Micah Ballard, Seven Poems

When a poem takes a movie, takes any image from pop culture, it sends out a dare from itself as poem to image as stuff. It can be more or less direct: Let’s date: Every man wakes up / with a horse’s head / in his bed. Or it can play the jumbling game: You really mix me up: be gone girl, with / the wind / in your / face off a / buffed-up willowy / alien predator. Or it can be elliptical as need be: We see each other, but pretend we don’t: either there’s no example here or / there is / Louie’s Pig / Newton’s last / words.

I love the way Micah Ballard flirts with the images and makes them blush, pulls them under the spell of a poetics that’s got them cornered, until they say what the hell. One minute you’re just in his poem, the next you’ve been sent out of that room so that something else can happen. When you come back in, it’s happened, and there’s just a kind of trace for you, a scent, perhaps of something you’ve missed.

Which is to say that we choose not just a medium, or objects in a medium, but a working relationship with a medium (or media, which complicates things enormously). An interesting question, it seems to me, is just what is it that we make part of ourselves when we are born into media (as surely as we are born into language)? Often we feel we’re passive, hosts for media parasites. But two (or more) can play that game. And from inside us, where language insists on its own shapes and shades, the frames that we throw into the world are built both of poetic values and of attitudes towards—or call them absorption rates of—our cultural mediations. There’s a new game in town, every time we open our eyes, our mouths. In it, media don’t just play us, we play them. From another, higher perspective, this must seem like a pretty delightful field of play. If there were a higher perspective.

Micah asked if I wanted him to send me the film references that would “clarify” these poems—that’s a good sport talking, who’s already figured out the games he was playing. When we consume these things, clarification is the last thing that matters. Think of that “Rimbaud” in his “Tribunals.” What hits me mostly is the great “Rimbaud” sign in the loft that figures so prominently in Orphan Black (in the window, but facing in!). It’s a mystery there. Why shouldn’t it be a mystery here? (It’s a mystery whether Micah’s ever seen Orphan Black, too.) It’s one of those empty/pregnant signs that throws for loops those of us who make this association (am I the only one?)—from the poet to the BBC production and back to Micah’s poem. It doesn’t matter (I think) how he intended it, or if he’s thinking of that film where Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rimbaud. What matters is that between Rimbaud and Micah’s poem the first mediation that intercedes is the mind of some reader—a reader already thoroughly mediated. (JM)

     Sleeve Notes

I am looking for a solidarity not deadening, a private view of chaos in a single stroke. Or an easy elegance enjoying its own revival, the best of the young (underpriced) before the affiliated years. The importance is in the passing, where one boldly swarms into life then forgets about it. If I’m less flourishing than my appearance indicates, give me time. I’ve lived here for fifteen years and have never been asked to read except for summers when they make you pay. I envy the strong minded who can dull their senses on demand. They are not far removed from emotion, but wouldn’t one rather the nerves take control? Enough about them. Tell me volumes and pour out everything. I want to enjoy every advantage without interruption of technology or its boring agents. Interest matters so long as it doesn’t disturb the room or dominate conversation. Only the old, deep company know how to create an honest diversion, where the words build a bridge and you never think about making it across or where you’ll wake up. Allow me the affectionate farewell. I took a cab then walked then caught a bus and now I’m on a train. Fine dinners, large quantities of wine, and delicate hands will find me and if they don’t then surely the world must be against me. Forgive us all. Self-mythologizing is a tired poet’s game. I am grateful for the silence but refuse to be in its service. There is much to see and so much more to admit.

     Early Vapors

Cryptic scenes

a red triangle of arched vaults

chinese dens & anonymous ceremonies

held in nearby rooms. In spite

of their absence I suggested

the original might be purchased

forty cubes of white sewn into the seams

divine rites and a limping heart

to be drained between sinks

they kept saying “do not bruise the beast”

or “hard will be your pillow”

then a strange light would appear

between their eyes. It was hard

to predict the silence, scant solace

& bit of fluff for all the black

they were wearing. I wished a new delivery

parallel worlds of waiting assassins

or at least the dealers of yesteryear

a new inhaler in anticipation of

     Cellophane

It goes on for days

& I am the result of a perforated feeling

A daunting inventory

Of stock footage

Densely layered into an array of tricks

Less iconic than the first lady

Bloody & presidential

Or the off-screen reportage

Found in this week’s tabloids

The power of names so narcotic & trancelike

A Night in Paris & the lovely blooms

That prank your chambers

A sequence of set backs

To dull the edges, strip the originals

Eventual aftermaths

That drives a wedge between what’s real

& what’s actually happening

I shall not feel their pains

I shall not see their shadows

Old illustrations famously corrupt

& self-serving, lost allure 

Departing glances reclusive in their telling

     The Maids of Troy

Let us consider mummies

Or the Maids of Troy

Such soulful lites & easy on the lungs

Compared to these Camel wides

Dreamt from the Cairo visitor center

Ten bones a pack

But worthy as any torch

So long as The Temple of Doom keeps playing

Not BET or Ghost Hunters

That means “keep everything at a distance”

Inside the head of a typewriter

This is not to state the obvious

One trips regardless the dose

You will turn from understanding to celestial

Gush renewals worthy of attention

     Siberia

A blue flame flattens me

its internal medicine calms the doors

I rub my hands against them

& pick at the scabs from Acheron

those who drink under the lamps

the lamps and their faces

what does it matter to wake on this train

my head on the hard marble table

a spectacle, unhinged, with my hood cut off

one must talk louder to keep warm

I think I am one of their children

we pick our teeth in black windows

     Tribunals

The epilogue

rewinds in silence

grainy flash frames

then a little white

ghost holy to

its congregation

another lavish

production lacking

recognition and wormwood

heavy outlines

then a supervised walk

to hide the hatchet

cloud the drink

necessary alterations

this pale skin

we inhabit

a diminished vitality

reminiscent of Rimbaud

     Ivory Coffers

Who heeds not

but falls heavy

to thy might

the summer cannibals

anemic and cool

their robes of saffron

a road of crimson

spread at your feet

not at all proud

like Hall & Oates

Live at the Apollo

or War Babies

Along the Red

Ledge of 1978

but held captive

by a thread of light

the olden dyes

of Hollywood gone

oh come back little

Sheba! Betty Blythe

has left the room

Micah Ballard lives in San Francisco and is the author of two full-length collections, Waifs and Strays (City Lights Books, 2011), nominated for a California Book Award and Parish Krewes (Bootstrap Press, 2009), and over a dozen small books including Evangeline Downs (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006) and Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners (Auguste Press, 2001). He is the co-editor of Lew Gallery Editions and Auguste Press and co-directs the MFA in Writing Program at USF.

John Hathorn, Seven Visuals

In the most obvious case, a poem might say, “He walked down the street like Chaplin,” or specify “the anaconda’s Gioconda smile.” Or in a movie, a boy might go sotto voce and recite “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Or a playwright might specify that her set be hung on one wall with Warhol prints, on the other with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

And then there’s the question of adaptation: what happens when someone takes a poem and extrapolates it into a novel, which is then interpreted as a graphic novel, later to be picked up and made into a movie, which turns out to be so successful that it engenders a video game—which, perhaps, people write poems about? It’s worth noting that at every stage of this process, everything previous is up for grabs, and so is every strategy of permutation and synthesis.

Meanwhile, young straight white men of the 30s tried to walk like Fred Astaire; in the 40s it was Bogart’s cigarette and wiseguy panache; in the 50s, James Dean, in the 60s Steve McQueen, in the 70s Warren Beatty, maybe, or De Niro; and so on, cinema turning into lifestyles, or at least life images. The same kind of thing was happening for white women, though not for blacks or latinos. (This says something, of course, about the international rise of martial arts films, not only for Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, but also for dispossessed urban men and women of other races.)

So there is this question: what is the relation between cross-media borrowing in the arts, and media-to-life-image borrowing—the media becoming myth becoming folkway? I think this is an important question (I won’t pretend to be able to answer it) because it mutates from a kind of empirical matter—what’s on the screen and what’s on the street?—to something much more theoretical and mysterious: what is art to us? How does a poem, for instance, that invokes at one moment Chaplin and at another moment Giotto work its way with us so that something becomes a part of our psychological makeup—of our lives?

I asked John Hathorn to contribute something to this August project because of the superb way in which his museum showings have combined a variety of media. I did not expect the incisive minimalism of the conflations he submitted: a line from Baudelaire’s “The Swan,” a piece of string, an envelope, a line from Rilke’s fifth Duino Elegy, a bit of fabric, Baudelaire’s “Jewels,” barely legible, some ink, some postal stamps, some paint. Each piece calls to mind the phrase “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing,” yet the moving parts are few and simple, almost painfully so, at least starkly so. The pieces give a sense not of a “plastic artist” combining “media,” but of one art—the only art, in which the things of this world combine, speak to one another, express themselves and express otherness. On one “level” (but who can trust such a simplistic version of what compels our attention?) a painter (let’s say) “responds to” some “poems” (or to some poets) and finds “objects” and “materials” to “make a statement.” But (and here the digital processing of these images unanchors them, gives them to us more nearly free of context than any building could) as objects for anyone’s speculation, the simplicity of these combined materials frames everything as equal in value and equal in power. I think that this minimalist unanchoring speaks to the way art-made images become part of us. It’s not sufficient to see something in a medium, or as media: we need it broken free, turned into living currency. Perhaps myth (of Fred, Humphrey, James, Warren, but also of Baudelaire, of Rilke) defines the real intermediate spaces in which our lives change. (JM)

A Note on Baudelaire

A Note on Rilke

Cardinalis (Baudelaire's Synonym)

Cardinalis (On Rilke's Fifth Elegy)

Lacrimosa Cardinalis

Lobelia Cardinalis

The First Word of a Poem (On Rilke)

Born in 1954 in Oxford, Mississippi, John Hathorn completed B.A. and M.Ed. degrees from the University of Mississippi, and received his M.F.A. from Florida State University. He is a Professor of painting in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he has taught since 1982. He has also taught in the UL Paris and London Study Abroad Programs on five occasions between 1990 and 2013, extending his travels to England, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums and participated in group exhibitions across the United States. In 2008 the artist was the recipient of the Distinguished Professor Award and in 2014 the Ray P. Authement Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is represented by the Craighead Green Gallery in Dallas, Texas. In 2013 the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana mounted a 30 year retrospective of the artist’s work, accompanied by a 68 page color catalog.

James Finnegan, "The Dead Don't Cast Shadows"

I’d been toying with the idea of focusing my attention this month on movies and such, and when Jim Finnegan posted this poem a while back I was hooked. Not just his noir embrace of movies and Weegee, but also his carefully crafted image throws light on a consideration that’s crucial for me: mediation (that space between, and the action between) is always somehow in shadow (and perhaps, always somehow cast beneath and in response to the dead, if dead means unmediated). (JM)

     The Dead Don’t Cast Shadows

That sounds like the voiceover

from a film noir flick. Still,

as in a crime scene, say the still photos

of Weegee, there’s some truth to it.

First off, when you’re dead

you’re most often recumbent, prostrate,

splayed or sprawled, splatted even, lain out

in some way a bit akimbo, arrayed

in a generally uncomfortable manner.

Then there is the matter of the earth,

your shadow is stuck under your body,

body slammed, gone to ground,

so to speak, squashed thin, so that

it rolls up easily into your body.

But your shadow has not fled so much

as it has forgotten its duty. To stand

there beside you in the light. The pale one

says to the pall, Brother, do you not know me?

Not to hold you up. But to give you

a target, a place in which to fall.

James Finnegan’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review , as well as in the recent anthology Good Poems: American Places edited by Garrison Keillor. With Dennis Barone he edited Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens (U. of Iowa Press, 2009). He is the president of the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens (stevenspoetry.org). His aphoristic ars poetica can be found at ursprache (http://ursprache.blogspot.com/).

Jerry McGuire, Why (Not) Mediation?

When I play “Moon River,” I have before me the presence of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The sounds make me remember her and she makes me remember the sounds. . . . There are these extra-musical recollections: rainy New York streets, Audrey Hepburn’s impishness, the Hollywood romance. The song caresses these places and events and her. (David Sudnow, Talk’s Body 53)

  

When I was a little kid I was surrounded by music and homegrown self-taught musicians, and also by people who, in quite idiosyncratic ways, valued writing, or at least reading. I had a great reputation as a singer (not a reputation as a great singer) when I was six or seven, and had a pretty good repertoire of lyrics—especially, though not only, things by Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Webb Pierce (but he, unknown to me, was singing a song recorded in the twenties by Blind Blake—and it wasn't new with him, either), and Tennessee Ernie Ford. So it seemed natural that I’d try writing my own lyrics—though I wasn’t writing longhand yet.

My father worked in a paper mill, and there was a place where incoming loads of junk paper that would be pulped for boxboard were dumped by the truckload. Before it was taken to the “Beater Room” (I don’t know what that means, but it was a big part of my childhood), the men (they were all men there) would go through and grab things to take home—lots of comic books, mainly. But my father, though he brought home comic books for my older brothers, also brought home a variety of other stuff, including Bibles, medical journals (no doubt dating from the 19^th century), novels, and even blank paper. A great prize, which he gave to me—I think I begged him for it—was what I now realize was an accounting ledger—tall yellow pages with inscrutable vertical lines. This became my first “journal”—the place where I began writing poems, which is to say, sort of a six-year-old’s version of hillbilly songs. I kept that thing with me for years before it disappeared; somehow I feel that I’d be a better writer now if I were still writing in it. It’s the first thing that ever struck me distinctively as a medium for writing, and my interest in all sorts of media has its origin, inasmuch as I can recover it, in those rough, tall, yellow, oddly-lined pages full of fragmentary childish songs. Each page provided extraordinary space—room for little pieces of writing to feel quite big in, but also room to grow.

And then one of my brothers brought home a reel-to-reel tape recorder and had me sing into it. He played it back. The rich, tuneful baritone I heard in my own head, I discovered, was the squeaky, tuneless, alien voice of a strange little boy. Yet if I was appalled, I was also fascinated, and my brother and I played with the thing for hours, making up dialogs, singing along with records, recording people when they weren’t paying attention. If it was a toy and a piece of alien technology, it was also, even to my eyes, magically transformative: everything temporary became permanent in that thing, in ways that mattered.

Just one more autobiographical detail. In my twenties, snowed in in a wicked Connecticut storm, I found myself fixated on my girlfriend’s large artist’s drawing-pad. But I’m incapable of drawing a straight line, or a circle. I can’t do a passable job of tracing my hand. So my fixation seemed to have nowhere to go, until I stumbled on her box of magic markers. I made several false starts with them, and found myself idly using different-colored markers to write and to edit my writing. Looking at this there on her easel, I felt that little flashbulb go off in me, and before I knew it, I was consciously trying to write a poem that could only take shape in that specific mediated context—large paper, several colors of magic markers, revisions a part of the process. Here’s the thing I wrote, which wound up on my refrigerator for several years. It’s a photoshop simulation—you’ll just have to imagine this, say, 24 X 36 inches with scattered coffee and butter stains (but if it were on immaculate white paper and 8½ X 11, you’d have to imagine that, as well):

So that’s the kind of thing that brought me to my interest in mediation—how the various stuff of our lives (a ten-year-old Romanian girl once told me that “stuff” was her favorite English word) affects how we produce and consume things, especially works of art. This month I’m going to use Truck to present a variety of visual and verbal (sometimes both) works that address questions of mediation. I’ll be writing introductory comments about the writing and visuals I'm uploading, not to establish any particular expertise, but to provoke interest and suggest ideas. By all means, please skip these if you're just interested in the poems and visuals themselves. But (in case anyone does read the introductions) I also encourage everyone, but especially the artists who wrote, painted, constructed, or otherwise produced these works, to respond to the works themselves, and to my comments, especially where they find those comments wrong-headed, bone-headed, pig-headed, misleading, or simply vacuous.

And we’re off . . . (JM)

Anny Ballardini, untitled

Anny Ballardini’s emails come packaged with an extremely Nietzschean quotation from Nietzsche: “I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star!” There’d seem to be a lot of slogging between that one and the equally wonderful quotation from C. S. Peirce that underpins this visual piece she’s sent. But to my eye, each “mode” CSP mentions is a mediation, and the way that displaces the “I” talks straight back to Nietzsche (as a brother-in-arms) to say, Man, you’re hilarious!

Anny Ballardini recently completed her PhD (2013) at the University of Verona with a thesis that explores the philosophical writings of Charles Sanders Peirce in relation to contemporary American Poetry. Her MFA (2008) at the University of New Orleans was earned with a specialization in poetry. She has published two collections of poetry: Ghost Dance in 33 Movements (Otoliths, 2009) and Opening and Closing Numbers (Moria, 2005). In addition, her writing appears in several online collections: Instruments of Change (Lavender Ink, 2007); Blogging as the sharing of knowledge: Poetry (Lavender Ink, 2006); Architecting Fate: Arakawa and Gins: Architecture and Philosophy (AG3: 2010).

As a literary editor, she is the founder and editor of the Poets’ Corner (2004-present). She has translated Henry Gould’s In RI (2010), and several contemporary poets from English into Italian, including the work of Dennis Barone, Landis Everson, Ruth Fainlight, James Finnegan, Fan Ogilvie, Ann Fisher-Wirth, and others.  She has also translated writings from Italian into English, including the work of Michele Pierri and Arturo Onofri, among others. As a contributing editor she appeared in Ekleksographia, with a special section on translation:  http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/ballardini/index.html.

Ballardini presently works as a translator and interpreter having gained a degree as a simultaneous and consecutive translator and interpreter, and she teaches English in Bolzano, South Tyrol, where she resides.

Michael Basinski, A Visual and Eight Poems

We can’t forget (but we do, sometimes) that (whatever this means) one of the media we work in is language—whether we’re thinking of sound, of printed matter, of performance. It’s specially interesting to think about the massage of this medium—that is, touching and being touched by it—when the various resistances of language are brought to the front. Mike Basinski clearly likes to get his hands (and mind? and tongue?) dirty, as he variously squeezes, chokes, smacks around, pets, and tickles his materials, graphic, phonological, semantic, syntactic. Freud said that play is the work of the child, and it begins with some object that we can’t keep and can’t let go of—and thus the work turns into works. (JM)

     Trailer Endings

ol love

will not turn to you

on Wednesday

the headlights wont come off

handcuffed to cup

insert takes

singly cut cop

her one tuber

purple

not prune hard

a robin hands up

off the robin blue egg cup

yanking at the grassy

worm dick Jesus

up those of

a slipper

in pur with crimson

blotch

         very

strong scented Sleipnir

or pineapple and

knots

I forget

forgot about Ishtar

dishwater

soft hungover pig

now dance the

jackoff jig

shrub rib

    Rerun of Some Trailer Endings

dirty white

heart-shaped ship slip climb up her leg

irregularity

too ripe the shade

maid

wash rather

lather the

branching heads

dishes washed

the wash he washed

her delicate

monkey puzzles

sometimes

I don’t understand

what you are saying

as if it wernt

everyday vigorous hoop

a poetry in Rihanna's dress

tubes tied

     Moo V Trailer Endings

deciduous fire hydrant

coldsore or

small tree beer

Iroquois in Buffalo bees is

bumble bum bum

Bumble Bee tuna

I love Bumble Bee

best kept a night negligee nightingale Niagara secret

Secret.com: Deodorant & Antiperspirant

jar china white pink in cream

shades of lilac lipstick whipped

it is important Severn

to take out old heads

as soon as I die

among the slivers

infected and oily

as a slumbering ghost

the pie is o poem

the birds sang opo

andsangandsang

for the funeral of dawn announced

to the divine tavern keeper

Siduri. she said, “You will not live forever,

wove, a mountain of vines

who causes thieves

to burn to burn

the oral grapes

to burn ripe

trouble birds

at the burning dawn

of bakeries

wreck wrung

belteen,

who wore a thin ceiling fans

in so many words

viaduct, Sanka, fig wasp,

in the sea seed

sesame

rolls open o poem to the accompaniment of music

rejoicerejoyce

return toast wilt

blossom blouse

to your toes

your burn”

     Trailer EndDings: What’s a SASE?

for the poet

each is the last day

maybe

you just sent some poems to

The Parish Review

and Jacket 2 too

poetry!

I could have kicked myself in the ass

     Trailer Endings

as meteorologist of the poets

Autumn Lewandowski has noted:

“We have setting skies”

or up ever red

red small in up

to in across fruit

dark red perish

red heavy close

after all a small

early often

oven which

rarely

forms

lowewer up to

low upper

about

fufts small

but clusters

gnome

toothed striped

mon naughty

harmony

deep yellow

ripening fete

but bulb

smooth blue

blue star

large blue

seed red

open in baked

are other red

has six stamens

all the king’s horses

constant coe nymph

pyramidal

in with a

influffy thumb

thicket of sockers

see see

white sails

cherry red

two lipped spider

and is in that both

a wall ir yo ti

yellow centre

fruit glubose yellow

hard Astarte ije

with beneath

bell singly

on short beautiful

wet by a bad

fading

that she drowned

without a gown

sneeze weed

Asia araia all

ito in or obo

in wold

but much less in

cult in

pendulous rub

    Little Eye Yellow Lies

cutting appear less

in bed china

China in a

Alilac lie of flowers

foulers conjoined

howler monkeys

in the precinct of night pervfewm

bobby

my sin in your pins

heart and mine

pinned to wings cut          a cut

                          Cut!

sounds

                          produced

                          reproduced by

                          connected insects

current

jelly snap thee wings in cup

freight by a thin

rim of her train

white robe rob

robbed apressed whose his name where

arrested

charged of his skin

cut off his fingers

cut off from civilization

will remain as a memory

while spying his rosary

red red red red

red red roses ghost

red red red red

and then ghosts

hard

Refrain Most of the Time I Can’t Understand What

You’re Saying But I like to Listen

touch a time         lettuce

once

summum mim

some nood moon wedding

cutting

unwutered

under water

night disguessed pantails

cup

luxury thing

cuticular

membrane

Mimer’s well of

foam white

froth dance

frosting blue

sea thieving frosting on

thriving doughnuts

tympanic

panic parade police car

blue type

trumpet blue in

a restricted blue

blue

Michael Basinski is the Curator of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo. He performs his work as a solo poet and in ensemble with BuffFluxus. Among his recent books of poetry are Piglittuce (Propolis Press - 2013), Learning Poem About Learning About Being A Poet (Press Board Press - 2012) and Trailers (BlazeVox - 2011). His poems and other works have appeared in many magazines including Dandelion, BoxKite, Antennae, Open Letter, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, First Offense, Terrible Work, Kenning, Lungfull, Tinfish, Score, Unarmed, Rampike, House Organ, Ferrum Wheel, End Note, Ur Vox, Damn the Caesars, Pilot, 1913, Filling Station, fhole, Public Illumination, Eccolinguistics, Western Humanities Review, Big Bridge, Mimeo Mimeo, Nerve Lantern, Vanitas, Talisman, Yellow Field, Staging Ground, and Poetry. Recent visual opems (yes, opems) located in: www.wordforword.info.

Truck's new driver/editor for August 2014

Many thanks to Edgar Gabriel Silex for seeing us through July.

Truck's new driver/editor for August will be Jerry McGuire. The keys are over the sun-visor, Jerry.

Truck's driver/editors past, present and future as of Aug. 1, 2014

Present

Karri Kokko

Future



Oct. 2014 -- Márton Koppány
Nov. 2014 -- Burt Kimmelman
Dec. 2014 -- Chris Lott

Jan. 2015 -- Marc Vincenz

Past

Apr. 2011 -- Kate Schapira
May 2011 -- Wendy Battin
June 2011 -- Frank Parker
July 2011 --  Skip Fox
Aug. 2011 -- Ken Wolman
Sept. 2011 -- Michael Tod Edgerton
Oct. 2011 -- Kelly Cherry
Nov. 2011 -- Andrew Burke
Dec. 2011 -- Lewis LaCook

Jan. 2012 --  Larissa Shmailo
Feb. 2012 -- Gerald Schwartz
Mar. 2012 -- Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Apr. 2012 -- Lynda Schor
May 2012 -- David Graham
June 2012 -- Lars Palm
July 2012 --  Elizabeth Switaj
Aug. 2012 --  rob mclennan
Sept. 2012 -- Georgios Tsangaris
Oct. 2012 -- Douglas Barbour
Nov. 2012 -- Dirk Vekemans 
Dec. 2012 -- Erik Rzepka

Jan. 2013 -- Alan Britt
Feb. 2013 -- Mark Weiss
Mar. 2013-- Mary Kasimor
Apr. 2013-- John M. Bennett

May 2013--Orchid Tierney
June 2013--Victoria Marinelli
July 2013 -- Volodymyr Bilyk
Aug. 2013 -- David Howard
Sept. 2013 -- Philip Meersman
Oct. 2013 -- Chris Lott
Nov. 2013 -- Alexander Cigale
Dec. 2013 -- Catherine Daly

Jan. 2014 -- Maria Damon
Feb. 2014 -- John Oughton
Mar. 2014 -- Colin Morton and MaryLee Bragg
Apr. 2014 -- Alan Sondheim
May 2014 -- Glenn Bach
June 2014 -- Bill Pearlman
July 2014 -- Edgar Gabriel Silex
Aug. 2014 -- Jerry McGuire