"Tuesday; An Art Project" -- Lives On!

When art, photography, and poetry merge into a single project and a nifty packet of all the the above gets issued, it's understandable to wonder whether there will ever be another volume ... so I'm exhilarated to note that TUESDAY; AN ART PROJECT just completed its fifth issue (there are two issues per year), and is now offering two-year subscriptions.

Brainchild of Jennifer S. Flescher, who's the editor (Advisory board: Ralph Angel, Jennifer Arin, Sophie Cabot Black, Teresa Cader, Greg Delanty, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cate Marvin, David Rivard, Ravi Shankar, Don Share, A. J. Verdelle -- this should be ringing glad bells for many!), this is a "journal" that comes wrapped in its own intricately folded sheet that serves as table of contents and statement of the issue. The inside sheets (mostly letterpress work from DWRI) are independent, unbound, except for a neatly printed "belly band" around the four-by-six-inch printed gems. Poems, photographs, and prints follow no particular order. In the spring 2009 issue, Mary Ruefle provides "Poem Written Before I Was Born," which offers a taste of summer, along with Ruefle's vaunted ability to surprise as she braids fruit, incarnation, and individual choice. Its central passage is "In the month of July / in the middle of the month / in hte middle of the day / in the month of that hour / I enter the nectarine world."

A translation and several other poems follow, including one by Terese Svoboda ("The Widow's Walk"); then at the center of this issue there's a set of five photographs by Dark Room Collective poet Thomas Sayers Ellis (other poems and prints follow these, including some remarkable material by Joshua Blake Edwards). Ellis provides a statement:

Images are constantly worrying the world to allow them to become permanent. The photographer, sensing this, attempts to meet an unborn motion or stillness at its birth-moment. There's nothing sacred or instinctive about the process. The craft is interaction, a difficult interactive anonymity. The problem is being a body, forgetting that you are a body, so that the unborn photo will not fear becoming fixed. History does not exist without photography. It occurred before cinema and poetry. The photograph is purer than memory. The eye (not the mind) makes it so.

OK, I'm not going to try to take that apart. But if it appeals to you -- along with the intricacy of a packet of poems and prints and photos -- you might consider subscribing. It's $25 for a two-issue year -- see www.Tuesdayjournal.org or write to Tuesday; An Art Project, PO Box 1074, Arlington, MA 02474.