ONandOnScreen – Spring 2013

ONandOnScreen publishes poems alongside videos, incorporating the “conversation between moving words and moving images, on and on.” This issue contains a variety of poetry styles as well as ways in which the “moving images” enhance the poems. It holds Looney Toons, dancing Goths, a videodrawing, a news clip, Jiujitsu, several artistic videos, and, of course, excellent poetry.

ONandOnScreen publishes poems alongside videos, incorporating the “conversation between moving words and moving images, on and on.” This issue contains a variety of poetry styles as well as ways in which the “moving images” enhance the poems. It holds Looney Toons, dancing Goths, a videodrawing, a news clip, Jiujitsu, several artistic videos, and, of course, excellent poetry.

Charles Bernstein’s small poem “The Threshold” contains a quick image of a man who wakes in the night, “thinking she’s / sleeping beside him,” and “shoots through / door,” presumably killing her as “blood pours / over threshold.” This is paired with a news clip about how Oscar Pistorius, a South African disabled Olympic athlete, killed his girlfriend in the middle of the night, claiming that he thought it was an intruder.

Catherine Wagner’s video is a reading of her poem “A Pattern” over-top footage of a bird repeatedly flying into a glass window. “If you understand / away and home, the pleasure of refrain, / let me make you feel as if meaning,” she writes.

In Dorianne Laux’s poem, it’s the 2012 solstice, and the “end-of-the-world-light” is coming in through the blinds, “which never quite close.” The poem speaks of lifelessness, of “the evasive, the devastated,” of “the end-of-the-world clouds, / shredding themselves like tissue paper / above the uppermost fingers of the oaks, / like souls come apart toward the end of their days.” The images are haunting yet peaceful, paired alongside a video by Laux and Richard Nace in which, above a city skyline, lightening pierces and illuminates the night sky.

Be also sure to check out John Ashbery’s “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” Tan Lin’s “+    —,” and others. Each piece in ONandOnScreen is its own conversation, its own unique experience.
[onandonscreen.net]