Poems on hotel letterhead, resplendent with stamps – crafted in mountains, on tracks and seas, while finding ways to be lost, avoiding pirates and ghosts, bouncing – from pastoral Lower Canada across radio waves to a provincial caboose in Japan, onward to find you, you alone
Items, forgotten: featuring A. McLuhan
Poems on hotel letterhead resplendent with stamps crafted in mountains, on tracks and seas, finding ways to be lost, avoiding pirates and ghosts, bouncing from pastoral Lower Canada across radio waves to a provincial caboose in Japan, onward to find you.
Read by punk rock guitarist, hockey dad, art theater projectionist, wordplay/visual poet, keeper of Inscriptorium & wrangler of The McLuhan Institute, Andrew McLuhan on his show “the spoken word” on county FM radio,, audio file harvested by Brad Rees
Slow rolling Postcards from Gravelly Beach poetry pods, handcrafted since 2005 all from the very depths of my wee heart
The collection read in pod is excerpts from “Items Forgotten” which has 10 volumes (Disguise, Ramble’d, Time Traveler, Hubris, Circumnavigation, Espionage, Resistor, Reinvention) + some i forgot – crafted on letterhead, wrought in Himalayan Vedic solace, Arabian pirate seas, Malay traintracks & Mediterranean meanders
Available all the podcast places, I think so anyway, and of course at my creative life archive for your enjoyment and convenience
And I might as well tell you I’ve got a few more communications queued up
Bounce off ionosphere: Items Forgotten on Spoken Word Radio – Postcard #91
(32MB, 21:52, mp3, stereo)
Along the way, I produced a series of visual freeverse poetry called “Items: Forgotten in Drawers“ – part pirate treasure map, part meanderings stashed in a non-secret hiding place, part punk rock handbills. Crafted at an Ayurvedic clinic the Himalayas, a ship in Arabia and ruins around Mediterranean, then attached to vintage hotel letterhead acquired from at a Greek Monastery store Montreal neighbourhood, assembled in off-strip Las Vegas, shared in Utah canyons… and now distributed to points unknown. Further batches were assembled on Nusa Ceningan, Indonesia with scraps printed here and there.
So much more to say about all of this but for now, you can investigate the originals “Items Forgotten in drawers” on 6 or so collections (Disguise, Ramble’d, Time Traveler, Hubris, Circumnavigation, Espionage, Resistor):, here’s a blurb:
Along the way, I produced a series of visual freeverse poetry called “Items: Forgotten in Drawers“ - part pirate treasure map, part meanderings stashed in a non-secret hiding place, part punk rock handbills.
+ Back Story
The poems started in an Ayurvedic clinic the Himalayas, a ship in Arabia and ruins around Mediterranean, then attached to vintage hotel letterhead acquired from a tiny Greek Monastery store in (a heavily Hasidic neighbourhood) Montreal neighbourhood, assembled in off-strip Las Vegas, shared in Utah canyons... and now distributed to points unknown. Further batches were assembled on Nusa Ceningan, Indonesia with scraps printed here and there.
+ Process
Sometimes, i don't have a printers, other times Internet, often no typewriter so i make do with what i have: scissors, glue, paper...
When i write, (usually) starts as scribbles in notebooks and then gets hastily transcribed into a digital form and printed when opportunity strikes for editing - in this case, the editing leaves errors in typing and structure and instead cuts and pastes (like Burroughs to Bowie would do) and then reassembled in various ways.
+ Form
Each substrate (hotel letterhead, aerogramme, envelope, shown is uniquely augmented with stamps – both postal and ink – and other ephemera, carefully selected and then applied as though it wasn't. Sometimes, lettraset letters, fuzzy Lomo photos and bits of typewriter come along.
+ Themes
Overall, the pieces explore themes of wandering lost, losing self and others, scraping beneath the crust of culture and myth, remixing identity, connecting the history to the present in all it’s vagaries, and considering what becomes of our story when we vanish... naturally made with affection.
Post boxes and hotels, also beaches but not all at once in this case
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“Hand-crafted since 2005 | Field notes & poetry from splendid locales.”
“Raise your antenna high for today's transmission. Bounces off the very underbelly of the solar system. Originating from a public radio station in Prince Edward County, Ontario, and relayed through an unlicensed transmission depot at Tsuchida, Okayama, Japan, and then onwards to your delightful ears wherever you might be.
This comes an excerpt of the spoken word presented by Andrew McLuhan. If you recognize his name, perhaps you'll know the lineage of which he carries, of his father, Eric, and grandfather, Marshall, and he now is a media theorist, for lack of a better term, as well as a projectionist at the local arts theater. He's a hockey dad, a punk rock guitarist, and the keeper of the Inscriptorium, occasionally dispatches come of marginalia and annotations from an epic, in the truest sense of the word, library.
If you are someone who cares about the information about information, well, please attenuate accordingly. He's also the curator, the captain, the wrangler of the McLuhan Institute, TMI.
These days, he rambles widely around the globe, presenting to audiences of all sorts, telling them about what the future looks like, because he knows, because he pays careful attention to the past, and observes[…]”
