RECEIVED: David Stafford's "Language is a Virus" Mail-Art (Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA)

[De Villo Sloan]

Mail-art by IUOMA member David Stafford (Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA)

 

March 15, 2011 - David Stafford is far more than the original ATC Rebel Without A Cause (watch those sticky labels, they're hard to wash away). He has a tremendous sense of humor. He has real skill with satire and parody, and the New Wave in asemic writing is providing ample subject matter as this mail-art proves.

 

David pulls us out of the ether long enough to see a bit of absurdity in this mania. After all, we are dealing with a kind of writing that aims, more or less, to be meaningless and which seeks to communicate nothing. WTF? It is good to step back and question what one is doing sometimes. The reverse side of the piece illustrates the point perfectly. Asemic writing would not do well in a real life emergency, nor would your pharmacist make much sense of it either (or is it ether?):

 

Great work, David, IMHO. Getting mail-art from you is always a refreshing break from the trend further east these days - everyone is just mailing their trash to everyone else. But maybe it's just who you associate with. I always did fall in with the wrong crowd. David Stafford does excellent envelopes too:

Tanks again.

 

 

MAIL-ART PSYCHIC

If you're going to be in the bad girl club, you're going to need tiny flowers. The only thing missing would swell to grotesque proportions among other changes. A mouth full of friends. The former not the ladder. Chances are you will bounce back. Lucky numbers: 2, 14, 32, 33, 39, 43

 

 

MAIL-ART COLOR OF THE DAY: Blue

 

 

MAIL-ART QUOTE FOR THE DAY

 

Some one-line poems by Ted Berrigan:

 

 

THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION

 

There were seven to choose from, all putty.

 

 

I found these Berrigan poems re-reading sections of David Lehman's "The Last Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets." Lehman writes about the so-called second generation to which Berrigan belongs and their interest in the work of Frank O'Hara:

 

"For a band of younger poets that led bohemian lives in the East Village and made St. Mark's Church in the Bowery their poetry headquarters - poets such as Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, Peter Schjeldahl, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Meyer, John Godfrey, Maureen Owen, Jim Brodey, Tom Clark, Michael Brownstein, Lewis MacAdams, Tony Towle, John Giorno, Lewis Warsh, Alice Notley, and Andre Codrescu - O'Hara was, to use a phrase from one of his poems, 'the wings of  an extraordinary liberty.' Inspired by Lunch Poems, the younger poets turned out diurnal chronicles in the O'Hara manner."

 

I AM A MAN OF CONSTANT SORROW

 

'I know from my own experience that telepathy is a fact."

 

 

[De Villo Sloan]

I appreciate the comment Dark wall. I'm glad to have someone who agrees with me about everything.

[De Villo Sloan]

glad to read something by someone

 

who doesn't know "stuff"; & it reminds me of

 

growing up in Riverdale over by Takoma Park; & I know

 

what you're gonna say it ain't DC butt you know it's inside the beltway; now

 

i grew up immediately before i "dropped out" of the creative writing program

 

at Towson State in 1917 & everyone know the Howard Nemerov story anyway

 

& so then they created vorticism that started this wave of ugliness

 

butt as I say i grew up before i "i dropped" which has always

 

been a misconception i wanted to clear up