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A little silliness... Gary Sullivan asked me to write a poem for him to turn into a comic... so I did, a quatrain thing that sort of riffs off of this "Pasha Noise" character I've been using in another poem (for some reason I have a "z" in this instead of an "s" dunno why. The poem also incorporates bits from my MS Word auto-condensation of Kenny Goldsmith's "Soliloquy" and other little chunks of digital detritus to break (I thought) the narrative momentum, but it's interesting to see how Gary attempted to preserve what he could. The colab definitely not the New York School -- it'll probably be quite baffling in the end -- but here's the first page... I think it will be about 4 pages in all. Gary's images are based on a children's book retelling of the Marco Polo story, though of course it has that air of Bollywood about it (not to mention Prince Valient). The big kiss is coming up shortly, stay tuned.
The great Sergio Bessa, poet and indefatigable -- yes -- Haroldo de Campos scholar, has forwarded to me the following translation and bio of the late poet.
There is, of course, a whole load of interesting stuff on ubu.com (Haroldo de Campos search) -- including the Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry written by the Noigandres group and partly inspired by Lucia Costa's "Pilot Plan for Brazil."
Brazil's version of Concrete poetry may be the only art movement ever premised on the idea of a creating an "exportable" art form -- specifically for exchange within the global economy. Though I can't find the exact quote that states this, the Pilot Plan ends: "A general art of the word. The poem-product: useful object." I'm sure you neo-Romantics will find this yucky.
The following poem is from de Campos' post-Concrete phase:
The Education Of The Five Senses
1.
chatoboys (oswald)
itching
like fleas
peirce (proust?) considering
a color—violet
or an odor—
cabbage
rotten
rot—consider
this word: wines,
horace, odes
(principle of a
poem—
ogre)
2.
the purgatory is this:
enter / inter-
consider
the journey from the word stella
to the word styx
3.
(marx: the education of the five
senses
the tactile the mobile
the difficult
to read / readable
visibilia / invisibilia
the audible / the unheard
the hand
the eye
the hearing
the foot
the nerve
the tendon)
4.
the air
lapidary: see
how connects, this word,
to this other
language: my
consciousness (a parallelogram
of forces not a simple
equation of one
sole
unknown factor): this
language is made of air
and vocal cord
the hand that instills the thread of the
trellis / the breath
that unites this to that
voice: the point
of torsion
diaphanous work but that
is made (throughout) with the five
senses
with the color the odor the cabbage the fleas
5.
rare labor such as
to spin a top on one’s
nail
but that leaves its trace
minimal (non prescinded)
in the common division (incision)
of labor
pulsating trace / pulse
of the senses that are (pre) formed:
un-prescinded (if minimal)
the flicker of sunlight in the eye
—claritas: flash of epiphany!
a few registers modulations
rough paper or smooth a fold
secure a cut
a sure shot
on the bull's eye
in a flash the tiger trail the deer
(sousândrade)
the tiger-like assault
6.
that what accrues
rests
(in the senses)
even though minimal
(hubris of the minimal
that rests)
Translated by A.S. Bessa
Haroldo de Campos, (1929-2003), gained worldwide recognition in the early 1950s as one of the founders of Noigandres, the Brazilian group of poets who set the agenda for concrete poetry. Campos earned a law degree in 1952, but never practiced in that profession. He taught literary theory at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica, in São Paulo, for most of his life, and published several volumes on translation theory and on Brazilian and international literature. In 1972 Campos defended a controversial doctoral dissertation on Macunaima, a landmark of Brazilian modernism, based on the theories of Vladimir Propp. A decade later, his book on Gregório de Mattos, an elusive figure of the Brazilian baroque, also created a stir among academic circles in Brazil. Campos's "anti-logocentric" readings of Brazilian literature, admittedly influenced by Derrida's deconstructive model, have been of capital importance in the re-evaluation of authors such as Mattos, Kilkerry, Sousândrade and Oswald de Andrade—authors who, according to Campos, constitute a "tradition of rupture" in Brazilian literature. He was a prolific translator who introduced the work of many foreign poets to Brazil, beginning in the early 1950s with Ezra Pound, and most recently Charles Bernstein. His last work of translation, Homer's Iliad, has been published in two volumes by Mandarim, in São Paulo. An English volume of his collected poems and essays is due next spring by Northwestern University Press.
Haroldo de Campos died last Saturday, August 16, at the Hospital Oswaldo Cruz, in São Paulo.
AAA Another American Artist — each axis spawns another axis — And — and? a sort of beggar’s testament — typed that’s not me — — whom I know you might consider one of the lightweight artist-intellectuals of our time — perhaps not the most productive) — or especially — Did the flounder flounder — the bass bass? as I am also dissatisfied — in London town — — you have to live with it — practicing in Brooklyn — Finessing the first kiss. For your pleasure — try the Mount Rushmore posture for any longer than 15 years — Seconds ago — — poverty — abjection — — named her — with the sky just pissing over the horizon. — the lad’s skinny legs barely activated for the days ahead, the eyes still red from summer’s lawn chairs — Hello hello. I was lying. — it was nearly voted in — the amendments constructed — and the toxic verticality of its filaments integrated into the country’s fabric — as the moment is digital — — unbothered — — axis thinking — like nation <==> individual — real people — real poems — Well — I thank you — It doesn’t pay to be conservative.
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Things a little too light to ever revise or publish, but too "together" to take apart and use elsewhere. But I like them — and they are dedicated to Jordan Davis, the indefatigable!
Four Improvisations
I want to know more about that murder, yes.
Give me another hour of coverage, ok,
this morning isn't plural enough
and besides, I plan on sleeping all day —
I want to eradicate the baloney of my mind,
this is the quickest way to the treasure. I'm going to dream
over their hands
as they are moving.
Sleeping in news repose.
*
That small digital woman
in the expert photograph,
she's a fortune for those of us
at the editor's desk
especially me,
who keeps disappearing
in the text, replacing
the letters with em-dashes
and acting all
superior about it — she pulls me back
and soon I am writing
some marketable crap
about headaches, Pat Cash,
and the Secret Service.
What do I know? The poems
appear in a little yellow book.
She shows up
at the launch party, and signs her name.
*
Someone was fat and happy.
(I've learned to write
on the marble.)
Does it pay to care about things?
One could be precocious
and start a Day Op,
(first, we'd have to know what that is
and stop caring about being lonely)
— did you forget her conversation
so quickly, because
you were drunk for days afterwards?
Hopping on tiny leather springs.
*
I found cheeks in my blow dryer.
But it's only the sincerity
of the voice that matters.
It's only the pitch and temper
of the voice that matters.
I found a thong in my television tubes. That time,
it was getting kind of crazy.
I found a plural in my
days on earth.
Please translate this misery
into several languages.
Take a quarter with you
in case you need to call.
There are better ways of passing
for a 9th Army tyke than whistling.
When it rains: wheelchairs.
I met Jim Jarmuch last night.
He looked kind of like
my brother, or could have been.
I found
delirious amounts of affection
for my mother in my last paycheck.
[I posted this yesterday but am reposting as it got lost under the prehistoric bird.]
I've started a new blog for a photo / poem project:
What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers
The stuff there now is pretty random -- just what is most presentable at the moment. I'm not quite sure what the project is except that the poems are in a sort of "variable foot"-inspired stanza form I invented (and rather Ashberian in tone, but this will change), and the photographs will move back and forth between "straight" photos and pictures in which objects, through the magic of digital technology, are doubled, tripled, etc.
I hope to develop some more significant interaction between the photos and the poems. The new blog is just a way to organize the photos and poems.
[I wrote this a few months ago, before I took Ron Silliman to task about his "School of Quietude" business. It's really just a scan of the book -- the "Mills of the Kavanaughs" is probably more a curse than a blessing, even for "Lowell fans," but I still think the book is important and a great read. I think my lines about Browning, brief as they are, are key considering Browning's huge impact on Pound -- I think Lowell got Browning much better than Pound did (a comparison of the three pre "Cantos" and "Mesmerism" to "After Surprising Conversions" testify to that), even if he could never achieve the scale. There's a little Browning in all of us -- even in Charles Bernstein ("The Klupzy Girl" especially) and in that poem of RS's dedicated to CB, "What," which starts with an allusion to that very poem. I'll explain all of this later in my radio interview with the BBC.]
Robert Lowell
Collected Poems
Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Lowell died in 1977, about a year after John Ashbery -- a poet who writes nothing like him, but who would displace him as the major living figure of his time -- won a triple crown of literary awards (including the Pulitzer) for Self Portrait In A Convex Mirror, which in hindsight could be seen as the oblique, Chinese cousin of the elder poet's landmark 1959 collection Life Studies. One can't help, reading through this massive, spellbinding volume, mourning some of what has been lost in American poetry since Partisan Review crowd was in the ascendant: an earnestness about writing (and rewriting) poetry in a bid for immortality (Berryman's narcissism may have killed any frank courting of this instinct), an intellectual aggressiveness that was more ethical than theoretic in nature (like Auden, Lowell's pacifist politics were often transparent, and he was a conscientious objector in WWII), an imagistic impulse that was best typified by Lowell's unerring sense of visual detail ("...octagonal red tiles, / sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; / a Rocky Mountain chaise lounge, / its legs, shellacked saplings." [162]) and an embodied, phantasmagoric sense of history and geography, highlighting that generation's greater chronological proximity to Pound and, before him, Robert Browning (and the Victorian habit of comparing one's "age" with a prior historical epoch, especially that of the Roman Empire). The greatest misfortune of Lowell's critical reception is that he would be called a "confessional" poet -- as Bidart's afterward essay notes, not only did Lowell carefully sift through details to preserve those with greatest aesthetic effect (he seemed to aspire to a Mallarmean impersonality despite his accented vulnerability), but these details themselves were sometimes stolen from the lives of his peers, such as the following famous "autobiographical" lines, lifted from an anecdote told by Delmore Schwartz's wife: "It's the injustice… he is so unjust -- / whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five. / My only thought is how to keep him alive. / What makes him tick? Each night now I tie / ten dollars and his car key to my thigh…" Lowell fans will be delighted to see the full version of "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," cut down to a handful of stanzas for the Selected Poems, as well as the complete Land of Unlikeness, his awkward first book which he never allowed to be reprinted (and which, containing earlier versions of poems in award-winning Lord Weary's Castle, appears as a humbling appendix); a small group of unfinished and late poems is also included. The ambitious blank verse sonnet-sequence History, never as popular as the "confessional" books, shows him confronting the specter of Browning with prismatic, distinctive voicings of historical figures from Caligula to William Carlos Williams: "Ninth grade, and bicycling the Jersey highways: I am a writer. I was a half-wasp already / I changed my shirt and trousers twice a day." (578) Not enough can be said to encourage the reader to absorb, even attack, this book, from beginning to end or skipping around, to make an adventure of how Lowell's style -- "lurid, rapid, garish, grouped / heightened from life, / yet paralyzed by fact" (838), from his earliest poems to several late, unfinished works -- remained constant, yet occasionally swerved revealingly, with each poetic challenge.
I'm too busy today to post anything more than this photograph of a prehistoric bird. You'll notice that it has a hairless cat (see below) in its beak.
The great Brazilian concrete poet Haroldo de Campos died last week.
I wish I could write an informative elegy about his life and career, but I admit to knowing very little about him except for the writings in the early concrete manifestos and the concrete poetry that appears in such books as the Mary Ellen Solt anthology of concrete poetry, all of which was really important to me at some point. You can now find all of this material on ubu.com, of course!
Marjorie Perloff wrote a somewhat disappointing essay about one his post-concrete works which can be found at her EPC homepage, "Concrete Prose": Haroldo de Campos's Galáxias and After" -- disappointing because, after a few rather abstract observations about his work that could have been applied to any number of other writers -- she doesn't read Portuguese, of course -- it just tails off into a discussion of Rosmarie Waldrop! At least that's my memory of it; I haven't reread it.
Other than that I've not seen a whole lot about him, though Northwestern (I believe) is putting out a collection of his writing in the near future -- that is very much something to look forward to, as he was one of the leading theorists (along with Pignitari, who I did meet and see read) of the bunch, and I think some of his ideas are more interesting than the work they produced (which nonetheless is still quite fascinating to me, even if I've leaned more on the Lettrists of late).
I have a few gorgeous, if gaudy, books by his younger brother Augusto de Campos, but like a dumbass, I lost his email address and haven't even been able to thank him for sending them to me!
But I did find one great essay in a Richard Kostelanetz anthology -- where else! -- that I wrote about in the long essays in Fashionable Noise about the computer poem, herewith called the "CP." The essay is composed entirely of paragraph long footnotes, which makes it a bit tough to read. Here's the entire one on the de Campos essay.
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The CP, with its alien, fragmented but nonetheless consistent rhetorical strategies, requires new, somewhat clinical and analytical methods of reading, and probably the most important group of writers prior to the Language poets to systematically describe such methods from the viewpoint of artists were the Brazilian concrete poets, most importantly Haroldo de Campos. In “The Informational Temperature of the Text,” de Campos addresses the issue, raised by several critics of Concrete poetry, that the movement he help found was “impoverishing language”; his method for doing so is to take the term “impoverish” literally, and to determine where exactly the riches of a text might lie. His description of “informational temperature,” based on the writing of Max Bense, is as follows:
If we take 1 as the highest limit of a text’s informational temperature, that temperature, in a given text, will be higher the nearer it is to 1. In such cases, for Mandelbrot “the available words are ‘well employed,’ even rare words being utilized with appreciable frequencies. Low temperature, on the other hand, means that words are ‘badly employed,’ rare words being extremely rare.” Of the first case, Mandelbrot… gives James Joyce, whose vocabulary is “quite varied,” as the example; of the second, the language of children. (pp. 177-178)
That is why it rejects the airs and graces of crafsmanship – in spite of the seriousness with which it considers the artisan’s contribution to the stockpile of extant forms – from the art of verse to the elaborate diversificaiton of vocabulary in pose. It ahs recoure in its turn to factors of promximity and likeness on the grahpic-gestaltic plane, to elements of recurrence and reduncancy on the semantic and rhythmic plane, to a visual-ideogrammic syntax (when not merely “combinatory”) for controlling th flux of signs and rationalizing the sensible materials of a coposition. This is how it limits entropy (the tendency to dispersion, to disorder, to the –maximum informational potential of a system), fixing the informational temperature at the minimum necessary to obtain the aesthetic achievement of each poem undertaken. (179-180)
Ok, I'll stop this chatter in a moment... I've changed back to the old header with the Williamsburg sky -- photo taken right outside my window. This puts the Madame inside one of the buildings in the picture... get it? Very Waste Land-y, huh?
Occasionally, the Fox News team can be seen peering into my room, but on this particular day it was blank, like a very ill-designed satellite dish:
The old new header -- the one of the American flag in the UPS garaga (see below) is being used on all of the archive, individual entry pages, etc. I think it's just too loud for the homepage, which features enough colorful stuff as it is, generally.
I had a different header up earlier today but have since replaced it with this one, which has a detail of a UPS garage that I had photographed in Chelsea last summer. Here's the full pic:
Question: do you think just using the detail makes me look like a jingoistic, flag-waving freak?
Who cares about Flarf -- a monkey could write it!
Speaking of which, what do you think of the new FSC header?
Edited by Janet Kraynak
The MIT Press
0-262-14082-9
420 pages
Nauman claims, in the extensive 1980 autobiographical interview by Michele de Angelus, that he knew very little about Marcel Duchamp’s affinity for puns when creating his own semantically slippery conceptual art style: “MD: You found out about that later? Like the Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q… BN: I think that we all saw all those letters written there but I don’t think anybody ever explained it and I never asked.” (233) Nauman’s eerily intuitive way of creating sophisticated, intellectually angular art out of simple gestures –a ten minute film of himself bouncing balls in a studio and titled “Bouncing Two Balls between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms,” for example – relies on the dry matter-of-factness about his language as it is placed in juxtaposition to a confounding visual element, often something whose fascination is never offset by the blandness inherent in repetition or naive craft. He is nearly a poet in this sense – his neon spiral “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths,” for example, has the uncanny resonance to neon works of the Scottish concretist Ian Hamilton Finlay – and yet, again and again in these interviews, he makes very few claims to an intellectual – and certainly not “postmodern” – agenda, despite his wide reading in such writers as Wittgenstein, Nabokov, and Beckett. The 1972 interview with Lorraine Sciarra has him confessing to not having heard of Merleau-Ponty even though, she states, several critics have insisted his work responds to the French philosopher’s ideas. Instead, Nauman – who, despite the occasionally violent or sadistic nature of his art, seems most concerned with creating beautiful, contemplative, and often "interactive" experiences – discusses how “a book called Gestalt Therapy [was] very important because it has to do with awareness of you body and a way of thinking about it […] I think what happens is you get sort of interested in something and then something else, someone, or some book, comes along that makes what you are doing more clear to you, and you can proceed more easily.” (166) Such formulations might be disappointing to a reader looking for a West Coast version of the ambitious essayist Robert Smithson, or – accepting simplicity and reticence – a Warholian spirit of enigma or Fluxus-inspired loyalty to trumping the bourgeois. Perhaps his nearest analog might be with the worldly and sage-like Brian Eno, someone who courts extreme, even clinical, thinking, if only as a way to achieve practical and reliable experiences in art, as when Nauman summarily comments on his use of puns: “I think humor is used a lot of the time to keep people from getting too close. Humor side-steps and shifts the meaning.” (193)
Of the group of nineteen artist writings in this book – mostly instructions for repetitive performance pieces that take the viewer/reader on experiential voyages that are difficult or nearly impossible to create, reflection of his appreciation of his friend LaMonte Young’s minimalist compositions which can potentially run for eternity – about nine haven’t been previously published in last year’s Art + Performance volume on Nauman (one of these, a cheeky comment on “earth art,” was intended to be skywritten and is a single line: “Leave the Land Alone”). Five of the interviews also appeared in that volume, which leaves nine exclusive to Please Pay Attention Please, one of which – the 100-pages by de Angelus – has never before appeared in complete form. The long introduction by Kraynak is satisfactory in its marshaling of basic semantic theory to explain Nauman’s relationship to words, and his words to their contexts, but lacks the cathartic insights one might expect in such a tight focus on his language, and utterly avoids the issue of Nauman’s relation to other conceptual artists who use words extensively -- she references Bakhtin and Benveniste over Rusche or Holzer -- this in lieu of the 27 essays and reviews that appear in the Art + Performance volume. Nauman is mild and reticent as an interviewee – he rarely answers a question beyond what is being asked – yet this volume is necessary for anyone wishing to get behind the ideas of his art, even if it duplicates much of the recent John Hopkins volume and is nearly twice as expensive.
(Image courtesy: The Art Institute of Chicago: Art Access.)
[I hope to do a much fuller write-up on this book -- Pound was my first great poetic love in high school, and I had far too many ideas about this book than could fit in one paragraph -- so please accept this as "credit" for the later essay.]
The Library of America
ISBN: 1-931082-41-3
14,000 pages
$45
The writings of Ezra Pound have been traditionally associated with the late James Laughlin’s avant-garde publishing venture New Directions, and volumes such as his 1949 “collected” poems Personae, his sprawling epic The Cantos, his thick book of Translations, and the slim, tidy distillation of Selected Poems with its forbidding, purse-lipped profile of the poet, have been foundational, strangely comforting features on poetry lovers’ shelves for decades. Containing Pound in a single, albeit huge, volume that made claims to completism seemed impossible, and yet Richard Sieburth – best known as a critic and translator of Holderlein – has done an amazing job of finding and logically arranging nearly everything that Pound wrote that could be called a poem or translation, including the juvenalia of “Hilda’s Book” – written for fellow University of Pennsylvania student Hilda Doolittle – to the late, moving elegy, first published in 1971, that he wrote for the brother of one of his St. Elizabeths acolytes, but which Sieburth clearly intends for Pound himself: “Out of the turmoil, Mother of Griefs receive him, / Queen of Heaven receive him, / May the sound of the leaves give him peace, / May the hush of the forest receive him.” (1203) That Pound could figure himself as a seeker of peace while being, infamously, a virulent anti-Semite and supporter of Mussolini, is just one of the conflicts that make this volume compelling; but except in the rich chronology and footnotes that Sieburth provides (there is, sadly, no introduction), practically none of this social context make its presence known beyond proclivities of style: the poet's always precise, even "macho" meters, the near absence of any intimate or autobiographical tone, and his Puritan impatience with “Symbolist” ambiguities – he was set on curing the world of the decadent “nineties.” That Pound famously considered his life-work, the 800 page Cantos, a “botch” – and took to referring to himself as a “minor satirist” during the last years of his life as he suffered crippling depressions – makes the verve, optimism and confidence of such undertakings as the reversionings of Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel (however shackled by 19th century conventions), the robust, still fresh “Cathay” sequence, the metrical displays of “Tenzone," “Dance Figure” and "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and the innovative “Homage to Sextius Propertius” – all from his richest period before the 1920s - right through his passion for translating Sophocles and Confucius’ Classic Anthology, seem like an Icarian flight primed for a great, however morally distressing, fall - one that took some of American poetry’s very thirst for hearty, internationalist undertakings with it. Pound believed that all mankind needed to know of literature could be contained in a two-foot shelf, and he set out translating, for a country he thought had yet to ascend out of “barbarism,” those works that were missing; his own place on that shelf might not be that thick – all-in-all, many of these pages are taken up by trivial sequences like the “Alfred Venison” poems (Cockney ballads in support of his “social credit” ideas) and the social farce of "Moeurs Contemporaines," idiosyncratic “readers” versions of Sophocles and Japanese Noh plays, and the Confucian works which crave simplicity and wisdom but are clearly the products of a didactic, irascible and fatally undialectic iconoclast: “He said: problem of style? Get the meaning across and then STOP.” (731). Yet one can’t help to think that the appearance of this volume, which seems streamlined, coherent and responsible compared to the many pages of The Cantos that are barely readable due to stylistic infelicities and political excesses - compare his work on the Analects to the "American President Cantos" - will give readers of poetry a sense of starting over, of renewed energy in resorting through the horrific details of a long, ideologically wounded century and the myriad luminous details of a few millennia of European and Asian literature.
Unbeknownst to me, Earthlink changed the name (and gender!) of my server -- from "candy" to "benny" -- around the time of the blackout, so my MT app wasn't able to login for a week since it couldn't find the permissions file. Anyway, I've fixed that, and upgraded my MT scripts to 2.64, which I suppose should give this blog new features -- though what can compete with a hairless cat, I don't know. I'm guessing that a lot of people with MT blogs have been experiencing similar problems -- drop me a note if so, I can give you a few tips on how to go about solving this.
Nothing new today except for this picture of a hairless cat:
Talonbooks
0-88922-473-0
Derksen likes to position his poetry right in the mainstream of the saltier, sparring realms of “political discourse,” his lines surfacing from the same semantic gumbo that produced Spiro Agniew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” and Oscar Wilde’s whipsmart butlers getting one over on their narcissistic, hidebound masters. A spirit of paradox lurks behind the arras of Derksen’s lava-paced comedic discharge: “From agitprop to diamat / I believe it was Tatlin / who said — or was it Jacques Villeneuve: / Learn to make leisure / more work, rumours over tumours, / strategies over tactics. I stand / before you asking to be memorable / for my memorabilia and / symptomatic for my mottoes / in these times when we are told / that movement is what we all share / it’s just that some have more legroom.” (98) 1996’s Dwell began the exploration of a style that would become linked with Derksen: poems of spare, astute “socialist one-liners” (his own phrase) that accrued sentence by sentence to elaborate a complex field of issues, mostly concerning geopolitics and nationalism but also sexuality, culture and class identity. The mode departed from earlier varieties of “Language” poetics – such as those espoused by Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews or the “new sentence” of Ron Silliman — by not fetishizing opaque formalisms over (or in place of) “content”: Dwell was, even for the newbie, accessible in themes, comfortably paced, and motored by an anti-heroic punk sensibility that jived with the author’s working class background in Vancouver, Canada. Transnational Muscle Cars, his third full-length collection, doesn’t add greatly to the poet’s arsenal of poetic methods — the title poem, “Social Facts are Vertical” and “But Could I Make a Living From It” could be extensions of poems from Dwell, and indeed of each other — though “Jobber” and the stanzas of “Forced Thoughts” (which read at times like decidedly un-Juba-to-Jived Harryette Mullen quatrains) reflect a confidence in extending his methods into longer works. There is a noticeable increase in the language of globalism — focus on the “specific,” especially brand names, is valorized, as a welter of capitalist detritus is depicted as links in a chain of transnational correspondences (“I want to see / the real relations / but you’ve got Nikes on and I like you / so I have to try and understand”) [10], while abstract terms are rendered material, humanized so as to be subjected to warm satire: “I’d like to inflate a bubble building as a mobil public sphere, but I’m a little breathless.” (106) Derksen quirps in “Social Facts are Vertical”: “I questioned authority and the question won,” a characteristically self-effacing remark that takes the “self” as both identity trace and Cartesian burden, but exhibiting a note of frustration with the language of theory itself as a wieldable force of opposition. But Derksen has turned this question into incredibly effective, lively but careful, Brechtian poetry that turns the event of reading into a hootenanny in the village square, and has already been quite influential on other writers creating bridges between radical formalism and a vaudevillian social platform, such as Kevin Davies, Rodrigo Toscano and Tim Davis.
Good article by Maureen Dowd about political blogs in the New York Times today -- but no links!
(Check it out -- Maureen and the Madame could almost be sisters!)
***
In a lame attempt to be hip, pols are posting soggy, foggy, bloggy musings on the Internet. Inspired by Howard Dean's success in fund-raising and mobilizing on the Web, candidates are crowding into the blogosphere — spewing out canned meanderings in a genre invented by unstructured exhibitionists.
It could be amusing if the pols posted unblushing, unedited diaries of what they were really thinking, as real bloggers do. John Kerry would mutter about that hot-dog Dean stealing his New England base, and Dr. Dean would growl about that wimp Kerry aping all his Internet gimmicks. But no such luck.
Instead, we have Travels with Tom, Tom Daschle's new blog recounting his annual August pilgrimage around South Dakota. Trying to sound uninhibited, he says he has "no schedule and no staff" and promises readers "amazing experiences" with "fascinating people."
On Aug. 7, he revealed, "I visited the Orthopedic Institute in Sioux Falls today and was given an informative tour." The next day, "I continue to be impressed with small business people who struggle to offer their employees health insurance."
Bob Graham dubs himself "the original blogger" because he has filled more than 4,000 color-coded, laconic notebooks over the last 30 years with a running diary of his every move, from ingestion of morning cereal to debarkation from a plane. (A typical Graham entry: "3:20 p.m. — Take bus to hotel.")
***
Vanished! all traces of the motherfucker…
(words inspired by Lawrence Raab)
here, in a spiral-bound notebook, or there
on vacation with the glossy Ken Knabb.
Vision is reeling again, but it’s air-conditioned
and stamped with various approvals
(the kind with legs — “blurbed” — as is the fashion)
“These are assays that will prove no vowel
ephemeral…”
— indeed, they are the hive’s own eggs!
hermaphroditic before hatching, alive
not yet given to boasting, or yet a “good eye.”
— These words seem portents, and yet will not peg.
I suggest: one doesn’t spell the “life of the mind”
in colors too stark, or with words too kind.
My mother with the half moon eyes
(oh! she's had a bit to drink,
her eyes are usually minus signs).
Chance. Chair on the slant
magnifying a penchant
for fractious, gambling behavior
before it leaves, forever.
[Warped floor: hence, a person of no wealth. He's had to put a rug down to keep his desk chair from rolling away as he typed. This poem is especially prized because he seems to enjoy it.]
Having written that biography of sex
and known the ones you were interested in
— the lights casting shadows on Graham Street
any hour of the day, but especially night
with the bus stops, grotesqueries of newscasters
in advertising light — pretending to be married.
Of the handful of sensations collected,
placing some value on those justly deferred.
Seems like:
it's easy,
centered just.
It's
also easy
to remain in L.A.
It's
easy to be
here.
It's easy
to humiliate
a friend.
The blight of A____ was upon the land,
the patterns long forgotten,
and poems one could understand
from Chaucer "down" to Auden.
drift
that can’t be the cosmopolitan style
we’ve rehearsed lax maxims
vaudevilled into luxury
samples
heirlooms of mere strobe patterns
vital to the chromosome
what’s keeping the posture up
is the sausage of karl marx
proviso
you study here
and keep reading
group dieting for change
which stops
mark pollacks it for three books
cady lettermans it for twelve
stops
i view keen distances from my youth
in monopolied south america
flat as the expanse of schwarmerei los angeles
is the sea montezuma didn't bid on
the diarist
was smitten the croat jumped ship
rhythmless inflation was propitiously induced
for speech
was confined to smile tones
what’s vital turning blue
and sundry lyrical hues
“my pancreas will be true to you”
i know such croons from the dispatches of youth
trespassing
into static noblesse oblige
venom was carcanetted out of the library
several thousand velveeta miles away
health of the nation
depending on this moneyed abstraction
Two radio streams to check out. The first is an experimental site run out of MIT labs that distills various threads of music into a single synthetic track -- a bit like those dissolving Listerine sticks that might be a bit too sharp to give any pleasure, but useful as a way to disinfect the orifices -- the second just a good dub station with some other kooky stuff thrown in (and your typical college-boy type DJ).
(Actually, I'm enjoying Eigenradio a lot more than the above might suggest -- it's just that when I first turned it on, it was quite noisy, like Plunderphonics with no soul -- as if it ever had one -- but now it's going through a pretty mellow, even kind of sexy, phase, a clicky electronic wave with bits of saxophone flitting above it.)
"Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, "Music, what are you, really?" you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you. When you're tuned in to Eigenradio, you always know that you're hearing the latest, rawest, most statistically separable thing you can possibly put in your ear."
Eigenradio - The top 20 singular values all day, every day!
Dublab appears to be down for the moment but the URL is www.dublab.com.
I got my first request for porno today... see the comments bar on the right, under the heading "Wazzup." Of course I'm terribly flattered, but my boobs are not for sale.
This is quite a koinkidink, as Rachel and I just watched Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy last night, which was pretty amusing. The idea that one could become rich and famous simply by the ability to maintain an erection on film is a life lesson I will not soon forget.
"Wazzup" -- I didn't care much for informative titles, then -- also includes some commentary I had written ages ago but had forgotten about, regarding two paragraphs of Silliman's Blog that I mentioned in the more recent commentaries. RS's original blog post is from November 6, 2002.
(BTW, RS MUST take that author photograph off of his blog, or at least integrate it into the design. It looks like a communist bloc "great leader" poster -- but closer to Solznyetsin than Mao -- flapping over the town square. Be happy you only have the Madame here!)
My entry below, from November 7, 2002, is not particularly well-written but I did get to use the word "hamstrung," which, like "handcuffed," is a word I picked up watching tennis on TV. I'm reposting it here since I still think it's kind of relevant and it never had it's day in the sun.
***
I was reasonably perturbed about a recent post on Silliman's blog (what follows is two paragraphs of a longer one):
Which reminded me of how seldom this is the case for me with poets from English-speaking countries other than the United States. With the very notable exception of Basil Bunting, I find there to have been shockingly few poets from the old Commonwealth on either side of the equator whose work I would characterize as having a strong ear. More often than not, I can't hear it at all, not even in Hopkins' so-called sprung rhythms. Whatever the other values the poem might propose - & often enough they are many - the prosody of so much non-Yank Anglophone verse strikes me as jumbled, prosaic, "a dozen diverse dullnesses."There are of course exceptions, but I notice how many of them are poets who seem to have taken a particular interest in the American tradition of poetry - Tom Raworth, Thomas A. Clark, Fred Wah, Jill Jones, Lee Harwood, Gerry Shikatomi [sic]. Yet the whole idea of poetry's relationship to spoken English - & through speech to sound - is one that invariably leads back to Wordsworth & Coleridge. This makes me wonder if there isn't some disability within me that just can't hear it, whatever "it" might in this instance be, rather like the Kansan watching a British film with North Country accents who longs for subtitles.
I actually think the value of speech-based meters was understood by too few writers, and led to a lot of very sloppy, boring stuff (the bit that Silliman quotes in his blog from Curnow is pretty bland to me). Part of the reason I've taken on a reading of people like Drew Milne and John Wilkinson -- even though I find these writers a bit recalcitrant when it comes to the candor that I enjoy in, say, Williams or Coleridge, or Raworth for that matter -- is because of their attention to sound patterning, verse forms, linguistic experiences that are "other," beyond the scale of what a human normally exerts when engaging in speech. Which is to say the artifice of their work, the way sound plays against each other over several lines, echoes returning from several lines previous and foreshadowing what is to come. This is one of the many virtues of the lyric, that there is a certain promise of return with every syllable included -- a sound sets up the context for another sound, which may occur several line away. It's poems that exploit these features that usually astound me as being much beyond anything I would expect language to do.
Much "speech based" stuff -- or at least the language used to discuss it, such as the idea of a "good ear," which I think is a term that needs to be retired -- does not play with these potentials. What we are left with, quite often, is meter -- sounds included to fill out some motion that it supposed to send the line across the page. Sure, it's a type of meter unique to the 20th century, but it's gotten quite conventional, not to mention disengenous as we've grown to realize that so called "natural" rhythms sprung from "breath" are certainly as learned a behavior as, say, greeting someone with a kiss of each cheek. What also happens -- in the case of Olson especially -- is a lot of bluster that is perfectly impenetrable in terms of "content," and uninteresting in terms of language itself.
Ok, I'm being vague. But I would take Hopkins, Prynne, Auden, Riley, Finlay (he did "write" poems once), an Australian named Martin Johnston, etc. over several of the writers Ron names in terms of "ear", and I'm an American damn it! John Wieners probably had one of the best ears going, but his metrics are about as indebted to folks like Herrick and, say, Verlaine, as they are to "speech." I'd rather see us be colonized for once rather than view the entire range of Anglophone poetry of the previous century through the frame of "speech" -- or anti-speech, for that matter, which I guess is where the real game for Silliman lies.
[As a last note, it's worth observing that despite what Creeley says, Williams' line went as against speech as "for" -- a poem like "The pure products of America" from Spring and All is as motivated by having a short line in the middle of a three-line stanza, a very couunter-speech tactic, as it was by listening to his speech rhythms. In fact, this poem is as far away from breaking the line based on speech patterns as any I know (I mean, of poems that pay attention to "metrics" at all), which is why I think WCW's metrics have yet to be very understood. No one talks like the voice in this poem -- it's one long ramble, and to keep that it alive one had to estrange the language continually, not naturalize it, hence the often choppy nature of the line breaks, use of commas, etc. Other poems like "As the cat..." are very regular metrically, which is why one would read it aloud without paying attention to the line breaks, the same way one would read a good lyric poem without a huge pause at the end of each line. A poem "In Breughal's great picture" are as motivated by conventional metrical concerns as, say, Pound's Usura Canto -- a relationship to rhetoric as much as lyric -- and a poem like "Old age is..." is as motivated by visual skinniness as constraint -- James Schuyler wrote "skinny" poems, according to F O'H -- as by anything like a speech based line. I guess the problem is that each poem presents its own issues, especially for WCW for whom each poem was a new venture into outer space. End digression.]
I wish I had time to touch up these lines -- I'm really just providing a little content now that my shoulder's back in shape. Stay tuned.
[Following is a poem that is not "flarf" but uses some of the techniques of it during the last long stanza -- i.e. Google searches, in this case, based on a paragraph from Rimbaud's "Season in Hell."
I somehow think I exhausted my interest in writing "flarf" several years ago when I started mashing texts with computer programs and then trying to have them make some "sense," giving myself rules such only allowing myself to change the punctuation.
I don't mean to sound snotty, but I can't get too excited by the hectic energy and quick-paced and irreverent imagery of much of the "flarf" issue of Combo which I just received in the mail.
A lot of those poems - even the very impressive tour de force introductory quatrains of editor Mike Magee - would be much improved if the writers just slowed down a hair and let their effects take hold before racing to the next item on the agenda (or the search results).
The pace of a quick wit is always interesting, but when this pace is augmented by a machine, it's more of a sign of wit to slow down and deny the computer its electric celerity, the circuit board its easy capacity to forget (if that doesn't sound too Yoda-like).
David Larsen's poems - which are not obviously "flarf" as far as I know - stuck out this way, as they were careful with their tones, letting some things explode and others merely echo across his sequence. (I don't have the issue on hand to comment more deeply on this.)
But I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon about something that is obviously intended to be pure fun - and I did, after all, play Mozart - not Salieri - in Gary Sullivan's flarf play, which was the hight point of my year as an actor. So saying there are "too many notes" is probably ironic.
I guess I think the Google poem or "flarf" or whatever has some potential if you get past the easier pleasures of mainlining chaotic text into verse forms. And of course, as an anecdote to hyper-formalist practices and the more preening forms of lyricism, it's welcome.
A companion to the "flarf" issue might be the issues of Arras 5 that I posted recently, called "Riddled Argots." I still have to write the intro to that! Probably the best "all natural" flarf that immediately comes to mind is the opening of John Ashbery's "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" -- that mean old cartoonist!
For the most part, the following is a poem from my own notes. It originally appeared last year in the Asian American Journal of Columbia University, co-edited by my friend Andrew Maerkle.]
The Window Ordered To Be Made
To hospitalize the ones we love most
(Beginning an election and ending a corpse)
To take that money
I’m going to start on election day
(I’m basing this prayer on Citizen Kane)
I’m going to start
Asking the world if I’m straight
At a balloon lunge event, where lightness is fitness
Here (he shoved the aphrodisiac)
“Be in code!”
The Amish getting squeamish
(The net privileges
Transcendental moss)
This essay is addressed to the audience
As I caught the misunderstanding of “fantail rout”
As I caught
That au courant
Autocrat hit the sky
So, talk through these sour depressions
And immigration counseling
We decided: we are a pair of absurdities
(I’m waiting for Scottish air)
Everyone thought you were beautiful
Now, to deliver the urban landscapes
Seems only normal: upsets, lapses, hosannas, bananas…
I am a happy
Victim of intelligence
(Robots picked up Willa at the airport)
“He probably went the wrong way with his eyes on”
Comedy?
Gene Wilder’s an expert
These are like
Dropping off the guys off somewhere
(Bakunin’s temp hair is limp)
The anonymity of the “I” on the web page
Remembers graduation
And the Chinese years symbolized by animals
Worthy of reading
If only for the erotica category
However badly spellt
By thirteen-year-old Petey Birdsong
(Within his mirrors of catoptromancy, etc. etc.)
Thirteen-year-old Petey Birdsong
(The rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Unbelievably endowed to play these sages
(Behind him, the walls were spread with the human body)
Thinking
Starting a Gore
And ending a wimp
bluish
Can burn this
with this kind of information
available to panic
A new Flash poem by Thom "with an H" Swiss and George "not Bernard" Shaw...
I like the concept and the varieties of interactivity, all of which are pretty witty, surprising, and "humanized" by the use of gravity effects and natural sounds. You have to play around with it to get through -- pull things, click and hold, or just move the mouse around, etc. After you are done with the piece -- only 6 or so sections -- there is some nice interactivity in the navigation that suddenly appears.
The text has that self-referential "let me tell you about myself" (i.e. about digital art) feel to it that I generally discourage, and the graphics are slightly "designy," like those shaved-head cuts that have now gone out of fashion. But for the most part the piece is spare and unpretentious, and as it is a part of the new issue of Postmodern Culture, it is supposed to be didactic and illustrative of techno-po principles, at which it is quite successful.
One of the best pieces in this mode -- the self-referential graphic new media essay -- is still Charles Bernstein's and Dante Piombino's Mosaic for a Convergence, which doesn't use any Flash etc. and is quite ugly to look at. Worth spending a few minutes of your work-time noodling through it's doodles (indeed, it makes the act of clicking feel like "doodling" itself -- rare).
I'm still losing sleep over the fact that my piece, The Truth Interview, with Kim Rosenfield, has not received a whole lot of attention, though, indeed, one part of TheLanguageofNewMedia -- the bit with the words moving up on elevated lines -- seems some sort of reference to the make-your-own-poem game of the Truth Interview (click the red button that says "vote" on the left column).
Thom's been doing lots of nice work with designers and programmers -- a writer working with other artisans, in the tradition of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Kenneth Goldsmith (in his web work) -- which I think is a good way to go for "cyberpoets" and whatnot who don't have the time to really make the plunge into a new trade. Not that the do-it-yourself line is all that bad either.
Tell me I'm nuts... here's the second "Dreamlife" style ad I've seen today (the first is just below)...
Rachel thinks I'm just seeing things, but I've been looking at how people use letters in other Doubleclick Flash ads, and it's nothing like this kind of naive playful stuff with fades etc. on an orange background.
If you see any others, send them to me! (You can find Flash ads in your browser's Temporary Files folder -- you can't just download them from the page.)
By the way, if you ever want to eavesdrop on the ubuweb group, you can see it here: Yahoo! Groups : ubuweb (I think).
I had just finished writing an email to the ubu list about bpNichol's line "All That Signifies Can Be Sold," which I was critical of, and then turned to Yahoo! to do a search, and what do I see...
This, for those of you not in the know, appears to my naive, perhaps self-interested eyes, as a rip-off of my Dreamlife of Letters. The colors, the recombinant aspect of the letters, the fades, etc. (Click "Refresh" to see it play again.)
My ubu post was the following:
That bpNichol quote always kind of annoyed me, actually, or I think it's a bit easy. It doesn't say anything about how much something is being "sold" for, or for how long it could be "sold." If something "sells" for a week or so, I hardly think of it as "sold" -- i.e. we all just sink back into the slime of artists for other artists. (And certainly practices that don't signify are not accounted, obviously.)
That's why people keep trying to resurrect forgotten modernists -- most recently in the new How2 -- as if, because they haven't been "sold" in a long time, they are fresh, and the mission isn't complete until said modernist can be "sold" again. I guess I am not sure whether Nichol is being a neo-Romantic in this quote: like with MacLluhan, there is the pith of the observation but I'm not sure of the affect.
Even if there is no "endgame," I think there has to be some sort of striving that can escape the fatalistic ironies of "All That Signifies Can Be Sold." That's like saying "All Who Born Boys Can Be Seedy Old Men" -- of course that's true, and it's much funnier and closer to sounding like an obscured truth than "All Who Are Born Boys Can Be A Good Parent" -- but do I want that (i.e. the former)?
But I do agree that the old "museum walls" idea of the white page and "official literature" lost its charge, oh, 20-25 years ago. All of these confrontations -- deflecting "absorption," "decisive" confrontations -- happen on a stage that only those already invested in the discourse (which itself is canonizing) can view.
My mother has no idea what the value of a book like "Day" is because she doesn't know who Duchamp or Cage were or cares. (BTW, I gave a copy of "Day" to my friend who is a Reuters journalist based out of Boston -- he liked it, but for reasons more peculiar to his hatred of the NY Times.) It's self-deception to think that the book has an egalitarian value accessible to all potential readers or consumers -- the kind of self-deception I'm afraid John Cage himself promoted, as if his chance-operations could side-step the sort of disciplines necessary to attain the states of spiritual nirvana his artistic practices are premised on achieving.
We have to admit, part of the reason something like "Day" works is because he think of it as an imposition on the canon -- and how the canon is supported, via the book trade -- and not just because it's so grossly exaggerated as a "writing" project. It's a book that stands on the shoulders of giants, I think, as does all of Kenny's work (and I think it was Newton who coined that phrase), but that doesn't preclude him becoming a giant himself.
Anyway, my two cents...
Wired News: Bush Impeached? Wanna Bet?
Though there was an outcry over the Pentagon's terrorism futures market, a similar online exchange is in the works to predict what the U.S. government is up to.
The American Action Market will offer various Washington "futures" that can be bet upon and traded. Examples include:
•Which country will the White House threaten next?
•Who will be the next foreign leader to move off the CIA payroll and onto the White House's "most wanted" list?
•Which corporation with close ties to the White House will be the next cloaked in scandal?
The AAM will begin registering traders in September and plans to open for business Oct. 1 -- the same launch date proposed for the Pentagon's terrorism market, until it was shelved.