A Note From the Editor

Recently I was reading an article in a Canadian west coast newspaper about the Pacific gyre of plastic containers, nylon netting, toothbrushes, toys, and other detritus, a huge swirling island of manmade junk. Shortly thereafter I read about the residents of Denman Island, at Canada’s Pacific edge, out on their beaches, cleaning up washed-up litter, mostly plastic.

These atrocities infected my mind and stayed in play when I was thinking about the central concept for this issue of BOULDERPAVEMENT. They led me to the contemplation of plastic, plasticity, and artificiality, and set me to wondering how to include these notions in a journal that is not an environmental polemic, but one that explores arts and ideas.

Art can manifest plasticity in its shaping and reshaping of materials, such as in the digital poems of David Jhave Johnston. Art can also directly address environmental issues without losing integrity, as in evalyn parry’s Bottle This rap or in the conceptual visual art of Elinor Whidden. And art can speak about the elasticity of language and meaning, as in the essay on translation by Enrique Servin Herrera, or the poems by Adam Dickinson.

Other pieces included in this new issue also move beyond the tangible world. In the realm of the audible and inaudible, Paolo Pietropaolo and Simone Gillies explore sound, artificial and natural, and the wish to eliminate it in one case, and capture it in the other.

Thinking back to the original impetus for this issue of BOULDERPAVEMENT, I consider how, in a world of contradiction and complicity, we live daily with our own moral plasticity. We pick what we are rigid and pliable about, sometimes, though, remaining unaware of forces shaping us.

Can art heighten awareness? Can art create hope? Can creative dialogue make change? The answer varies. But we seek no answers here — rather, I hope that BOULDERPAVEMENT engages and intrigues, that its expressions pique your consciousness, and move your world toward a dynamic, responsible shaping of each new moment.

Steven Ross Smith
March 2010