johnmbennett.bandcamp.com/album/a-flattened-face-fogs-through

• A Flattened Face Fogs Through

  by John M. Bennett

  

  •  

  	Cake 00:00 / 01:03

  Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

  CD contains a full color 15 page booklet of photos, poetry, artwork and ephemera, as well as three additional bonus tracks not available on LP or Digital formats.
  
  Includes unlimited streaming of A Flattened Face Fogs Through via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

  ships out within 7 days

  edition of 100  19 remaining

    $18 USD or more 

• 
  

Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

Includes a full color 21 page 8.5" x 11" booklet of photographs, poetry, artwork, liner notes and other ephemera.

US STOCK SOLD OUT AT SOURCE, REMAINING BANDCAMP COPIES SHIP FROM BELGIUM.

**US DISTRO: VIRTUAL LABEL**
**UK / EU DISTRO: BOOMKAT**

Includes unlimited streaming of A Flattened Face Fogs Through via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 7 days
edition of 300  5 remaining

  $29 USD or more 

•  

Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

  $12 USD  or more

 

 

Dr. John M. Bennett (Chicago, 1942) has been a prolific contributor on the absolute fringes of the American poetry, mail-art, and underground music worlds throughout his career, while working as a scholar and archivist of Latin American literature and avant-garde writing. One of two sons to prominent cultural anthropologist John W. Bennett, he was born in Chicago and spent his childhood years living across Saint Louis, Post-War Japan, and Columbus, Ohio, often traveling with his father to archeological sites. After living and studying in Mexico and Southern California across the 1960s, he emerged from UCLA in 1970 with a PhD in Latin American literature. He then re-settled in one-time childhood home of Columbus with a job as a Spanish and literature professor (and later archivist) at OSU, and began self-publishing his works at a prolific rate. His poetry explored the minutia of a seemingly bland existence in the corn walled, strip mall infested landscape of Middle America, using a unique and heady strain of word-mangling steeped in the surrounding monotony.

In terms of pure bizarreness, Bennett’s poetry perhaps has precedent in some of the work of William S. Burroughs (whose manuscripts Bennett has edited), though there is a visual expression and concrete commitment that places him in the realm of early sound poet and dada artist Kurt Schwitters or Bennett’s contemporary Richard Kostelanetz. There are also elements of the grotesque and absurd on display in much of Bennett’s early work, in league with one-time correspondent Genesis P. Orridge and frequent collaborator Blaster Al Ackerman. John M. Bennett cut a notorious figure in the avant poetry world, prolifically contributing to underground literature magazines along with publishing and encouraging the work of others, nurturing an independent culture of experimentation and disregard for literary norms.

During the 1980’s, Bennett began to experiment with newly available home recording technology and electronics. After 1985’s The Spitter, which featured Bennett reading his poems alone, he began pairing performances of his poems with improvised music and vocal processing to create immersive sound worlds for his surreal explorations of the mundane. From his home studio in Columbus, Ohio, these recordings were released via self-dubbed cassettes alongside formidable chapbooks of visual poetry and traded through the postal service via his already prolific poetry imprint Luna Bisonte Prods (also home to the venerable Lost and Found Times periodical). These cassettes often featured unique artwork and calligraphy by Bennett himself, amounting to handmade art objects in the tradition of Fluxus Mail Art.

A Flattened Face Fogs Through was selected and sequenced by John Also Bennett from perhaps some fifteen hours of material, taken from cassettes spanning from 1986 to 1995. Concrete experiments with voice and tape manipulation, FM synthesis, early sampling keyboards, experimental percussion, flutes, and saxophones create a phantasmagorical backdrop for Bennett’s panting and gurgling poetry performances, spinning a sputtering picture of a quaking domestic void, at times evoking an almost Lynchian existential dread emanating from the shopping center parking lot.

Flattened Face includes recordings of classic Bennett poems like “The Shirt The Sheet”, “Last In Line”, “The Transmission”, and “The Blur”, all newly re-mastered by Jack Callahan. LP and CD formats are presented alongside an extensive booklet containing photographs, poetry, visual art and other ephemera, as well as Blaster Al Ackerman’s original introduction to the sought-after 1986 release Ax Tongue. The sound works presented here were made with a spirited cast of collaborators and conspirators - Byron D. Smith, Ficus Strangulensis, Mike Hovancsek, and Jack Wright to name a few (not to mention JMB’s oldest son William E. Bennett, then a child). They represent a fraction of John M. Bennett’s massive output in this marginal but fertile artistic community, and should stand as a testament both to it and to the underlying strangeness of language, the American Midwest, and of being itself. 

credits

released January 14, 2022

All poetry written and performed by John M. Bennett
Compiled and produced by John Also Bennett
Mastered by Jack Callahan
Original Ax Tongue introduction by Blaster Al Ackerman
Afterword by John Also Bennett
Cover photographs by Edward Lense
Booklet cover photo by Mary Albrecht
Design by Jeroen Wille

 

 

FORMATIO EST by John M. Bennett

FORMATIO EST

John M. Bennett

John M. Bennett's poetry has been explored in the recent book by Jim Leftwich, CONTAINERS PROJECTING MULTITUDES: Expositions on The Poetry of John M. Bennett, 2019. Bennett's recent books include OJIJETE, 2020; HAVING BEEN NAMED: De-Reading Popol Vuh & De-Reading Iván Argüelles' The Shape of Air, 2021; IS KNOT, 2021; and SIX MONTHS' HACKING: or, Six Years Hacking Six Months Aint No Sentence, John M. Bennett Hacks Jim Leftwich's Six Months Aint No Sentence 2011-2016, 2021. The present compilation, FORMATIO EST, consists of poems and visual poems from 2016-2017. Writing in English and Spanish, Bennett is one of our time's most unique and innovative poets. “...la sombra / negra del volcán al / otro lado...tongueless lost yr / feet just 'walk' a / cross the halted edge of sleep”.

Poetry & Visual Poetry

$20.00 US

172 pp.

ISBN 9781938521812

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POET ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY: In Memoriam David-Baptiste Chirot

POET ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY: In Memoriam David Baptiste Chirot

Edited by Tom Hibbard, C. Mehrl Bennett, & John M. Bennett

After a five month stay in hospital, well-known international artist and poet, David-Baptiste Chirot (birth name, David Harris) began, in the late 1980's, a new phase in his artistic journey at River View apartments in Milwaukee Wisconsin with artworks, films, writing, only to have it interrupted in early June 2021 by his untimely death. Friends and fellow artists/writers helped piece together this in-memorium from notebooks, files, loose pages and artworks, salvaged from his apartment, and with works inspired by his art, writings, and their memories of father, brother, friend, artist, writer, poet & visual poet, David-Baptiste Chirot (b.1953 - d.2021).

$14.99 US

ISBN  9781938521805

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