Rupture by Eleanor Leonne Bennett and Scott-Patrick Mitchell at Lethologica Press
we have achieved time travel. we have created a wormhole that is both temporal & spatial. we have found a rupture in the world… & through it we speak to each other.
Rupture is a collaborative project I am undertaking with international award-winning photographer Eleanor Leonne Bennett. Eleanor is an incredible talent, and at only 15 years old is someone to watch with vested interest. Her work has an articulation that is sublime, forthright and at times unnerving - it’s incredible to think that somebody this young already has this much capacity. Just imagine what she’ll achieve in another 15 years…!
This project is our attempt to communicate across international dates lines using only artistic expression and tiny IM chat windows. We’re attempting to accentuate ruptures in the world - after all, it would not have been possible a century ago for people so far apart to be able to communicate with each so fluidly. Clearly the world has been broken somehow. Or perhaps it’s just the people who inhabit who are now broken. Either way, this project attempts to disrupt the disturbed patterning of the new millennium further.
Below is one of the poems I have written from the postcard game NOBODY SENDS POSTCARDS ANYMORE that I am currently playing with Eleanor. This poem in particular, SPRING, has recently been published by creatix online journal (see relative post below for journal link etc).
The remainder of the project blurb, which appears on the Lethologica Press website, reads as follows:
Meet Eleanor Leonne Bennett & her imaginary friend Scott-Patrick Mitchell. Or are we meeting SPM and his new imaginary friend, Kitten? Or have we stumbled into a project that ruptures artistic process & creative response. Or… are we already here, inside their world, where they speak to each other through tiny little windows? Pen friends are a rare commodity in this world, almost nostalgic… but for these two creatives the bond is essential. After all, when you find kin, you have to let them in.
Rupture is a trans-hemispheric adventure in discovering somebody who surprisingly reminds you of yourself. It’s an attempt to push creative talent to the extreme, aligning two unique visions to produce a tome that is urgent, startling, graphic and – ultimately – an exercise in showing your vulnerability through the ruptures humanity wounds across the world.
For full project listings concerning Rupture, and to see some more of Eleanor’s remarkable photography, click the red title at the top of this post to travel through to Lethologica Press. While there, why not check out some of the other publications also currently underway - it’s an exciting, creative time here in Perth.
new poems on canadian experimental poetry site, ditch
ditch, where you find poetry that’s off the main road.
I have had my eye on Ditch for a while now. It’s a Canadian poetry site that specialises in the experimental, off-beat, non-linear & just plain excellent. I stumbled across the site about 2wo years back now & have delved into it from time to time to discover some of the world’s more edgy & exciting voices in poetry.
Now, it seems, I get to add mine to the mix.
Ditch have published 4our of my pieces, which include:
- grammatical instances // instant grammar (extract)
- circumference
- corporeality
- bolting for certainty
As you know, the first poem is from a collaboration I did with my brother, Eric James Mitchell. We produced a photographic book, extravagant in size & experimental at heart - I took 22wo of Eric’s photographs & wrote a poetic response to each. Then Eric supplied a further 22wo images, these abstract & uncertain in content. Then, using all the words from the 22wo poems already written, we created 22wo abstract poetic responses via a computer program that randomly regenerated the texts into secondary, somewhat ‘broken’ poems. The idea was to play with the structure of the expression, both visually & sonically, & see what could be created with the inspirations supplied to present a secondary instant of meaning, insight & creative expression that chance - or technology - supplied us with. As brothers, the opportunity to emphasise chance operations is something that we both hold dearly in our theory & our creative expression - process yields a profundity that is liberating yet poignant.
review of the rutting season in The KSP News
It was almost a decade ago that American ex-pat come Perth poet Zan Ross took me under her wing. She became the first poetry mentor I ever had. Her brash, loud style was a charm, her poetry a sensual assault on literary theory. We found a resonance in the other. It was she who first edited my work in a way nobody else had ever done prior. The most crucial thing I learnt from her? Other than that there would always be somebody louder than myself? That poems constellate to collect narrative around them.
Now, a decade on & 4our minor collections later, Ross has stepped across from mentor to reviewer. Her subject? My latest release the rutting season, a collection of queer love poetry published this year by WA poetry chapbook publisher, Mulla Mulla Press.
reviews for forthcoming release, the rutting season
Everyone now is finned in “calling” in the archipelagic – “gull & man combat a / turf where elements converse,” (with) Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s (the rutting season an) invocation that each reader crawl forth from seafoam – an archipallium implanted, sub-memory, “curled like shells sidle / head – cochlea ocean dead / – ear we amplify what was,” released… from the decadent into newly lit luminescence.
- Edric Mesmer, Yellowfields
Be sure to read Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s the rutting season out loud, and hear the poems as deft performances of language. You will find here a lovely combination of the tough and the sweet, a rhyming and a stammering, a fist full of language slamming into your ears - all the stories of love and loss woven into a nest of linguistic tangle. At once lyrical and jarring, you’ll want to revisit these poems again and again.
- Ellen Zweig
Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s the rutting season sets out a new constellation for the male muse, the stag, each line punctuated with unexpected breath and leap and stroke. In each poem the poet’s tongue is tied to the body-object, rolling with and against the bonds that fuel our writing, and we—the readers—are tempted forward into the disco dance: “let our dreams together/ we create”. The raveling score will light the sky.
- Jessica Wilkinson, rabbit: a journal for non-fiction poetry
the rutting season comes out may 2012 through mulla mulla press.
…the sky is always doing something in your photographs, scott-patrick…
new work appearing in Yellow Field #5
New poetry of mine appears in the latest edition of brilliantly underground poetry journal, Yellow Field.
The work published in this edition - Yellow Field #5 - is from the collaborative poetry projectInteractive Geographies II, written in cohorts with Matthew Hall and Siobhan Hodge. These poems, or territorialiams, deal with memory, place and the movement of the self through the two, in every direction, the eventual end text a mix of our three voices. Here, however, you can read some of the basic building blocks that comprise my voice within this project.
Also appearing in this edition are fellow West Australian poet John Charles Ryan alongside the likes of Michael Leong, Cui Fei, Shane Rhodes, Mary E. Kohler, Rhys Trimble, Megan Kaminski, Donna White, Janet Kaplan, Aisha Sasha John, A. L. Nielsen, Stephen Novotny, Yellow Field editor Edric Mesmer and the legendary Peter Larkin.
If you are interested in purchasing a copy of Yellow Field #5 please write to Edric Mesmer at yellowedenwaldfield (at) yahoo (dot) com and tell him SPM sent you.
under the pink
At the request of my eldest sister, Susannah, I wrote this poem for my sister Rebecca’s funeral in England. Unfortunately I was unable to attend, so Susannah read this poem as my elegy for Becky on my behalf. Becky succumbed to trans-vascular lymphoma after several years of struggling with this virile and nasty form of cancer.
She leaves behind her loving husband Jerry and two amazing children, Jacob and Jennifer, to whom I send all my unending love across the mighty oceans.
This poem was published in Elbow Lane Poems today, the day after Becky’s funeral.
Pink was her favourite colour. Please note the title takes its name from Tori Amos’ sophomore album.
Becky was 42 and a half when she passed.
under the pink
for becky
16.8.1969ine - 17.3.2012elve
sunset glints pink: beauty
is always just an instant
, passes through like humans
do. moments are made for
sharing. we will never forget
the way night arcs across
horizon as wide as her smile
is light. fierce leo girl, your
fire will always burn bright
, teeth sparkling like stars
& constellations ignite the
darkness. your heart’s laugh
booms like thunder, pushing
lightning wit across heaven
. up there, where the clouds
thin to moisten edges of our
imagining, you are now, in
every sky yielding colour
, but especially the pink, at
dusk, or at dawn, the night
space we travel through to
remember the daughter,
sister, lover, mother, wife
, friend who will always be
beside us, who we will love
, forever & again, when the
sun is gone, know it will
return: as will you, rebecca
ann
.
they say monks planted this olive tree
Salvador 84 Lens, Big Up Film, Pop Rox Flash, Taken with Hipstamatic
architectural (Taken with instagram)
voice of verbs // at the cafe at GRAMMATICAL INSTANCES
everyone knows what pelicans look like
edits (at paper mountain)
