BLUR at Sweet Briar, Va.

Monday night I taught a workshop on site-specific writing at BLUR: The Blue Ridge Summer Institute for Young Artists at Sweet Briar College, Virginia. The landscape was amazing, the teachers welcoming, the young artists enthusiastic and, more often than not, kinda brilliant.

We talked about Public Record and site-specific writing, psychogeography, writing for technology, and more stuff an’ t’ing. And most importantly, we took one of the letters of Elijah Fletcher – the Antebellum landowner whose farm became Sweet Briar – and the young artists made poems from his language. These they transformed into QR codes to, later, be sited around the campus – perhaps even Fletcher’s old mansion, now the President’s house, which the lads and ladies were to visit the following day.

I’d like to risk a lawsuit from these eminently publishable young poets and post two of the pieces here. These are simply the first two that I came across on their tumblr blog, but they’re also, in my humble opinion, fairly striking pieces – particularly when you imagine them concocted in 20 minutes surrounded by other students and with chatty mentors pacing back and forth.

I don’t have the authors’ names, but if they’re interested in being credited I would LOVE to do so – just let me know. Finally, I’m also going to cheat here: Besides the code itself, I’m putting the actual poems, so that those without iPad2′s and such can check out the goings-on’s.

No body would tell me

That they are still

Our bodies and our

Energies and

When it is

Hard there

Is no one but

Him.

Dear brother,

Dear conceptual face,

Your last letter arrived blank,

Time elapsed without time,

Without you, dear brother,

Dear past summer,

I am pleased to have been with you alone,

We were old,

Upon our last trembling legs,

Dear brother,

Dear sometimes crippled gaze,

Sometimes my spirit would not induce me to think it,

Many ardent years,

Passing through ink,

Through pages,

Through me and you,

Dear brother,

Through timothy, entertain,

Through Inda, gloomy,

Through Bettie, humble,

Through bodies and our energies,

Let no words live alone at the old mansion,

Let our feelings and spirit talk the other way,

We will look no longer lonesome dear brother,

I shall go at it next,

Write often dear brother,

Dear no body,

I am always here.