David C .Ward Biography

David C. Ward is a historian at the National Portrait Gallery where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, among others; in 2010 he co-curated the controversial exhibition, "Hide/Seek. Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." He is now working on an exhibit on American poetry, called "Poetic Likeness." Ward is a poet himself and recently collected some of his work in Internal Difference (Lintott Press/Carcanet, 2010).

Preface

The internet as a center for community is currently touted as one of the beneficial and constructive developments for society as it adapts to the new technology. Facebook and other social media, such as plans for communal cyber “wikis” are held up as organizing templates through which fragmented communities can be both created and restored. One is inclined to be skeptical of the extreme claims that technology can create the sense of organic and personal connection that technology has itself in many ways hindered, if not destroyed. Facebook, for instance, is in the process of transforming traditional ideas of friendship from an actual, personal connection based on one individual’s ties to another – through love, work, intellectual or personal interests – into a passive accumulation of connections based on nothing more than the click of a computer key.  People pile up hundreds, even thousands, of friends – with whom they share nothing more than a shared, carefully edited “personal page.”
If  internet technology is going to serve the interests of actual human needs, instead of accelerating the process of ongoing alienation already implicit and driving modern societies , it must be the starting point, not the end point, for human connectivity.

Scarlet Monahan and I met in the superficial way that internet connections begin. She was Facebook “friends” with someone who I “knew” and not being immune to the allure of piling up a big count of
“friends” – and because I was intrigued by the military helmet she wore in her carefully cropped profile picture – I sent her a Friend request. She assented, not least because as an artist (she later explained) she was interested in expanding the possible market for advertising and selling her work.
What ensued was, I believe, exceptional. Through a series of off-hand comments about politics and art – I am a left liberal American male academic historian who writes poetry; Scarlet is a socialist Englishwomen who makes art – we evolved a conversation that moved into collaborative art making and genuine friendship -- although we have not met.

The immediate product of our early internet connection, and from which our subsequent relationship developed, came from our joint dismay and anger at the war(s) in Asia Minor. Responding to Scarlet’s antiwar comment, I wrote a poem called “Death from Above” about American drone warfare, an issue that is as troubling to me as my country’s use of torture. Scarlet responded by creating its visual complement, “Fear the Reaper.” From that initial artistic connection, we have gone on to create the series of artistic and verbal collaborations that are presented here, with more to follow.  The subjects range across topics from politics to the enervating anomie of modern life to sexual desire.  They are all political, in the sense that they try to create an alternative way of seeing and conceptualizing the world.
Not all of the poems and artworks match up seamlessly. They are individualized even as they are collaborative:  they are both our voices, existing in call and response, the one to the other.  But they would not have existed at all but for Scarlet Monahan’s remarkable generosity in creating a connection out of the thin social fabric of cyber-space.

David C. Ward

Fear the E-reaper / Death from Above	Sundays in Suburbia / Breaking news report	Light lunch in Eden - leaving for Lesbos / strike force circe	The arms of Morpheus / CCTV
Clockwatcher / In the cold light of night	The smallest thing / Pierce me	New town - the naked Vigilante / Whats a girl to do	Silent loss of all apparel / Debridement
Shallow Tred / National security state	Shade her gray with ashes	Teabreak in perspective / Close shadowed lanes	Here today gone tomorrow
Naomi was a Nano and the mistress of distraction / Nice girls don't	Bluebird / The orphanage of Sligo	The absolute sweetness of decay	Dark water
Downtown in virginia / Your gagging for it	Gobby girl / Craw	At a glans / For Gustave Courbet	Fandango / Summer hols
D.N.Angels gone shopping / Getting and spending	Vodka sunrise / Whore	"I tried to call...." / Answering...Machines	A LA VITESSE DE LUMIERE / Uncertainty principle
New Jerusalem / The people's charter	Blue stain in the rain / Ripper	Aurora panorama	White Lightning
Bread and Cheese The Historians Lunch	The state execution	Pulse	Pumpkins and melons