$

It's fundraising time for Manchester. Most of the team will be driving from New Hampshire to St. Paul, MN. I'll be driving from Tennessee. Then we have a hotel room or rooms to pay for. Oh, and food. We like to eat. Not huge amounts, mind you, but enough that are voices are louder than our stomachs when we're on stage.

For those of you in Manchester/Portsmouth/etc. there will be activities and fundraisers and features and so forth. In fact, we're plotting a 7-day 24-hour reading. That is, every person on the team, including the coach and assistant coach, will read for 24 hours. Back to back. Seven days of poetry, with only 15 minute breaks every once in a while for bathrooms and food. I'll let you know more about that as plans come together.

In the meantime, we've got a PayPal account set up. If you'd be willing to donate something, even a dollar, that's one less dollar that comes out of our pockets while we're at Nationals. I'm devoted to my art and, for the duration of the competition, to the sport aspect of it, but I don't want to go hungry, I don't want to sleep in my car (with several other people), and I don't want to nervously watch my tank get emptier and emptier as I cross the great expanse of the rural Midwest, hoping that there's a gas station coming up soon and that my card will be accepted there. So, please, take a look. Toss us an amount you think worthwhile.

In fact, just to tempt you further, I'll re-post the link to Arts & Crafts, my free album of poems, essays, and conversations in both audio and video formats: http://www.jeffstumpo.com/stage.html. If you like the kind of stuff you hear from me; if you want spoken word that plays with the boundaries of what spoken word can and should do, donate. If you don't like what you hear - hey, we've got a team with diverse voices. There's a good chance you'd be supporting somebody whose poetry you like. You want a sestina about Ol' Dirty Bastard from the Wu-Tang Clan? We've got it. You want a poem from a woman to the person who used to be her girlfriend, then was her boyfriend, and is now just a friend? We've got it. You want towering toasts to the everyday folks who could, if nobody was looking, be gods? We've got it. You want a poem about what would happen if the author had a talking hamster? We've got it. You want a piece in sign language, written for three people? We're working on it ;-)

Take a look. Take a listen. Take a chance (on me... yeah, now that song is stuck in your head). Help send us to NPS.

http://sites.google.com/site/slamfreeordie2010/

Arts & Crafts now available

Arts & Crafts is now available for download at my website: www.jeffstumpo.com/stage.html.

There are two missing files - the video essay "Collaboration" will be uploaded this weekend. Tim Weaver's version of "ADD TV" will follow whenever he's done with it.

Please feel free to share this with anyone - email, torrent, put on CD, whatever. It's a free album.

Why free? Because I can, because I think I ought to, and because it will help me get exposure.

As a graduate student, I have access to free recording equipment, though I myself am not a great videographer (you'll easily be able to tell who did professional recording and when I just set up a camera myself). That means that it cost me nothing but time to put this album together. Jeff Morris, Danny Yeager, and Janet McCann helped out with recording equipment/space. Tim Weaver videoed the Bryan slam team at NPS2007, and Poetry Slam, Inc. allowed me to use that footage gratis. My friend Carl is hosting the files on his website, which is a huge bonus. Buck, Byron, Stephen, Travis, and Logen all let me use their likenesses/voices for free. With all that in mind, I'm able to put these recordings on the web for "nothing."

I'm not releasing this album to make myself out to be an expert in performance poetry, but I do want to help explain a few things about the genre. Based on the fact that "ADD TV" and "There will be no reinvention of the wheel" are being taught in university classrooms, I can (without a great deal of vanity) say that I've done a few things right. I want to unbox those for curious poets and people interested in poetry. It's a happy obligation.

The last reason is not entirely cynical. I haven't been a touring poet. I don't have great exposure on the national scene, except as part of the Bryan team in 2007 and for a foray into the top 10 in Famecast.com's poetry contest a while back. I would love to get more gigs, especially at universities. I'm far more interesting in person than on video, and I can work a classroom as well as a stage. If you're a student and you like what you see and hear, press your professors to bring me in. I'm not that expensive anyway :-)

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If you like "ADD TV" and are willing, drop by www.bookhabit.com, register, and vote for that poem before December 7. If I'm at the top of the stack by the end of that day, it'll be $500 in my pocket.

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For those of you near Bryan-College Station, this Sunday will be my last Mic Check. I'll be back in April (I'm teaching a two-day workshop in performance at the Poetry at Round Top Festival - think about registering), but this will be the last time I perform in a while. Nothing fancy, but it's as close as I'll get to a send-off.

Prepping, Bookhabit,

I made some quick (literally - took me about ten minutes) changes to my website to prepare for the release of Arts & Crafts. Once this is done up properly, you should be able to stream all of the audio and video as well as download them wholesale. If you want to grab the cover art early, just right-click and Save As.

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Anybody know if this Bookhabit.com/New Zealand Poetry Society contest is legit?

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Yet another brief October post. There's too much real life at the moment.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow (and tomorrow)

It's October, and those of you anxiously awaiting Arts & Crafts (by the way, I'm quite flattered that some of you are actually anxiously awaiting it) will notice that it's not here yet. Thanks to the dissertation, dissertation proposal, grading, and selling the house, everything is delaying everything else. I'm also waiting on some permissions from Poetry Slam Inc to use footage from the 2007 National Poetry Slam. I'm giving that two more weeks, after which I'll just use video from one of the team practices.

To tide you over, or something, here's another piece from the album, appropriately titled "In Absentia" and dealing with the presence/absence of the author.

The Butterfly Wins, But Paint Fumes Prevent It From Flying Tonight

OK, I'm not even extending the poll for a full week. Between online votes and people coming up to me/IMing me/calling me, it's clear that everybody prefers the butterfly.

Since it's more of a "real" album cover, I'm going to proceed with the insert idea. That is, I'll make up a PDF that acts as an e-booklet to accompany the album.

Unfortunately, I ache and am dizzy with paint fumes. We're on day...something of too many...getting the house ready for sale. All that remains is the kitchen, the front and back doors, and tidying the trim in the bedroom (this last item is still on my agenda for tonight). We're all ready to beat each other with sticks. Probably paint sticks. The ones used for mixing. Nevermind, you knew which ones.

See? Paint fumes. I remember once more why I don't do drugs.

Dizzily,
JeFF

The Butterfly is Back

You'll notice that I missed Monday's post. The recap:

Class went as usual. Syllabus blah blah blah, then play Apples to Apples in small groups. Writing assignment for Wednesday - two pages recounting the game you just played from someone else's point of view. Those students who needed examples were given ideas from past students: the person sitting across from you, a person sitting behind you who can only hear the exclamations but not the normal content of the conversation, an ant crawling on the wall. They now know about this blog, and one student wrote down the address, so someone may come across this post which reveals that it's all a sneaky way to get them to talk about the ethics of writing. Yep, you read that correctly. Wednesday is going to be a discussion about ethics - whether or not it's OK to write as someone else, what the limits and expectations of research are, do fiction and poetry adhere to the same rules as nonfiction for certain things, is there anything we can't/shouldn't write about, the same question specifically applied to the classroom, etc.

I'll finish the Batman bit later. If any of my students are checking out this blog, they'll quickly note that it's pretty bad writing. I stand by the concept, but the writing is bad. Not a good impression of your professor for the first week of class. Maybe I'll post samples of work I've published in Fence or 88 or Borderlands later.

The big news on the artistic front, besides an acceptance from Rhino (which is pretty cool, my second time in that journal), is that Guillaume Provost (rOmy) emailed me about his art. I can use it for the cover of Arts & Crafts if I want. So here's a poll. I think I can put up a poll here. Which do you prefer - the butterfly or the typography?

Designing a Cover for an Intangible Album

A good-looking book has always appealed to me, as has good cover art on a CD or LP - though the font often appears to be an afterthought on many album covers. I really got the bug working at Cushing Memorial Library and Archives at Texas A&M. You don't understand how amazing solid typography can be until you've been able to flip through the Kelmscott Chaucer. I'm also fond of more creative typography, from calligraphic (there's some amazing work in Arabic and Chinese, whose alphabets lend themselves more readily to organic visuals) to graffiti.

For Arts & Crafts, I've been mulling over the cover concept about as long as I've had the album concept. I originally wanted some kind of art that would reflect the dual nature of the album. As a combination of poetry and essays, the visuals should combine two seemingly-opposed elements. This could be elemental, like fire and water, or conceptual, like old and new.

My first choice was to adapt a wallpaper created by rOmy over at customize.org. I wanted to crop the wallpaper to the correct size, orient the butterfly on the right half, and fill in the title in the upper left, just off the wing:



Conceptually, I was thinking something like art/nature as the binary. It was also just a striking image, and one that would show up well on an iPod (more on this later). Unfortunately (or fortunately), I haven't been able to get hold of the artist to get permission.

I realized that for this project, unlike the jacket I did for my chapbook Riff Raff, I should rely on my own work. The next attempt was to split the cover into halves:



My wife quickly pointed out that the blurry photo on the right looked bad, and she was right. Back to the drawing board... Which of course was part of the problem. I'm not a great drawer. I can't paint or even sketch very well. Photography, sometimes. But I'd been swimming upstream in my attempt to emphasize a picture as the visual. Why not place the emphasis on the words?

I tried out a free layout program called Scribus, which allowed me to get a good look at the text (it is superior, in this aspect, to the GIMP, a free image-editing program). Taking some inspiration from excellent books by presses like Kelmscott and Unicorn and from broadsides and posters at deviantart, I came up with a simple block, 2cm smaller on each side than a CD case. By using the track listing as a visual element, I could fill the space with words in a pleasing manner.

This last bit, the track listing, led me to a realization. I'd been working on a back cover and an insert so that readers/listeners could "roll their own" CD, as it were, a DIY cover set. However, this isn't a CD. It's an album, a discrete set of tracks to be listened to in a particular order (at least in certain cases). It's going to be distributed for free over the internet. I'm including in the mp3 tags certain information, such as which track is which, lyrics (for the poems), and so forth. If you load up the tracks in Amarok, iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, or whatever, they'll automatically show up in the right order. No need for a track listing or table of contents. No need for an insert, at least with Amarok or iTunes, as the lyrics are contained within the file itself.

The dualism I was going for, then, is partly present in the contrast between a traditional concept (the track listing/table of contents) and the fact that such a thing is not necessary for the medium in which I'm distributing. The cover of the album looks good, and I think it will remain good-looking (meaning both that it will be aesthetically pleasing and that it will stand out from other album covers) in a very small format, such as on an iPod or Zune. If it's close to anything out there as far as album art, I'd compare it to something like Paul Simon's Graceland. But, like the capital Fs in my name, it's very much a surface game. There's a little depth, otherwise I couldn't have written this entry. I suppose I could go on in more detail, developing the theoretical basis behind the cover. But for most people looking at it, it will simply be a little paradoxical.

Of course, I may, now that I have a template developed, write up a PDF "booklet" to accompany the album. I'm also halfway tempted to blow the image up to around 20" by 20". I think it would make a nice broadside/poster. Thoughts?

Arts & Crafts samples

In the interest of

A) trying to keep at this blog on a regular basis
B) show off something interesting
and C) practice my html skills

today's entry consists of two samples from Arts & Crafts. The first is my poem "There will be no reinvention of the wheel," which was a featured poem on Indiefeed's Performance Poetry podcast (show #396 if you want to get specific). If you listen to the podcast, you'll hear bits of an essay I wrote and posted regarding "There will be no reinvention of the wheel." I informally expanded on that essay in audio form, and on the forthcoming "album" they will be tracks 2 and 3. More on track order and intangible albums in the next post...

In the meantime, this should, if it works, offer you the choice to stream the audio or download it.



Download "There will be no reinvention of the wheel"



Download "Persona (essay)"

If you're able to listen to this in the blog (i.e. using those nice embedded Google media players), would you let me know? Linux is acting up on me, and I can't seem to load them myself.

-JeFF

UPDATE: OK, it's confirmed. The media players aren't working. Does anyone out there know of a good embedded player I can use here or on my website?

A Piecemeal Poet(ry)

Piecemeal seems appropriate.

I work in fits and starts, on a number of projects at once. I'm particularly fond of writing poetic sequences, which are brief poems that, when grouped together, outline a longer narrative arc or arcs. A blog is an interrupted series of narratives, glimpses into the bits and pieces the blogger chooses to reveal. It works.

What are you going to see here?

I'm not totally sure yet. I expect I'll keep the world (though it will likely be a tiny world) abreast of some of my projects.

For example, here's a sample cover image for Arts & Crafts, a series of poems and essays in audio and video format I'll be releasing soon. Both the album and the cover are a work in progress, but a blog seems the perfect place to put bits of it out there a little at a time.



I may incorporate teaching elements into the blog (e.g. "For next week's readings, check out my blog"). Teaching is a constantly-new experience, and my creative writing classes in particular always come up with some interesting way to make my syllabuses* inadequate, so this may prove a useful way to keep the class up to date with itself. I'm new to this whole blogging thing, so it's up in the air right now.

We'll see where it lands (and in how many pieces).

JeFF

*Yes, I'm aware that I just linked to Wikipedia. Mea culpa, mea culpa. I'd have used the Oxford English Dictionary to prove that "syllabuses" is a proper plural of the word "syllabus," but not all my readers will have access to the OED online.