Jennifer Barnes

Hometown:

Lubbock, Texas

Statement:

Rather obscurely, art is the manifestation of the sentient creature's purpose to prevent the Universe from stagnating.

Less obscurely, I really love lawn gnomes.  My dad bought me a ceramic one for Christmas one year as a joke, when I was 12.  His name was Charley and he was a painter, holding a little pallet and a paint brush, with a half-finished red mushroom at his feet.  My room mate's cat killed Charley; there he was smashed to bits behind the recliner when I came home hot and sweaty one dry prairie summer day, after some six hours of making expensive and bad coffee for high maintenance yuppies. I was heart broken.  It is truly amazing how much meaning we can attach to physical items wholly unrelated to anything at all happening within the strangeness of the soul.  This is the mystery of symbolism, this is the magic of art and poetry bridging soul to soul, mind to mind, heart to heart.

 If I write a poem and put it out for the world to read, I am seeking to reach inside your chest, grab your beating heart and squeeze hard with one hard while I use the other to pick your nose or poke the inside of your ear until I squish your brain and you find yourself feeling and thinking things stimulated by something birthed out of things I have felt and thought.  

Also, I like to stare at clouds so I have a hard time keeping jobs and I'm hungry.  Please check out my stuff. 

Background:

Growing up on the dusty plains of West Texas, I had to do something to fill up the great emptiness of all that sky.  I have been telling odd little stories to anyone who would sit still long enough to listen for as long as I can remember.  Surrounded by a family of talented and fallen musicians, I find myself fascinated by the rhythmic possibilities of verse and prose.  I indulge in fantasies of being descended from the great Celtic bards of old.  I read Tolkien one too many times as a child, and I feel his ghost haunting me every time I pick up pen and paper, every time my fingers start to fly across the key board.  An obsession with William Butler Yeats seems at times to mock me when I read back over words and rhymes and themes I dared at first to claim as mine.  I believe that the most ordinary of experiences are the seeds of the greatest epics, and should be treated with poetic reverence on the page.

Currently I draw my inspiration from a recent move to Austin, Texas, where the live oaks vibrate with the wail of bluegrass and the green hills shimmer at dusk under the weight of a strange and prideful history.  I am experimenting with a series of stories and poems based upon the dust and stink and beauty of my hometown, and have a chapbook in the works exploring the cultural phenomenon of the Awakening Goddess.  I refuse to sanitize my work, so don't bother with my art at all if you can not stomach blood or dirt mixing with sunsets and heart-breaking landscapes.

Upcoming:

In Austin, Texas, at the moment, jumping to and from various open mics at random.  No sense or reason to any of it at the moment, perhaps that will change in the near future.  Possible bicycle street theater coming up; if you're in the area and want to join a gang of Bicycling Druid Ninjas, get hold of me!

Other:

I miss cheese.