BRAVE NEW WORD magazine: 2019

Monday, December 9, 2019

ISSUE 16

Editor's note:

You know how it goes:
"It's time! It's time! It's time!". And then Dan Severn's WWF theme kicks in. Because you're about to experience something completely different, something that will fundamentally change your perception of reality. Something that will change your opinion on what art is capable of doing to mind.

Some loud words, huh? Well, gotta start with something. Why not start with some braggadocio? Never a bad thing.

***
Some backstory. Originally, Issue 16 was scheduled for September. The submissions were going strong and there was a lot of stuff to pick from. Over the course of August and early September i was ecstatic how well things were going - the traffic was solid, i had a hundred or so submission to make another issue right away. You can't imagine how happy i was that there was no extended hiatus between the issue as it happened throughout 18-19.

The other thing that made me really happy was that the submissions and decline reactions were far from the toxicity i had 17-18. Hell, i can make an issue entirely out of angry rejection letters, there were some nasty stuff. But this time, no one was making drama about the rejection of their works. It was very formal and very refreshing. It was also the root of the problem, but i failed to notice it.

I started to construct the issue in early September and somehow it didn't came together. It just wasn't working. Things refused to gel. It was just a bunch of stuff. Bunch of really cool stuff, but it wasn't working as an issue. It was just a bunch of stuff. And it really bugged me. I don't want Brave New Word to be a compendium of sacramental "bunch of stuff". BNW is like an Unkle album - a constellation of different visions making a starry sky and making room for further inspiration.

And so I've tried and tried and tried to make it right - rearranged the sequence over and over again, experimented with different post layouts, tried to mix things here and there - nothing worked. Around October 20th it was time to "...lose, and start again at your beginnings".

Doing Issue 16 Mark2 was somewhat dubious. I couldn't get away from the phantom of the failed iteration. Because of that, second incarnation of Issue 16 was mostly about chasing ghosts and trying to catch that particular "je ne sais quoi". There was no focus - just an attempt to fix something that didn't even existed. Naturally, it never even came close to being finished.

So in late November i wrote a post on Facebook explaining the situation. It wasn't like i had any explanations to do - after all, barely anyone even knows about Brave New Word. I just needed to let it out of my system.

Four days later Russell Jaffe made a comment on the post: "I am submitting because you are the bomb and I trust you as a real artist". This was it. This comment broke me into tears. It pointed out what was wrong all along.
The problem was that I've mixed up my dayjob with the rest of my life and in the process - pretty much lost my mojo. I've tried to approach work of passion as if it was business, just another facet of my day-to-day activity, some matter-of-fact rumblings with milestones.
Naturally, it wasn't working. It would never work like that - by trying to make the best issue, i've handled BNW as a product and it took out the very essense that made the magazine click.

What was i thinking? Probably, nothing in particular. That's how you give up - the grind and hustle are so tight, things just blend together. And it never occurs to you that you just did a u-turn. The heat is on and that's all that matters. And by the time you notice it by yourself - it's already too late. Hopefully, Russell reminded me what it was all about.
If The Great Russell Jaffe believes in me - that's gotta mean something. And I had something to prove.

The subtitle of this issue is "with a little help from my friends". It is an assorted collection of different artists presenting their artistic explorations - a kaleidoscope of sorts. Some of it is easygoing, some is laser-focused on going beyond the knowable. Without further ado - Brave New Word Issue 16.

***

Issue Line-up:

J D Nelson - five poems

J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. Visit www.MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published poems. Nelson lives in Colorado.

Jenne Kaivo has just dipped her hair in the coffee. Sometimes she wears her deep sea suit to make mischief of one kind and another.

Yrik-Max Valentonis wanders through the urban landscape seeking out fairy circles. He makes puppets so other people can see his imaginary friends. He steals apples to justify his philosophy. He is Baba Yaga's favorite grandson.

His comics and writings have appeared in magazines, e-zines, and the anthologies: “Sinbad and the Winds of Destiny”, "Zombie Nation: St. Pete", "Animal Blessings", and "Divided Again".

He has M.F.A. in Poetry and Prose from the Naropa University and a B.A. in English and American Literature from the University of South Florida.

Piotr Szreniawski, concrete poet, interested in metapoetry and in the space where poetry and comics interact. He publishes his poemics and later distributes them for example by running and leaving them at bookcrossing spaces.

About the works: "This is a series of one letter poems. Fonts created at fontstruct.com were used. The backgrounds are photos from a train station, changed in Gimp ("cubism" filter)."

Russell Jaffe is an edutainer and Literature Instructor for Course Hero. https://www.youtube.com/user/CourseHeroVideo/playlists

Robert R. Thurman is an artist, musician and poet. Robert’s work has appeared in Coldfront Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, Columbia Journal, Eyedrum Periodically, Vlak 4, Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine the Arts and Humanities, Rune: The MIT Journal of Arts and Letters, The Monarch Review, and Exquisite Corpse. His work has been exhibited in New York City, Los Angeles and London.

Johannes S. H. Bjerg: a Dane who writes in Danish and English simultaneously and mainly haiku and haiku related forms. 1 of 3 of the editors of Bones - “Journal for contemporary haiku” (http://www.bonesjournal.com), and sole editor of “the other bunny - for the other kind of haibun” (http://theotherbunny.wordpress.com) and “One Link Chain” - a blog for solo linked verse and haiku sequences (http://onelinkchain.blogspot.dk/) Has published several books: http://january-stones.blogspot.dk/p/books.html

Howie Good is the author most recently of What It Is and How to Use It from Grey Book Press and Spooky Action at a Distance from Analog Submission Press. He co-edits the journals Unbroken and UnLost.

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/

Volodymyr Bilyk is a poet from Ukraine who writes in English. 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.

Since the 90’s, Christian ALLE, painter, collagist and photographer is active in the networks of mail art as a participant on the various projects, but especially as publisher and animator of Nada Zero, information magazine and free participation in the spirit of FLUXUS.

https://nada-zero.jimdosite.com/

Tom Snarsky is a special education math teacher at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. He is the author of Threshold, a chapbook of poems available from Another New Calligraphy. He lives in Chelsea, MA with his wife Kristi and their two cats, Niles and Daphne.

KB Nelson is a Canadian writer who thrives in the intersection of art and science. She has won awards in both poetry and short fiction, and is published in a variety of journals and anthologies. KB has resided from coast to coast in Canada, in Arizona, and in New Zealand. A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Southbank writing program, she currently lives in Greater Vancouver.

Michael Estabrook small press poet since the 1980s striving always for greater clarity and concision rendering language more succinct and precise more accessible and appealing a Sisyphean adventure for sure. Retired now writing more and working more outside just noticed two Cooper’s hawks staked out in the yard or rather above it which explains the nerve-wracked chipmunks. The Poet’s Curse, A Miscellany is a recent collection (The Poetry Box, 2019).

Elmedin Kadric - Matchstick Haikus

Elmedin Kadric is a widely published minimalist/haiku poet writing out of Helsingborg, Sweden. His first collection, buying time (2017), was published my Red Moon Press. His website: www.elmedinkadric.com

Hiram Larew's poems are waifs that have found shelter in North of Oxford, River and South Review, Contemporary American Voices, Voices Israel and elsewhere. His fourth collection, Undone, was published by FootHills Publishing in 2018. On Facebook at Hiram Larea, Poet and at POETRYXHUNGER.COM.

Born in Catanzaro(1962-Italy) where he lives and works…Claudio Parentela is an 

illustrator,painter,photographer,mail artist,cartoonist,collagist,journalist free lance...Active 

since many years in the international contemporary art scene.He has collaborated&he 

Born in Catanzaro(1962-Italy) where he lives and works…Claudio Parentela is an 

illustrator,painter,photographer,mail artist,cartoonist,collagist,journalist free lance...Active 

since many years in the international contemporary art scene.He has collaborated&he 

Born in Catanzaro(1962-Italy) where he lives and works…Claudio Parentela is an 

illustrator,painter,photographer,mail artist,cartoonist,collagist,journalist free lance...Active 

since many years in the international contemporary art scene.He has collaborated&he 

Claudio Parentela is an illustrator,painter,photographer,mail artist,cartoonist,collagist,journalist free lance...Active since many years in the international contemporary art scene.

Nils Geylen was raised between the arctic and the equator and currently stuck in Belgium. He works in literary inclusion and literacy promotion. His creative writing currently investigates topics such as human and machine behavior and the oppressive qualities of culture and history. He is interested in the illegible and or the incomprehensible. Faced with the limitations of print, he prefers online journals and is always looking to escape the lexical, phrasal or narrative constraints of writing in favor of a more experiential delivery.

NORMAN CONQUEST is a visual artist, writer, and publisher. “The Room” is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, smells like teen ‘pataphysics (Black Scat Books)

Cecelia Chapman is an investigative artist activist and video poet whose work examines the image and the long range effects on consciousness. Her video and works on paper emerge from a deep curiosity regarding the fluid connection between inner and outer knowledge, perception and consciousness. She is from California and based temporarily in Massachusetts. ceceliachapman.com

About the works:
"Semiotic-pareidoliapophenia explores writing: metaphor and magic in the abstract 2019. The experience of reading meaningful signs and symbols in rock lines, paint splatters, leaf mold, skid marks, scars, cracks. Finding connection and pattern in random data. Lanaquarelle paper, watercolor 10 x 14 in., 26 x 36 cm. gouache, personal rubber stamps, graphite, ink."

ISSUE 15

Editor's Note:
This one was long time coming but in the end i'm satisfied with the result. This issue rocks. No drama involved in the long development. I was trying to make this issue really good.
One of the things i always intended to do with Brave New Word is moving forward. Each issue is distinct, very different from the previous. And after a while, it gets really hard to maintain that. You get more of the same even though the authors are different. This causes some sort of development hell. It would've been great if things went a bit faster - but it is not exactly like that.

Without further ado - Brave New Word Issue 15

***

Issue Line-up:

Alex Salinas - Three Poems

Alex Z. Salinas lives in San Antonio, Texas. His poetry has been published in the San Antonio Express-News, Shot Glass Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, Duane's PoeTree, and in the San Antonio Review, where he serves as poetry editor. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as Every Day Fiction, Mystery Tribune, Red Fez, Schlock! Webzine, Nanoism, escarp, 101 Words, and 365tomorrows.

Theodoros Chiotis - Physics of surfaces

Theodoros Chiotis is a poet and literary theorist. Amongst his publications are Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, 2015), Screen (in collaboration with photographer Nikolas Ventourakis; Paper Tigers Books, 2017) and limit.less: towards an assembly of the sick (Litmus, 2017). His work has appeared in journals and anthologies in Greece, the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, Turkey, Poland and Croatia. He has translated contemporary British and American poets into Greek and Aristophanes into English. He is a member of the editorial board of the Greek literary magazine [φρμκ] and contributing editor for Hotel magazine. His project Mutualised Archives, an ongoing performative interdisciplinary work unfolding throughout the whole of 2017, received the Dot Award by the Institute for the Future of Book and Bournemouth University and will be published in 2018; he has also been awarded a High Commendation from the Forward Prizes for Poetry.

***

Physics of surfaces I: Practice makes perfect

you can hear the paint

being stripped off the walls

the tips of the nails scratching at the boundaries:

the unexpected haunting of the

neuro

logical system;

still

desire leers at you

despite repeated attempts to analyse

family genes and environmental factors

as if it were a simple matter of finding

two adjoining rooms with windows

overlooking the lake.

The residual evidence

of possibility

a series of images of the unwanted

dead

on a spatter dash

immune

to temporal friction.

***

Physics of surfaces II: Life on Mars

And, certes, the text most infallibly concludes it.

(William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.2.143)

The eye pores over

the bodies shored up by the tide

in an attempt to recalculate the possibility of taking

liberties with

the script;

this will be a Palm Sunday tradition:

the scattering of flowers

with dragon mouths

opening

and snapping shut

without ever uttering a word.

Flebimus super illos.

Is all this empty

clothing worthy of

storage?

II.

The I now splayed

outside its own text

(or in the depths of other texts)

is carried away by currents

flowing without reason:

police interrogations

are by default

incomplete.

Mikhail Shchupak-Katsman - Visual Works

Author's note:
"I really like to poke people’s brains. From business, to family and friends, and even love [especially love], the core foundation of all things boil down psychology, and the workings of the brain. I think the human mind is a bizarre and peculiar place.

As fragile as it may be, it can become an unbelievably powerful force. It creates and imposes meaning from conjured ideas, and interestingly, skews our view of the world, as well as ourselves in a remarkably distorted, yet sentimental way.

This is what inspires the subject matter of my stu# most of the time. I’ve always been fascinated by how the world seems to be viewed so drastically di#erently by everyone compared to myself, and I can’t help but wonder and imagine: what could they see? How different is their reality from mine?"

Joan McNerney’s poetry has been included in numerous literary magazines such as Seven Circle Press, Dinner with the Muse, Warriors with Wings, Blueline, and Halcyon Days. Four Bright Hills Press Anthologies, several Poppy Road Review Journals, and numerous Kind of A Hurricane Press Publications have accepted her work. Her latest title is Having Lunch with the Sky and she has four Best of the Net nominations.

Cheryl Penn - Letters written one on top of each other

Cheryl Penn is a conceptual artist and independent contract university lecturer/examiner in the practises of art history, conceptual art practice, creative thinking, aleatory poetry.

Bruno Chiarlone Debenedetti è nato nel 1947 a Cairo Montenotte (SV).
Dal 1980 è attivo nel campo della poesia verbo-visiva e della mail art internazionale.
Appena un anno dopo, nel 1981, il noto artista bresciano GAC, lo nomina maestro di cerimonia per il suo 100° anniversario 1914-2014.
Nel 1990 scrive il Manifesto Eco-arte che presenta a Savona (Filmstudio).
Nella sua nativa Liguria, a Rocchetta Cairo, con amici artisti, ha realizzato grandi pitture murali.

Ha pubblicato in Italia, alcuni romanzi storici e vari libri su Cavellini oltre a numerosi suoi libri d’artista, ora conservati in biblioteche italiane ed estere. Collabora alla rivista di mail art Circulaire 132 pubblicata in Canada
Scrive vari articoli che compaiono saltuariamente on-line su Savonanews, Cagliari Art Magazine, Trucioli blog, Mediterranews, IVG, Culture Creative.
Si dedica al collage, al libro d’artista e alla fotografia di paesaggio ed alla promozione di progetti land-art e la collocazione di cartellini dipinti nel territorio naturale.

Patricia Walsh - 5 poems

Patricia Walsh was born and raised in the parish of Mourneabbey, Co Cork, Ireland. To date, she has published one novel, titled The Quest for Lost Eire, in 2014, and has published one collection of poetry, titled Continuity Errors, with Lapwing Publications in 2010. She has since been published in a variety of print and online journals. These include: The Lake; Seventh Quarry Press; Marble Journal; New Binary Press; Stanzas; Crossways; Ygdrasil; Seventh Quarry; The Fractured Nuance; Revival Magazine; Ink Sweat and Tears; Drunk Monkeys; Hesterglock Press; Linnet's Wing, Narrator International, The Galway Review; Poethead and The Evening Echo.

Author's note: These poems are a collaboration with torch-rnn, a neural network library that writes words one character at a time. The neural network was trained on my own body of work from the past twenty years. The resulting poems, therefore, are my own writing rewritten by a computer, then edited by me.

Stephen of Lindow took his MFA at Umass-Amherst 2004. He has been writing and performing poetry since 1986. In 1997-98 he toured with Poetry Alive!, Inc. His poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Bateau & Meat For Tea. He was a poetry editor for The Naugatuck Review from 2010-11 and slam judge at Western New England College. While in L.A. in 2012 he created poetry films from his laptop, & published poems in ARTillery, Bad Robot Poetry & Penumbra. He is a SCUBA diver,
urban explorer & noisician[sic] who performed Kurt Schwitters's 'Ursonata' with Dadaist group
in Holyoke, MA. He lives in Florida.

Jess DeLong's work has appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, American Letters and Commentary, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo, as well as the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner. My chapbooks, Tearings, and Other Poems and Earthwards, were released by Curly Head Press.

***

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, a Misunderstanding. x1 is an algorithm, a computer software; x2 is the mind.

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01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100010 01110010 01100001 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110111 01100101 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110000 01101111 01101001 01101110 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111

01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110011 01100001 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100

01010100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101

01101001 01110011 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101110 01110011 01100011 01101001 01101111 01110101 01110011 01101110 01100101 01110011 01110011 00101100

01101110 01101111 00100000 01000100 01110010 01101111 01110011 01110100 01100101

01100101 01100110 01100110 01100101 01100011 01110100 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01000011 01100001 01110010 01110100 01100101 01110011 01101001 01100001 01101110

01010100 01101000 01100101 01100001 01110100 01110010 01100101 00101100 00100000 01110011 01101001 01110100 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101

01101001 01101110 00100000 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101100 01101001 01110100 01110100 01101100 01100101 00100000

01100111 01110010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01110100 01110010 01101111 01110101 01110011 01100101 01110010 01110011 00101100

01100011 01110010 01110101 01101101 01100010 01110011 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101000 01101001 01110011

01100110 01101001 01101110 01100111 01100101 01110010 01110011 00101100

01101111 01100010 01110011 01100101 01110010 01110110 01101001 01101110 01100111

01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101111 01100010 01110011 01100101 01110010 01110110 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 01110011 00101110 00100000 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101101 01101001 01101110 01100100 11100010 10000000 10011001 01110011

01100001 00100000 01100010 01100001 01100100 01101100 01111001 00101101 01100100 01110101 01100010 01100010 01100101 01100100 00100000 01100110 01101001 01101100 01101101

01100001 01100100 01100001 01110000 01110100 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100010 01101111 01101111 01101011 00101110 00100000 01001110 01101111 00100000 01000111 01101111 01100100

1100101 01101100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01101111 01110010 01100101 01101101 01110011 00101110 00100000 01001110 01101111

01100111 01101000 01101111 01110011 01110100 00101110 00100000 01001101 01100001 01111001 01100010 01100101

01100001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100101 00101110 00100000 01001110 01101111 00101100

01100111 01101000 01101111 01110011 01110100 00101110

x1 is excellent at achieving checkmate;

there is no practical algorithm for checkmate in chess;

therefore: the explanation of x1’s talents cannot be that x1 is running an algorithm.

x2 can understand;

there is no feasible algorithm for understanding;

therefore: the system that natural selection selected, the whatever-it-is that accounts for understanding,

(x2) cannot be an algorithm.

Plaugolt SatzWechsler (psw) - Three Pieces

No Photo No Bio

***

J. D. Nelson - Five Poems

J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words and sound in his subterranean laboratory. Visit www.MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. Nelson lives in Colorado.NW

ISSUE 14,5

Editor's Note:

Well, this one came out of nowhere!
There is a reason for that. I wanted to put out an issue with zero build-up and even less expectations so that it would feel out of nowhere. And since no one really cares about it - this cunning stunt is relatively easy to pull off.
Without further ado - enjoy!

***
Issue Line-up:

Сторінки

Monday, December 9, 2019

ISSUE 16

Editor's note:

Issue Line-up:

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

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