Poetry. In her new collection, painter, poet, and critic Marjorie Welish presents two books in one. "In the Futurity Lounge" may be read as that de-centered laboratory of the modern futurity lounge where experimental works are in a constant state of being constructed. Her poems are written across, through, and at the expense of urban sites, themselves part architecture, part language, including Roebling's Aqueduct, Wright's Fallingwater, Diller Scofidio + Renfro's High Line, and Rem Koolhaas's student center at Illinois Tech. "Asylum for Indeterminacy" is an extended zone of research devoted to translation constructed freely from a few given words from prior translations. Baudelaire's "Correspondences" is the provocation.
"Finished and finely wrung, this book is a linguistic experiment in active collaboration with matter—the dense data itself. Marjorie Welish, a painter in her multi-verse, leaves very little out though it may seem as if ruthless in being stark. But anaphora and lyricism lighten all passages. Her iridescent gray links her to Johns, and the very soft strophes of Morty Feldman. Her music may seem prolonged to some, but it is just long enough. I have been so impressed with her refusal of the dogmatic way. Her works are historical, social, and often lyrical in the desert, where the great dancers and the non-decorative architects meet, magically meet in one of our true baroque books of poetry. It's not by accident that she appears in The Fold of Deleuze."—David Shapiro
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA
Marjorie Welish is the author of THE ANNOTATED "HERE" AND SELECTED POEMS, WORD GROUP, ISLE OF THE SIGNATORIES, and IN THE FUTURITY LOUNGE / ASYLUM FOR INDETERMINACY, all from Coffee House Press. The papers delivered at a conference on her writing and art held at the University of Pennsylvania were published in the book Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books). In 2009, Granary Books published Oaths? Questions?, a collaborative artists' book by Marjorie Welish and James Siena which was the subject of a special exhibition at Denison University Museum, Granville, Ohio, and part of a two-year tour of artists' books throughout the United States. Her honors include the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Fellowship from Brown University, the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship at Cambridge University, and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has held a Senior Fulbright Fellowship, which has taken her to the University of Frankfurt and to the Edinburgh College of Art. She is now Madelon Leventhal Rand Distinguished Lecturer in Literature at Brooklyn College.