Julie Patton

There is something very organic to me about the writing process, about poetry with a P, language with an L, and the feel of books, fingers on paper, shapes of letters, and hammering of keys. “A line is a dot that went for a walk" (Paul Klee) and keeps on going, swirling, spiraling, morphing into print, playful graphics, typography and topography, altered books and texts, music and sound recordings, drawings, illustrations, maps, collages/assemblages, objects, and installations. My predilection for the concrete condition of Language, for its visual/visible, phonetic/sonic, and silent/gestural manifestations, and for its immense productivity in the ethereal, or abstract realm of ideas/meaning/semantics, extends from my education as a visual artist, and also from my ear for traditions of orality, storytelling, wordplay, blues, jazz, and ballads.

Moving back and forth between visual impressions of sound to live recitation with its sonorous peaks, and plains, and valleys, I seldom look before I leap. I just go—and I go on paper sheets and stage, performing readings as writings (living, breathing compensations), and writings as legible performance scores. Among other approaches in this vast, encircling body of work, my sense of text as landscape, and my expression or vision of nature as text (the Book of Nature), unfolds... I keep flowing as I think on feet—ABC daring—blocks and boxes of projects later; making good on a promise I made to trees (when I was a young budding poet) not to 'waste' them or the lives of birds (due to the dioxin toxic papermaking process). So I continue to research alternative ways of 'publishing' or making my work public—from one of a kind limited editions, to site-specific installations in welcoming literary journals (off the walls of pages), to 3-D spaces that function as books, and to music gigs displaying pen den din.

Julie Ezelle Patton is a permaculturist, poet, performer, artist, and sculptor. Her poetics take the form of scrolls, extended texts, limited edition work, performances, and site-specific installations.

Patton's performance work emphasizes improvisation, collaboration, and otherworldly chora-graphs, and bridges literary and musical composition. She has performed at many international venues and festivals including the Stone, Jazz Standard, Festival Internacional de Poesía in Medellín, Colombia; The Kitchen, La Bâtie-Festival de Genève. Patton is also a frequent collaborator with choreographers, poets, filmmakers, and composers including Uri Caine, Henry Hills, Don Byron, Henri Grimes, Sally Silvers, and Anne Waldman.

With the support of her 2015 FCA grant, Patton participated in readings at the Page Poetry Salon, Poets House, and the New School. Her writing was also featured in the anthologies What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (University of Alabama Press, 2015), Please Add to This List: A Teaching Guide to Bernadette Mayer Sonnets (Tender Buttons Press, 2015), and Best American Experimental Writing 2016 (Wesleyan University Press, 2015).

Patton is the author of Teething on Type (1996), A Garden Per Verse (or What Else do You Expect from Dirt?) (1999), Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake (2007), and Using Blue To Get Black (2008), B (Tender Buttons Press, 2015), and Writing With Crooked Ink (Belladonna, 2015). Her work has appeared in ((eco (lang)(uage(reader)) (2010), Critiphoria, I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2005), and other publications. The Building by the Side of the Road (2012), chronicles Patton's adventures creating Let It Bee Ark Hives on the Glenville edge of Cleveland, Ohio's University Circle cultural district. This living, breathing, D-I-Y home-ec[o]arts INNstallation houses visiting and resident creatives and scholars, a number of Patton's own projects in visual and performance art, as well as permaculture. As a Green Horizons Fellow at Bates College, Patton created a sculpted library called “Room for Opal," an eccentric take off of 19th century naturalist laboratories.

Prior to receiving her 2015 Grants to Artists award, Patton received the 1993 New York City Arts-in-Education Roundtable Award for Sustained Achievement in Poetry. She was also the recipient of a 2006 Mellon Learning Fellowship and a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She was a 2007 National Poetry Series Finalist, and received a 2008 Acadia Arts Foundation Grant and the Doan Brook Association's 2012 Watershed Hero Award.

She has taught at Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Learning Thru Art at the Guggenheim Museum, the Studio In a School Program at New York University, Case Western University, Naropa University, and Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna, Austria. Patton received her B.F.A. from Antioch College in 1979.