May 112013
 

David Helwig

David Helwig, author of over 35 books, who has contributed translations, poems, and fiction to NC over the years, an insistent and constant recidivist in other words, herewith changes genre and turns photographer, offering a collection of graffiti art he has discovered, mostly in Canada but as far away as China and Venice. Graffiti art is folk art, hybrid art, amateur art, uneasy art — rebellious, dramatic, inappropriate (often), underground, illegal (sometimes), piratical, dangerous (how do they do those highway overpasses?), a sign of life.

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Venice12 040Venice 2012

Trip OttTor 020Gatineau 2011

Trip OttTor 019Gatineau 2010

  Toronto Wall art 09-04-2010 11-34-38 AMSan Francisco 2010

Toronto Wall art 09-04-2010 11-06-18 AMSan Francisco 2010

TO 067Toronto 2011

SnaFran 014-2San Francisco 2010

87210015Toronto 2009

87190006Toronto 2011

55120086Montreal 1993

55120062Montreal 1993

53040102Montreal 1994

53040021Montreal 1993

15490008China 1987

2010-12-45Toronto 2010

2010-12-34Toronto 2010

 —David Helwig

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David Helwig is the author of more than 35 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction including, most recently, About Love, 3 Stories by Chekhov (Biblioasis) and The Year One (Gaspereau Press), Duet and his autobiography The Name of Things (Porcupine’s Quill). The founder of the Best Canadian Short Story Series, he has edited more than 25 books for Oberon Press. His avocation, however, is not writing but vocal music. After abandoning this for some years, he returned to it in his forties and has sung with a number of choirs in Kingston, Montreal and Charlottetown. He has appeared as bass soloist in Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and Mozart’s Requiem. He currently lives in an old house in the village of Eldon in Prince Edward Island.

Mar 132012
 

Nance Van Winckel is on a roll. Two new books are coming next year (poems and stories). But much of her attention these days is focused on her pho-toems, collage art or off-the-page poems, if you will, or combinations of poetry, found and altered poetry, graffiti, ads, signage, and, well, walls. Photos and poems. Here’s what she wrote when she sent them: “So I thought I’d send you a couple of these altered ads, things I’m doing now for, Numéro Cinq. After I alter the text of the ads, it seems to me they need some place to live, so I stick ’em on walls.” Nance makes it sound easyand casual, but the images themselves are spectacular, surprising, expansive, witty and charged with a mysterious interaction of language and space. NC has published earlier pho-toems and a short pho-toem video. And here also is an interview about pho-toems Nance did with Diane Lockward.

 

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—Nance Van Winckel

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Nance Van Winckel will have two new books out in 2013. Pacific Walkers, her sixth collection of poems, is due out from U. of Washington Press, and Boneland, her fourth book of linked stories, will appear with U. of Oklahoma Press. She is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships, an Isherwood Fiction Fellowship and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. New poems appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review. She has new short fiction in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, and Kenyon Review. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Her primary interest lately is Poetry-Off-the-Page, and she has had work in several juried art shows of her “pho-toems” (photo-collage with text). A solo show of this work opened in January at the Robert Graves Gallery in Wenatchee, Washington; examples may be viewed at:  http://photoemsbynancevanwinckel.zenfolio.com/