Lanny Quarles is a poet and multidisciplinary artist whose writing moves freely among surreal collage, visual imagination, popular culture, grotesque comedy, and experimental language. He was a founding member of the Post-Dogmatist group and has worked across poetry, drawing, painting, digital art, performance, and other mixed forms.
The magazine published Quarles in Issues 27 and 33. Issue 27 preserves The Radiation of the Golden Armor of the Werewolf Knights (The Curse of Waldemar of Oregon); Issue 33 lists A System For Burying Orbs.
Werewolves, cinema, and collage
The Radiation of the Golden Armor of the Werewolf Knights builds its world through collisions. Paul Naschy’s Waldemar Daninsky, Northwest fog, literary history, microscopes, fossil ferns, billiards, heraldic fantasy, and bodily grotesquerie enter the same shifting field. Images accumulate by association until the poem begins to resemble an unstable illustrated manuscript.
The repeated invocations of Waldemar give the poem a loose center while each surrounding image pulls the language elsewhere. Horror cinema becomes one material among many, capable of meeting art history, pseudo-scientific vocabulary, antique diction, erotic comedy, and dream logic within a single sequence.
Visual art and poetic form
Quarles’s visual practice helps explain the density of his poetry. His work in digital art, painting, drawing, collage, and asemic mark-making treats language as something seen as well as read. Lines can behave like fragments arranged on a surface, with abrupt capitals, parenthetical stage directions, lists, and isolated phrases changing the pace of the page.
This approach belongs naturally beside experimental poetry, especially work that treats typography, juxtaposition, borrowed vocabularies, and visual structure as active parts of meaning.
Post-Dogmatism and independent culture
Quarles was among the founding members of the Post-Dogmatist group formed with Cecil Touchon in the late 1980s. His writing and art developed through independent publishing, handmade books, journals, blogs, exhibitions, and collaborations rather than through a single medium or institutional path.
His bibliography includes Nosering Cellphone and a large body of independently produced books and visual-text projects. Gus Van Sant also used writing from one of Quarles’s homemade publications as the fictional screenplay written by a character in the novel Pink.
Language as material
Quarles’s poems often treat vocabulary as a material substance. Archaic words, invented compounds, scientific terms, names from cinema, and comic commands arrive with equal force. Meaning emerges through pressure between fragments: sound, texture, association, and image continually revise one another.
The result is a poetry of excess and mutation, in which a recognizable cultural object can be transformed through a sequence of verbal detours. Readers can follow adjacent work through contemporary poets.
Magazine appearances
Issue 27 presents the long werewolf sequence in full, while Issue 33 records A System For Burying Orbs. Together the two appearances preserve Quarles’s presence in the magazine across separate periods of its run.
Past Issues places both appearances within the magazine’s chronology.
Further reading
Poets & Writers preserves a directory entry for Quarles. Vispo describes his Post-Dogmatist background and independent literary work. Cecil Touchon’s profile of Quarles surveys his long practice across writing and visual art.