“The only way to make a solid, enduring myth is to create a moment or a thing which is frozen–the “fly in amber” effect. The perfect group or record is something with a legacy that cannot be muddied by later perceived missteps, or by new permutations which confuse the enthusiast… Death is the most surefire method of attaining a state of “perfection” and therefore ensuring the accumulation of power and influence, but the shortterm dividends are obviously not attractive.”

- Supernatural Strategies for Making A Rock’n'Roll Group by Ian Svenonius

For those who have not yet noticed, we are dead and perfectly content with our dividends, such as they are.

Please do not send us submissions or queries. Thank you!

If you would like a limited edition copy of  our final, “Last Words” issue, or to inquire further about its contents, please email Marina at marina [at] explosion-proof [dot] net. Their cost of $7 includes shipping.

We fully intend to embark on future projects, and will note them here if and when we do so.

3 bands, 1 DJ; drinks (cheap, various); dancefloor; magazines; folks (ibid.); hoo-ha!

The show was conceived, as the artists wrote in its invitation, as an attempted response to a question which is very near to our hearts at Explosion-Proof, namely: ”Are we built to last, or are we built to be destroyed?”

Readers of our magazine will be familiar with Kari’s work, whose Dr. Seuss-ian nightmare “Pull It Out”* appeared on the cover of “The State of Union” – Issue #4. Now that the issue is somewhat behind us, Reader, we might let you in on a little stunt we pulled: taking Kari’s original work, we flipped it upside-down.

Also, look out for her reappearance in our latest issue (“Homeland Insecurity”), which accompanies Maria Jagodka’s three mixed genre short-short stories with illustrations magical, murderous and metaphysical.

Sophia Tragash is a graphic designer and artist, who works in oil paint, video, pencil, ink, Adobe Creative Studio, and computers in general. Her work was exhibited at Detour Basel during the Art Basel Weekend in Miami, FL. You can find more of her work at http://www.sophiatragash.com

Kari Cholnoky is a painter and current Recent Grad Resident at The Brooklyn Artist’s Gym. Her work is on view at the Woman Made Gallery (Chicago) in the exhibition Twenty In Their Twenties currently through Feb. 23rd; thereafter she will be featured in solo exhibitions at HERE (New York) and the INSTINC Gallery (Singapore). Find her at http://www.karicholnoky.com/

“It Always Starts with a Swing Set”

Doors will open at 8 and close at 11 — there will be paintings, and videos; also there will be snacks, beer and wine. Located off the L, blocks from the Graham and Grand stops, come hang-out, and perhaps go carousing with us later.

Graham Powers Gallery
155 Powers St, 2D
Brooklyn, NY 11211

February 2nd, 2012, 8pm

RSVP here: http://www.pingg.com/rsvp/2f88hk3k4nbv665qn

Ex-P #5 is here! Featuring interviews with Rivka Galchen and Justin Torres; poetry by Matthew Dickman, Stephen Burt, Matthew Zapruder (and many brilliant others!); essays on thespians-awaiting-death, Virgil’s literary imperialism, and unpretentious economics; short stories about homesick Moon-People, the villainous White Ramón and one nasty cough; as well as one beautiful graphic narrative by  Sylvia Watanabe, don’t miss the first issue of our second year!

Explosion-Proof poetry contributor Ben Mirov is featured today, January, 12, 2012, on Poets.org’s Poem-A-Day.

You can read Ben’s poem “Automatic Teller Machine” on Poets.org here, and you can find his poem “How I Get the Nectar Into the Well” in Explosion-Proof Issue 4.

Poets.org is the official website of The Academy of American Poets whose stated mission is “to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry.”

You can follow Ben on Twitter at @Benmirov, and while you’re there, follow us @exproofmag.

You can also find us on Facebook.

Go ahead and “Like” us, we’ll be your friends.

- Ex-P

P.S. – Keep on the lookout for announcements pertaining to the release party for Issue 5: Homeland Insecurity, coming soon. There will be rage.

It has been a while. Hopefully this doesn’t surprise. In the next week we’ll be releasing our 5th Issue, “Homeland Insecurity,” which is slated to be (as in the case of all newborns) our currently favorite child. Stay tuned for previews of the issue in the next few days.

Until then, some things we’ve been meaning to post about for a while.

In case you missed us at the New York Public Library in November, an audio file of our talk, “The Internet as Literature and the End of Magazines,” has been posted at on the library’s “Periodically Speaking” lecture series site. As the NYPL originally billed it, our chit-chat follows “the lifespan, supposed impending death, and posterity of the little, print magazine in the face of a digital abyss.”

Sketch by Travis Pratt (pencil on questionnaire, L-R: Liz, Nick, Dwight, Alex, Ryan and Kat). At the time of this sketch, neither Nick nor Dwight possessed the facial hair here depicted; Pratt has declined to comment on the matter.

The evening began with short readings from Ex-P writers Ryan Lee Wong (“On Marx and Hipsterdom”, Liz Stevens (aka Gordon Ebenezer Gourd; “Wolf Memoirs”), Dwight Livingstone Curtis (new material) and Kat Stoeffel (“The State of Union”), and continued with a discussion among the writers and founding editors Nick Greene and Alex Ludlum.

*

Additionally, we want to congratulate Liz Stevens (that is, Miss. G.E. Gourd), whose story “Wolf Memoirs” (originally published in Ex-P #2) was recently featured on Fiction Daily’s “Long” selection. Might we add, we are rather pumped to find our “short” stories are considered, on the Internet, to be “long”? You will remember, reader, the particular tribute that vice pays to virtue. Well, in this case the Internet needs no hypocrisy to amend its debt to Print: strait-forward prostration, apparently, will suffice.

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Further shout-outs to our writers, which are even more woefully overdue. If you’ve got a subscription to the NYer, you might have already seen that James Wood has a big, big crush on Ex-P #4 contributor Ben Lerner, whose debut novel Leaving Atocha Station is quite simply, as they say, bomb-ass. (For this reason, we publish his poems). As Wood writes:

“[A] subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel. . . . [Leaving the Atocha Station] has a beguiling mixture of lightness and weight. There are wonderful sentences and jokes on almost every page. Lerner is attempting to capture something that most conventional novels, with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and “conflict,” fail to do: the drift of thought, the unmomentous passage of undramatic life. . . . But it is one of the paradoxes of this cunning book that what might seem a skeptically postmodern comedy is also an earnestly old-fashioned seeker of the real—that other thing.”

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Finally, in December the New York Times named Matthew Zapruder’s latest collection Come On All You Ghosts one of their 100 Notable Books of 2011. Think that’s cool? How about the fact that, of the 100 selections, only FOUR were books of poetry? While that context better reveals Zapruder’s distinction, we will take this moment to register a complaint with the Gray Lady. Frankly, you don’t seem to read enough poetry. As the only American daily with the cosmopolitan authority to, you know, sustain our culture, you might want to get on that one, Times. Seriously.

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Most of that is old news, we know. For this tardiness, we facetiously apologize: didn’t you read our manifesto, Internet? We don’t care about you. Forsooth.

Fondly,

Ex-P

A special thanks goes out to the two fantastic musical acts that honored us with their rocking: The Keeps and BEHAVIOR.

We here at the magazine are working hard on Issue 5 (the ‘Home’ issue) which will be published in the coming months, and talks are already in the works for another epic night of Fun-Raising to celebrate it’s launch.

Keep in touch by liking our Facebook page and following us on Twitter so that you don’t miss out on any of the Explosion-Proof excitement to come.

Thanks again!

So far the journal Telephone (like the children’s game in which a phrase changes as it is whispered from ear to ear) has released two issues of poetry translations. Each issue features a handful of poems by one foreign poet and then ten translations of those poems by different poets and translators. In addition to introducing us to poets we may not have otherwise read (the first issue featured the German poet Uljana Wolf) the journal’s innovative format provides a playful and provocative examination of language. The experience is something like looking at a text through a kaleidoscope, its meanings and diction shifting with each permutation.

For the magazine’s third issue, the people at Telephone have teamed up with The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Brooklyn’s own Ugly Duckling Presse to create a multi-disciplinary event inspired by the work of the Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos. Beginning in the 1950s, de Campos defined his work as “verbivocovisual expression,” incorporating geometric and graphic elements (and more recently, sound and animation) into his poetic process. Think ee cummings but with color, sound, and movement. Fun fact: de Campos was cummings’ Brazilian translator.

Responding to de Campos’ diverse multi-sensory texts, the exhibition and corresponding publication “Telefone Sem Fio: Word-Things of Augusto de Campos Revisited” brings together an equally diverse group of artists and poets whose “translations” range in form from Morse Code patterns to Flash animation to scavenger hunts. These works will be on display at the EFA Project Space from November 4 to December 17. Issue 3 of Telephone, printed by Ugly Duckling, will double as an exhibition catalogue.

Bridging the gap between the written word and the visual arts, this is a must-see/read/hear event for those folks interested in conceptual/unconventional poetry.

– David Feinstein