Order Info
- SOLD OUT; contact San for more info
Description
- Sandra’s second collection of poetry, 2007
- a multimedia experience that includes audio, film and photography
- poetry, creative ‘translation’; 80 pages
Do we, any of us, speak the same language? Blissful Times is a collection of poetry that tries to find out. Beginning with found text from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, Sandra Alland ‘translates’ the poem 63 times, morphing it into different poetic forms and emotional states, even different media. Using formal constraints, specialty dictionaries, internet search and translation engines, voice-activated software, the weather, global news and personal experiences, Alland invents pieces ranging from lyric poetry to sound poetry, from theatre to rant, from photography to Boggle. Edgy, passionate, amusing and intelligent, Blissful Times is a poetic cocktail for our troubled times.
For those who already have the book, this index links to all URLs of online ‘translations’ from the book (audio, video, photographs).
Watch/listen to a captioned video of San reading from Blissful Times on YouTube.
Reviews
“A rather amazing tour de force showcasing poetry’s aptitude for invention and re-invention.”
– Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory
“…reminds me of Bernadette Mayer’s belief that poetic experiment shows us exactly how much language can affect empirical meaning… poems like these encourage the reader to look beneath the surface of language, only to find more words there.”
– make/shift Magazine