Friday, April 8, 2016

THE WEBSITE scottezell.org HAS BEEN ATTACKED AND DOES NOT FUNCTION.
UNFORTUNATELY THE LARGE VOLUME OF WORDS, MUSIC, INFORMATION, AND PHOTOS FORMERLY ON THE SITE IS TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE.
THIS BLOG IS A PLACEHOLDER WHILE A NEW WEBSITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION
PLEASE CONTACT SCOTT EZELL BY EMAIL FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
contact@scottezellgallery.com
Scott Ezell with Wa State Army soldiers on the China-Myanmar border, December 2014.

Scott Ezell is a Pacific Rim poet and multi-genre artist with a background in Taiwan, China, Southeast Asia, and indigenous peoples. He has published three volumes of poetry, a nonfiction narrative book, has released over a dozen albums of original music, and has exhibited paintings in the US and internationally, as well as being involved in installation and performance art projects. Since 2010 he has been working on a multi-volume poetry project, Zomia, about marginal landscapes and communities in the China-Burma-Laos border region.

Scott Ezell's Painting website still works.
Scott Ezell's books on Amazon.
Scott Ezell's music on iTunes.
A first-person report on the ongoing conflict in Shan State, Myanmar, from a December 2015 visit.
Scott Ezell's music on Soundcloud.

A FAR CORNER, University of Nebraska Press, 2015:
“There’s magic in this brilliant, lyrical, and deeply informed ethnography. Ezell, happily, never gets in the way of the Austronesian artists, musicians, and craftsmen whose self-conscious recreation and performance of indigenous identity he has
so closely and sympathetically observed. So much comprehension has rarely come with so much pleasure and satisfaction.”
James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University

“Reading Scott Ezell’s A Far Corner I gradually became absorbed and actually delighted. Like true adventures this story is about something which, chances are, you will know nothing and consequently become pleasurably informed.”—Jim Harrison, author of Returning to Earth

In 2002, after living ten years in Asia, American poet and musician Scott Ezell used his advance from a local record company to move to Dulan, on Taiwan’s remote Paci c coast. He fell in with the Open Circle Tribe, a loose confederation of aboriginal woodcarvers, painters, and musicians who lived on the beach and cultivated a living connection with their indigenous heritage. Most members of the Open Circle Tribe belong to the Amis tribe, which is descended from Austrone- sian peoples that migrated from China thousands of years ago. As a “nonstate” people navigat- ing the fraught politics of contemporary Taiwan, the Amis of the Open Circle Tribe exhibit, for Ezell, the best characteristics of life at the margins, striving to create art and to live autonomous, unorthodox lives.

In Dulan, Ezell joined song circles and was invited on an extended hunting expedition; he weathered typhoons, had love a airs, and lost close friends. In A Far Corner Ezell draws on these experiences to explore issues on a more global scale, including the multiethnic nature of modern society, the geopolitical relationship between the United States, Taiwan, and China, and the impact of environmental degradation on indigenous populations. e result is a beautifully cra ed and personal evocation of a sophisticated culture that is almost entirely unknown to Western readers.



PETROGLYPH AMERICANA is a book-length poem published by Empty Bowl Press that careens across landscapes of the American West and resonates with Scott Ezell’s dozen years in Asia. By turns narrative and lyrical, Petroglyph Americana is a journey through Death Valley and Las Vegas, through the Great Basin and San Francisco’s administrative assistance industry, and through the history of the Gold Rush and an LA traffic jam—all with reflections from Asian landscapes, cultures, and poetry. Petroglyph Americana embraces the lust, freedom, exuberance, and folly of America, distilling a geographic, cultural, and ecological sense of place.

Petroglyph America is one of those volumes that casts a long shadow. Its philosophical components are spot on for our time in this country. Ezell renders his insights with frequent humor, but his language is pure heaven. Whether he is writing of a highway that “unscrolls like an asphalt tongue” or of how “the cowls and towers of a tungsten mine / stand like robot trees or missile silos / against a canvas sky” he orchestrates precision of image with music every time.”
—Karen Swenson, author of The Landlady in Bangkok, National Poetry Series winner, 1993.

“Reading Scott Ezell’s Petroglyph Americana, I imagine de Tocqueville returning from an Asian exile or Hart Crane rising from the Gulf of Mexico somehow summoning the strength for one more paean to the absurdity of our times and the phantasmagoria of our passage. And yet, the sweetness is overpowering. Another bodhisattva sends back news from the trail.”

—Bill Porter (Red Pine), author of Road to Heaven, translator of The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain.