Penguin Poets at Richard Hugo House


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Beautiful Doom: Heizer's "City" and Scott's "Blade Runner"

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There’s a striking similarity between Douglas Trumbull and Ridley Scott’s pyramidal design for the “Tyrell Corporation” headquarters in Blade Runner (1982) and the photos I’ve seen of Michael Heizer’s monumental plaza, Complex City , which has been under construction in Garden Valley, Nevada since 1972.  I’ve not seen any evidence that Trumbull & Scott would’ve been influenced by Heizer. I think the resemblance is probably nothing more than some shared archaeological interests. Still, I love the fact of the resemblance, because it really opens up a web of thinking about art and architecture’s relationship to the future. Both works explicitly and implicitly imagine futures, and both works have monumental properties:  they commemorate the present for a viewer in distant time. I want to start by outlining the web of connections, here: Both City  and Tyrell Corporation are obviously pyramid st ructures, and the structures really are similar—it’s as if Heizer’...
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This World: Hunter Bear / Dr. John Salter Jr.

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            One of my American Heroes is Hunter Gray, also known as Hunter Bear, whose name was Dr. John Salter, Jr., when he taught a class in social justice that I took at the University of North Dakota.   At the time, I was 19, coming  out of a small, Minnesota town, and had never met someone who’d both 1) been a key figure in the national struggle for civil rights, playing a key part in the 1963 Woolrich lunch counter protests in Jackson, Mississippi (that's him being assaulted in the foreground of the photo at left), and also 2) been “abducted” and studied by friendly beings from another planet.   Most students found him really captivating, or at least quirky and interesting, and for me, meeting him was challenging —his life was hard to assimilate .   On the one hand, you had to put your body on the line for causes you believed in;   I still have a hard time imagining myself exhibiting the courage that...
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10th Anniversary Poets & Artists

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Ten years ago, the inimitable publishing force of nature known to the world as Didi Menendez expanded her empire from MiPOesias  and MiPOradio  to include a new magazine known as Oranges & Sardines . That's right. After the Frank O'Hara poem, "Why I Am Not a Painter." You know the one:  ---- for instance, Mike Goldberg  is starting a painting. I drop in. ... "You have SARDINES in it." "Yes, it needed something there." ... But me? One day I am thinking of  a color: orange. I write a line about orange ...  There should be  so much more not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is, and life. Days go by. ... My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. ---- Yeah okay it's better if you read the whole thing .  But Didi wanted to put painters and poets together in a magazine and when she wants to do something she does it. I had been w...
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