ISSUE 12

Issue 12 

Ernest Hemingway's "Blank Verse" Elaboration

Brave New Word Issue #12 was a long time coming. Real long time. I first thought about making "Blank Verse"-related something-something in the summer of 2016 when Brave New Word was just an idea in the back of my head. I knew I needed to do something with it but I just couldn't get my grasp on it for some reason. It was just slipping away and showing its gnarly tongue every time I attempted to do something with it. That was until mid-2017 when I decided to make it an Issue of Brave New Word as a proof of concept for further developments. 

But even after that it was a rough ride. Almost immediately after I started to work on this issue - the troubles started. I was out of one job and then jumped straight into another one and that didn't worked out well despite all the effort. In addition to being burned out i was focused on finding another job. And after i've found it - it didn't worked out either and I was out of action yet again even more burned out and exhausted. It was really time-consuming and demotivating time for me. In addition to that I needed to finish my own book which took an eternity already. While i've tried to maintain BNW at that time - i wouldn't say these were the strongest issues. Because of that Hemingway Special was put on indefinite hold for a while. 

Then Matt Margo asked me to take over editorial duties on Ex-Ex-Lit blog. It was a refreshing experience with a completely different pace. And it turned out to be the key to understanding how to pull Hemingway issue off the right way. 

Instead of fully focusing on it and trying hard - i left it to slowly grow in the background. With the hurry and pressure out of equation I've found that the whole process of putting an issue together to be smoother and much more focused.

And now it is finally done.

***

But why "Blank Verse"? The reason is really simple. It is one of those poems that provide big and nasty sandbox with multiple possibilities to be explored. 

Ernest Hemingway needs no introduction. The king of the less is more school of expression, the man who an attitude and so on and so forth. However, there is one element of his early artistic output that is often overlooked - his poetry. 

Long story short - there is a reason why he focused on prose. While his poetry isn't really bad - there's not much to talk about. It is your standard modernist-infused stuff that was all over the place back in late 1910s and throughout 1920s. Funny thing is that back in the day Ernest declared the novel form dead. Then he read "The Great Gatsby" and changed his mind. The other funny thing is that his prose got more poetry that his actual poetry (by a long shot, to the point you can go fishing for it).

Despite that, Mr. Hemingway had managed to compose one piece of poetry with a lasting impression - "Blank Verse". It is a short poem written in 1916 as as a school assignment that published in November 1917 in a humor column Air Line of a school newspaper Trapeze. 

"Blank Verse" is a five line poem that consists solely of punctuation marks divided by extensive spaces to resemble a legitimate text object. The poem consists of: 

• a pair of quotation marks; an exclamation mark, colon, coma, dot; coma, coma, coma, dot; coma, semicolon, exclamation mark and another coma.

As you can see - it is obviously a throwaway joke. But in the same time it manages to go far beyond its original intent. 

Conceptually - it is a dig at overzealous readers who don't really care about the poems and just hang around in a self-satisfaction bout for sake of warped joyous overthinking and nothing else. And I guess we can all agree that these folks are somewhat annoying.

But this introduction is running too long already. If you want to read more about "Blank Verse" and my understanding of it - check out my essay about it.

https://medium.com/@volodymyrbilyk/ernest-hemingways-blank-verse-f955f9cf3aff

Without further ado - Brave New Word Issue 12 Ernest Hemingway's "Blank Verse" elaboration. This brings us to this issue.

***
Issue Line-up:

• Andriy Antonovskiy - One piece to rule them all
• Bri Esposito - Blanked Verse
• Russell Jaffe - Blank Verse Variation
• Kim Vodicka - Blank Shakes
• Volodymyr Bilyk - Oak Trapeze
• Luc Fierens - One Punctuation Piece
• Gregory K. H. Bryant - Twelve Punctuation Pieces
• Nathaniel D. Horowitz - waveswavy
• Zoria April - DISTILLED EMOTION: NEUROMANCER'S TOKYO
• Sacha Archer - Gathering from The Sun Also Rises
• Mark Young - Meanwhile, in Ketchum, Idaho
• Mithrandir Mithrahnuruodo - Just another piece
• Erica Baum - Modern Series
• Mark Blickley - RAGE in a CAGE leads to a TWELVE GAUGE
• Fernando Futuro - An OOK interpretation
• Andrew Taylor - an early summer's day
• Michael Kostiuk - Self-refential Essay on Ernest Hemingway's Blank Verse that ended with a Blank Page
• John M. Bennett - )))garga...ojos(((
• Carlo Parcelli + Rosalie Gancie - Two Punctuation Pieces
• Jenne Kaivo - A Poem With Character
• Heath Brougher  - Attempts at Hemingway
• George Sabov - Weak Passwords
• Marton Koppany - One piece from 2004
• Michael O’Brien - The shot that killed Kennedy
• Gregory Betts - Poetics what I like purity
• Jeff Bagato - Grawlix Grid
• Daria Zengerstein - Slightly Perplexed

Zoria April - DISTILLED EMOTION: NEUROMANCER'S TOKYO

Zoria April (Zorica Petkoska Kalajdjieva) has been writing and being published since she was 7 years old. She is a master public reading evader, she writes in short forms, currently lacking the discipline for a novel. She is writing in 3 languages, reading in 10. She translates between some of those, sometimes professionally, sometimes just to break beauty down to its smallest parts and recreate it. She has published 2 poetry collections of her own, Stars and Sparks of a Dream 2000 and Wordigami 2015, and has been published in various group collections and magazines in several countries and languages, most recently in Japan and Hong Kong.

She holds an MA in English literature and is just completed a research fellowship in Japanese culture and concrete/visual poetry. She is currently a travel writer for several magazines and websites.

Andriy Antonovskiy - One piece to rule them all

Andriy Antonovskiy is a poet from Ukraine who currently lives in Barcelona. He is a strong proponent for Catalan Independence and he considers his primary mission to be building a cultural bridge between Ukraine and Catalonia.

Photo by Zhenia Perutska.

Kim Vodicka - Blank Shakes

Kim Vodicka grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana and received her B.A. in English from UL Lafayette in 2010. She is currently working on her M.F.A. in Poetry at LSU, where she is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant and was Co-Coordinator of Delta Mouth Literary Festival 2012. Her artwork has been published in Tenderloin, and her poems have been published in Shampoo, Ekleksographia, and Dig. Her first book, Aesthesia Balderdash, is forthcoming in June 2012 from Trembling Pillow Press

****

Daria Zengerstein - Slightly Perplexed

Daria Zengerstein is a high-plains drifter who has no idea why she exists on this cursed earth of this sensual world. But she enjoys having fun and stumbling upon the great something-something causing utter bouts of severe perplexion.

Just like this time.

Fernando Futuro - An OOK interpretation

Fernando Futuro was born and raised in Barcelona. As a Catalan freedom fighter - he is forced to reside in the shadows. But he likes it there very much.
He enjoys doing stuff the other way around because he sees no point in doing the way it was already done before.
You can't find him anywhere and you will never know what he is up to.

Jeff Bagato - Grawlix Grid

A multi-media artist living near Washington, DC, Jeff Bagato produces poetry and prose as well as electronic music and glitch video. His text and visual poetry has appeared in many journals including Otoliths, Ex Ex Lit, The New Post Literate, Angry Old Man, and Zoomoozophone Review. Short fiction has recently appeared in Horror Sleaze Trash and Gobbet. His published books include Savage Magic (poetry), and The Toothpick Fairy (fiction). A blog about his writing and publishing efforts can be found at http://jeffbagato.wordpress.com.

George Sabov - Weak Passwords

George Sabov is a pseudonym for the writer-translator who wished to remain anonymous because of ironic paranoia and respect for the sense of mystery.

He is the man whose artistic persona had spawned out of reasonable and totally not obsessive fascination with Gerogerigegege, Hanatarash and Einstuerzende Neubauten.
You already know who he is.

Gregory Betts - Poetics what I like purity

Gregory Betts is the author of seven books of poetry, including If Language (a collection of 56 perfect paragraph-length anagrams) and The Others Raisd in Me (150 erasure poems of Shakespeare’s sonnet 150). He is also the author of Avant-garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations, the first holistic study of avant-garde writing in Canada. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Michael O’Brien - The shot that killed Kennedy

Michael O’Brien lives in Glasgow Scotland. His work has most recently appeared in the journals - Akitsu Quaterly, Cattails, Bones, Moonchild, The Other Bunny. He is the author of, As Adam (UP Literature) and Big Nothing (Bones). He was a runner-up in the Mainichi Daily News Haiku Contest in 2009. You can follow him on twitter @michaelobrien22

Marton Koppany - One piece from 2004

Márton Koppány (b. 1953) lives in Budapest, Hungary. His books include: Immortality and Freedom, Coracle Press, 1991; The Other Side, Kalligram 1999; To Be Or     To Be, Runaway Spoon Press,1996; Investigations and Other Sequences, Ahadada Books, 2003; Endgames, Modulations, Addenda, all by Otoliths, 2008, 2010, 2012; this is visual poetry, 2010; Fall Leaves, Woodland Pattern Book Center, 2011; The Reader, Runaway Spoon Press, 2012. E-books include: Waves, HungarianLangArt, TheAhaMoment , all by Eratio, 2008, 2014, 2016.

 Collaborative books include : From The Annual Records of The Cloud Appreciation Society, with Nico Vassilakis, Otoliths, 2008; Short Movies, with Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, cPress, 2008; Book of Numbers, with Jim Leftwich, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2011. An ongoing collaborative project with Anatol Knotek is online at Márton and Anatol.

In anthologies: Anthology Spidertangle, The Last Vispo, A Global Visuage, The Dark Would and The New Concrete. First exhibitions: Barbican Library, 1989, Woodland Pattern, 1991. Recent shows: Text Festival, Manchester, 2011 and 2014; The Dark Would, Edinburgh, 2013. Recent readings (2011-2013): The Green Lantern, Chicago; Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee; UNF, Jacksonville; Birkbeck, Rich Mix and X Marks the Bökship, London.

Heath Brougher - Attempts at Hemingway

Heath Brougher is the poetry editor of Five 2 One Magazine and the co-poetry editor of Into the Void Magazine. He has published 3 chapbooks, A Curmudgeon Is Born (Yellow Chair Press, 2016), Digging for Fire, and Your Noisy Eyes (both by Stay Weird and Keep Writing Press, 2016 and 2017). He is a Best of the Net Nominee and has had work translated into anthologies and journals in Albania and Kosovo. He edited the anthology Luminous Echoes, the proceeds of which are donated to an organization which helps prevent suicide/self harm. He was the judge for Into the Void Magazine's 2016 Inaugural Poetry Contest and has had his own work appear in The Helios Mss, Chiron Review, Zoomoozophone Review, Word For/Word, Expound, MiPOesias, Gloom Cupboard, Full of Crow, Cruel Garters, Lakeview Journal, Otoliths, East Jasmine Review, X-Peri, Carnival, Red Ceilings Review, Clockwise Cat, Moss Trill, Gold Dust Magazine, Squawk Back, BlazeVOX, Diverse Voices Quarterly, *Star 82 Review, eFiction India, and elsewhere.

Carlo Parcelli + Rosalie Gancie - Two Punctuation Pieces

Carlo Parcelli is currently Beat Poet Laureate of Maryland, USA. He is widely considered one of the greatest poets of his generation, or any generation.

Rosalie Gancie is mail artist. She was features on a numerous exhibitions and been published in numerous online and print publications.

Andrew Taylor - an early summer's day

Andrew Taylor is a Nottingham based, Liverpool born poet, editor, critic and lecturer. His second collection of poetry, March, was published in September 2017 by Shearsman Books. He is editor of M58, a blogzine of alternative poetries. www.andrewtaylorpoetry.com

Michael Kostiuk - Self-refential Essay on Ernest Hemingway's Blank Verse that ended with a Blank Page

Michael Kostiuk is a multimedia artist. He was born in Paris, Texas, USA. Currently lives in Yamaguchi City, Japan. His works were exhibited all around the around.

John M. Bennett - )))garga...ojos(((

John M. Bennett has published, exhibited and performed his word art worldwide in thousands of publications and venues. He was editor and publisher of LOST AND FOUND TIMES (1975-2005), and is Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at The Ohio State University Libraries. Richard Kostelanetz has called him “the seminal American poet of my generation”. His work, publications, and papers are collected in several major institutions, including Washington University (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, The Ohio State University, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major libraries. His PhD (UCLA 1970) is in Latin American Literature.

Sacha Archer - Gathering from The Sun Also Rises

Sacha Archer is a Canadian writer, visual artist and ESL Instructor currently residing in Ontario. He was the recipient of the 2008 P.K. Page Irwin Prize for his poetry and visual art, and in 2010 he was chosen to participate in the Elise Partridge Mentor Program. His work has appeared in journals such as filling Station, ACTA Victoriana, h&, illiterature, NōD, and Experiment-O. His most recent chapbooks are Detour (Spacecraft Press, 2017), The Insistence of Momentum (The Blasted Tree, 2017), and Acceleration of the Arbitrary (Grey Borders, 2017). One of his online manifestations is his blog at https://sachaarcher.wordpress.com/

Mark Young - Meanwhile, in Ketchum, Idaho

Mark Young lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia, & has been publishing poetry for almost sixty years. He is the author of over forty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. His most recent books are Ley Lines & bricolage, both from gradient books of Finland, The Chorus of the Sphinxes, from Moria Books in Chicago, & some more strange meteorites, from Meritage & i.e. Press, California / New York.

He is the editor of Otoliths.

***

Meanwhile, in Ketchum, Idaho

"I get a shotgun & load it"

intent! now present: no way for blanks, or failed loads.

Need much more, want extras, want action, an end to cares.

Become, try to become; not a failure but a spectacle!

One farewell to arms, obverse

*****

"        shotgun          "

      !     present: no         blanks,                .

          more,      extras,            , an end         .

Become,              ;                     spectacle!

    farewell        , obverse

*****

"                         "

      !            :            blank ,                .

              ,            ,            ,                .

      ,              ;                              !

                    ,   verse

*****

"                        "

      !            :                  ,                .

              ,            ,            ,                .

      ,              ;                              !

                    ,

Erica Baum - Modern Series

Erica Baum, New York. Recent museum exhibitions include Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Kunsthalle Berlin and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York; Recent
 solo exhibitions include The Following Information, Bureau, New York, 2016, Stanzas, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, 2015;

Selected biennials include; AGORA 4th Athens Biennale, Athens, 2013 and the 30th Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence of Poetics, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012. Publications include  Erica Baum, The Naked Eye, 2015 Crèvecœur/œ Paris & Bureau New York and second edition hard cover Dog Ear, 2016 Ugly Duckling Presse

Mithrandir Mithrahnuruodo - Just another piece

Mithrandir Mithrahnuruodo is the man 

who is vain enough 

to hide behind the stupid name 

that combines two minuscule details 

of his favorite series 

from the childhood 

into one nonsensical combination 

that is imposing enough 

to be intimidating as an artistic name 

and also insist on having line breaks in the bio-note 

with no particular reason.

***

Mark Blickley - RAGE in a CAGE leads to a TWELVE GAUGE

Mark Blickley is author of the story collection Sacred Misfits (Red Hen Press) and his most recent play,The Milkman's Sister, was produced last Fall at NYC's 13th Street Repertory Theater Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. He recently published the text based art book, 'Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes From the Underground.' (Moria Books, Chicago)

Jenne Kaivo - A Poem With Character

Jenne Kaivo never makes a mistaek.

Nathaniel D. Horowitz - waveswavy

Nathan D. Horowitz was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, in 1968. Creative Writing major at Interlochen Arts Academy. Bachelor's in English, Oberlin College, 1990. Master's in Applied Linguistics, University of Massachusetts - Boston, 2006. Four years in Mexico and Ecuador, fifteen in Austria. Currently teaching English at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA. Author, translator, and proofreader of literary and commercial texts. 

Gregory K. H. Bryant - Twelve Punctuation Pieces

Gregory K. H. Bryant is a registrar with the National Air and Space Museum, where he has been on staff since 1978. His poetry, essays and short stories have appeared widely in the underground press, notably Bouillabaisse, Wormfeast, Homemade Ice Cream Press, Musea, and Shockbox, as well as Gaslight Magazine and Black Lotus Magazine.

Volodymyr Bilyk - Oak Trapeze

Volodymyr Bilyk is a poet from Ukraine who writes in English. So he's basically from another dimension or Parts Unknown.

Long story short: he follows Ezra Pound's "Make It New" and considers Pink Fairies song "Do It" to be a quite adequate description of his artistic intentions.  

His latest book "Roadrage" was published by Zimzalla in 2018. His other works include "To When Tea Ties Hence to Wank It Too" / "Eminent Means of Basil Dado Hem-Welt" (2015), "Heartbeat, Footclick, Machine Gun Vocalizes" (2016), "Eellogofusciohipoppokunurious" (2017) and "The Songs of The Great Tits" (2018).

He edits Ex-Ex-Lit aka THE BEST EXPERIMENTAL WRITING BLOG ON THE WEB.

Luc Fierens - One Punctuation Piece

Luc Fierens (born in Mechelen, Belgium, 1961) is a networked collagist and visual poet provocateur. His work emerged out of Poesia Visiva, Mail Art and Fluxist circles. Fierens’ diverse practice focuses on language/image as a raw material and the exploration of alternative forms of distribution and communication.

As such, he promoted a transnational dialogue prior to the inception of the Internet with his mail art projects (“Social-Art”, “Cornucopiae…”) and publications (Postfluxpostbooklets) from 1984.

Now, he continues his research with artists (since 2013 he has worked closely with performance artist Elish Falanga) from his “social architecture” with whom he exchanges, forwards, and directs art, and collaborative projects through the (e-)mail, and with whom he organizes performances, publications (artists’ books) and exhibitions.

His publications and works can be found in major archives (R&M Sackner Archive, Miami and Artpool, Budapest), libraries (MoMa Library, Rare Books Collection of the University of Buffalo), museums (MaRT (Trento e Rovereto, Italy)) and several private collections (Fondazione Berardelli (Italy), Verbeke Foundation (Belgium)).

Russell Jaffe - Blank Verse Variation

Russell Jaffe teaches at Loyola University in Chicago and Fusion Academy in Oak Brook, and stars in literary study guides for Course Hero.
He is the author of the poetry collections This Super Doom I Aver (Poets Democracy, '12), INTROVERT//EXTROVERT (Punk Hostage Press, '14), LA CROIX WATER (Damask, '16), and Civil Coping Mechanisms (Civil Coping Mechanisms, '17).
Russell Jaffe, shoopa shoopa, Russell Jaffe.

Bri Esposito - Blanked Verse

Bri Esposito has never been published in McSweeney's

***

Announcing Issue 12

BRAVE NEW WORD ISSUE 12 IS GOING LIVE RIGHT NOW!

Issue Line-up:

• Volodymyr Bilyk 
• Andriy Antonovskiy 
• Bri Esposito
• Russell Jaffe 
• Luc Fierens 
• Gregory K. H. Bryant 
• Nathaniel D. Horowitz 
• Jenne Kaivo 
• Sacha Archer 
• Erica Baum 
• Mark Young
• Mithrandir Mithrahnuruodo 
• Mark Blickley
• Andrew Taylor
• Michael Kostiuk 
• John M. Bennett
• Carlo Parcelli 
• Rosalie Gancie 
• Heath Brougher 
• Marton Koppany 
• Michael O’Brien 
• Gregory Betts 
• George Sabov 
• Jeff Bagato 
• Fernando Futuro 
• Daria Zengerstein
• Kim Vodicka 
• Zoria April