Recently I left a poetry reading feeling agitated. Anxious and overeducated, the poets reading that night had tried in vain to resurrect the spirits of great dead poets instead of creating something of their own. It wasn’t the first time since moving to New York that I left a poetry reading feeling deflated– romanticizing about times past when poets were the outlaw prophets and Rimbaudian punk rockers who ran around downtown New York fizzing over with verse, transfixing everyone in their paths. A time when poetry was composed around the wild, meandering rhythms of the counterculture: stanzas found in impetuous road trips and meter heard as whispers through the walls of darkened motel rooms. When I happened upon the work of Jem Goulding (whose poetry also finds form as experimental cinepoems and photographs) I was thrilled to discover a poet canonizing the spirit of the young, unbridled, and passionate so rawly. “I want to do poetry for the now, make it hot again” Goulding recently divulged over dinner in Williamsburg, her fiery green eyes widened for emphasis. “If this level of intimacy is what it’s going to take to break through the stereotype, then fuck it.” It struck me there and then that not only was I perched opposite a poetry pioneer but, more importantly, I had just discovered poetry’s new sex symbol.
A world-traveller with a free, Laurel Canyon spirit despite her British roots, Goulding’s work is a celebration of post-digital bohemian life, love, and art. In the tradition of female artists like Lenore Kandel, Barbara Rubin, Bette Gordon, Nan Goldin, and Patti Smith, Goulding counterbalances the traditional spectatorial male gaze with an equally powerful feminine one. But feminine agency is just a small piece of Goulding’s ammo, her true originality laying in her brazen analog meditations on male beauty and sexuality that do not set out to emasculate or dissect. Her photographs and poems about paramours in paradise and surfer boys with angel faces and Mick Jagger haircuts celebrate her subjects as equals. While Goulding’s devotion to analog and warm 60s light resurrects the spirit of a time when poetry flowed more freely, her perspective — powered by an unwavering sense of sexuality parity – is clearly one of the 2010s
Goulding has already made waves in London with her experimental 16 mm cinepoem( based on a written poem of the same name) entitled“The Bone Echo.” Starring British super-muses Alice Dellal, Eliza Cummings, and Josh Beech, “The Bone Echo” features an original soundtrack by The Disappears and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, recorded live in Sonic Youth’s Echo Canyon studio.“The Bone Echo” is a visually stunning paean to animalistic love; an eroticly charged, darkly magical statement that effectively gives poetry back to the wild-hearted. Goulding’s sentiments — unlike many contemporary poets – aren’t couched in esoteric language or pardoxical allusion in order to remain inaccessable. Instead Goulding treats poetry as a glass vessel in which to pour truth; as an art form that everyone can and should understand and appreciate once again. After the jump Goulding tells OAKAZINE just who she is and what she’s about. — Text by Marlo Kronberg.
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