BUNNY ROGERS RYDER RIPPS R. LORD }{ AMERICAN MEDIUM

UPLOAD LINK

In any structure of architecture, or form, there are a number of parts and identities, though they each turn to the most basic functions and components. The arch, that is the excavation and hollowness which allows for a new fullness, the column, the wall veil, and more miniscule components such as the cornice or dripstone – those being the capital.

Though, we must turn our attention here to a particular component of architecture – an often pleasingly visual component, the arch. If we take Ruskin at his word, the Greeks invented the column (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. and variations on each theme), the Romans the arch (that grand Triumphant Arch of so many Masaccio and Renaissance painters), and the Arab pointed and foliated the arch – its ogee drawing lines between the taller apogee and lower perigee. This caste, or historically-progressive exclusion of the past, is specific to any analysis of structure and form, and for our purposes we will look at poetry. Specifically, that of three poets who are most formative to our contemporary moment: Bunny Rogers, Ryder Ripps, and Rachel (R.) Lord.

The three poets cum artists/artists cum poets were enlisted by the latter, R Lord, to read at American Medium – a Bed Stuy gallery founded in 2012 and showing artists such as Ann Hirsch, Andrew Norman Wilson, Jon Rafman, Kareem Lotfy, et al. ­The three read short, specific passages from new books (Rogers), recent musings (Ripps), and memories in the form of myth (Lord). For such a moment of poetry, there could not have been a different, yet potent triumvirate of poets to read.

Rogers poetry reflects much of her visual artwork, most recently on view at Société in Berlin, in that it is meticulously refined, melancholic, and yet deeply and joyously respectful. During Roger’s reading I found myself looking over onto adjacent brownstones, not particularly due to her deadpan delivery, but because her words change the physical environment into monstrous, darkly hilarious visions that threaten to attack their found environment, but instead smile inside. Window blinds and porch covers became white and green-striped teeth that held their serious position, but were approachable in a masculine-defined role that only Qiu Miaojin or Rogers could particularly understand. It is a kind severity that could attack, but would rather guard and protect in an elliptical path, highs and lows smoothed into the svelte, lovely vicious curve of a panther.

Ripps, on the verso, would rather forwardly attack with the ironic curve. It is not a demeaning or dastardly attack, but every episode or thought that leaves his lips instantly makes the thought irrelevant. To say Ripps’ words and writings were some of the funniest heard in contemporary poetry would be an understatement. There is a direct dryness that even supersedes Rogers delivery, one could say a tiredness, but Ripps is energetic and confident about his time that he embodies, and the dump.fm cofounder would rightly show this confidence in the in/originality of death driven intensity in the repetition of image and word. Further, Ripps recognizes that insincerity has passed and the letters he utters are not those of personalized, failed thoughts, but addresses to those still living behind the moment: “Do not go this route,” is the warning. Perhaps, like the Roman arch, Ripps most finds that he is stuck in this beautiful transition. There is a grand understanding of the past and a well-invisioned path of the future, but the tight beauty he has created may only be of this moment.

R. (Rachel) Lord – though she specifically stipulates she prefers to keep the forenames separate for textual and visual mediums, respectively – was the most anomalous, possibly basic?!, poet of the evening. For starters, I refer to the confused basic not in the contemporaneously demeaning definition of the word, but in the Doric definition. Lord’s poetry, pointedly being the delivery, was traditional, formalist poetry. She referenced her childhood in D.C. as an atypical myth of childhood – seeing it in her present as she imagined the present. Narrative at its surface, Lord left a feeling of well-crafted conceptualism, possibly more wrought than the two before her. I left confused on Lord’s performance. I did not understand it, however on leaving my thoughts were milled on past explorations of excavating the present. It may be trite, but would turning to Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations be so wrong? Lord dug out the past in a lucid, determined desire so as to make it relevant for the future. If any, she was the poet who made the past, not the present, the most pleasurable and understandable by future archaeologists. Perhaps, by her rather sing-song tone and delivery, I was distracted to the past with all her content, and obscured to the real meaning of it. Like I said, I left damned confused with her work. It did just not fit in.
That is wonderful.

Often times I leave a night of readings with a “yes, those were good,” or “yes, those were quite good and some quite bad,” – the bad referring to just desiring of more work and attention. However, there is no doubt that each of the three readers at American Medium were exquisitely skilled in reading, poetry, and the desirable beauty of art. No one I have talked to has said one harming thing against Rogers’s art. It is seriously exquisite.

If I could imagine them all, then I would find Rogers the most crafted and poignant to the near contemporary, that being sincere and direct, her writing most reflective of the form of Internet linguistics. Her politically and sexually charged distances become ready mades for the damning solitariness of our internet sociality. She transverses the highs and lows, that Ogee arch, in her excavations of the present and I find myself crying in joy to  see her work.

Ripps does not demand laughter, though he could and many would oblige. As the Ionic, he has progressed in an ahistorical phormat – determined in his stature, and flowering in easily-read comedy. It is the reprieve from the non-ironic nature of capitalism that Ripps makes one lift their head from the doldrums. Forgive his large rhinestone cowboy buckle belt, it only adds to the hilariousness that one needs to look to for understanding our absurdity in contemporary movements – dump.fm and Red Bull are his corpocratic toys.

Lord, I admittedly still do not understand. She danced in the pit of dirt that was the American Medium backyard, swaying back and forth as she read each of her poems, as if each was a choreographed performance. Considering the venue and preceding readers, I cannot but assume this was Lord’s intent – she was a most basic conceptualist that levered thoughts past traditional poetry reading. I need to hear her read again. I need to read her writings. Her Angry Birds paintings, controversially denied by a notorious art flipper, were adamantly base, and yet so complexly visionary that it is understandable they were not bought. Do we possibly have the foresight to understand Lord’s poetry and work at the moment? Using Betteridge’s law, we must say yes to the question, but it is damning tribulation to undertake. I only hope that I did not perversely overthink her writing due to the two poets before her. May we say she is the Doric? The original and most traditional, but privileged for increasingly complex developments.