My Chicago for Your Ljubljanica
This project was conceived for Chicago Artists Month, October 2009
Poets Joel Craig and Travis Nichols paired with video artists Kirsten Leenaars and Dean Rank to each create a collaborative piece translating the written word into visual art and vice versa. The videos were presented at the Hideout along with live phone calls from poet and sometimes translator Paul Killebrew, as well as Honorary Slovenian Consul in Chicago, John P. Vidmar, PhD.
How to Make Paperhouse
by Kirsten Leenaars and Joel Craig
STEAM
by Dean Rank and Travis Nichols
Recommended viewing: Watch the animation, read the poem, re-watch the animation
Untitled
Poetry by Travis Nichols
His thin story happened then while coat and pant cuffs flapped around
a stepfather and half sister. The memories true or not against him seem
to be turning to steam, as I turned, all the while thinking of chewing
out alone eventually through the ghostly meats. Just as I, on the side
of his index, opted to drift into the present and finger for a while
the sleeping back of hoping, of folding his hands with my present
fingers around the crows, vultures, goldfinches and hawks. There are
woodpeckers, robins, bluebirds and cardinals, but nothing is as lovely
as a crow cawing, “off the overhang around the parking lot, a missed
opportunity walks, stopping in every subdivision to hear a muffed
note.” A murder of crows. Multiple murders of crows in the budding
trees waiting to send the lilac sky to black, or every once in a while to
bend remembrance gone on at the waist into coughing too long into
the night. Up and down the parking lot when no one cares what any
one crow is apparently talking to, everyone gets talked about as long as
everyone under the crow-steamed sky stays put.
