Broadsided: Poetry, Prose, & Art on the Streets as Modern Broadsides

Broadsides poetry broadsided press art literature grassroots vectors

• ON THE STREETS in Indianapolis, Indiana:

Send your pics to us at broadsided@gmail.com. We'll post them!

• NEW VECTORS in Afghanistan, California, and beyond. See the full map.

Think of it as web-enhanced grassroots guerilla art.

On the first of every month, a new literary/visual collaboration will be posted here for you to download. Free.

We hope you'll be inspired to print it and post it in your local haunts—coffee shops, libraries, office doors, telephone poles, etc. That will make you a Vector.

Vectors are posting Broadsided around the world.

Our goal is to create something both gorgeous and cheap.

We want to put literature and art on the streets.

Tell your local paper or radio station about Broadsided — you are the story. You're a local person who is participating in an international experiment:

• About Broadsided
• About the Editors & Artists
• July 2010 Press Release
• Sample Cover Letter

Let us know what happens!

Replying to SubPrefect Zhang
Poem by Wang Wei
Translation by Dawn McGuire
Art by Yuko Adachi
Broadsided July 1, 2010

Download the Broadsided file
to print & post
(487kb PDF file)

Collaborators' Q&A:

Bsided: What surprised you about this collaborative piece?
Dawn McGuire: Everything! I had no idea what to expect. The reference to Asian landscape paintings of the Tang is very neat, especially sing Wang Wei was also a painter, and founded the Southern school.
Bsided: When you began this piece, was it color, shape, or some other aspect that you followed?
Yuko Adachi: I did not want to overshadow the beauty of poem with my image I create, so I try to stay imaginative just like the poem without too much complication yet follow its depth of expression in simplicity.
— Read more from Dawn and Yuko

Meet The Collaborators:

Translator Dawn McGuire was born in Grayson, Kentucky, in the foothills of the Appalachians. Her latest book, Hands On, was published by ZYZZYVA in 2002. "By day," she is a San Francisco neurologist focusing on complications of HIV/AIDS. McGuire studied Chinese at Princeton University and Middlebury College. McGuire believes there is no such thing as "the" translation of a Tang Dynasty poem. Poetic compression is extreme—a typical Tang poem might have only 20 words in all—and inflectional aspects of English such as tense, person, number are absent. A given word (character) easily may have a dozen meanings, and the poem may be a conversation with a poet of a thousand years before, or a contemporary such as SubPrefect Zhang. Each translation, also, is a conversation, and a bow.

Artist Yuko Adachi is a Tokyo-born artist who was raised in Japan, Paris, London, and the United States of America. She has been painting since she was a little girl and has been showing her works through solo and selected group shows internationally. Her painting was featured for the cover of Artscope, New England's Cultural Magazine (May/June 2007) and Takara Magazine, the Japanese Culture and Information Magazine in New England (2007 issues). In 2007, her work was awarded best in painting for "Healing Power of Art" by Manhattan Art International. Today, she lives and works in Boston. She has just opened an artist studio store, "Planet MOMEKO," in Rockport, MA. www.yukoadachi.com

Poet Wang Wei was the "Poet Buddha" of the extraordinary Tang Dynasty, when poetry was the center of Chinese cultural life. Along with Du Fu and Li Bai, Wang Wei remains a treasured poet, still read and memorized—and translated—1300 years later.

i pledge to vector the poems posted on your website. i work for a circus that travels up and down the east coast of the united states so i'll be able to spread them around a bit. now i'm always looking at things in a new way, wondering if its a good spot to vector.
—Jay

Read more and tell us what you think of Broadisded or about your Vectorizing adventures.

6/1/10:
At the Christmas Party for the Infectious Diseases

poem by Christina Olson
art by Lisa Sette
(get it - 434kb pdf)

5/1/10:
Composition 101

poem by Nicelle Davis
art by Cheryl Gross
(get it - 556kb pdf)

4/1/10:
Ex Ovo Omnia

poem by Jennifer Perrine
art by Julie Evanoff
(get it - 390kb pdf)

3/1/10:
Dear Body

poem by Dan Rosenberg
art by Ira Joel Haber
(get it - 316kb pdf)

2/1/10:
Replacing the Window,
Downtown Medford

poem by Amy MacLennan
art by Lochlann Jain
(get it - 400kb pdf)

1/1/10:
One Lineage of Ice, Ravened

poem by Jari Thymian
art by Kate Baird
(get it - 400kb pdf)

12/1/09:
from Wreckage: By Sea (i)

poem by Gretchen E. Henderson
art by Elizabeth Terhune
(get it - 396kb pdf)