Paul Vermeersch: December 2015

Thursday, 24 December 2015

My Mail Art Project is One Year Old Today

It was a year ago today that I announced my mail art project: I will send original, hand drawn postcards to you for ten dollars each. My postcards have become more detailed and complex over the past year, but the price is still just ten bucks. Here are some samples:

To see all the post cards and to learn more about the project, click here.

Thursday, 17 December 2015

Russell Smith writes about my Sunrise with Sea Monsters blog

Novelist and columnist Russell Smith has written about my Sunrise with Sea Monsters blog in his arts column in the Globe and Mail. Have a look:

A blog is a hobby; a blog is a notebook; a blog is a forum; a blog is a piece of art. A blog is unpaid, and so can rewrite our idea of what a journal is, what publication is. It reminds us that, in the age of culturecrat jargon such as “viability” and “private-public partnerships,” we can give away art entirely for free and that art can infiltrate a larger culture and therefore be worth something all on its own.

Here’s a blog I like: It’s called “Sunrise With Sea Monsters,” and it’s a project of the Canadian poet and editor Paul Vermeersch (who is also a colleague of mine in the small-press publishing trenches). It is a poetry journal: He asks poets to contribute poems whose only constraint is that they be titled Sunrise With Sea Monsters. This is the name of a rather odd 1845 painting by J.M.W. Turner, currently on display as part of a Turner show at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

To read the whole column, click here.

Monday, 7 December 2015

A new poetry blog: Sunrise with Sea Monsters

From 2010 to 2014, I curated a poetry blog called They Will Take My Island. The sole premise was that I would invite people to write a poem called "They Will Take My Island", a title taken from a painting by Arshile Gorky.

Click here to visit They Will Take My Island

My latest online project is similar, and draws its inspiration from J.M.W. Turner's painting "Sunrise with Sea Monsters", and so far contains poems by Gary Barwin, Sylvia Legris, Pearl Pirie, Michael Holmes, and James Lindsay. More to come!