Hello,

I am beginning a new curatorial project: the line. And so, I am calling for work.

https://pleasepress.wixsite.com/theline

[This section was personalized based on how I was connected to the artist.] And I wonder whether You might be interested in participating. 

Similar to my past projects, You should feel free to submit anything (visual, audio, and particularly textual) for inclusion via email or respond in any way. Ultimately what I receive will direct the development of the project.

And as always, feel free to share this call with friends. I do not plan to include the project in search engine returns until after it is considered complete.

I do have something a bit different for this project. I am sure "the line" brings to mind existent discourses for You as a poet. I don't discourage You from remaining engaged in those discourses. I do want to provide two other points that might serve as commonalities for departure. Both are from Renee Gladman, whose work I first encountered while completing MFA work at Otis College of Art & Design.

The first is a quote from Gladman's book *Calamities,* which I recommend if You have time. It can be found in repositories such as Hoopla for free.

I began the day asking the individuals of this group of my ex-lovers to map a problem of space, but not the problem that involved the anxiety of whether they could or could not draw, nor the one that asked how it was even possible to translate “problems” into lines, rather, I meant real problems, where you had to think about where you were in a defined space and what your purpose was for being there. We got thrown off course. One of our party was insisting that the “point” should be our vehicle of expression (“not the line”) since it was the point that was the base of all communication. While I felt compelled to agree with her—the point certainly did take up less space than the line and seemed to be the originary gesture of all movement—I did have to counter that though the point may be the base of all communication, it could not function as the base, because most people did not begin looking at points until they became lines. We were having a picnic in the park, perched on a small hill, our bodies arranged on an old pink sheet from the 70s, decorated with a bloodred stripe. This was a time of the summer where Brooklyn had become a regular destination for me, and I was turning forty. I was turning forty so I felt that my ideas were very potent. Every time I found myself leaving an era at the same time that I was entering a new one, which was not always how it happened, sometimes something big ended and absolutely nothing followed it for a long, long time, except maybe you got fat or your sweet dog died, but on the occasion of going from thirty-nine to forty—well, it was one of those things where everyone filled in your sentences for you. You’d say something like, “I’m turning forty on Monday,” and people, regardless of the degree of intimacy between you, began to tell you a story about themselves or a stranger or about you yourself—and yes, their stories did approximate some of what you’d been thinking over the past weeks, but why wouldn’t they let you tell it? Impossible when it was a small picnic and you were among your dearest and one of them was nowhere near forty and one was quite generously past forty and the last was just kind of dragging some years behind you, and every time you wanted to say something serious about these eras you were exiting and entering you kept getting interrupted by the name Chana Morgenstern, because no one there knew whether she was a real person or a code name used by someone who was not in attendance and didn’t like you anymore. So you let everybody else tell you about turning forty as the sauvignon blanc did its thing in the cooler bag and tasted amazingly of grapefruit. You would never be forty again, somebody had just brilliantly told you.

-from *Calamities* by Renee Gladman

The second is a mini-feature piece of writing by Gladman at TRIPWIRE: "The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture." This piece is a bit longer, so I understand if You don't have time to open it. 

https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/tw.renee_.pdf

Whether You have time to look at the Gladman materials or not, I look forward to seeing your work for the line soon.

to the new year,

Edward 

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