All Posts — The Jasper Project

Thanks to Otis Taylor for officially welcoming Jasper to the Columbia arts scene in Sunday's The State paper. If you missed his kind introduction, we've copied it below. Let us introduce you to Jasper.

Jasper: The Word on Columbia Arts is a magazine that will release its first issue on Sept. 15. The website launched last week and already the writers, in a section labeled “what Jasper said,” has begun posting interesting ideas.

For example, the following was written in a post titled “Sometimes, Jasper is bored”: “Jasper just wishes that his beloved ballet ADs would believe in their audiences enough to know that they want to be challenged — they’re getting tired of the same old, same old. Yes, they love their sleeping beauties and their enamored pirates, but when an audience already knows the score to a show by heart then, honey, it’s time to change the show.”

The post went on to mention area choreographers who would, undoubtedly, make sparks fly if they were allowed to choreograph for Columbia City Ballet or Columbia Classical Ballet.

Jasper, which will be published by Muddy Ford Press, will have a familiar tone when it rolls off the press. Editor Cynthia Boiter heads a staff that includes Kristine Hartvigsen, Ed Madden and Kyle Petersen, writers who had their work previously featured in undefined magazine.

If you haven’t already made the connection, Jasper shares a name with Jasper Johns, a contemporary painter and printmaker who was raised in South Carolina. Jasper, the magazine, will be printed bi-monthly.

Dream fathers

By Ed Madden

We drive across the bridge, late at night, a hundred feet or so of clattering boards—

no rail, no rim, just jagged planks, and river flowing slow and brown below. The bridge

collapsed last year. I cross it every night in sleep—sometimes alone, sometimes with him—

but always away from home. The bridge's end may veer; each night I go someplace else,

dark cypress swamp on either side. One night my father is the driver and the car.

He opens up the door of his side, and I climb in. I cross the bridge again,

riding in the body of my father.

Dream fathers and more of Ed’s poetry can be found in his most recent book of poetry, Prodigal: Variations, 2011. Ed is the poetry editor for Jasper Magazine.

Jasper was in the news again

A poem by Ed Madden