DALT WONK
THE RIDDLES OF EXISTENCE
(LUNA PRESS)
You can choose to take playwright and poet Dalt Wonk’s latest, The Riddles of Existence, at face value and treat this oversized deck of cards as a literal game, where a short verse and illustration lends clues to each card’s depicted costume, to be paired with an index on the last card that includes titles like “The Worm,” “The Atom Bomb,” or quite vaguely, “Metamorphosis.” “The Light Bulb,” for example, is depicted as a bearded fellow with a tightly wrapped torso, accompanying filament crown and the verse “Fashioned like an ornament / although intended for a use, / I valiantly combat the dark, / but shatter at the least excuse.” (Though all the costumes aren’t so easily deciphered.) I find this collection works best with the “rules” dismissed entirely and treated as its own tarot deck, each card a hint at some invented mythology or divination, like a prop out of a Borgese story. The release of The Riddles of Existence is well-timed for Mardi Gras season, as it could be the perfect post-parade party game, to be enjoyed by a well-juiced crowd—like a poet’s charades—or even alone, where one can simply keep occupied with each expressive image (and its equally spry verse) until carnival’s excesses wear off. —Dan Fox
Link to source: http://www.antigravitymagazine.com/2014/02/reviews-february-2014/
“THE FROG AND THE LIZARD,” ONE OF MORRIS’ FAVORITE TALES IN DALT WONK’S FRENCH QUARTER FABLES.
Anyone who has spent time in the French Quarter knows it always has been a great place for people watching. Living there can be like living inside the pages of a book of complicated short stories where all of the characters are unexpectedly connected. Observant residents are inevitably privy to all sorts of secrets that can never be revealed for fear of invading someone’s privacy. Although I never asked him point-blank, I have long suspected my colleague Dalt Wonk created his French Quarter Fables as a way of sharing his observations as discreet parables with elegantly funky animals standing in for human characters. All have a ring of truth about them, but rendered allegorically in verse they assume a near-mythic quality that is illuminating without being personally compromising.
One of the poems that appears in Nocturnes is called “For Chopin”: “Time pauses before the web / your seanced fingers spin, / glistening and so delicately attached / to anything solid, it consoles like perfume.” Frédric Chopin’s own nocturnes were freeflowing, rhythmic pieces, often lyrical, sometimes melancholy, and always very expressive. His use of the pedal gave to the composition a greater sense of emotional expression by sustaining the resonance of the played note. While Nocturnes, a collection of poetry and images, is not a tribute to the pianist, it is, in part, inspired by the same sensibilities. There is a sustained resonance in the book, too, one that is rarely achieved nowadays by most visual art books. Nocturnes is the first publication of Luna Press, founded by New Orleans-based photographer Josephine Sacabo and poet Dalt Wonk. It exemplifies their belief in the importance of interdisciplinary associations, and specifically illustrated books. “The best and most natural appreciation of a work of art,” reads their manifesto, “may be a response to it in another.” Partly inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s concept of “correspondences” in the arts, this belief in the natural interrelatedness of all art forms provides the key to understanding the rapport between image and text in Nocturnes.