Ira Livingston
The Poetics Lab Book Series includes four of Ira Livingston’s books published as a set by Poetics Lab in 2024-- (1) Ecopoetics Groundwork, (2) Heaven and Hell on Earth, (3) Transobjects, and (4) Writing With Things-- in a colorful slipcase that conjures up a secret message hidden in the titles. Each of the books is also available individually; see below for descriptions, samples and links. To take a look at the set on Amazon, use this link: PLAB Book Series.
NEW BOOK! The first of my new books published by Poetics Lab-- Ecopoetics Groundwork (click here for sample) is now available on Amazon via this link: Ecopoetics on Amazon. Ecopoetics Groundwork does the brain-rewiring to ground the emergent discipline of ecopoetics in an anarchist philosophy of open systems, exploring reparative practices that work on and through language and its kinship with other ecologies. Groundwork refers to an overturning and opening up of our conceptual grammar, displacing modernist dualities among nature, humanity, and divinity. Individual chapters follow ecopoetics through the realms of language, visual art and architecture, science, religion and mysticism, and poetry, accompanied throughout by key poetic texts. A radical design by book designer Duncan Hamilton includes visual pleasure and surprising conjunctions of form and content on every page; this design is only available in the paperback (not in the e-book version).
NEW BOOK! The second of my new books published by Poetics Lab-- Heaven and Hell on Earth: What Visionary Art Makes Visible (click here for sample)-- is now available in paperback on Amazon via the following link: amazon.com/Heaven-Hell-Earth
The first half of Heaven and Hell on Earth-- a meditation on living through the End of Modernity, the reign of a Mad King, and a Plague-- concerns how we make hell on earth. The second explores poetics and language more generally as ritual practices of heaven-making. Attuned to vital resonances-- in all directions-- of visionary art and poetics with mystical practice and political activism, the book leads the reader toward a set of emergent contemplative objects just beyond knowledge and cognition: what visionary art makes visible. The paperback edition of Heaven and Hell on Earth features an innovative design by book designer Jamison Lung, with visual pleasures on every page. An e-book version is also available on Amazon, but only in standardized e-book format, so please buy the paperback if you can!
NEW BOOK! The third of my new books published by Poetics Lab-- Transobjects: Play, Prompts, and Creative Practice (click here for sample)-- is now available on Amazon via this link: Transobjects on Amazon. Transobjects develops a transdisciplinary practice and theory of prompts and explores the use of prompts and play in creative and cognitive process, and in the classroom. The book is especially intended for designers, artists, writers, and teachers. The first chapter explores the universal importance of play and its historical timeliness in the present moment, followed by a creative-practice and pedagogical how-to manual (interwoven with prompts throughout) designed to be stolen. The book ends with a chapter on maximalism as an aesthetic, a cognitive and creative process, and a philosophy; and a chapter on how to make the kinds of things named in the book's title. A radical design by book designer Jamison Lung includes surprising visual pleasures on every page; this design is only available in the paperback (not in the e-book version).
NEW BOOK! The fourth of my new books published by Poetics Lab-- Writing With Things: Anarchy and Openness on the Cusp of Drawing and Painting (click here for sample)-- is now available on Amazon via this link: WWT/Amazon
Writing With Things uses my drawing and paintings (including 16 large color images) as gateways to a sustained engagement with art-making as a contemplative, meditative, and visionary practice-- as suggested by the ways the included images occupy a set of cusps that displace dualistic distinctions between drawing and painting, foregrounds and backgrounds, abstraction and figuration, chance and intent, and image-making and writing. By close attention to making art as a durational and open-ended practice, the book explores what the evolution of a drawing makes visible and experienceable-- what it opens up-- even in its eventually "fossilized" form. Along the way, the book is in ongoing conversation with works by mystical writer/painters such as Blake, Kandinsky, and contemporary kabbalist David Chaim Smith.
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