tony barnstone
These poems were written to accompany sculptor Blane de St. Croix's installation Mourning Doves at the Art Park in Hollywood, California, and were read at the opening with the electronic accompaniment of Bob Dale. The installation consisted of several hundred gray-blue sculpted doves arranged in clusters in the open-air site. Interestingly enough, the poem "Blue Angel" was composed in part through neomodernist (I wouldn't really call it postmodern, since its roots are in the readymades and altered readymades of Duchamp and Picasso) technique that involved the adaptation of cut-up phrases from searches for the color blue, for mourning doves, for angels, and for taxidermy. It's a technique that has become common enough these days, and that in the last few years has taken on the name "flarfing," though without the explicit desire to be "un-PC" and to write deliberately bad poetry that flarf-poets celebrate. Other poems I constructed from this technique can be found here and an interview about readymade poetics can be found here.