Limited Fork

This video poam is an unintended collaboration that in the lack of intention becomes a lattice itself, a community of interactions from multiple locations intersecting on a number of levels (or lattices). The compatibility of KC's video, and the spoken language with Ansted's images seems designed rather than incidental, yet it wasn't until I had these separate components for the Gallery exhibit component of "Pleasurable Complexity" Limited Fork poetry event that I realized the benefit of seeing the separate pieces together, allowing them to speak a shared language in addition to the multiple levels of saying in their separate languages. Two themes of the "Pleasurable Complexity" Limited Fork poetry event were "place value" and "implications of the lattice," with "implications of the lattice" contained in notions of "place value," and notions of "place value" contained in "implications of the lattice." More "Pleasurable Complexity" materials are available from the Limited Fork podcast. --Thylias Moss

Text of poam (product of an act if making) part of a University of Michigan

Engineering 477 VRML (virtual reality modeling language) Project, Fall 2003,

related to themes, images, & attempts to locate what remains

dealt with in Tokyo Butter © 2006 by Thylias Moss.

This poem, though a part of the book, is outside the book.

Go to http://www.engin.umich.edu/class/eng477/projectsf03/POEM/Report/Report.html to see details of the Virtual reality Modeling Language project.

This movie poam explores what led me to write the narrative in verse SLAVE MOTH when my son, the composer of the soundtrack for this short movie poam, was in sixth grade at a grade-six-through-twelve school. During a meeting, some parents wanted to ban a required ninth-grade ancestry assignment that was embarrassing, humiliating, and demeaning for disclosing that their sons could trace their ancestry no further than slavery. Right away, I realized the need for other models of slavery so that the shame being experienced could be attached to a broader, and I felt, likely more accurate context, one more able to embrace the range of possibilities of circumstances during slavery which, even if owners were benevolent, was unacceptable because ownership of human beings was unacceptable. Part of the horror of slavery is that benign gestures might make the peculiar institution seem acceptable, a good indignity. Imagination can make an incredible difference, and in fact made an incredibly negative difference for those mothers who in 2002 were unable to imagine a plausible, less obvious layer of the history so embarrassing for their sons that they would prefer not to explore the rich offerings of a past that their ancestors obviously survived no matter what horrors were encountered. How awful that they were so willing to deny the testimony that survival can be. How awful that they could construct for themselves only constricted, generic, and simplified images of slaves. I remain impressed and inspired by survival. There are layers of experience in SLAVE MOTH, and the Perry household is a complex and dynamic system of existence, relationships stabilizing and destabilizing as alliances shift and as feelings are poorly suppressed; there are conflicting understandings of responsibilities to self and others, and power shifts according to what is stabilizing and what is destabilizing at any given moment. The fact that power shifts makes it difficult for any one person to wield it well or consistently. SLAVE MOTH offers access to more of the layers of humanity that some mothers in 2002 were unable to allocate to enslaved persons. I too spoke at the meeting; just before I left to start writing immediately I informed the group advocating abolition of the genealogy assignment that my son, only in sixth grade that year, had had no trouble completing his assignment to write an ancestry poem. I commented that Ansted had traced his ancestry all the way back to the big bang, and considered himself a descendant of stardust. The text of his poem is part of "Project Genealogy," and is also offered here:

Ancestry Poem

We all came from a single cell

a vast time ago

specks coming to life

in the oceans of the planets and in space

everyone of us evolved from star dust

into the form we take on now

looking at space through telescopes

at the next generation of star dust

that will breathe

--Ansted Moss,

22 October 2002.

The soundtrack and sonic variations of "Project Genealogy" are available at the Limited Fork Music podcast.

poetry as sound art (a poam) --companion to the 15-minute online poetry writing friendly competition at quickmuse.com (see the 27 June archived agon for the real time play back of the writing of the poem and to read the finished static piece)

DOD is a theory piece of Limited Fork Poetics, an experimental film that celebrates how text, sound, and both moving and static images can form sensory communities of varying densities while explaining some of what necessitates such explorations. The sensory paths are not duplicates; the sonic is not trying to say what the visual image is saying or the visual text, but they are all commenting on shared existence, so there are moments of convergence, and moments that contemplate, even if they do not complete, exchange. The death of depth in part suggests that a notion of distance may not belong in LFP, for in Limited Fork Poetics, there are means of instantaneous travel, to any location including the infinitely small and the infinitely large. Once arriving at these locations, surface is encountered. To cut into something, to identify a slice is to expose an interior surface. LFP understands fracture and rupture as an opportunity to build again, and an interest in building again, even while knowing the structures that form are temporary according to varying time scales. An instrumental version of the soundtrack is available from the Limited Fork Music podcast.

2002 performance of "Glory" in which the poet speaks and sings the words, allowing the music composed and performed by Ansted Moss to reshape them for their occupancy of the sonic page instead of the 2D page.

Soundtrack from the first Limited Fork video piece "The Song of Iota," October 2004. The text of this piece, adapted from the video piece where the text was composed, also exists as a print object in Gargoyle 50.

The first LFP poam. Limited Fork Poetics was born in October 2004 when I watched the closing credits of a movie at the Quality 16 Cinema. It was a moment of convergence in which separate strands of knowing intertwined. I became fluent in the language of activity, the language of shifting structures, the language of impermanence. I became aware of more ways to respond to experience, and though the palette is heavier, I appreciate the enhanced options. There are infinite communities, and interactions within interactions. I was struck by the infinite multiple connections between things on every scale, the cosmic and the subatomic. The connections offer navigable paths for the ordering of experience, and these connections are also tethers so that I not get lost in this. "The Song of Iota" is offered as the first Limited Fork piece; prior to going to the Quality 16, I'd made nothing like it. Prior to the arrival of this understanding, I had no reason to make anything like "The Song of Iota." The revelation was immediately enabling; I made this piece that very weekend, and shared it with my students on Monday, so convinced I was of the usefulness (and the transforming quality) of the understanding. "The Song of Iota" contains my initial LFP insights, and as this was my entry understanding of the unifying goals of LFP, I hope that it supports similar gateway understanding for others.

An essay that defines Limited Fork Poetics, the study of interacting language systems, as of May 2006.

sound art; a poam that continues a consideration of the theme of place value. also a companion (not a close relative) of the video art piece "Pi Complex," not yet part of the podcast.