My new chapbook, Performance Poems, will be ready for my performance videopoem presentation at Mount Pleasant Library on Thurs evening. 'the Performance Poems' (Epopeia Press, 2016) is a limited edition of the poems that I do in performance and that I have made multi-media videos of, and will be available for sale at the event.
On the back cover:
In 2013, Brenda Clews began performing poems that a
repertoire of imagery, drawings, paintings, masks,
choreographies of creative movement, had accumulated
around. She videoed these readings with a tripod and
edited them with a newly-found creative freedom. The
subjectivity of the poet performing the poem is central
in a personal nexus of arts - poetry, painting, dance,
video editing - each of which comprise a different
access to the same topic yet all of which emerge from
an inner drive to produce a composite approach to a
theme. Her oeuvre draws on the multiple resonances of
intersections of writing, painting and videopoetry. Poem
fragments emerge in drawings. Or a painting evokes a
poem that is later inscribed in it. She may recite a poem
while dancing it wearing a mask that has emerged from a
painting. The poem, mask, dance, painting, soundscape
and art house video editing, however they appear in a
single piece, arise out of the same creative process. Each
multi-media project is a contract of elements, a unity of
multiply intertwining energies. The videopoem, then,
becomes the stage where the entire show can play.
Toronto Urban Folk Salon
Thursday, February 25 at 6:00 pm
at the Mount Pleasant Library 599 Mount Pleasant Road (south of Eglington)
Featuring: Gannon Hamilton, Brenda Clews, Norman Cristofoli, Ann Elizabeth Carson,
Glen Hornblast, Kirk Felix and Jeff Orson
(Promise to hold a launch for this chapbook in the near future - and show a bunch of the performance videopoems - it's 40 pages, 7" x 10", and quite lovely.)
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