Tag: Mark Blickley

Gravity Ungrateful

By Mark Blickley

 

Yes, I am dressed in mourning.
Dark clothes for a dark time.
Yet I yearn to escape
pandemic imprisonment
with the germ of an idea
that will allow me to soar
above my confinement
in an airborne threat
against complacency and boredom
as I reach up to a blue heaven
that promises social distancing
on a cosmic scale.
But that old bitch gravity
bears down on me,
slapping me down
like a petulant child
crying out
for what she cannot have,
slammed back
to a blanketed earth
of red white and blue.

 

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the text-based art collaboration with fine arts photographer Amy Bassin, Dream Streams.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash.

Crime Scene

By Mark Blickley and Nancy A. Kiel

 

 

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the text-based art collaboration with fine arts photographer Amy Bassin, Dream Streams.

Nancy A. Kiel lives in Sydney, Australia, where she’s an award-winning musician, songwriter, writer, and founding member of the New Zealand band Baby! and the Australian group Party Girls. Nancy is the founder and Managing Director of Miss Nancy’s Dried Berries.

Translated from the Portuguese

By Mark Blickley

 

Artist’s note:

This past fall, I co-curated an exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal, Tributaries, that opened on Sept. 30th and ran for ten weeks, under the auspices of the international artist’s cooperative, Urban Dialogues. While in Lisbon, I went into the oldest continuous bookstore in the world, Chiado Bertrand Bookstore, which was founded in 1732 (the year of George Washington’s birth). I found this Portuguese published book about Donald Trump that I immediately bought because a redacted title of the book jumped out at me, O Me Too, (which piggybacks nicely on the Me Too movement)). When I got home I was able to also redact “A Pee Poem” (alluding to the Steele dossier about the salacious incident of Trump hiring Russian prostitutes to pee on the bed where the Obamas slept in Moscow). And, as I progressed down the book cover, I was also able to redact Go More Anal and then I placed DJ-45 in front of a golden wall.

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center as well as the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Scholarship Award for Drama. He is the author of Sacred Misfits (Red Hen Press), Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes from the Underground (Moira Books) and the forthcoming text based art book, Dream Streams (Clare Songbirds Publishing). His video, Widow’s Peek: The Kiss of Death, was selected to the 2018 International Experimental Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain. He is a 2018 Audie Award Finalist for his contribution to the original audio book, Nevertheless We Persisted. Visit his website to learn more about Mark.

Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes From the Underground

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Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes From the Underground, a chapbook, is my collaboration with fine arts photographer Amy Bassin. I matched quotes from many of history’s most infamous tyrants to Amy’s funereal sculptural portraits to produce spins by DJ Trump surrogates from Genghis Khan to the Koch Brothers. Each quote (report) echoes a distinctly Trumpian thought, issued forth from the weathered patinas of plein air cemetery sculptures. We consider the Trump administration to be a graveyard where each day we are forced to attend daily burials of American moral conscience and civil liberties.

– Mark Blickley

Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes From the Underground can be purchased via Lulu, here.

Free PDFs of the book can be downloaded here.

The creators gratefully acknowledge Trump surrogates:

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Idi Amin
John Wilkes Booth
Osama Bin Laden
Caligula
Roy Cohn
Jefferson Davis
Muammar Gaddafi

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Saddam Hussein
Judas Iscariot
Jezebel
Genghis Khan
Koch Bros.
Charles Manson

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Joseph McCarthy
Josef Mengele
Benito Mussolini
Pol Pot
Vladimir Putin
Josef Stalin

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New York fine arts photographer Amy Bassin and writer Mark Blickley work together on text-based art collaborations and videos. Their series, Dream Streams, was featured as an art installation at the 5th Annual NYC Poetry Festival, and excerpts have been widely published including in Columbia Journal of Literature and Art.  Their video, Speaking In Bootongue, was selected for the London Experimental Film Festival. They recently published a text-based art chapbook, Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes From the Underground (Moria Books, Chicago). The publisher has sent their resistance book to the White House. Bassin is co-founder of the international artists cooperative, Urban Dialogues. Blickley is the author of Sacred Misfits (Red Hen Press) and proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center.

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