Basket
HEAT Series 3 Number 19
Mayer’s openness to the living moment will also guide me, Vanessa Berry writes, as she begins a day reenacting poet Bernadette Mayer’s famous artwork Memory – a colossal month-long project in which Mayer set herself the task of capturing her life in thirty photographs each day, and writing about her experiences. Taking up the bounds of Mayer’s original project, Berry spends a funny, lonely day roving the streets of New York, and turns her precise and humorous eye on the city that now bears a fading resemblance to the one Mayer inhabited.
This issue gathers together pieces full of playfulness, games, restrictions and parameters and explores the ways constraints can propel and intensify whatever they aim to contain – keeping an openness to the living moment. Michael Farrell’s ‘acrostic’ poems take the letters from their titles and reorder them repeatedly – forming strings of new, surprising, and unexpectedly funny sequences. Chris Andrews, a poet who often draws on the rules and constraints of the French literary movement Oulipo, takes these and other parameters into a dance with five wise and witty poems on attention and yearning.
In his story about two students smoking para in the back of a run-down pizzeria, Reyumeh Ejue uses a solid wall of long, breathless sentences to capture the unbroken hurtle towards their next fix, at the expense of everything else. Miriam Webster’s farcical story about a couple taking psychedelics in the bush has its focus on the kinds of painful games that two people can play with each other – and which can keep a relationship alive, with or without love.
And Miro Bilbrough gives us two comic scenes from inside a car – views of the world from the car window, and exchanges with her driving companions – that work as miniature portraits of human foible and friendship.
Contents
Miro Bilbrough Two Portraits prose
Vanessa Berry Enduring Present prose
Michael Farrell Four Poems poetry
Miriam Webster My Brother Said I Was Your Dog prose
Chris Andrews Five Poems poetry
Reyumeh Ejue Buoyant prose
Frontispiece by Louise Weaver
