Description
Poetry. Art. FINELY TUNED STATIC by Charles Borkhuis, with paintings by John McCluskey, is a distinctively braided venture: a series of calls and responses between word and image that pairs poet Charles Borkhuis' glyphic, micro-narratives with painter John McCluskey's collaged, abstract surfaces constructed from vinyl paint, torn paper and board and represented in FINELY TUNED STATIC in 12 full-color plates. Charles Borkhuis, author of nine books of poetry and a playwright, engages with painter John McCluskey's scissored abstractions as mirrored planes that calls out the splinters that poetry makes of a tale. The resultant collaboration is a dyad consisting of centrifugal impulses arrayed in language along the torn shards of McCluskey's colors and form: The "...crimson field trembling." Borkhuis declares early on and "the sentence broken off at the lip" which puts the reader/viewer on alert that this is syntax of another order. Its inscribed articulation has arisen so as to "listen for your voice in the static." What proceeds from their discourse is not a set of parallel codes but an exchange of "song of the scissors...across the jagged chasm." The poem observes "tremulous detail" within ".a wound in the pigment." FINELY TUNED STATIC offers a dynamic force and counterforce of evinced vocabularies, each rearing towards a truth, a "body held together by a thousand cuts."
Author Bio
Charles Borkhuis' nine collections of poems include: FINELY TUNED STATIC, with painter John McCluskey (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2017), DEAD RINGER (BlazeVOX Books, 2017), DISAPPEARING ACTS (Chax Press, 2014), and Alpha Ruins (Bucknell University Press, 2000), selected by Fanny Howe as a finalist for the W.C. Williams Award. His poems have appeared in eight anthologies and his essays were published in two books on contemporary poetics published by the University of Alabama Press. He curated poetry readings for the Segue Foundation in NYC for 15 years and translated from the French NEW EXERCISES by Franck André Jamme (Wave Press, 2008). Borkhuis' plays have been presented in NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hartford, and Paris and published in four books. His two radio plays were produced for NPR (www.pennsound). He is the recipient of a Dramalogue Award and is the former editor of THEATER: EX magazine.
John McCluskey is a painter who has shown in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. His work has been exhibited at the Pennsylvania State Museum as well as Katonah Museum of Art, New York and Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University. His work is included in the permanent collection of the International Collage Center and his paintings are in private and corporate collections. His jobs have included assisting sculptor John Chamberlain and teaching art at Bucknell University. He resides in Pennsylvania.Selections from his work may be seen at johnmccluskey.com.
Author City: USA