A figurative clay sculpture without any discernable 'details' is considered too risqué? YouTube wants to classify this videopoem as 'adult content'??? She might as well have been wearing a body stocking for all the detail there is. I seem to be running into a few problems with YouTube and mysterious 'violations' of their policies. Since when is figurative art considered porn? Am I supposed to clothe a fairly indistinct clay sculpture (in terms of details of anatomy and the forbidden parts - heck, she doesn't even have nipples) and that is mostly torso? I've been laughing all morning. They threatened to pull it from public viewing but it's still there, for now at least. Though they do appear to have frozen the view counts, something I have requested a review of.
Lol! A lovely Mother's Day - a video call with my daughter for an hour, and my son kindly raked and cleaned up my patio and then we went to Lizzie Violet's Cabaret Noir - the best!
That's me reading a complexly constructed piece that will become the opening in a voiceover prose poem in a videopoem - I compacted three different pieces of writing (that I dragged out of the tangles in my mind) over months to create an intricate piece that was edited and re-written a few times and yet it was thought to be stream-of-consciousness writing... which struck me as quite funny (it had been a lot of literal fret-work). But, I suppose, the thing is to make the final version look effortless and a bit bumpy, as if it had been dashed off in a moment of inspiration.
Or maybe it was reading from a Moleskine journal - the place where you usually write the first draft as it comes out. I had written all over the place in a number of different apps and programs on my computer and tablet and actually hand wrote the final edited version from all the computer ones!
I need to write a few more pages before it will work with the clip that I have already edited. If the body of the piece takes as long as the beginning did, it could be many months before it's done!
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At the Poetry Salon I hosted at Urban Gallery in Toronto on April 26, 2014, I had two fabulous features: Michael Mirolla and Claudio Gaudio. This video is a review I composed after their readings and in which I show an excerpt of a video clip of each of their readings.
Below are their bios:
Novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright, Michael Mirolla's publications include a punk-inspired novella, The Ballad of Martin B.; three novels: Berlin (a Bressani Prize winner and recently translated into Latvian); The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; and The Giulio Metaphysics III, a novel/linked short story collection wherein a character named "Giulio" battles for freedom from his own creator; two short story collections: The Formal Logic of Emotion (translated into Italian as La logica formale delle emozioni) and Hothouse Loves & Other Tales; and three collections of poetry: Light and Time, the English-Italian bilingual Interstellar Distances -- Distanze Interstellari, and the just published The House on 14th Avenue. A short story collection, Lessons In Relationship Dyads, is scheduled with Red Hen Press in the U.S. His short story, "A Theory of Discontinuous Existence," was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, while another short story, "The Sand Flea," was nominated for the US Pushcart Prize.
Claudio Gaudio is a Toronto based writer born in Calabria. Studied literature and philosophy at York University. "Texas" a novel published by Quattro Books, is currently being translated into Spanish and, excerpted, by Francesco Loriggio to be included in an anthology of Italian Canadian writers to be released in Calabria, by Rubbettino Editore. His work has also appeared in ELQ (Exile Literary Quarterly), Rampike literary magazine and Geist.
