Poetry. "The oneiropoeia of AINU DREAMS, involving a remarkable process of collaboration, transcription, and transformation, has generated these affectionate, quirky, and questioning pages. Fables retrieved from the borders of consciousness, dialogues with the infinite and what lies beyond. What a wild idea, what fun!"—Anselm Hollo. "There is a world of difference between the dream that is dreamed and the dream that is told. And maybe that difference is precisely the world we live in, the compromised latitudes between private dream and public telling. AINU DREAMS is an exciting book because it asks Who is dreaming? Who listens when who is telling? Negotiating issues of identity and absence, Quasha and Hasegawa weave and unweave subtle patterns of narrative—a story is not just what can be told, but also what can be distorted, transformed, forgotten!"—Robert Kelly.
Author City: BARRYTOWN, NY USA
George Quasha's work as a poet, including Somapoetics (1973) and AINU DREAMS (1999) among others, has steadily broadened to explore principles in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and performance. Preverbs, of which VERBAL PARADISE is the first book, has been a core vehicle of this exploration. His recent Axial Stones: An Art of Percarious Balance, foreword by Carter Ratcliff (2006), focuses on sculpture, drawing, and language (as text and installation) shown at the Baumgartner Gallery (Chelsea), Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (SUNY New Paltz), and elsewhere. His axial video works with language, sound, and portraiture, including art is: Speaking Portraits, recording over 800 artists, poets, and musicians in eleven countries (saying what art/music/poetry is) and exhibited internationally at museums, galleries, and universities. Awarded a Gugenheim Fellowship in video art and an NEA Fellowship in poetry, the latest of his twenty books is An Art of Limina: Gary Hill's Works and Writings (with Charles Stein; foreword by Lynne Cooke) (2009). Co-founder and -publisher with Susan Quasha of Station Hill Press of Barrytown, New York, he performs both solo and in collaboration with Gary Hill, Charles Stein, and David Arner.
Reviews and Other Links
author site