ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Laura Moriarty

NON TONAL

Dreams a rule
Words not mine
Not a body of beliefs
Melancholic dusty waltzes
But a knowledge of techniques
Technique of knowledge
Imagination overcome
Beautiful nightmare
Opposed to genius
Letters not addressed suggest
New sound or new personality
Deathsick moon
While remaining virtually unperformed
Arousing resistance
Every innovation destroys
What it produces
The bonds of a by-gone esthetic
Floated into the non tonal
Speech becomes music
With no other aim than comprehensibility
Blacks the sun
Textures rent by incompatible elements
Speech versus music
“I feel the air from another planet”
Not a technique but a passing phase
Uncataloged dissonance
Pierrot lunaire
Growing up with the same influences
Emotional revolution
Or a different place and time with the same mind
Having abandoned tonality
We create language not style
With an almost somnambulist sense
Bravely to plunge
“Free” composition and sublime banality
The green horizon
Makes the past accessible to the new feeling
Laughs, spits, hisses, makes animal cries
Maid of the sky
Complains if you do this you are not “free”
To do that
A new geological formation
Serial universe
Obvious musicality
Or universes
Remix ensemble
Not a single thing
Or will be

Please join us Sunday, August 23 as we welcome...

Clark Coolidge and Laura Moriarty
with two short films by Brandon Downing


LIVE! ONE NIGHT ONLY!

21 GRAND, 416 25th Street, Oakland

6:30 pm 5 USD

CLARK COOLIDGE is an American poet born in Providence, Rhode Island. Often associated with the Language School, his experience as a Jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects - including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac, and movies - often finds correspondence in his work. His books include Alien Tatters, Mesh, Mine, The Crystal Text, The Rova Improvisations, On the Nameways and many more. Coolidge grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and has lived, among other places, in Manhattan, Cambridge (MA), San Francisco, Rome (Italy), and the Berkshire Hills . He currently lives in Petaluma, California.

LAURA MORIARTY’S A Semblance: Selected & New Poetry 1975-2007 came out from Omnidawn Publishing in 2007, as did An Air Force, a chapbook from Hooke Press. Her long essay poem A Tonalist is forthcoming from Nightboat Books next spring. Other recent books are Ultravioleta, a novel, from Atelos and Self-Destruction, a book of poetry, from Post-Apollo Press. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University among other places & is currently Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. She is findable on-line at A Tonalist Notes and related blogs.