Selected Art, Music, & Poetry

St. Louis-based visual/sound artist, designer, and poet Nathan Cook runs the experimental cassette label Close/Far Recordings. His interdisciplinary work is typically concerned with proximity, geometry, mysticism, psychodynamics, identity, the primeval, and critical spatial practice.

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I think Nathan Cook has excellent taste, and that’s rare. It’s something that can’t be taught, though it might be self-developed through the kind of playful, self-critical dialogues that murmur abstractly within ourselves, and which Cook expresses so well. Regardless of what medium he’s working in, there’s a playful elegance, subtle wit, and critical poetic spirit threading Nathan’s work. I’d place Cook alongside many Millennial artists who take poetry seriously, yet in a private way. If Millennial artists inevitably walked into a post-conceptual situation, artists like Cook are not content with post-conceptual one-liner truisms, instead developing the art into the poetry that it merely implied, via a more sincere and thoughtful writing engagement. However, some of the symbolic, glyphic pieces like Keep Your Life Close are still in this post-conceptual domain. One poem declares that he is different when alone, and this is perhaps a universal feeling — we often feel more ambitious, more expansive, more sincere, more real, in our private imagination. Good poetry lets the reader into these interior reflective processes of the aesthetic mind. Perhaps known more as a talented musician, I wanted to emphasize Cook’s poetry, which touches upon this profoundness of our interiority, hoping to bring it out into the open. The reader of his poems finds humor alongside hermeticism, implying a peace with alienation. Cook also excels at the art of suggestion, projecting just enough riddle-imagery to get the imagination going. Much of the poetry takes music as its subject, and Cook’s musicality is uniquely able to draw out poetry’s deep relationship with music, without liquidating it into lyrical accompaniment. Ezra Pound proposed that there were three criteria for poetry — musical cadence, conceptual/historical references, and projecting imagery into the reader’s imagination. Cook meets these ambitious criteria, and that’s rare in an era where poetry too often expresses self-help platitudes and social truisms.

- Bret Schneider

Fireproof Safe of Transgressions Displayed as an Opaque Edifice

I-XXX

I
Exhaustive permutations of restricted elements as personal obsession
II
Piano digitally encoded and diffused in automobile as expression of futurism
III
Manifestation of forgiveness as kernel of utopia
IV
Presence as crux of humanity
V
Sonic hologram as projection of nested acoustics
VI
Intervallic fixation of overtones as mode for cyclical applications
VII
Proximity as a critical factor in relationships
VIII
The present as unalloyed miracle
IX
Fireproof safe of transgressions displayed as an opaque edifice
X
Instinct as purgatory of consciousness
XI
Life span as maze of propogation
XII
Genetic hardwiring as negator of free will
XIII
DNA as map of preordained behavior
XIV
Ancestral muscle memory as behavioral reflex
XV
Recognition as a staple of healthy psychic energy
XVI
Meditation as negation of the world
XVII
Syncretism as key to interpersonal religious reconciliation
XVIII
Reverse engineering of fusion as process for discovery of original fusion
XIX
Real world taste as explanation for proximal parallel in cyberspace
XX
Information glut as cause of spoiling on the vine
XXI
Impersonalism as measure towards realignment of social purpose
XXI
Mischaracterization as a result of reading nonexistent subtext
XXIII
Removal of unwanted socialization as practice of controlled burning
XXIV
Draining of personal culture as mechanism for tabula rasa fantasy
XXV
Invention of repressed memories as malfunction of introspection
XXVI
Low-sensual simulacrum as common trait of digital experience
XXVII
Deep exploration of the mud as cause for disdain of the lotus
XXVIII
Prayer as transtemporal metaphysical conduit
XXIX
Digital communication as double-blind experiment
XXX
Bioluminesence as harbinger of evolutionary rejection of electricity

XXXI-LX

XXXI
Neoplatonic roleplaying as fulfillment of asexual fantasies
XXXII
Stress as short-circuiter of intelligence
XXXIII
Circadian rhythms as predictive metronome of consciousness
XXXIV
Injection of luciferin as attempt to become living light
XXXV
Blind spot detector as a step toward a transhumanist third eye
XXXVI
Pitch-shifting as sonic alchemy
XXXVII
Clickbait as gambit for statistical exposure of guilty pleasures
XXXVIII
Sitting in a dark room as away to induce the prisoner's cinema
XXXIX
Reading erratic autobody language as predictor of driving behavior
XL
Dressing in all black as method for neutralizing artifactual communication
XLI
Hugging the yellow line as show of affection to the curve
XLII
Choosing the right typeface to use as a subtitle for this moment
XLIII
Artistic self-ghettoization as a result of implementing too many smokescreens
XLIV
Transcontinental marketing as deployer of cultural land mines
XLV
Code-switching as example of pluralistic identity
XLVI
Rumble Strip as example of a life saving sound
XLVII
Decision making as form of art
XLVIII
Finger snapping as echolocation for the perfect beat
XLIX
Frantic search for identity as comparison to hunt for teeth after fire
L
Glut of pre/post-game athlete interviews as evidence of nihilism
LI
Non-ornamental hedgerow as living barrier
LII
Remembering the cadence of footsteps as aural identifier of individuals
LIlI
Score for bell tree as reflexive use of Arboresence
LIV
Recognizing dreams as demonstrations of the imagination
LV
Characterizing connect(ing) the dots as pregnant with invisible lines
LVI
Prayer as inadvertant psychoanalytical tool for the discovery of true intentions
LVII
The living as perceivers for the dead
LVIII
Eating dirt as an exercise for terroir identification
LIX
Castling as an attempt to hide from a checkered past
LX
Reading Lorem ipsum as exposure therapy for a fear of the daily news

ANCESTORS

Rather than shrink from fear
fall into it

For it is a kind of nerve
that will alert you
if too much damage is being done

As pain is a reminder of living
fear remembers the suffering of our ancestors

To commune with fear is to
recall its earliest memories

Those universal memories
contain a thousand death rattles
and the resounding pitch of

the first cry

LIFE SAVING SOUNDS

I
Rumble Strip

II
Ambulance Siren

III
Cuckoo-chirp crosswalk signal

IV
Smoke alarm

V
Tornado siren

VI
AMBER alert

VII
Railroad crossing bells

VIII
Car horn

IX
EKG flatline

X
Oraison by Olivier Messiaen

SCOTT WALKER AND THOMAS COLE

Angel of Ashes
softly plays in the background
as I walk into
The Voyage of Life: Youth
and begin to float down stream towards
a radiant new age palace

Scott bellows:
”They’ll fly in a mind dance
And blind you with wings
Wrapped in flame”

St. Francis whispers to a crow:
”nature is the mirror of God”

Thomas picks a hog’s hair
out of a Yellow Ochre stroke

Winding down the river past the
glaring white palace
I round the oxbow into
View from Mount Holyoke…

As the string section decays
into a thunderhead
an arc of black birds descends
into the Chrome Green valley

GREEN PLACE

As I stand
in front of the window
drawing the curtains
I wonder
What are you like when alone?
What do you do when alone?

As for myself
I am quite different when alone
How so?
In the way I move
The way I hear
The way I see
What I think and
what I do

As I sit
at the table
drinking from my glass
I noticed
Your empty place was green

Animus Puzzle

M E M O R Y OF C L A Y

Storms saturate the soil
revealing a shell filled with clay

Against my ear the shell is whirring inside
pregnant with the breath of the sea

Our hands remember the coldness of clay

In the persimmon grove
a nightjar rests on a lichen covered branch

Our sky mocks the growing pains of each wing
Our sky beckons us to singe our wings

Storms saturate the soil
revealing a skull filled with clay

Permutation of Restricted Elements