Large Amounts of Natural Suspicion, Under the Raspberry Tree - November 12, 2009

Make us feel critical of the mind.
Repeat the jargon next to the hypothetical elevator.

Divided between two in all directions.

Uniformity through six, a natural conclusion.

Looking to escape the crowd.

To see concentrically outward.

A boundary observed from space.

Perceived ringing pushed beyond the horizon.

This photograph disappeared from New York.
A small fruit farm, in black and white.

A new image developed.
Spreading slowly away from the dying leaves.
Run past the trees,
And live to see the second world.

A climatic zone breeding resilient plants.
With a dozen before ten,
A second experiment grew large and small.

Tinkering within hidden marshlands.
Deep purple and golden reds.
Enormous red fruit thrived in bushels.

A bottle of winter left for four years.
A cold tonic invented to cure.
Only raspberries grow in the swamp,
And tea leaves change the weather.

The system could be accessed.
An entry point behind the phenomenon.
They knew it and didn't know.

Background: I take the Brooklyn Rail newspaper and underline words and phases in the articles that catch my attention. Then circle a word or phrase for the title. It's more of a subtractive process, taking a page of words and editing down to a poem or maybe several. It's kind of backwards from the traditional process of adding words to a blank page, but it works for me. The pieces of newspaper with these random abstract poems get used as collage material in my artwork.

The concept of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new was inspired by a Richard Prince exhibition at the Guggenheim - 2008. His re-photography, nurse paintings, and deKooning woman, collage paintings were my favorites.

"Large Amounts of Natural Suspicion, Under the Raspberry Tree" was created from the following Brooklyn Rail articles.

The Brooklyn Rail - November 2008 pg. 92

From "Under Every Spreading Tree" by Carl Peterson

"The Raspberry Prince"

"The New Suburbia"

"The Strategic Value of Holcombe High"

Familiar Sketches In Chronological Order - 10/18/2009

Give us the world as it is.
Leave us with a story of everyday life.

Copy the original quote, or write another?
Mirrors cut from mirrors.
A single paragraph fragmented together.
Equally, you might say.

Word for word.
Line for line.
The versions were identical.
Mirrors never escape from the shadows of originality.

I wish for a bit more.
A mind of fire, living in tribal myths.
The raw power of a delirious moment.
Primal, exquisite.
Free from judgement, restriction, and reflection.


Background: I take the Brooklyn Rail newspaper and underline words and phases in the articles that catch my attention. Then circle a word or phrase for the title. It's more of a subtractive process, taking a page of words and editing down to a poem or maybe several. It's kind of backwards from the traditional process of adding words to a blank page, but it works for me. The pieces of newspaper with these random abstract poems get used as collage material in my artwork.

The concept of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new was inspired by a Richard Prince exhibition at the Guggenheim - 2008. His re-photography, nurse paintings, and deKooning woman, collage paintings were my favorites.

"Familiar Sketches In Chronological Order" was created from the following Brooklyn Rail Articles.
"The East, The West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters" by Kaitlin Bell - July/August 2009, pg.21
"Reflections by Jonathan Blitzer" - July/August 2009, pg.21

Painted Words From The Eye of Another Era - 8/30/2009

From black to white,
But also white to black.
Punctuated forms in ambiguity.
The idea of drawings,
Made of charcoal blacks from the imagined world.

It felt good to be outside.
A humble emancipation from imagination.

Follow the reflections of a world no longer real.
Completely empty for a time.
Listening to daily life at certain angles.

Momentary gestures disrupt convention.
Experimental sounds play an upside down keyboard.
An acoustic minimalist loudly became a distraction.
Atonal ecstasy improvised slowly.

Anxiety about everything expresses a yearning to preserve.
Day to day thoughts haunted by disorderly feelings.
Machines create them.
There is so much to tell.

With a string dangling a watch,
Thought may be cynical.
Pleasure exposes our personality.
Moving to a point in desperation.
It was death that led to departure.

A collage of images,
Printed on brown paper bags.
Replicated, and laid on a bed.
Nude women with a banana.
Printed images to synthesize sex.

A villainous white man,
Painted expressionistic cobras by a giant tree.
Step away from unobtrusive color.
Things in the world exude a quite shift in creativity.

One metaphor inside another, infinitely small.
Paint before us.
The secrets obscured in meaning.

Two are made of one.
One can be seen, but three transform.
Tradition forces the present.

I remember seeing eccentric objects.
Lonely, empty.
The sound of crickets.

Petals on a blossom predict love.
To be nothing remains the final act of reason.

Rituals of Probability In A World Without Desire

The Important Things I Like Happen To Be Big
2009 - 11"x12", Mixed media on wood.
www.ErikVP.com



The poem titled "Rituals of Probability In A World Without Desire" lives within the newspaper collage of this painting.



Rituals of Probability In A World Without Desire
A yellow vortex of exploding bubbles.
The theme untitled.
Potential electricity is so often the case.

One outstretched arm.
I don't understand it.
Is nil French for zero, or nothing?

Every evening, in the morning.
Night after night,
Recalling someone red.

I know you from somewhere.
Look at my watch.
Is this you?
I imagined who I recognized.

Found with a few trees.
Cold water.
A metaphor, or fiction?

It's a composition in need of a story.
Prolific bunnies that never seem to connect.

Imagining a message on all sides.
It would have to be a message.
Incomprehensible, and therefor indispensable.

An original dream.
To be hypnotic, and express a desire.
Take me there, to find death.

The idea of abstract surrealism.
Emotion beyond the Freudian art.
Paint the potential to perceive.

Concealed in what was innocent.
Performing nude,
In beautiful, expensive, paste-on glitter.

Give to the gladiators everywhere.
There were seven.

Sense of Guilt Fantasies From the Early 60's Joined With Charisma

Bizarrely beautiful,
Completely absurd,
And subtly off-kilter.
Glue explains the lack of conjunction,
With impermanence.

A fascination gone too far,
In this pure realism,
Whose primary mode is X and Q.

A dozen readers of nothing.
Can this book develop misunderstanding?
A consciousness incomplete.
The other, we had to innovate.

The rule of thought was fascinating, and birds sang.
This was original.
Mistakes delineate an uncertain entity.
Survive the stories we tell through telling.
Stories about perceptive cats,
An old woman who sits.
Reality is made of reality.

Echoes change in mood,
While becoming unstable.
The ever increasing complexity of history,
Mirrors the lifetime of three.
From a leader among the defeated.
The dream of revolution.

A picture raises two questions.
Prejudice or intellectual arrogance?

Here is a way.
A precautionary approach to nature.
If you practice nature.
The scientific argument changes.
Life with nature, arranged in sections.
I was delighted.

Redefined or difficult to prove,
The third mind glaring.

Laid to rest.
Mixed feelings now transformed.
Examination of reason while driving.
A double reward.

Translucent brush strokes.
My mind living elsewhere,
From thought to thought.
Tokyo, Paris, New York.
The sound of two hands between east and west.

Days, seconds, a staccato.
Because I am normal.
Ordinary life.
A reminder of the real.

An Emotional Composition Painted In A Neutral Color

Digital is producing a kind of human capacity.
So many people are forecasting death.
But the physical medium is alive and well.
The concept of death created.
She chose to create.

Certain feelings consciously placed on the table,
Consciously use meaning.
If we think about everything else,
And everything through the beginning,
I often think about it equally.

I don't want to look.
You have that spot.
Say something important.
Then be the still life,
And go.

Try to draw composed patterns.
It's dumb, semantically,
But I like the idea of things.
They have meanings to other meanings.
To other people.

I had some used bricks.
Bricks come to mean ruin, in some way.
Who died?

Theatrical paintings are always unspokenly theatrical.
There is that element.
Left un-thought-about,
They show patterns,
With yellow paint.
I don't really have a pattern.

Can you talk about color?
I'm obviously thinking,
And I don't know what I mean by that.
I had color.

There was a discussion recorded.
Something about post-modernist instability.
I really wish people understood that.
Yes.
That would be something.

Random, Abstract Poetry - 4/15/09

Absurdity In Three Pieces
It is somewhat unclear,
How well it resonated.
A set of twins,
With almost no trace of human figure.

Symbols of female fertility,
Around the wall.
A greater emphasis on circumstantial context.
Her ideas are related.
Each is practical or primary.

Individual context of history.
Open to interact.
The dot screen shift to yellow,
Could be read.

Language and meaning.
Delusion and fortune,
Available to the viewer.

Something relevant, disjointed, or arbitrary.
Fragmented about a moot point.
Both have symbols.
The meaning, multiple and distinct.

The seamless has rendered,
To the ongoing evolution.

Daydream about how.
I recalled.
Interrogated about culture.
I imagined.

Photographic imagery.
The viability of ambiguities become visible.



Horizontal Bands Between Solidarity and Evanescence
Make sense for a reason,
And grasp the tangible.

The male nude, stiffly drawn.
Never painted a nude.
He was a painter, self-taught.

The concept of boxed-in feelings.
The geometry of urban living,
Will fill those spaces.

A small gesture reveals sensibility,
And unusual viewpoints.

Occasionally, snail-like accumulations,
Of color next to color,
Form shadow and space.

Things seem to be rigorous.
Falling somewhere between,
Predictable and unexplained.

Repeat things familiar.
These arrangements yet absurd.
Fish don't have access to the obscure.

Energy, an oasis of warmth.
The glow of inspired optimism.
Not that everything will.

A field of yellow.
The chaos understood.
This curious blend of words.


A False Metaphor, Mapped From Linguistic Meaning
Purposeful experiments in urban psychotherapy.
To change negative thought patterns,
The therapy is uniquely focused.

Distressing social structures,
Between forces of nature.
One problem and one location.
Futuristic speculation dismissed as fantasies.

Piece together geraniums.
The swan song of January.

A can of soup?
There's a fly in my soup.
Be discerned by the kitchen utensils.
Complex symbols of meaning.

Find a way.
More elliptical.
We have passed a time,
For delirious visionaries.
Imagine that.

Exotic coconuts,
Have a ritual we recognize.
An unlikely pair who resonate.
One was sophisticated,
The other reclusive.

Random, Abstract Poetry - 4/1/09

Background: I take the Brooklyn Rail newspaper and underline words and phases in the articles that catch my attention. Then circle a word or phrase for the title. It's more of a subtractive process, taking a page of words and editing down to a poem or maybe several. It's kind of backwards from the traditional process of adding words to a blank page, but it works for me. The pieces of newspaper with these random abstract poems get used as collage material in my artwork. I create the artwork. My darker, semi-schizophrenic alter ego creates the poetry.

The concept of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new was inspired by a Richard Prince's exhibition at the Guggenheim - 2008. His re-photography, nurse paintings, and deKooning woman, collage paintings were my favorites.

Examples: You can see actual articles from the Brooklyn Rail with the poetry on my website at www.ErikVP.com/poetry



A Boundary Between Perception Pieced Together
This is what we do.
Something or seeing something.
Looking up or looking down.
I empathize with that.

You make your own prints for intervention?
The color of strange colors.
Technical defects.
Unpredictability is always one thing.
Life and mirrors.

I was interested in invention, obsession,
The opposition to historical objects.
This guy looks at the same things,
But never interested,
And saw blue.
I thought, "oh my".

You know he gets more personalized.
Picture he's a flower.
Not so interesting.
He's not well.

Mud.
I also adore.
Interested in various kinds.
That's really obsolete!

What are your thoughts?
Who blurs the image?

We make hypotheses,
Reconstructing this process.
Visual illusions are extended,
As an image in a dream.

I don't think he loved Mussolini.
He just wanted to stay home.
Don't you think?



Watery Lily Pads Mocked By Instrumental Froggy
Be careful about the flower children.
An overdetermined idea.
Reading a sketch,
Then painting very clearly.

He was surprised by the fact.
Just spontaneous and totally classical.
I think it was overdetermined.

Maddeningly empty.
If apocalypse is revelation,
It's the end of understanding relevance.
Get ready.

The deluded old man,
Was genuinely touching.
His brilliance of manipulating.
The connection between sound and sounds,
Stripped of their color, words or images.

Can you talk about alchemy?
I was totally taken by it.
I wanted to find a way.

The musical landscape speaks.
I feel within your brain.
I deal with drama.

Over time, I am drawn to,
Part of my brain,
As well as color.
They're all people,
Who have life experience.

Virtually unnoticed.
Fashionably unconnected.
Fortunately, he had enough sense.
I can't think of one precisely.

Surreal, and beautifully rendered,
With highly physical experimentation.
A complex layer of conflict.
The message heard.
At times overlooked.
Stop fighting it.

A moment needs to be the next moment.
I can listen,
Lying broken.
It still sounds fantastic.



The Future May Not Be Completely Rosy
Cyan, magenta, yellow.
And make sounds called dance.
A cerebral piece?

Utterly original.
Contained within a labor of love.

Manufactured to the strictest standards.
Classical vinyl.

Nothing like a coherent narrative.
Political repression underneath surrealistic humor.
Serious words parsing at a literal level.
Funkier than a disco beat.

The mysterious German,
Strumming chords.

I discovered slippery truths,
About elusive recorders,
The word heresy.

Semi-acoustic, no-fi, lo-fi.
The secret studio.
Hundreds of beer and wine bottles,
Miraculously tidied up.

I'm not interested in composition.
I don't consciously use technique.

Ears decide who,
In terms of methodology.
People who choose to go,
And for some,
They do not experience a tangible artifact.
It's not personal.

For example,
Superimposed results compared to,
Meticulous restructurings,
That retain too much form and character.
Fascinating?
Frequently inspire,
And they will listen.

A man is like schizophrenia.
Legend says, he was listening on the radio.
This guy.
He was kind of a genius.
There is a kind of art called art brut.
I think you can call this music.

It's a song but also personal.
It's called rock 'n' roll.
But in fact rock 'n' roll.


Allow Meanings To Emerge
Their plans were delayed.
Irrevocably interrupted.
A non-stop mastermind from left field.

Wide geographic separation,
People still refer to "the impossible",
In 20th century structures.

An accessible art form.
Suburban worlds eventually go stale.
The niche creative projects had been found.

Compose life, and then go to the other side.
I like that quote.
Everything is equal.
I don't like hierarchy.
I don't like rules.
Arranging things that are equal, and so emotional.

The uncategorizable cow.
Tang, tang, tang.
Copy me?

I really wish people understood.
Move on to something else.
Reference a particular irony or nostalgia.
Probably nostalgia, as an illness.
People died of it.
Now think something sentimental.

Longing for home,
As an escape from war.
We were marching for the first time.
Into a world of really strange things.
I just woke.

I think paintings communicate.
There's the matter of one doing,
That nudges you.

You work, work, work.
It does something that you couldn't predict.
The baggage of convention entails serious slippage.
Whether faster or slower,
All I really care about is getting drunk.

Two inclinations may be diametric.
One aimed at creation.
The other about reality.
Objectively, the subjectively have a sense.
One might outweigh the striving of balance.
As you say, I like red and green.

Random, Abstract Poetry - 3/15/09

Background: I take the Brooklyn Rail newspaper and underline words and phases in the articles that catch my attention. Then circle a word or phrase for the title. It's more of a subtractive process, taking a page of words and editing down to a poem or maybe several. It's kind of backwards from the traditional process of adding words to a blank page, but it works for me. The pieces of newspaper with these random abstract poems get used as collage material in my artwork. I create the artwork. My darker, semi-schizophrenic alter ego creates the poetry.

The concept of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new was inspired by a Richard Prince's exhibition at the Guggenheim - 2008. His re-photography, nurse paintings, and deKooning woman, collage paintings were my favorites.

Examples: You can see actual articles from the Brooklyn Rail with the poetry on my website at - www.ErikVP.com/poetry


The Intellectual Obscurity of Absolute Understanding
A transition to the invisible,
And the anxiety of convention.
I had to learn.

You mention civilization,
Being one-dimensional.
The negation.
An opposition to positivism.

The marginal was tangential.
So you would be aware of it.
Always in resistance.
Abandoning society.

Whether it was ten or ten thousand.
He thought deeply and completely lucid.
Very critical of the French.
A necessary block,
To understanding a complicated language.

To think about theory,
All complexities can be understood.

Do you think that way?
It's possible.

The dark side was very difficult.
I was influenced by the thinker.
The difference between negative and positive.
Being oneself and so on.

I'm also thinking.
In other words, the knowledge of knowledge,
Can teach us knowledge.

Writing In Fragment Down The Page

Take a piece of paper.

And follow it.

What have you written?

Searching for an entry.

The sound of birds.

So much talking.

Stories are the collection of stories,

With a beginning, middle and end.
He awoke with a mind,
From the left side of right.

The two-headed god?

Ideas ask questions.

It's possible, but none the less.

That's not weird, it's just interesting.

An observer of his own life.

Leading to the climactic line.

It is finished, isn't it?
Yes.

Random, Abstract Poetry - 3/3/09

Background: I take the Brooklyn Rail newspaper and underline words and phases in the articles that catch my attention. Then circle a word or phrase for the title. It's more of a subtractive process, taking a page of words and editing down to a poem or maybe several. It's kind of backwards from the traditional process of adding words to a blank page, but it works for me. The pieces of newspaper with these random abstract poems get used as collage material in my artwork. I create the artwork. My darker, semi-schizophrenic alter ego creates the poetry.

The concept of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new was inspired by a Richard Prince exhibition I visited at the Guggenheim - 2008. His re-photography, nurse paintings, and deKooning woman, collage paintings were my favorites.

Examples: You can see actual articles from the Brooklyn Rail with the poetry on my website at - www.ErikVP.com/poetry


It's What The Story Is About
The mind looted,
Tumbling off cliffs.
Courage and suffering renders,
Meaningless contradiction.
Never pay for lies.

Tiny beauty, apparently threatened.
Grammar, which somehow becomes transgressive.

Done only to kill.
Deliberate, mind-blowing.
The monotone of a man's soul.

One year later, most sincere.
It's a classic.


A Physical Representation of The Id
Condemned to the irrelevant.
Anti-depressants of the global economy.
The paradox of insanity.
Maybe the pendulum swings.

Sometimes incoherent,
The unconscious in ourselves.

A man with an asymmetric sexual fantasy.
Eyes shut, harvesting dangerous desires.
Waiting for things to appear.

What we desire,
Tells us what to desire.
Desire a dream.
We can imagine.


The Vibe Is Established
Blue poetry.
A particular obsession,
Between language and thought.
The eye should listen.

Language, a paradox.
Margins reverberate throughout,
Of proverbs trapped.
The possibilities.

Every dream is vital,
To the thinkers and stones.
Fused so seamlessly,
Without gray spaces.

Seeing a Chinese film.
Asking the same question.
Look, but not always.

Random, Abstract Poetry - 2/18/09

Background: I take the Brooklyn Rail newspaper and underline words and phases in the articles that catch my attention. Then circle a word or phrase for the title. It's more of a subtractive process, taking a page of words and editing down to a poem or maybe several. It's kind of backwards from the traditional process of adding words to a blank page, but it works for me. The pieces of newspaper with these random abstract poems get used as collage material in my artwork. I create the artwork. My darker, semi-schizophrenic alter ego creates the poetry.

The concept of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new was inspired by a Richard Prince exhibition I visited at the Guggenheim - 2008. His re-photography, nurse paintings, and deKooning woman, collage paintings were my favorites.

Examples: You can see actual articles from the Brooklyn Rail with the poetry on my website at - www.ErikVP.com/poetry


Just There
You know, I began going nowhere.
I remember that.
Like Van Gogh's drawings.

The drawings were very important.
Even now, they are lucid.

Color is something really open.
It was art with people,
who couldn't talk.

If you went over there,
they'd stop and not talk.
I didn't fit in.

You belonged to the color.
But I didn't really feel comfortable.
That was true.

The color didn't have structure.
Struggling and struggling.
Just trying to draw.
Too many choices.
You can't give people too many choices.

Going to Egypt?
I should go to Egypt.
The pyramids.
I could stack together,
and not move the air.

I realized.
It just came to me.
The last key to the puzzle.

You got to struggle to figure out color.
I think that's about right.


I Didn't Know People
Shakespeare hardly had any friends.
But his ghost was present,
as though he'd never left.

An education in literature imagined.
So innovative and experimental.

A very unorthodox critic, traumatized.
Because I did not have the tools to write.
Thinking creatively in whatever.
Probably philosophy.



None Of This Was Ever Really Spoken
You were born early.
I wonder how that influenced you?

It was very intense.
They couldn't figure me out.
I read everything.

The war had a lot of resonance.
The 21st century complexity,
and so on.
The complexity of identity.

I found out later,
I wore rosary beads.

Much later in life,
I invented the process,
of organizing beloved figures.

I got very nervous.
They would vibrate any time the train went by.

Random, Abstract Poetry - 02/12/09

Background: I take the Brooklyn Rail newspaper and underline words and phases in the articles that catch my attention. Then circle a word or phrase for the title. It's more of a subtractive process, taking a page of words and editing down to a poem or maybe several. It's kind of backwards from the traditional process of adding words to a blank page, but it works for me. The pieces of newspaper with these random abstract poems get used as collage material in my artwork. I create the artwork. My darker, semi-schizophrenic alter ego creates the poetry.

The concept of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new was inspired by a Richard Prince exhibition I visited at the Guggenheim - 2008. His re-photography, nurse paintings, and deKooning woman, collage paintings were my favorites.

Examples: You can see actual articles from the Brooklyn Rail with the poetry on my website at - www.ErikVP.com/poetry


Door-to-Door Salesmen
The creators, looking to deceive.
Intellectual principles all centered on,
A devotion to the idea.

Peddled to the curious.
People bought complex, scientific theories.
This was decidedly odd.

Odd or ridiculous.
Unorthodox as much as sarcastic.
Hilariously hilarious.
Orchestrated ideas with humor.

It really is hilarious.
It might even be great.

It is strange to think,
But that's what happened.


Harmless Except To Himself
You talk literature with them.
Actually English.

You talk about anything?
He didn't talk much.
A very quiet, ominous language.

It wasn't literary,
But very intelligent, of course.

What were they like?
Sometimes, usually a psychoanalyst.
Concentrated on one person.
You get the idea?
Then next time,
It would be somebody else.

One thing was funny.
He didn't like Ireland.
It was a long story, I remember.
And I didn't notice the manuscript.

So strange.
The pauses taught silence.
He taught in silence.
This woman stood up and said,
This is terrible.

I wouldn't call that a great success.
But I guess it was successful.



The Way It Functions
This is a common thing.
People who don't believe.
When I believe.
Who really believes?

People are hostile.
Like Wal-Mart before they come in.
It's not planned cynicism.
But cynicism is not.

If you think it's a good thing,
To make people cynical,
What are you going to do?

There are two ways of looking at that.
Which never changes.
A laissez-faire state.
Sort of anti-ideology.

All the stuff gets tossed away.
Things, stuff,
And the red stuff.
That stuff has very little place.
You rarely hear about it.

Just a cynical maneuver?
I think so.
The magnetic power has exerted itself.

Random, Abstract Poetry - 1/25/09

Background: I take the Brooklyn Rail newspaper and underline words and phases in the articles that catch my attention. Then circle a word or phrase for the title. It's more of a subtractive process, taking a page of words and editing down to a poem or maybe several. It's kind of backwards from the traditional process of adding words to a blank page, but it works for me. The pieces of newspaper with these random abstract poems get used as collage material in my artwork. I create the artwork. My darker, semi-schizophrenic alter ego creates the poetry.

The concept of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new was inspired by a Richard Prince exhibition I visited at the Guggenheim - 2008. His re-photography, nurse paintings, and deKooning woman, collage paintings were my favorites.

Examples: You can see actual articles from the Brooklyn Rail with the poetry on my website at - www.ErikVP.com/poetry


An Opportunity To Understand Something
You figure out where because,
I don't feel whatever happened,
Cannot change.

People called me, and then
They tell me to go.
That was pretty wild.

We went out to walk.
A guy says, "Where are you?"
"Well, I'm here."
He says, "No, you're not here."
"I was here."
And the guy's like, "No, you're not here."
And I remember you were.
I was devastated.

But then I realized.
I'm here.
People tell me to go back.
I can go back.

If I tell, do they know,
They are supposed to go?
They would have to go,
Right?

I know I can always go.
That moment, I realized that.
[Laughs.]


A Hollowed Out Onion

One then another.
Down to three.
Where the woods begin,
The lesser one remains.

Heavy weather turned to rain.
Clouds which loom.
A picturesque backdrop.

That evening,
Stars dangled above.
Mushrooms in fleece and wool socks.
Behind a velvet curtain,
The composer conducted.

A thick sonata.
An interwoven symphony.
False notes slipped.
The failed attempt to engage.

The influence of the masks then spoke:
Beyond science and demolition.
What was monolithic?
To have never loved another?

Deep in the morning, skeptically observe,
That which wouldn't exist.

On the sunny afternoon, our final day.
Dead, emptied, systematically wrecked.
Humor must fail.
The end, in the face of realities.

The audience, with thrilling vigor,
Showed a complex-minded capacity to laugh.

Random, Abstract Poetry - 1/18/2009

Background: I take the Brooklyn Rail newspaper and underline words and phases in the articles that catch my attention. Then circle a word or phrase for the title. It's more of a subtractive process, taking a page of words and editing down to a poem or maybe several. It's kind of backwards from the traditional process of adding words to a blank page, but it works for me. The pieces of newspaper with these random abstract poems get used as collage material in my artwork. I create the artwork. My darker, semi-schizophrenic alter ego creates the poetry.

The concept of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new was inspired by a Richard Prince exhibition I visited at the Guggenheim - 2008. His re-photography, nurse paintings, and deKooning woman, collage paintings were my favorites.

Examples: You can see actual articles from the Brooklyn Rail with the poetry on my website at - www.ErikVP.com/poetry


Edges Negotiated
Disintegration is necessary,
In order to create new ones.
Lines don't intersect like this.
That's true.

They break down.
Things break down.
Give the positive,
To make the negative.
I want the opposite of break down.

My approach uses unpredictable images.
Time can be condensed.
Construction is destruction.
A consequence of both.

Nature, in a way proactive.
It's a quicker tempo.
More extreme.
I don't really have any control over that.

A very complicated transparency,
Set in motion.



Together Again
There's this whole thing about recognizing.
An agenda of the government.
They recognize these people.
Then they filter whoever.
Our government.

What do you take from this?
People don't realize,
What appears to be.
Ends up being really intense.

Some sort of connection.
Seen around the world.
They break apart,
Then come back.
Or vice versa.



Painful To Be Purple
Free falling into a pit of snakes.
Coming unhinged,
Is more precise.

Time, a conventional structure.
More articulation.
Waiting for the beat.

Infused and broken down.
A song called.
Can you see?
The final song to everyone.

Random, Abstract Poetry - 1/11/09

Background: I take the Brooklyn Rail newspaper and underline words and phases in the articles that catch my attention. Then circle a word or phrase for the title. It's more of a subtractive process, taking a page of words and editing down to a poem or maybe several. It's kind of backwards from the traditional process of adding words to a blank page, but it works for me. The pieces of newspaper with these random abstract poems get used as collage material in my artwork. I create the artwork. My darker, semi-schizophrenic alter ego creates the poetry.

The concept of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new was inspired by a Richard Prince exhibition I visited at the Guggenheim - 2008. His re-photography, nurse paintings, and deKooning woman, collage paintings were my favorites.

Examples: You can see actual articles from the Brooklyn Rail with the poetry on my website at - www.ErikVP.com/poetry




In A New Land
Our dialog about life and myth.
The intimate experience with expectations.
Can you talk about that?

It was two years ago.
Seems like yesterday.

I got on the wrong plane.
Landed in Africa.
Then, got run over by a car.
Very naive.

I had this idea about living.
Living, I thought.
A really interesting phenomenon.

All these people living,
All over.
From different worlds.
The mixture is most wonderful.

It takes time to realize.
I was living.
It's all beautiful.


It's About Dirt
Coming to a new place.
Often in a dream.
I realized only recently.
Connected personally from before.

Seeking, and could not find it.
Because, they didn't want to.

That sense of alienation.
Isolation.
A thought.
What had happened?

People without their feet.
Wars fought over land.

It's religion,
Or it's oil.
If you really look,
At what defines.



Notions Of The Cosmos
Obsessed with the stones.
The way they look.
Not in any way.
I feel a tremendous attraction.

They tie themselves into a puzzle.
A structure to reveal.
Like reading patterns.
Kind of abstract.

It struck me,
Those stones.
The planets?

We see these ancient forms.
The stones might hypothesize.
Which neither you nor I,
Care for.

I think some things are happening.
This kind of deformation.
Other levels of reality.