a journal on the writer's role in society edited by esther altshul helfgott Contributors are invited to address the question: What is the writer's responsibility to self & society? |
is reviews editor for the Seattle literary journal, LitRag. His poems have appeared most recently in Indiana Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Willows Springs. In 1999 Floating Bridge Press published a chapbook of his poems, entitled "Radiant Measures." He is a 2001 recipient of a Washington State Arts Commisison Literary Fellowship. |
FIREORGAN, AN INSTALLATION --after the sound installation by Seattle Composer Trimpin-- by James Gurley Five fiery columns encircle the gallery. Change hue as this aria built of imagination and surplus metal, built of Thomas Buckner's recorded baritone, wobbles at first. The gas flames enclosed in shimmering Pyrex--these yellow and white scales-- bend and flicker when music, his voice flares, and rings the gallery with chance harmonies. Behind us huge tin cans, heated by fire, pop randomly as the air inside them expands. It's Trimpin's sleight of hand; the flames, some engineer's riddle solved: fire, water, and air-- made music, thermodynamics, the light and sound Trimpin creates with this jubilation of trash parts. Somewhere in Trimpin's program notes is the understory, his childhood tale of the mid-winter Carnival week beside a bonfire in the Black Forest, each boy holds a hazelnut into the fire until it glows-- then slams it against a log, the starry embers rocketing upward, spinning over the valley. The bonfire's green wood crackles like steam whistles. Hazelnuts sparking, river-song, tree shadow. Their voices measuring out light. Winter dark, winter cold dispelled. Trimpin costumes that lure of the bonfire, metaphysics of childhood wonder in Buckner's disembodied song, luster and heat coloring each tarnished copper tube, this swirling libretto. The eye, ear tricked by aluminum plates, brass couplings, metal filings, tangles of wire-- such natural sounds--as in the blackness the blaze once seemed to Trimpin a choir, the boys' shouts of mischief in his mechanical tribute, these unlikely filaments, the gas flames lifting up through once cast off bits & pieces. copyright2001James Gurley |
is reviews editor for the Seattle literary journal, LitRag. His poems have appeared most recently in Indiana Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Willows Springs. In 1999 Floating Bridge Press published a chapbook of his poems, entitled "Radiant Measures." He is a 2001 recipient of a Washington State Arts Commisison Literary Fellowship. |
a journal on the writer's role in society edited by esther altshul helfgott Contributors are invited to address the question: What is the writer's responsibility to self & society? |
