EVAD is an extended meditation on place, the idea/ideal of home, belonging (or not), and the fleeting grasp of local knowledge and understanding. The sequence shares conceptual and structural DNA from Atlas, the long poem from which it is excerpted. Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes the long poem as "a box in which to keep an assemblage of things," an accumulation of "multiple interrupted or discontinuous narrative elements." EVAD is an artifact of improvised textual arrangements, a series of reverberations and collisions, a stacking up and a falling apart.
EVAD originated in a psychogeographic drift through the East Village Arts District in Long Beach, California. This project, and resulting one-person exhibition, was the culmination of my place-based practice in 2006: photo slide shows, sound recordings, digital images, and sound-based drawings.
Twenty years later, faint traces of those original imprints emerge as palimpsest. The audiovisual gives way to verbal. I lift texts from the compost and remix them into clusters and concentrations. New themes emerge through the sampling process: gentrification, rising sea levels, redlining, urban ecosystems. Although the project contains elements of experimental cartography and personal geography, the results fail to form a complete picture. I find inspiration in the uncertainty of knowing, in the slippery remnants of memory and nostalgia. Nothing is fixed and everything is flow. EVAD is a leaky box of questions that lead to more questions.
Other than a line or two, this second Atlas chapter has little to do with the original mapping project of that downtown Long Beach neighborhood, and it has everything to do with my gauzy perceptions of that place then and now. Robert Macfarlane wrote eloquently about landscapes we keep with us in absentia. I stumble through in my own clumsy way to a similar end.
Originally from Southern California, Glenn Bach now lives in the Dugway Brook watershed of Cleveland, Ohio. Glenn retired from a career in sound art and experimental music to focus exclusively on Atlas, a long poem about place and our (mis)understanding of the world. Excerpts have appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, jubilat, and Plumwood Mountain; sequence-length excerpts include cricket (eclipse) (Stone Corpse Press, 2024), verdugos (Ghost City Press, 2024) and EVAD (above/ground press, 2026). Glenn documents his work at glennbach.com and @atlascorpus.bsky.social.
