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My new cheap Canon digital was behaving badly at the party last Sunday to celebrate Nada and Gary's wedding, but it lasted long enough to get off a few good ones. You in blogland will recognize many of these faces -- in fact, I tended to stick to the smoking patio and the immediate environs given the heat in the restaurant. Have fun.
(Isn't there more than a faint resemblance between the Madame (to the right) and Nada below? Now if I could only find that picture of Maureen Dowd...)
Gary and Nada's Wedding 5/23/04
Who would have thought Farrar Straus & Giroux would have to lean on Arras to help move a few copies of their new book by Jeff Clark.
Music and Suicide: Poems, Jeff Clark
From the site:
"Jeff Clark's first collection, The Little Door Slides Back, was hailed as an unclassifiable classic in underground American writing: "Remarkable for its liveliness and intelligence" (Chicago Review), "Amazing and ambitious" (Rain Taxi), "a 120-page spell" (American Letters & Commentary), "A happy sadomasochism, a luxuriance of prurience" (Boston Review), "Devoted to the idea of possibility in the poet who operates as free agent, looking to the weather not for the springs of dailiness but for some message from the aether" (Arras), "[Clark's work] creates . . . our own precursors, precursors who behave differently than our supposed avant-garde" (Rhizome)."
Though I liked his book, I didn't hail it as an "unclassifiable classic" -- who would want to buy one of those anyway (well, me, I guess) -- and since there's no underground American writing, I don't know what that means. But heigh-ho Jeff, congrats on the new pub!
These actually use a little programming. Still the same basic principle, though less than flattering pictures of Rachel in the first one:
http://www.arras.net/polaroids/weird.html
http://www.arras.net/polaroids/subwaywoman.html
I'm working on a much longer, more complicated one based on photos of Times Square at night -- it will be more like a film, though just using 20 or so images. Fun!
[Quick and dirty comments on some thing I read on Kasey's {limetree} recently regarding Poets Against the War and the feeling among "us" about it recently. BTW, I had to delete the comments function of my site until Movable Type comes up with some way to keep out the spam.]
I didn't like PAW at all, thought it made the mistake of:
1) making it seem natural that poets would be against the war because poets, like puppies, are against war in general, which we know has not been historically true at all -- quite the opposite. This seemed a deception and a misrepresentation at a time when we really had to make clear that poets who are against the war are free-thinking adults.
2) it equated poems with votes -- the ridiculous parading of numbers of poems contributed was embarrassing considering that numbeer of poems/votes could not have turned an election in Boise, nevermind the country (or the world).
3) the free use of the word "historical" in describing (rather immodestly, I thought) the achievement of the site and the publciation of the book was really distracting, and being a web-guy myself, I can tell you that numbers, content, email lists, all that stuff, are very easy to do on the web -- I had more spam in my inbox this morning than they had poems on their site -- and they didn't organize the site so well, it was ugly and amateurish, nothing to brag so much about (and they DID brag). It looked like the work of monks.
4) after all that, I don't think any of us can point to a single poem that managed to capture the public imagination or serve as a succinct (contradictory, emoitionally nuanced, "poetic," etc) reflection or summary of anti-war (or anti-whatever) feeling. I.e. the words didn't do the work.
So I think it did "us" more harm than good -- that, in an effort for poets to "get along" in a time of crisis (why, so that we can scare them with a united front? 40 of our strongest poets couldn't win a wrestling match with a smalltown junior high school team) we simply pretend we don't have ideas beyond public expressions of pacifism, angst, moral rage, etc -- wrong to me.
"We" poets were represented as rather inarticulate in the face of an administration that likes to walk around with their knives hanging out of their pockets, preferring rather to brandish their grandfatherly and evangelical tones on Fox and CNN. We have to find a way to defeat these tones with our own, which takes precision, practice, charisma, etc. -- not mere numbers and pious exhibitionism.
Poets are not a class, or above it all, or much better at thinking about these things, than anyone else. We fall into the same patterns that Bush falls into when he describes Americans as being naturally this or that, more just, incapable of torture, yadda yadda. We have to resist being "specialists" in anything in this regard, we have to not know our own friends -- to be in the world and outside of this "community." And stop grandstanding among ourselves. If you want to grandstand, go to Union Square.
There is a point to PAW, however, which is to improve upon it. It was still a good idea on some levels.
Oh dear, I'm in a bad mood... sorry dudes. Just stating my opinion.
Brian
[PS: Heriberto Yepez has some similar remarks on his website mexperimental.
Also, it shouldn't be assumed, because of I wrote above, that I am necessarily in favor of the various poetry anthologies coming from the "experimental" side of poetry are more successful -- I don't think so at all.
Finally, I support all efforts by poets to keep these issues alive, though I think it's quite ironic that a digital camera has done more work for "us" in this regard than any of the writing by journalists or defectors from the administration in the past months.]
[If you happen to be in London in early May, I'm coming for a visit and appearing here.]
The Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC) Birkbeck presents:
The Birkbeck Contemporary Poetry Conference – ‘On the Language’
Friday May 7th 2004
13:45 - Introduction by William Rowe.
14:00 to 15:30 - Language Now session
- Bruce Andrews – [‘Reading & Poetics’]
- Redell Olsen – [‘Visual Performance, Process and Poetics’]
- Jed Rasula – [‘Licence for Nonsense: Mystification and Opportunism in the wake of Language Poetry’]
- Robert Sheppard – [‘The Poetics of Maggie O’Sullivan’]
16:00 to 17:30 - The ‘Edges of Language’ session
- John Cayley – [‘Undeferred: Poetics, Inscription & Time’]
- Rob Holloway
- Brian Kim Stefans – [‘Circulars as Anti-Poem’]
19:00 to 21:30 (-ish) - Readings [1]
- Caroline Bergvall
- Ulli Freer – [‘BURNER ON THE BUFF’]
- Bill Griffiths – [‘The New North East’]
- Rod Mengham – [‘Terra Infirma’]
- Jed Rasula – [‘Tabula Rasula’]
- Brian Kim Stefans – [‘Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics’]
Saturday May 8th 2004
13:30 to 15:30 - Language & Design in Poetry Session
- Caroline Bergvall
- Bill Griffiths – ['Variations of Language']
- Pierre Joris – [‘Towards a Nomad Poetics: Poetry and Translation in a Global Age’]
- Peter Middleton
16:00 to 17:45(-ish) - Movement – Image – Text Session
- Brian Catling – [‘Muffled Blurs’]
- cris cheek
- Iain Sinclair [‘The City of Disappearances’]
- Lawrence Upton
19:00 to 21:30(-ish) – Readings [2]
- Gilbert Adair [‘Here as a Genre’]
- Bruce Andrews – [‘Recent Performativity’]
- Brian Catling – [‘In Advance of Puppeted Words’]
- Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte – [“S U M E R I C A V E –’]
- Redell Olsen – [‘Recent Work’]
- Aaron Williamson [‘Of Lives and Saints’]
Venue : Birkbeck College, Mallet Street, London WC1E 7HX, room b36
Nearest Tubes: Russell Square, Euston, Euston Square, Warren Street
Admission:
2 days £20/£10 concessions, 1 day £12/£8
Readings only £6/£3 per day
Tickets on the day.
Contact:
Stephen on 020 72444670 or at estaphin@hotmail.com
Piers at 07780 767099 or at piershugill@hotmail.com
[Darren Wershler-Henry had the brilliant idea of writing s series of poems using only the words that his dog understands. I don't have a dog myself, but a friend of mine recently wrote to me about his mother's dog, who for some reason responds strongly to the phrase "il conformista," which is the name of the famous Bertolucci film (starring the wonderful Dominique Sanda). He also, unwittingly in his email, told me a few other words that the dog understands, and of course I couldn't help translating one of the Pisan Cantos into dog language. This is the first of what I imagine to be a growing anthology of poems based on the vocabulary of dogs... I'd love to read others.]
Dog Canto
Outside... il conformista
walk milkbone
roll-over
il conformista
Sit! sit!
il conformista
Paw! paw!
il conformista
roll-over il conformista...
Good doggy.
Good good doggy.
Fidelius.
I had to take down my Denis Roche "Bootleg" for a few days because of a copyright infringement, but the publisher of Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Collected Poems, Anthony Barnett, has graciously permitted me to leave it up so long as I give proper acknowledgement in the file. There actually is a bibliography of source books on the last pages of the document, but no mention of permissions -- I'll fix that as soon as I get home today.
Ron Silliman has blogged my little chapbook, Jai-lai for Autocrats, published recently by Brenda Ijima's Yo-Yo Labs. He neglected to make the obvious pun, that FSC is, after all, the new FSG. Thanks Ron for the plug!
Lastly, I've been working on designs for the Segue Foundation site, just for practice really since I haven't been asked to do this and am not being paid. But heck, what they have now is such an eyesore, and I'm already doing the calendar for them! I've also recently designed a site for an employee peer of mine, Jane House.
I just discovered the following review by Edward Picot of Papertiger, a CDRom journal of poetry and art published out of Brisbane, Australia, that has a really nice paragraph on my Flash piece The Dreamlife of Letters.
I think he's totally spot on (of course, because he likes it!), right down to the last bit about it not being "avant-garde" or the issue with newness. It's for this very reason that, when asked to produce statements on "digital poetry" I rarely if ever write about what one is able to do with text in motion, etc. I've never been very convinced that a resurgence of "avant-garde" activity was imminent due to the availability of digital technology. But I'll take the "mastery" and even "form of classicism" that Picot mentions -- it's what one can aspire to with the extraordinary control that software and coding often provides.
Yadda yadda -- I'm a bit too tired right now to really divagate on these themes. Sorry for the my-own-horn-tooting, just not much else for the blog these days.
trAce Online Writing Centre - Review
"The last section is titled "Flash", and consists of four pieces of Flash poetry. None of them is non-linear, and none of them is interactive. The most interesting is The Dream Life of Letters by Brian Kim Stefans - a kind of fantasy on the letters of the alphabet, showing a list of words that start with each letter in turn, all animated in various ways. The whole sequence is played out within the confines of an orange square, and all the words are shown either in black or white, or a mixture of the two. Black or white lettering on an orange square works very effectively as a visual statement, as the Orange mobile phone company has discovered, so Stefans has this in his favour from the start. He doesn't use any sound effects, so his letters and words float and dance around the screen in silence, which enhances the dreamlike atmosphere of the piece. He is constantly inventive, frequently witty and thought-provoking: numerous small white examples of the word "am" go floating down the page early on in the piece, for example, with only one black "am" amongst them, which seems to say something about individuality. "Conventional", "cunt" and "curse" follow one another in quick succession around a circling C - the prim is replaced by the obscenely vulgar, and the third word, "curse", both describes "cunt" as a swear-word, and acts as a colloquialism for menstruation. There is a lot of material about gender and sexuality here, as Stefans suggests in his introduction to the piece, but for me its fascination lies primarily in how it works as a piece of design. Words and letters drift and drip down the square, or bounce, or float upwards, or slide across from one side to the other, or fade in and out. They can be aligned to the right, to the left, to the top or bottom. They can be large or small. Sometimes they chase each other, sometimes they are transformed into each other, and sometimes a formation made by one word is broken by an onslaught from another. This isn't avant-garde art: The Dreamlife of Letters is not trying to be radically different from anything we have ever seen before. On the contrary, the austerity and simplicity of its layout suggest a form of classicism, a purifying and restatement of themes and formats that have already been attempted more than once. What we are being asked to admire here is not newness but mastery within a given medium: not invention but inventiveness."
There,
They,
Were,
Yet,
Again,
Accordingly,
For,
Two,
Days,
More; When,
Strether,
On,
Being,
At,
Mrs. Pocock’s,
Hotel,
Ushered,
Into,
That,
Lady’s,
Salon,
Found,
Himself,
At,
First,
Assuming,
A,
Mistake,
On,
The,
Part,
Of,
The,
Servant,
Who,
Had,
Introduced,
Him,
And,
Retired. The,
Occupants,
Hadn’t,
Come,
In,
For,
The,
Room,
Looked,
Empty,
As,
Only,
A,
Room,
Can,
Look,
In,
Paris,
Of,
A,
Fine,
Afternoon,
When,
The,
Faint,
Murmur,
Of,
The,
Huge,
Collective,
Life,
Carried,
On,
Out,
Of,
Doors,
Strays,
Among,
Scattered,
Objects,
Even,
As,
A,
Summer,
Air,
Idles,
In,
A,
Lonely,
Garden. Our,
Friend,
Looked,
About,
And,
Hesitated; Observed,
On,
The,
Evidence,
Of,
A,
Table,
Charged,
With,
Purchases,
And,
Other,
Matters,
That,
Sarah,
Had,
Become,
Possessed—By,
No,
Aid,
From,
Him—Of,
The,
Last,
Number,
Of,
The,
Salmon-coloured,
Revue; Noted,
Further,
That,
Mamie,
Appeared,
To,
Have,
Received,
A,
Present,
Of,
Fromentin’s,
“Maitres,
d’Autrefois”,
From,
Chad,
Who,
Had,
Written,
Her,
Name,
On,
The,
Cover; And,
Pulled,
Up,
At,
The,
Sight,
Of,
A,
Heavy,
Letter,
Addressed,
In,
A,
Hand,
He,
Knew. This,
Letter,
Forwarded,
By,
A,
Banker,
And,
Arriving,
In,
Mrs. Pocock’s,
Absence,
Had,
Been,
Placed,
In,
Evidence,
And,
It,
Drew,
From,
The,
Fact,
Of,
Its,
Being,
Unopened,
A,
Sudden,
Queer,
Power,
To,
Intensify,
The,
Reach,
Of,
Its,
Author. It,
Brought,
Home,
To,
Him,
The,
Scale,
On,
Which,
Mrs. Newsome—For,
She,
Had,
Been,
Copious,
Indeed,
This,
Time—Was,
Writing,
To,
Her,
Daughter,
While,
She,
Kept,
Him,
In,
Durance; And,
It,
Had,
Altogether,
Such,
An,
Effect,
Upon,
Him,
As,
Made,
Him,
For,
A,
Few,
Minutes,
Stand,
Still,
And,
Breathe,
Low.
[I wrote this several years ago for the journal Kenning. I don't think I've put this online yet. I think the question posed to everyone was how one thought of oneself in relation to the term "poet critic."]
I haven’t found the term “poet-critic” very useful since it suggests that one could tack on hyphenated nouns endlessly to the phrase for every new activity that a poet might engage in (though I like the ring of “poet-programmer” since it’s a relatively new and confusing creature). A “poet-critic” is really not new, and most neologisms in criticism are bad (such as “poethics”). I think there could be a richer community of critical writers on poetry, people who are interested in creating flexible, lively terminology for further discussion and not keywords for academic roundtables, though there is often a fine line between these two categories. I think some poets could write very great criticism if they found a way of being excited about the language of criticism itself, but also about the drama of the critic in the world (searching for one’s own “lettre du voyant”). My sense is that the listserv critic would be a more interesting phenomenon were people more careful with their prose styles in emails; of course, since much of that writing is considered ephemeral, it’s understandable that many are not willing to take this extra step, and so I wonder if the listserv, rather than increasing our communal interest for extra-poetic verbiage, has in fact been detrimental to “criticism.” Impatience and a sense of wonder might be the two best qualities of a critic, though neither is very useful without a decent prose style. I guess, in the end, I would be interested in critical writing that had a theatrical bent, animating the entire stage of critical and cultural activity and how we work within it, shedding an optimistic light on the state of affairs while also providing a sense of urgency and focus.
The new issue of the Poetry Project newsletter has a nice little article by John Ashbery in it about the poet Joan Murray, whom Auden had picked as his first Yale Younger poet in 1947. Murray, who died at 25 and wrote most of her work in the last year and half of her life (Auden was a teacher of hers at the New School and made a special request that a ms. of hers be submitted), has an exquisite "ear" -- the relish for the extra syllable, the knowledge when to make a line sprawl or contract, the off-rhyme -- that Ashbery compares to the effect of waves washing up on shore. Here's a poem of hers I found online -- most of them were titled by her editor, using the first line of the poem, so let's assume this one is called "Sleep, Little Architect":
Sleep, little architect. It is your mother's wish
That you should lave your eyes and hang them up in dreams.
Into the lowest sea swims the great sperm fish.
If I should rock you, the whole world would rock within my arms.
Your father is a greater architect than even you.
His structure falls between high Venus and far Mars.
He rubs the magic of the old and then peers through
The blueprint where lies the night, the plan the stars.
You will place mountains too, when you are grown.
The grass will not be so insignificant, the stone so dead.
You will spiral up the mansions we have sown.
Drop your lids, little architect. Admit the bats of wisdom into your head.
I don't have Ashbery's article here, but writing my short review of the Yale Younger Poets anthology several years ago, I liked her work (as I did most of what Auden picked), though all I wrote was: "There is some surprisingly good work from two little-known poets whose single volumes were from the series, Joan Murray (who died at 25) and Robert Horan, all chosen by Auden; there is also some embarrassing work that, ironically, is mostly taken from volumes that were among the series' bestsellers." Well, now I feel bad for not giving her more of a plug -- I sound downright condescending, but that's because the anthology itself was so dull (hence the "surprise"). I can't find any of the poetry of Robert Horan online -- he may still be alive, though born in 1922 -- so I guess I'll have to get a copy of that anthology again to see if he's any good. Anyone heard of him?
Which reminds me of another poet who died young, Emily Greenely -- geez, I don't remember if that's her name exactly, but I picked her out of the New Coast issue of Oblek when putting together the first issue of Arras back in 1756 or so -- others were Moxley, Derksen, John Byrum and I think Fitterman, can't remember.
Anyway, I was saddened to hear that she had died -- I thought her work really stood out in that issue, lively and compact -- but always assumed that she would have her work collected in the near future and have a little book. Stupid optimism! (I thought the subways would stay at $1 forever, also.) But outside of Oblek and that first issue of Arras, which was just a stapled thing I put together at MOMA by coming in earlier and "liberating" the copy machine (100 copies or so), I haven't seen anything of hers. William Corbett is her executor and I believe was a teacher of hers. Any news out there about her? Boston in the house? Be nice to put together a collection of her work for some small press.
I'm working on a "bootleg" file of poems by the French poet Denis Roche. The material I have of his so far is:
3 poems in Locus Solus translated by John Ashbery
a sequence in the Paul Auster 20th Century American poetry translated by Harry Matthews
selections in Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Collected Poems
selections in one of Serge Gavronsky's books on poetry in France
more work translated by Gavronsky for the Tyuonyi "Violence of the White Page" issue
I'm writing this from work so I don't have all of the references at hand.
There's a children's book illustrator named Denis Roche who is not the same person. Our Denis Roche was an editor of Tel Quel, a translator of The ABC of Reading and I think the Cantos in to French, and is now (primarily?) a photographer -- below is one of his snaps (I'm sure he would cringe at the term):
I did find the following list of translations:
From the papers of Eric Mottram:
"French poets: Mottram manuscript essay headed 'Under the influence of Rimbaud' [1973-1978]; Mottram manuscript notes on mid-20th century French poets [1973-1978]; a section of photocopies of modern French poets' work, including Marcelin Pleynet, Denis Roche, Anne-Marie Albiach, Jean Daive [1984]"
From The Paris Review # 42: Winter-Spring 1968:
Eros Possessed: A Play
From New Observations (a journal I never heard of before):
54. Ecriture - The French Mind -
Serge Gavronsky
January/February 1988
Julia Kristeva, Anne-Marie Albiach, Ludovic Janvier, Marcelin Pleynet, Emmanuel Hocquard, Leslie Kaplan, Jacques Roubaud, Denis Roche, Martine Aballea, Denis Levaillant.
And a book published by Pennsylvania State University Press called that has a half chapter dedicated to his writing, published in 1999:
Poeticized Language
The Foundations of Contemporary French Poetry
Steven Winspur
I could probably get this last one in my library. The Paris Review issue is available cheap on abe.com.
Anyone know where the Mottram is available outside of his papers collected at King's College? Or what New Observations is all about? Also, come across any translations of Denis Roche? Interested in making some?
Articles in French by or about him online:
TROFOR > Webzine > PHOTO > C’EST MOI DENIS ROCHE
DENIS ROCHE
Le Web de l'Humanité: Denis Roche : une magie des images - Article paru le 19 avril 1999
Articles (fr) : Denis Roche - La Rage de l'expression ou le dernier des Mohicans
GRAVITATION
Lire : le magazine littéraire. L'actualité de la littérature francaise et de la littérature étrangère.
Here's another snaps:
This blog is slowly dying -- on September 26, its first birthday, it's going into the deep freeze. The Madame will take her tarot mysteries elsewhere.
I'd kill it right now but some of the material is still new, and that Iowa interview is still sending visitors over here. A partial archive list appears below, or you can click on "master archive" above to see the entire fabulous mess.
In the meantime, check out the site I designed for my sister Lindsay's company Invisible Light Studio. The site is presently not working too well on PCs -- problem with the stylesheet which I'll change when I get home -- but I'm pretty happy with the quick work (1 day!) I did on this -- very much a "in-progress," it will change over the course of this coming week.
Thanks for all of you who have visited here on and off for the past year. I'm sure I'll come up with something in the next year that will cover some of this territory, though it probably won't have anything to do with poetry.
Situationist-inspired graffiti has become the new thing, apparently -- a link to the Bureau of Public Secrets was posted both to ubuweb and the UKPoetry listserv recently, and I got an email from Stephen Vincent which I'm pasting in after the graffiti (click "read more") that acts as a sort of new introduction to the selections below.
If you like this stuff, check out the Anarchist site nothingness.org, which has an extensive online library of Situationist writings, including Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life, which inspired much of the graffiti and which I used for the Vaneigem series of fake Times articles. Nothingness also includes a small gallery of May 68 posters:
Nixon...the dustbin of history awaits you
My own inclination is to get past easy assocations of what is happening now with what happened in Paris, as (briefly) the political ferment of 68 led to some excessive jockeying for power and unwise commentary -- not to mention alliances -- from many of its young participants, and the kind of "nostalgia for the 60s" vibe that's been going around these days might make people gravitate toward positions purely for the sake of some romantic sense of truth in living / action.
This is not to say that the division between "living" and "surviving" is not as blurry now as it ever was -- quite the opposite, but unless one really submits to the spiritual and psychological discipline this graffiti (and The Revolution of Everyday Life) demands, I don't see what use one can put the political "fuck the police" aspect to.
I think the substance of the "now" has to be looked at in its own right, without posturing, and motivating energies derived from that -- one presumes passionate -- analysis. I think the seed of a "new poetics" (particularly for "Americans") can be found in the terse, socially-coded, paradoxical but demanding (as in "we, those who refuse to die, make these demands") style of the stuff below -- some are already doing it.
The much-balleyhooed French (or Cartesian) manner of hyper-rational, skeptical thinking, along with prose stylistics based on studies of Latin masters, not to mention a fair degree of Jesuitical missionary fervor -- and further, the dregs of the hardest core Surrealism -- go into the psychological mix that produces this type of writing as well.
This is not to suggest that the graffiti artists were all versed in these traditions, more that they were "in the air" of the culture, and are somewhat alien to American culture, in which the spirit of the petulant unsaid was never very gainfully employed.
It's a peculiar feature of this graffiti that some of it doesn't make a lot of immediate sense -- my favorite is "Under the paving stones, the beach" -- which has nothing to do with severing the sign or Wittgensteinian mind-games. Oh, possibly, but there's a huge difference between this and Robert Grenier's "Sentences." The Situationists thought the American avant-garde willful naifs -- apolitical pot-smoking hedonists, of sorts, whereas they, of course, preferred wine.
May 1968 Graffiti
In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.
Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .
Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, “We will breathe later.”
And most of them don’t die because they are already dead.
Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.
We want to live.
Don’t beg for the right to live — take it.
In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.
The liberation of humanity is all or nothing.
Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.
No replastering, the structure is rotten.
Masochism today takes the form of reformism.
Reform my ass.
The revolution is incredible because it’s really happening.
I came, I saw, I was won over.
Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!
Quick!
If we only have enough time . . .
In any case, no regrets!
Already ten days of happiness.
Live in the moment.
Comrades, if everyone did like us . . .
We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy.
Down with the state.
When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater, all the bourgeois theaters should be turned into national assemblies.*
[*Written above the entrance of the occupied Odéon Theater]
Referendum: whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.
It’s painful to submit to our bosses;
it’s even more stupid to choose them.
Let’s not change bosses, let’s change life.
Don’t liberate me — I’ll take care of that.
I’m not a servant of the people (much less of their self-appointed leaders). Let the people serve themselves.
Abolish class society.
Nature created neither servants nor masters.
I want neither to rule nor to be ruled.
We will have good masters as soon as everyone is their own.
“In revolution there are two types of people:
those who make it and those who profit from it.”
(Napoleon)
Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives.”
Don’t be taken in by the politicos and their filthy demagogy.
We must rely on ourselves.
Socialism without freedom is a barracks.
All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.
The revolution doesn’t belong to the committees, it’s yours.
Politics is in the streets.
Barricades close the streets but open the way.
Our hope can come only from the hopeless.
A proletarian is someone who has no power over his life and knows it.
Never work.
People who work get bored when they don’t work.
People who don’t work never get bored.
Workers of all countries, enjoy!
Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases.
My father before me fought for wage increases.
Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen.
Yet my whole life has been a drag.
Don’t negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.
The boss needs you, you don’t need the boss.
By stopping our machines together we will demonstrate their weakness.
Occupy the factories.
Power to the workers councils.
(an enragé)
Power to the enragés councils.
(a worker)
Worker: You may be only 25 years old,
but your union dates from the last century.
Labor unions are whorehouses.
Comrades, let’s lynch Séguy!*
[*Georges Séguy, head bureaucrat of the Communist Party-dominated labor union]
Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.
Stalinists, your children are with us!
Man is neither Rousseau’s noble savage nor the Church’s or La Rochefoucauld’s depraved sinner.
He is violent when oppressed, gentle when free.
Conflict is the origin of everything.
(Heraclitus)
If we have to resort to force, don’t sit on the fence.
Be cruel.
Humanity won’t be happy till the last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat.
When the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still have “problems”?
The passion of destruction is a creative joy.
(Bakunin)
A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of total revolution.
The tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods.
This concerns everyone.
We are all German Jews.
We refuse to be highrised, diplomaed, licensed,
inventoried, registered, indoctrinated, suburbanized,
sermonized, beaten, telemanipulated, gassed, booked.
We are all “undesirables.”
We must remain “unadapted.”
The forest precedes man, the desert follows him.
Under the paving stones, the beach.
Concrete breeds apathy.
Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.
Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming: life versus survival.
“My aim is to agitate and disturb people.
I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.”
(Unamuno)
Conservatism is a synonym for rottenness and ugliness.
You are hollow.
You will end up dying of comfort.
Hide yourself, object!
No to coat-and-tie revolution.
A revolution that requires us to sacrifice ourselves for it is Papa’s revolution.
Revolution ceases to be the moment it calls for self-sacrifice.
The prospect of finding pleasure tomorrow will never compensate for today’s boredom.
When people notice they are bored, they stop being bored.
Happiness is a new idea.
Live without dead time.
Those who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring to everyday reality have a corpse in their mouth.
Culture is an inversion of life.
Poetry is in the streets.
The most beautiful sculpture is a paving stone thrown at a cop’s head.
Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse.
Art is dead, let’s liberate our everyday life.
Art is dead, Godard can’t change that.
Godard: the supreme Swiss Maoist jerk.
Permanent cultural vibration.
We want a wild and ephemeral music.
We propose a fundamental regeneration:
concert strikes,
sound gatherings with collective investigation.
Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone.
Anarchy is me.
Revolution, I love you.
Down with the abstract, long live the ephemeral.
(Marxist-Pessimist Youth)
Don’t consume Marx, live him.
I’m a Groucho Marxist.
I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.
Desiring reality is great! Realizing your desires is even better!
Practice wishful thinking.
I declare a permanent state of happiness.
Be realistic, demand the impossible.
Power to the imagination.
Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.
Imagination is not a gift, it must be conquered.
(Breton)
Action must not be a reaction, but a creation.
Action enables us to overcome divisions and find solutions.
Exaggeration is the beginning of invention.
The enemy of movement is skepticism. Everything that has been realized comes from dynamism, which comes from spontaneity.
Here, we spontane.
“You must bear a chaos in yourself in order to bring a dancing star into the world.”
(Nietzsche)
Chance must be systematically explored.
Alcohol kills. Take LSD.
Unbutton your mind as often as your fly.
“Every view of things that is not strange is false.”
(Valéry)
Life is elsewhere.
Forget everything you’ve been taught. Start by dreaming.
Form dream committees.
Dare! This word contains all the politics of the present moment. (Saint-Just)
Arise, ye wretched of the university.
Students are jerks.
The student’s susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for any cause is a sufficient demonstration of his real impotence.
(enragé women)
Professors, you make us grow old.
Terminate the university.
Rape your Alma Mater.
What if we burned the Sorbonne?
Professors, you are as senile as your culture, your modernism is nothing but the modernization of the police.
We refuse the role assigned to us: we will not be trained as police dogs.
We don’t want to be the watchdogs or servants of capitalism.
Exams = servility, social promotion, hierarchical society.
When examined, answer with questions.
Be young and be quiet (a variation on the more common "Sois belle et tais toi", the classically sexist French version of "Just sit there and look pretty")
Insolence is the new revolutionary weapon.
Every teacher is taught, everyone taught teaches.
The Old Mole of history seems to be splendidly undermining the Sorbonne.
(telegram from Marx, 13 May 1968)
Thought that stagnates rots.
To call in question the society you “live” in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.
Take revolution seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously.
The walls have ears. Your ears have walls.
Making revolution also means breaking our internal chains.
A cop sleeps inside each one of us. We must kill him.
Drive the cop out of your head.
Religion is the ultimate con.
Neither God nor master.
If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.
Can you believe that some people are still Christians?
Down with the toad of Nazareth.
How can you think freely in the shadow of a chapel?
We want a place to piss, not a place to pray.
I suspect God of being a leftist intellectual.
The bourgeoisie has no other pleasure than to degrade all pleasures.
Going through the motions kills the emotions.
Struggle against the emotional fixations that paralyze our potentials. (Committee of Women on the Path of Liberation)
Constraints imposed on pleasure incite the pleasure of living without constraints.
The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution.
The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.
SEX: It’s okay, says Mao, as long as you don’t do it too often.
Comrades, 5 hours of sleep a day is indispensable:
we need you for the revolution.
Embrace your love without dropping your guard.
I love you!!! Oh, say it with paving stones!!!
I“m coming in the paving stones.
Total orgasm.
Comrades, people are making love in the Poli Sci classrooms, not only in the fields.
Revolutionary women are more beautiful.
Zelda, I love you! Down with work!
The young make love, the old make obscene gestures.
Make love, not war.
Love one another.
Whoever speaks of love destroys love.
Down with consumer society.
The more you consume, the less you live.
Commodities are the opium of the people.
Burn commodities.
You can’t buy happiness. Steal it.
See Nanterre and live. Die in Naples with Club Med.
Are you a consumer or a participant?
To be free in 1968 means to participate.
I participate.
You participate.
He participates.
We participate.
They profit.
The golden age was the age when gold didn’t reign.
“The cause of all wars, riots and injustices is the existence of property.”
(St. Augustine)
Happiness is hanging your landlord.
Millionaires of the world unite. The wind is turning.
The economy is wounded — I hope it dies!
How sad to love money.
You too can steal.
“Amnesty: An act in which the rulers pardon the injustices they have committed.”
(Ambrose Bierce)*
[*The definition in Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is actually: “Amnesty: The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.”]
Abolish alienation.
Obedience begins with consciousness;
consciousness begins with disobedience.
First, disobey; then write on the walls.
(Law of 10 May 1968)
I don’t like to write on walls.
Write everywhere.
Before writing, learn to think.
I don’t know how to write but I would like to say beautiful things and I don’t know how.
I don’t have time to write!!!
I have something to say but I don’t know what.
Freedom is the right to silence.
Long live communication, down with telecommunication.
You, my comrade, you who I was unaware of amid the tumult, you who are throttled, afraid, suffocated — come, talk to us.
Talk to your neighbors.
Yell.
Create.
Look in front of you!!!
Help with cleanup, there are no maids here.
Revolution is an INITIATIVE.
Speechmaking is counterrevolutionary.
Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.
Don’t get caught up in the spectacle of opposition. Oppose the spectacle.
Down with spectacle-commodity society.
Down with journalists and those who cater to them.
Only the truth is revolutionary.
No forbidding allowed.
Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes. It is our ultimate weapon.
The freedom of others extends mine infinitely.
No freedom for the enemies of freedom.
Free our comrades.
Open the gates of the asylums, prisons and other faculties.
Open the windows of your heart.
To hell with boundaries.
You can no longer sleep quietly once you’ve suddenly opened your eyes.
The future will only contain what we put into it now.
*
These graffiti are drawn primarily from Julien Besançon’s Les murs ont la parole (Tchou, 1968), Walter Lewino’s L’imagination au pouvoir (Losfeld, 1968), Marc Rohan’s Paris ’68 (Impact, 1968), René Viénet’s Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Gallimard, 1968), and Gérard Lambert’s Mai 1968: brûlante nostalgie (Pied de nez, 1988).
Translated by Ken Knabb, March 1999.
No copyright.
-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Vincent
Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2003 12:16 PM
To: UB Poetics discussion group
Cc: Brian Kim Stefans [arras.net]; Friends; Christine Murray
Subject: Graffiti/ 1968
Many are saying that the Iraq quagmire will repeat the one of the war in Viet-Nam. When I read these graffiti (below), it's a bit of a mental rub to negotiate the relationship between the present and the era of 1968 - 1974. The seeming nausea of the present has yet to unleash anything comparable to the rush of both possibility (hope) and critique that's operative in the graffiti. Maybe the nausea goes hand in hand with the current depressed economy where the economy in 1968 was robust and supportive of conditions of opposition, imagination, etc. Who knows? The only contradiction to the nausea is that at least here - the Bay Area - my sense is that things are more creatively robust than they have been in a long time, as if to say - in the act of making, and getting together with other makers - creative acts are the most visceral way to say fuck the war and vomit out its viral nausea. Whether new political and social critiques arise simultaneously, I can't say. Seems so dormant since last spring. But maybe as the Bush people are saying about the disconnects between his tax cuts and no new job creation, we're just experiencing "the lag factor." (!!) I bring these grafitti over from a posting on the UK poetry listserv. The attribution is at the bottom. Oh yes, a few of them are retrospectively a little embarrassing, or come across as toys thrown back and forth between the already socially and economically privileged. Such as was also true.
Stephen V
I was emailed a request for more info about that late Ezra Pound poem I mention in the Little Review of his Poems and Translations.
The poem was written for Sherri Martinelli, one of Pound's acolytes at St. Elizabeth's -- more like a pretty girl that he liked to have around, it appears, as she was apparently a terrible artist, kind of proto new-agey, yet he tried to promote her work by getting monographs published, etc. -- whose brother had died.
Anthony Hecht, yes that Anthony Hecht, wrote that sestinas, because of their repetitions, were particularly suitable for elegies -- as chants, drones, etc. -- which I never quite believed since I've never read one that made me think of death or the afterlife, despite their incantatory qualities.
But this little poem, which seems like a collapsed, even gutted, sestina to me, makes Hecht's observations (which I don't think are original to him, and are probably obvious after a reading of the Provencal) make a lot of sense. And now that I think of it, "The Painter" and Elizabeth Bishop's sestina about the grandmother and the kettle, etc., are elegies of sorts.
This poem first appeared in the Antigonish Review of Winter, 1971-1972 -- anyone know anything about that publication? I haven't googled it yet. The line about "Adah Lee" really strikes me as Poe-like, and it's struck me for a while now that the Poe line and the Pound line -- by which I mean their delight in, and success with, compact, redolent lyrics -- are very close.
Prayer for a Dead Brother
May his soul walk under the larches of Paradise
May his soul walk in the wood there
And Adah Lee come to look after him.
Queen of Heaven receive him.
Mother of the Seven Griefs receive him
Mother of the seven wounds receive him
May he have peace in heart.
By a stream like Castalia, limpid,
that runs level with the green edge of its banks,
Mother of Heaven receive him,
Queen of Heaven receive him,
Mother of the Seven Griefs give him Peace.
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.
I'm the featured artist on The Iowa Review Web this month, yay:
The Iowa Review Web : Volume 5, Number 4 (September 2003)
There's an interview of me by Giselle Beiguelman, who is...
"a multimedia essayist and web-artist who lives in São Paulo, Brazil, where she was born. She teaches Digital Culture and Literature in the Communication and Semiotics Program at the university there. Since 1998, she has run desvirtual.com, an editorial studio."
She's also the Brazilian digital poets' answer to Madonna and the one you read about in the New York Times last year who created an interactive billboard on a highway near Sao Paolo that project phrases submitted on a website (or something like that). Just Google her and see.
I'm pretty happy with the interview which, though a rambling mess, gets to a lot of good stuff. The new poem sequence that goes with the issue can be linked to just below, right here on FSC, but otherwise, go there to check out my other earlier work.
Sorry to be so self-promo lately but 1) I haven't had much time to write "dispassionate" literary crit of late and 2) nobody likes lit crit anyway, right!
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.
***
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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...
[Tom Raworth sent this one in -- I'm posting it because I like the picture, and JK makes a good mate for Madame Sosostris.]
CNN.com - Kerouac bobblehead doll giveaway - Jul. 29, 2003
LOWELL, Massachusetts (AP) -- A homegrown literary icon will be remembered next month with an honor usually reserved for sports figures: a bobblehead doll.
The first 1,000 fans at the August 21 game between the Lowell Spinners and Williamsport Crosscutters of the Class A New York-Penn League will receive bobbing likenesses of Jack Kerouac.
The giveaway, in partnership with the English department at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, is part of "Jack Kerouac Night" at LeLacheur Park.
The eight-inch doll features Kerouac holding a pen and notebook and standing on a copy of "On The Road," his best-known work.
"It's unusual, to say the least, to have a sports team get involved with a literary figure," said Hilary Holladay, director of the Kerouac Conference on Beat Literature.
Before he was a writer, Kerouac was a baseball fan and athlete. He excelled in football and track at Lowell High School, spent the winter of 1942 as a sportswriter for The Sun of Lowell, and played football at Columbia.
Now this is exciting... Kasey Mohammad of {lime tree} fame -- the site I've probably linked to most frequently from my blog, and who sends me quite a bit of traffic himself (see bottom of sidebar) -- has designed a gorgeous FSC icon for his blogroll.
Thanks Kasey! I encourage everyone to steal it who might want to promote my site. And if you want to promote Kasey's site, which is looking pretty nice these days, steal yourself some limes...
I'm just in work today to pay bills and revise some poems... if you're in much the same position, I encourage you to visit the world's tallest virtual building -- and to make your own floor! I think this will be the next big thing for poets after blogging... you heard it here first. (As of this very moment, the site seems to be down, but try again...)
[My galpal dropped this in my inbox this morning... a klieg light on the secret life of terminals. I've decided to leave the page citation there since, after all, this is right from the book.]
dear mr. arras,
i decided to see what you have been doing on your blog lately. i had fun reading it. i think i would go absolutely mad trying to have an opinion amidst all the chaos.
one thing, however, from a linguist's perspective - you write: "When nouns and noun phrases get pared down like this they can often, ironically, become..." etc.
I would just like to point out that only noun phrases can be pared down in the sense you are talking about, not nouns (or other terminal nodes, as they're called), unless truncation of the actual words is what you have in mind, and on that account the excerpt from Silliman could look more like what I pasted below (i just "pared down" nouns and other terminals) . In that kind of system each truncated word would necessarily signify the full word, plus some extra meaning added by the device of truncation, of course...but that's not how our poor human language works. (i'm just busting you for fun, my friend!).
Tits
are oft mislead,
subtits do are.
Check
out the drive
in the necar
though my rear
at a stop lit
(one ever sees
the lower body),
thi bony ma
wit a white beard,
tricolor rasta,
hisha cheeks
cause tyes to reed.
I dee he's a gentle son.
Rolls off ing
turn right,
ack cinders top the gavel.
ere come a mom
never
Ire my poem hen
tis a parent
it is errible
ma fraud,
o never
choose tear
read this,
butt his mom asses. (N/O 60)
The new image is of Madame Sosostris... but those are not Iraqi playing cards she's dealing.
Gary's posted a short rejoinder on his site... he asked in his backchannel email to me if I thought his rejoinder was too mean, but in fact, I was being mean -- I guess these are the day of getting, and then riding, the goat.
Well, Gary's come out swinging on his weblog, and it's not like I have nothing better to do today but I frankly think he was swinging low... here's my riposte. (None of us have time for more headaches, so hopefully this will fade quick.)
Hey Gary,
Well, this gets MY goat -- I'd be happy to see this go away, but you really go pretty low here -- I'll apologize in advance for taking you up on all your points, and hope this doesn't hurt your feelings. Maybe you could post my response on your weblog?
> DWH's comments above, unlike Swift's brilliant, exhaustive
> excoriation, lack any measurable sense of experience with the medium
> he's dismissing.
Darren's written over 4 books on the subject, and is the creator of both alienated.net (which you should know) and Free as in Speech and Beer, which is a spin-off of his book of that title -- so, if that's a way of "measuring" a "sense of experience," then let's use it.
If by "medium" you mean "personal weblog," then you do not medium as he clearly means it in his paragraph, which is the medium of the internet. Consequently, if you are comparing Darren's blog prose-style to Swifts, you might as well compare Silliman's to Coleridge's, or your own to Mark Twain's -- and then you are right in there with Darren, chanting "anemia," since neither you, nor Silliman (nor I) write so well. Nice tautology.
> I've already argued here for the value of personal weblogs--has Sei
> Shonagon's unedited, "formless" Pillow Book grown "thin" over time?
"Thin over time" -- I think we are talking about two different times here, that of history and that of, say, the daily news. I'm sure there is a blog out there that, collected in its entirety, might be worth reading several years from now, but that's not quite what we are talking about, is it? And because one person succeeds in a "genre" does not free the genre itself for all criticisms. Certainly the historical and romance novel has had its many brilliant successes, but for the most part they are not done well for reasons endemic to the culture that often produces them, that of the cheap paperback novel. So does that mean we don't try to imagine what a good historical novel might be like?
> mostly gender-centric assumptions
This is truly playing to the crowd? Darren's a man, eghad! (Wow, it really gets worse below... Gary, this is disappointing.)
> Let's look at two key words: "over time." Note that, for instance,
> Circulars (which DWH, as well as BKS, had a significant hand in), has
> slowed down significantly in since the invasion in Iraq--it's still
> being updated, but not at all with the collective excitement the site
> enjoyed in the first three or four months of its existence. "Over
> time," the content (literally the content) of Circulars has, in fact,
> thinned--to a proportionally greater degree than, say, that of
> personal weblogs such as Nick Piombino's Fait Accompli or Eileen
> Tabios's CorpsePoetics (formerly WinePoetics). This need not be the
> fate of a politically oriented, multi-authored web publication: take a
> look, for instance, at counterpunch.org.
Counterpunch is a muckraking newsletter that has a paid staff. Circulars was a short-term effort (or as short-term as the war) that was a response to what I sensed was, or would be (or hoped to be) a moment of crisis in terms of American self-identification. But like sports, crises has its seasons, and as you know having seen Circulars, it was a site with a mandate to collect the "disparate activity of poets" out there -- if there is no such activity, then certainly I can't collect it. Nor can I write it -- Coburn and St. Clair are professional journalists who make it there business to churn out prose -- it's what they've trained themselves to do, whereas I've trained myself in something quite different in terms of writing. They have a network of journalists (there is, after all, much more writing on political issues than there is about off-the-cuff journalism about poetry). Anyway, the comparison is specious: Counterpunch is not a weblog, it has a budget, a press office, etc. You know that. And as you know, I announced the death of Circulars weeks ago -- it didn't mysteriously trail away -- the point being that, next time, it could be done better, starting afresh. The paragraph that Nada is commenting on is in fact from an "exchange on Circulars" -- we're thinking of how to do it better. Anything wrong with that?
> DWH uses the modifier "anemic" to describe what he sees as an
> inevitability: the diminishing returns of personal weblogs. Without
> getting into Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor,"
(Why not? I can't imagine anything in it would be as low as what you write below...)
> there's something gender-specific about that particular word and the
> images it may conjur up: It is, after all, women who most often suffer
> from anemia--Nada, for instance, whose strong reaction to DWH's post
> you can read in the "comments" section following DHS's original
> post--has had at least two life-threatening instances of the
> affliction. Would, I wonder, DWH use "diabetic" in a similar way?
> Doubtful.
This is absurd. Plenty of men have anemia (from hemorrhoids, as it turns out, but also just plain old disease). And so did my mother (not from hemorrhoids), for years, and I'm not offended. And she's Korean, could have been a lack of iron in her Korean diet -- did Darren know that? This is low and ridiculous, frankly.
> Why not? Let's be frank: unconsciously, DWH probably would *not* use
> an illness as metaphor that he associated with someone he knows and
> respects. Anemia is a "safe" illness to use as metaphor--unlike AIDS, it's not un-PC to use it this way; unlike diabetes, it's probably not something any of his male writer friends actually has. It is, in fact, something *women* (and old people) have.
You mean, because Steve McCaffery and I are diabetic, he held back from calling webblogs "hypoglycemic"? This is a unique bit of reasoning. And what do you, or anyone else, know about Darren's "unconscious"? What are *you* unconsciously writing about then?
Andrea Brady recently told me that she was "hemmoraging money" in New York -- did I take offense because old people hemmorage more than young? Because hemmoraging leads to anemia? Would you?
> The public journal has, since the Heian period when Sei Shonagon
> authored hers, been associated with "women's writing." Blogger's
> precursor, Diaryland, was decidedly gendered (in look and attitude)
> *female*--assumption no doubt being that the personal journal is
> something chix do.
Most of the bloggers on my blogroll are male because most of them *are* male -- one of them has a blog called "The Jism" -- and I cringe every time I see that name there. Do you? And this business about the public journal going back to the Heian period -- well, what are the great public journals of the last 500 years? Just because it's from a different culture (an "Oriental" culture, I might add), and a different time, does this exotic "otherness" give it authority? Of course, I won't press this point.
> What, one wonders, does DWH consider to be "content"? Anyone who has
> read his wonderful book, Tapeworm Foundry, is probably going to be in
> the dark. (The work decidedly comes down on the Form side of the
> Form/Content divide. It's a oulipoianesque formal game--a good
> one--but a game, nonetheless.)
Sorry Gary, but I have to point out that there's nothing Oulipian about Darren's book -- it's just a string of ideas for poems and performance art projects, hardly formal -- it's a mess, it's more like Cage, loose but all "written," and full of "content" -- you make it sound like Barrett Watten's early work here. Just because it's not confessional content does not mean it's not content. Darren's book can be seen at www.ubu.com/ubu.
> Certainly, if we are to take what DWH says in the Circulars exchange
> at face value, he does not consider one's personal thoughts, opinions
> and emotions to be content--or they are, anyway, *thin* content.
Utterly beside the point. First of all, Nada is responding to an expression of Darren's "personal thoughts," and certainly to his "opinion" -- her complaint, in fact, was that it was "opinionated" (ironic for her of course; she, as do you, as do I, obviously believe that having "opinions" and knowing what they are is important in terms of self-identity). And just because someone splashes on a page "I feel like shit today" does not mean that they are expressing emotions in a way that makes for worthwhile reading -- otherwise, writing would be very easy, and we'd all have best sellers.
Why is it so crazy to think that one has to spend time in writing, and that writing "emotions" is practically the hardest thing to do? I'm amazed at how easy everyone thinks writing is!
(And frankly, if you thought that blogs were at their best when they were in the process of writing "emotions", then why was your St. Mark's blog issue entirely concerned with literary criticism -- didn't have any space for emotions there?)
> Dig the tone of the language he uses: Very Professor Tweed Condescends
> in order to Set the Freshman Girl Straight: "There's nothing *wrong*
> with personal weblogs ..."
You make it sound like he is responding to Nada when in fact Nada is responding to a semi-private correspondence that Darren and I are having and that I'm posting to my blog. Nice camera trick -- "fixed in the edit" -- but it's wrong.
> which have seen Everything! Everything!
Maybe you should read one of the many books he's written on the subject (none released in the US, unfortunately, but in the "elsewhere" of Canada, which I guess isn't far away enough). Why go over the top when you lack basic facts (and, of course, Nada thought Darren wrote "Eunoia").
> before suggesting that one way of addressing anemia is to do "more
> collective writing"--in other words, girls, you really *are*
> incomplete without your (male) Other. Oh, and, in Perfect Professor
> fashion,
Darren's a professor? I've seen you wear more tweed. (You are really beating a rather dead-non-horse here with the gender thing. This is, I dare say, a great example of how an argument can go "anemic" over time.)
> he reminds Freshman & Lapsed Freshman Chix Everywhere: "The problem is
> partly a need for education."
Yes, the education word kind of bothered me here, too, but I think he meant "self-education" -- as in what I did, teach myself a few things. But so he's suggesting that, well, now that we're in the web world, why not take it the next step instead of being bystanders? The internet is there for the taking, why trivialize its great potentialities.
> Uh huh. Of course it is. That's *always* the problem. Because, you
> see, without it, that grand and beautufully Male Thing: Ed(it) YOU
> Cation -- you see, without THAT, people can fall into a dangerous
> space where they begin to think their own thoughts, imagine their own
> futures, and create their own works of art.
Yes, male = edit. Or, male = education. Or whatever, not sure what the point is -- that the women in Afghanistan are not happy about going to school because it's a male thing to do? I'm sure I could list a thousand female poets who edit more than, say, Ron Silliman. Who, by the way, is the most prolific blogger out there. If one really cared for one's own thoughts, one would take the time to write them out very carefully. Original thoughts are, after all, hard to come by.
> DWH's message: Join the Boy's Club. Become Part of the New Old Boy's
> Network. (Note that these multi-authored blogs tend to be male-run,
> and largely male populated.)
Dude, as I said, drop the "multi-authored" from the above and you are talking about blog culture in general. And what multi-authored blogs are you talking about -- you sound like a professor here! You must know something I don't, because you seem to have the entire culture under your thumb! Was there not about a %75 to %25 male to female ratio at the commix convention the other day? Feel guilty? Not me (title of an Eileen Myles book concerned with independent thinking).
(I think it's useful to believe that some people know more about something than I do, like I know that you know more about commix than I do -- doesn't mean I'm a sycophant. I think that equation is harmful.)
> So, where does this language and attitude of DWH come from, and where
> will it lead? Simple: If one *really* wants others to join them, to
> work with them, on some possibly politically relevant or even
> potentially utopic site--it's *crucial* to be arrogant andor
> dismissive andor sexist andor ...
right. Either way, the men win again.
I think the idea is basically that sets of 2 panel cartoon are reconfigured based on the phrase you enter? Or maybe it's entirely random? The basic style is indebted to the little proselytizing pamphlets of Jack Chick.
![frok4[1].png](http://www.arras.net/weblog/frok4[1].png)
![frok13[1].png](http://www.arras.net/weblog/frok13[1].png)
![frok20[1].png](http://www.arras.net/weblog/frok20[1].png)
![frok5[1].png](http://www.arras.net/weblog/frok5[1].png)
[The New York Times had a story about the "corporate blog" a few days back -- I have yet to read it myself, but here is the beginning of Tom Mantrullo's little rant about it, referring to another blogger's call for (corporate)self-immolation.]
from IMproPRieTies:
Jeneane sees corporate blog, slays self:
Who will join me in leaping to a firey death after reading The NY Times article on "The Corporate Blog"?
To blog is to undertake to blog something different from what one blogged before.
[I received this email a few days back from Rachel Blau Duplessis in response to my Flash poem -- which she hasn't yet seen, I gather -- called "The Dreamlife of Letters," which was based, in a sort of twisted, algorithmically-enriched (or impoverished, depending on your pov), on her contribution to "A Poetics Colloquium: Body/Sex/Writing," forum enacted entirely through email on the Buffalo Poetics List in 2000. The email is also addressed to Dee Morris, who had presented a paper on Dreamlife at a conference somewhere (don't know the details on this). Rachel was spurred to write this by reading the dialogue, called "potentially suitable for running in a loop," that Darren Wershler-Henry and I had for a Cyberpoetry issue of Open Letter some years back and which appears now in Fashionable Noise. Anyway, that's the background. She gave me permission to post it here. (I've found my own original response to the colloquium online as well, which contains the original "dreamlife" poem.)]
email from Italy on 10 June 2003 to Dee Morris and Brian Kim Stefans. Hi both, one of you my dear friend, and the other an interesting acquaintance. The one will (I hope) forgive my odd tone in writing a double email,; the other will (I hope) forgive the bolt-from-the-blue aspect of this. I just received Brian’s book from Atelos, the day we left for Italy, and (while I left it at home) I had a chance to glance at the first essay and was struck by how it began with that orchestrated exchange that Dodie proposed a few years ago—in experienced time, eons ago. That is, Brian, you are talking about me, or being queried about that intersection of our work. So I just looked at Dream Life (again,) today, though, NOT in its flash form. I’m sorry about that, but I didn’t want to overload my simple hookup here (one laptop, thru an Italian server etc). That this unwillingness to have my screen saver taken over by your text (! scary warning!) might express a smidgen of resistance to things not lying flat on the page—well, so be it. That this is a belated response should surprise no one who knows me—it does not mean wound, hurt, insult, rage, etc—I am just slow. Brian—the wittiness of your work "The Dream Life of Letters" is patent. I think you did a remarkable thing with the terms I had set up. The alphabet and the mini-poems are charming and clarifying, actually. And gaffaw-laden. Although I don’t know whether my text was "too loaded," it does cover the territory in 2 ways, and I appreciate the challenge you met. It must have been hard to leverage anything into mine. Looking at your work today, I am intrigued by the words that repeat: dream, gender, in and no. No is actually a very important word for me, and the "N" of No actually begins Drafts. I’m writing because I want to tell you what I did, since you may not exactly have gotten it (or did you?) and tell Dee too, because now she seems to have written about this intersection of materials, but esp about Brian’s work as web poetry. (So I also wanted at long last to ask Dee to email me her paper by attachment if she could.) I frankly do not remember totally what Dodie asked us to do, but it was about sexuality and the polymorphous. I have read some Kristeva and Cixous and Irigaray, and Chodorow, and am intrigued (helped along by this theorizing) about oedipality and pre-oedipality in its ideas about how sexuality and gender are constructed. It seemed to me a simple extrapolation from this theory that people might not be gendered in their dream life, at least not in the same way they are in their day life, because oedipality is normativity, but preoedipality leaks thru in all sorts of ways including in the unconscious being explored in dream. This means we spend a lot of our lives not gendered in the way we more-or-less are, and not enacting the sexualities we expect of ourselves—but this part of our lives is asleep. I wrote a statement about this idea. Then I made a homophonic translation of the statement, as a staged example of preoedipal "babble" or the voice of the "chora." Two format issues then took over. One I intended, but the other just simply occurred, and will occur in any random formatted site that is run on its own default. The intended one: I placed the homophonic translated babble FIRST, before the sentences I wrote. I did not want the rational language to take precedence. The other—I worked by prose, but translated it line by line as the prose came up on my computer. One set of statements was simply set on top of the other, and in the original format, you could really see homophonic translation and then text, which gave a good idea of the pivotal balancing of analytic statement and broken-wild language. However, other formats will run the babble and the statement together in ways that differed from the original presentation. Brian—cutting thru this with alphabetization had a lot of flair. But it is also true that words without syntax, and playing with repetition necessarily changes the social and cultural bearing of my message, insofar as it was a message, or sort of a thought-provoker. This is the suggestion made by your interlocutor in the Atelos book: that your text has the effect of "losing" the feminism. You didn’t really answer him—and the issue might be unanswerable. You don’t, at any rate, seem to reposition the feminism. HOWEVER, there is a sense of aesthetic detournement, hard generationally for me, but something to face. That is, same story—**I** was supposed to be doing the "detourn-ing"! And you ended up doing it. Or perhaps we can share—we both did. But I think, nonetheless, that the exchange is great, even if your alphabetizatioon necessarily is an organization only of the babble part of my piece. (And the letters are in flight and play on the flash program—right?) So it’s interesting that you did The Dream Life of Letters, while I did The Dream Life of Genders. The relationship of any feminism to the avant-garde has been in play ever since Loy wrote "Feminist Manifesto" in 1914—or probably before. I think we (Brian and I) are re-staging this push and pull. any comment? thanks for listening. warmly, Rachel
[Ok, call me narcissistic... but I was checking to see if Barnes and Noble is carrying my new book and noticed the following information when going to the pages for my past books -- Billy Collins, Homer and I share some fans!]
Angry Penguins
Brian Kim Stefans
Our Price: $9.00
Readers' Advantage Price: $8.55
People who bought this book also bought:
Nine Horses: Poems Billy Collins
The Rose That Grew from Concrete Tupac Shakur, Karolyn Ali (Editor), Foreword by Nikki Giovanni
The Odyssey Homer, George Herbert Palmer (Translator)
Inferno Dante Alighieri, Archibald T. MacAllister (Introduction)
Paradise Lost John Milton, John Leonard
Gulf
Brian Kim Stefans
Paperback, April 2000
Our Price: $7.00
Readers' Advantage Price: $6.65
People who bought this book also bought:
A Patriot's Handbook: Poems, Stories, and Speeches Celebrating the Land We Love Selected by Caroline Kennedy
Nine Horses: Poems Billy Collins
Prophet Kahlil Gibran
The Book of Counted Sorrows Dean Koontz
The Odyssey Homer, George Herbert Palmer (Translator)
[I then checked to see if a few of my friends were quite as lucky as I was, and discovered that Miles Champion, Christian Bök and I share some fans -- do you think there is one person out there buying our books and Billy Collins? Then why don't I appear on Miles' list, and vice versa? Or is it four separate people on different instances buying a Billy Collins book and one of ours? Hint: Billy Collins doesn't appear on lists of books bought for those poets who actually sold copies through B & N, such as the esteemed Jennifery Moxley!]
Three Bell Zero
Miles Champion
Paperback, May 2000
Our Price: $10.95
Readers' Advantage Price: $10.40
People who bought this book also bought:
A Patriot's Handbook: Poems, Stories, and Speeches Celebrating the Land We Love Selected by Caroline Kennedy
Nine Horses: Poems Billy Collins
Prophet Kahlil Gibran
The Book of Counted Sorrows Dean Koontz
The Odyssey Homer, George Herbert Palmer (Translator)
Eunoia
Christian Bok
Our Price: $16.95
Readers' Advantage Price: $16.10
People who bought this book also bought:
Dictee Theresa Hak Cha
Nine Horses: Poems Billy Collins
Foolish/Unfoolish: Reflections on Love Ashanti
Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems Billy Collins
Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman
The Sense RecordJennifer Moxley
Paperback, May 2002
Our Price: $12.50
Readers' Advantage Price: $11.88
People who bought this book also bought:
Tender Buttons Gertrude Stein
Touch of Topaz Pat A. Larson
S*Perm**K*T Harryette Mullen
The Haiku Anthology Cor Van Den Heuvel
Just thought I'd mention that I traded for some amazing books yesterday at the mini book fare at James Cohan gallery in Chelsea. (I sold a whopping one copy of my book there, and that only because Chet Wiener cajoled his two French friends to pick one up.) The books are, in order of thickness:
Kenneth Goldsmith's Day, a complete resetting of one day's New York Times into plain text, read linearly across the page (like a scanner) -- it's a huge blue tome that makes his No. 111 look like a Poetical Histories chapbook. Of course we must be sceptical, of course we must be human, but it was actually lots of fun reading about Andre Agassi's 3rd round loss to Arnauld Clement in the 2000 French Open, just riding the wave of his big comeback, showing he's human and also not yet married to Steffi Graf (a little beyond human). There's some kind of weird generosity in this book; everybody from the Wall Street brokers (represented by the largest number of pages, pure numbers and business names), to children (in the ads for children's clothes) to, of course, those folks populating the news and entertainment stories (it was a Friday) are equally represented. I think it makes for a nice piece of anthropology (it certainly gives you a sense of how many WORDS are published a day on this planet -- it really would take a long time to even run your eye over this stuff); it's like putting a bug under a microscope, or flatting a pyramic out into a plain and making it live among the denizens of Flatland (to use a metaphor I've used before). Making a newspaper weigh 5 pounds also does something for ya. Useless, I mean priceless, I mean useless...
George Stanley's much-awaited collection A Tall, Serioues Girl -- the title is taken from the gorgeous final poem called "Veracruz" in which he wishes his father had married his mother's brother, whom he loved, and that his father were a woman, and that he (George) were a woman (the "tall, serious girl" herself) so that he could give birth to a son, the boy he's always loved... etc. (I'm making it sound farcical but it's really a one page poem in the "magical realist" vein, were that tradition to have been founded by John Wieners rather than, say, Milan Kundera or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) Well, this book is certainly a find -- it ranks with the collected John James (Salt Press) as a book showing on a lifetime of work that seems to perfect and relevant now but which I'd just not known about. Kevin Davies and Larry Fagin edited it; it reflects much of the precise wit, challenging but always elegant linebreaks and humor of the former, some of the lighter NY surreal, "daily" vein of the latter -- his taste for exquisite miniatures -- well, I'm not about the write literary criticism now, just wanted to provide a quick graph of my enthusiasm for the book, which I half expected to be dull simply because I think honest, meaningful poets are half the time rather dull (hence my general dishonesty in my own work) -- but, of course, so are the peacocks, usually.
Lastly, Rod Smith's new Music Or Honesty -- speaking of honesty -- which features a painting by Reubens on the cover (where did Roof get the cash to swing that?). I can say, on my first quick read, that I think it's his best full-length collection, his style has really developed to represent his channeling of both the absurd and the sublime (or absurd into the sublime, like Turner basing a painting of a tumultuous ocean on the smiley faces painted on the bouys and the angry sunbathers... maybe not) -- it's a style I associate with Ashbery's first books after The Tennis Court Oath, in which he's beginng to use a mellifluous line but still taking in some of that crazy, recalcitrant detail, tossed up like the drowned sailors in blue puke of Berrigan's sonnets (courtesy Rimbaud) -- now, the scale and the form of the poem are matching up more, he's really quite garrulous and words flow like water from a faucet, my hope only being that he doesn't even it out too much and become a "talker" -- a personality -- I don't think that will happen, it should have happened by now. What was I saying? The typesetting is certainly a lot better than In Memory of My Theories and the style more consistent, and the sequences seem more worked out, to me, than Protective Immediacy, though I miss the days when I would get a huge collection of Rod's work in the form of a stapled xerox chapbook from Rob Fitterman or someone like that. Well, I think Rod needs a good essay assessing his style, modes, influences -- not a longwinded academic one, mind you, but one trying to figure out how thematics work in his poems, how symmetry and chaos operate in his forms, etc.
Ok, enough, I'm not going to reread this, I'm tired...
John Wilkinson sent on these two pictures he took at last night's launch for my and Rodrigo's new Atelos thangs at Spoonbill and Sugartown bookstore. We each read (or in my case, talked) for about 5 minutes each. I must tell you that I am not as greasy as I appear to be in this photograph! There was a pretty huge turn-out -- I'm imagining that it was at least 40 people, possibly more, since I sold 19 copies of the book, half the people who came already had a copy, and I'm sure that not everyone who didn't have one bought one (am I making sense here?) -- simple math, dear Watson. Anyway, it was a lot of fun -- we got good and drunk from 7-9:15 at the store, and then moved over to the terrible Mexican restaurant across the street for dinner, stayed there till about 11:30 (Stacy Doris and Chet Wieners made their appearance at about 10), then got a night cap at Planet Thailand, the party still about 12 strong until long after midnight.
[Check out this email I wrote to the people who run Radiohead's official website -- a group called "W.A.S.T.E." I have no idea what this group is -- the site itself is quite lo-tech, not your average music company hi-tech site. Anyway, I got an address back today, so I'll send them a copy of the book soon.]
Dear W.A.S.T.E. etc.,
Odd as this may sound, my new book of essays about poetry and digital media includes a piece that riffs off of Radiohead's song "Creep."
I've created a new literary tendency, called "Creep" poetry, that is composed of real poets but (in fact) they are mostly involuntary members - the "movement" is more a critical construct, though I think an accurate one.
To further the strangeness, the essay is written in a form of "synthetic Scots," really just a pseudo-Scottish dialect that I created with dictionaries and computer algorithms.
In any case, I'd love to send a copy on to the band - I'm a huge fan. I'm not sure if I can use the address you have on the site for the videos for this - is there a place I can send it?
Here's the blurb on the book:
http://www.atelos.org/fashionable.htm
My own webites are a political art one, www.arras.net/circulars (which is now in "archive" mode for the summer) and www.arras.net, my digital poetry site.
Cheers,
Brian
Here's the cover of the book that my book was not named after, but with which it has a peculiar resonance, not just in title but content. One essay in Fashionable Noise was inspired by Alan Sokal's infamous writing of a pseudo-scientific essay which he had published in a major journal sometime in the early nineties. Google it if you want to know more. This is a pretty good book, actually, if you are not too emotionally attached to Lacan or Kristeva. Ever since I coudn't convince my postcolonialism teacher that Chomsky thought more seriously about real world politics than Foucault (who I think looked pretty bad in that first interview in Power/Knowledge), and that, rather than being simply post-Marxists, it's worth discussing Muslim fundamentalism as a force for "resisting" the West and capitalism -- i.e. that the strength of the phenemonon needs accounting for even if we, as progressives, find the gender politics abhorrent -- I've tended to side with the less poetic, "rational" tradition of philosophers than those set on undercutting common sense at all turns for the sake of theory. Fashionable Nonsense might seem like a valiant effort by philistines to take the piss out of poststructuralism; in fact, since they start from their position as physicists and merely look at the use of metaphors and analogies in the works they are critiquing, it manages to preserve and highlight what is in fact useful and attractive about the works.
I generally shy away from Google poems, but this one turned out pretty good (sure), with a little correction of punctuation and capitalization. The only thing I added were the curse symbols in the last line. It's based on the phrase "Fashionable Noise" -- I was hoping that my book and the book by Sokol called Fashionable Nonsense would somehow get mingled up in here. Well, back to the drawing board. The pantoum isn't so interesting. The Google machine I used is by Levi Leehto, and can be found here:
http://www.leevilehto.net/google/patterns.asp
AFTER NERVAL
Sombre future, writ large all over.
Penguins. His forthcoming book is called
Spirit Of Thoroughness Has Not Died:
Noise Rock Instead. Satisfaction that...
satisfaction that the spirit of...
that the spirit of thoroughness has not died
out in Germany. But has only been drowned.
Fashionique, fashionpolice,
recently angry penguins - 2000 forthcoming -
"Hey kids, which one of these - graphics and
noise - on digital poetics? Is due
goes to the police?" Donors for making
books are angry penguins (poems). And
- if you like - you can &$%# all sides.
HOTEL STE...?
They aren’t making any of the newly fashionable noise
despite the grisly realities, portending
fashionable noise rock. Instead - satisfaction,
Fashnek! Awek don’t seem to fit in their native
fashionable noise, despite the grisly realities portending.
("Not died out in Germany, but has only been drowned out,
Fashnek!!") Awek don’t seem to fit in their native
noise - fashionably late - fashioncore
not died out in Germany, but only drowned out.
Relevant results: we have omitted some entries very similar to the
noise. "Fashionably late." "Fashioncore."
You like? You can, all sides! Brian Kim Stefans’s
relevant results we have omitted, some entries very similar to those
by M. Mara-Ann (book, interior design):
"you-like." You can all, 'sides Brian Kim Stefans’s
noise rock. Instead? Satisfaction
by M. Mara-Ann (book). "Interior design,"
but has only been drowned out for a short while by the
noise rock. Instead? Satisfaction.
(Some entries very similar to the 25 already.)
Burt has only drowned? out for a short while by the
Tu Show - you? The most relevant results we have omitted -
some entries very similar to the 25 already:
"NOISE: see: Brian, Kim Stefans. Stops."
To show you the most relevant results, we have omitted
"Noise, rock." Instead: satisfaction !=
noise. See Brian Kim Stefans, Stops
- for Christophe Tarkos. Brian Kim Ste...?
Noise Rock instead? "'Satisfaction
Rock' instead." (Satisfaction
for Christophe Tarkos.) Brian, Kim, Ste...?
They aren’t making any of the newly fashionable noise.
[The following is from Steve Perry's Bushwarsblog concerning something he posted a few days ago, and to which I linked on my site Circulars. I think it's very pertinent as I've linked to other sites on my site -- "humor" sites -- that were criticized as being racist. My own response to Steve is below.]
I admit I had some misgivings over posting the Snoop Dogg translation of Bush's victory speech yesterday. And my friend Dave Marsh--the longtime rock critic and author whose new TCB blog goes live today--has the same reservations. Marsh is both hypersensitive and wise in matters of crypto-racism, and he wrote me as follows: "This isn't such a good idea. It reeks of coon show."
I know what he means, and the question comes down to this (I think): Is it prima facie racist to employ racially tinged stereotypes to make a point?
The point I wished to make between the lines was this: Gangsta culture is gangsta culture, and if you credit the reasoning of Bush's foreign policy, you have to respect the most hardcore gangsta rappers as well--and, needless to say, vice versa. Why? Because either it's all right to value getting paid over all else--sooner rather than later, and by any means available--or else it's not. Any which way, I see the Bush administration and the most grandiose of the hiphop gangstas in the same light.
But maybe this is all just so much rationalization, irrelevant even if it's correct in its own obscure way; maybe, for practical purposes, the most salient point is that employing racial stereotypes to any end is pernicious. Myself, I think we're past that point. But I'm not entirely sure. Tell me what you think: sperry@citypages.com
Dear Steve,
I run the website Circulars -- http://www.arras.net/circulars -- and reposted the Shizzolatin piece, though with some reservations:
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000608.html
I didn’t foreground the metaphor that you were making between gangsta culture and the Bush regime – I don’t think too many people would have gotten that, certainly not in the formulation that you made on your blog today.
(“The point I wished to make between the lines was this: Gangsta culture is gangsta culture, and if you credit the reasoning of Bush's foreign policy, you have to respect the most hardcore gangsta rappers as well--and, needless to say, vice versa. Why? Because either it's all right to value getting paid over all else--sooner rather than later, and by any means available--or else it's not. Any which way, I see the Bush administration and the most grandiose of the hiphop gangstas in the same light.”)
I put it up, though, because I see my site as a sort of clearing house for different ways of making political art, even if slightly tasteless. At times – like when I make links to the site whitehouse.org – racist stereotypes and language are involved. (Actually, it’s only that site that moves into racism – other more or less “tasteless” political art seems to have no problem stereotyping gays and women, not to mention those with mental health issues.)
Here are the two times that I linked to whitehouse.org and/or took some of their art: http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000583.html. (I actually agree with “Buford,” that the piece, which I hadn’t read entirely before posting, is pretty bad, though I think “he” is more full of “hatred” than I could ever be – I would never fantasize about doing harm to someone the way he does.)
Here’s the other one -- http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000480.html-- which seems to take shots at everybody, though the commenter didn’t obviously think so.
This is because I’m interested in the creative, non-discursive, “surprise attack” aspects of political art – excess, even if it moves beyond positive formulations of “what we should do,” since I feel pretty desperate to fill in the void of wilder forms of protest art that seem to have been more prevalent in the last century. Here is something rather extreme, again having to do mostly with celebrities: http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000582.html.
In addition, I write about “digital poetics” and cover topics concerning how a text can move from an ethically neutral zone to one that is ethically charged based on the work of a simple algorithm – the site pornolize.com is the example I use, but it seems the most recent crop tends to have to do with Black American English (there are tons of “Ebonics” translators out there).
I suppose, if this didn’t come from a site actually created by Snoop Dogg – I’m assuming it was, or by his company – then I wouldn’t have posted it, as there is a pretty tedious new streak of web art these days (I assume by whites) that tries to make a good point – that the internet, or at least most of the discourse around it, seems to be the domain mostly of whites and Asians – by “getting dirty,” trying to be on the good cop by pretending to be the bad cop, and doing obnoxious things like this site -- http://rent-a-negro.com/ -- whose URL speaks for itself.
I myself am Korean American (“half” Korean), and was not raised in a Korean neighborhood, so I’ve had my share of racial epithets tossed my way. I know that when I was in high school – I attended an urban high school in Jersey City rather than my mostly white high school in the suburbs – it was somewhat liberating for me and my friends there, who were mostly non-white, to play with racially-charged language – we took it over, in a sense, though not to pathological extremes – it still hurt when we heard it elsewhere.
I’ve never mentioned that I was Korean American on the site, though, as I didn’t think it mattered, in a way, and my hope was that the sensibility expressed on the site – to which there are over 15 contributors – would be general enough, beyond any need to psychoanalyze motives. But I confess that I was a bit afraid, also – would it be acceptable to people “out there” that a site that is so obviously critical of the Bush administration was created by a Korean American? I don’t want to know.
I guess I always hope that “we” can share a joke – that racist stereotypes are bad – by putting on the masks, switching identities, playing with the language, etc., but I’m not sure how that plays out in the long run, in either reaffirming what we would like to destroy, etc. I may have lost some readers by posting the links to whitehouse.org, or even your site – well, my readership has gone down anyway, since the “war” “ended” – which is unfortunate, but I’ve learned a lot by reading the comments section on my site in reaction to these pieces, even when they were flames.
There are certainly enough stereotypes about white people flying around in the political art of today, perhaps particularly Texans – is the fact that it white Americans create this art important? Are the perspectives translating well across a broad spectrum of culture?
Anyway, I have no answers to any of this. One can’t expect everyone to share one’s sense of the range of permissible forms of expression – something will always confuse or anger someone else – negativity, whether in the form of punk rock, gangsta rap, Dada, even these language algorithms, can have its liberating aspects, but to many it might just seem vicious noise.
Thanks,
Brian
[A second email soon after...]
Hi Steve,
One last point I wanted to make was this – that the ethnic make-up of the Bush cabinet seems to suggest that he is responding to a need for racial diversity in the government, and is in some ways “progressive.” Fine, but I think the issue is not just “diversity” but “difference” – that the various races that live in America also play by different rules when they are existing in their own neighborhoods, cultures, etc. – speak differently, also. Sometimes they don’t even hear each other, though the Bush cabinet, working in exquisite concord, apparently does.
I suppose, though I am not sure, that creating obnoxious cartoons about “difference” at least suggest the contradictions and potential conflicts in American culture that the Bush cabinet seems to want to gloss over, as they have glossed over differences with their peers around the world. I prefer this harsh highlighting of recalcitrant social detail over the evangelical “vision” that guides our foreign and domestic policy at the moment. Perhaps I am the wrong person to foreground this – I’m pretty middle class – but nonetheless it seems necessary.
Does this make sense?
Thanks
Brian
[Perfectly useless piece of news, but here's the cover to my new book. It's at the printers -- could be a matter of six weeks or so before it's alive. I decided not to use one of my own designs since I just wanted to get the thing done, and I think Ree came up with a nice, elegant solution -- it's (I fancy) in the "white series" of books such as Kenny Goldsmith's Fidget, Dan Farrell's The Inkblot Record, Steve McCaffery's two volume selected, and Christian Bök's Eunoia, etc.]
[Hey, I haven't had time to post anything to this blog for the past several weeks, so I'm hunting for material from my hard drive. Here's the text of an e-ticket I purchased (or that was purchased for me) for my trip to Detroit in, uh, November?)]
Issue Date:
27AUG02 NW/KLM Reservations
1-800-225-2525
www.nwa.com
Attn: MR BRIAN STEFANS Confirmation Number : 765L2H
Day Date City Time Airline Flight/
Class Status Meal/
STOP Seat(s) Equip
MON 11NOV
Leave LAGUARDIA
Arrive DETROIT
415P
614P NW 0261K OK
0 STOPS 20C 755
WED 13NOV
Leave DETROIT
Arrive LAGUARDIA
702P
856P NW 0538K OK
0 STOPS 08D D9S
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Passenger List: BRIAN.K STEFANS MR
Your trip has been adjusted to the itinerary above due to a change in our schedules. Please contact Northwest Reservations at 1-800-225-2525 if you have any questions. We apologize for any inconvenience this change may have caused.
THANK YOU FOR FLYING NORTHWEST/KLM ROYAL DUTCH AIRLINES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I haven't blogged in a while. So sorry. I don't even have any off-hand cheap-o poems or writing to toss up. Sorry again.
Here is the rough table of contents to Arras 5, a double issue, to gnaw on for a while. Each is roughly 96 pages; both should be done in about a week!
arras 5 part i
Featuring poetry and plays by Darren Wershler-Henry, Tim Atkins, Edwin Torres, a. rawlings, Gregory Whitehead, Kevin Killian, Brian Kim Stefans, Jordan Davis, Kent Johnson, Reptilian Neolettrist Graphics, Mara Galvez-Breton; essay by Katherine Parrish
arras 5 part ii
Featuring poetry by Kevin Davies, Katie Dagentesh, Ira Lightman, Carol Mirakove, Christian Bök, Gary Sullivan, Dagmar's Chili Pitas, derek beulieu, Jessica Grim, Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Fitterman and essays by Alice Becker-Ho and Darren Wershler-Henry
Other news: Fashionable Noise is finally almost off to the printer -- just a few typos on the cover to fix; I'll be on the insulin pump probably by the end of next week; I'm going to San Francisco in April with Rachel to visit my sister (and mother who is visiting my sister long-term) and the wee niece Natalia; working on .pdfs of Bruce Andrews' political writings which I'd also like to get up by the beginning of summer; what else; I'm being interviewed by the Iowa Review Web for their May issue which will feature "me" a bit too prominently for my taste (a review of FN will be in the issue); I've also been given the green light to write an essay on John Wieners for the Boston Review, but it won't appear for nearly 8 months; the Circulars hit count has been peaking at 3,000+ a day (roughly) and the site is due for some upgrades (search engine just added); I'm still broke. Thanks for asking...
(For those of you who like to be amazed, I'm listening to Radiohead in the office right now...)
[Here's the manifesto by LRSN that my Stigma 2001 manifesto was based on...]
We in the last quarter of 2001 affirm the following guidelines for the publication of literature, patterned upon the manifesto of the Dogme95 filmmakers. The Dogme95 Manifesto declared itself to be a "VOW OF CHASTITY" from the coercive representational techniques of mass-market cinema (sets, lighting, musical soundtracks, etc.); Dogma '01 goes even further, rejecting the no less coercive marketing and distribution apparatus which Dogme95 filmmakers seem content to have deployed on their behalf. Dogma '01 rejects the division of labor between writer and publisher that prevails in the literary market-place, and therefore its productions are unfit for all but the most informal modes of distribution (barter, give-aways, and low-volume sales). These rules are to ensure that they remain so:
1. Dogma '01 is unalienated labor. Author and publisher will ideally be the same person. If not, they are to share the labor and cost of printing. Dogma '01 productions are to be assembled and bound by hand. No sending books out to be Docu-teched, and no perfect binding.
2. The contents of Dogma '01 books should be photocopied. Type may be set on a word processor or typewriter, but handwriting (the textual equivalent of the hand-held camera mandated by Dogme95) is best. No technique of reproduction is definitively barred, but those methods and materials most widely available to the general public are preferred. What in the world of fine printing are considered defects, Dogma '01 views as beauty marks: staples, thumbprints, "binder's creep," etc.
3. The one-of-a-kind is hateful. Editions should be as large as humanly possible, unsigned, and un-numbered (except perhaps to compensate for the flaws of "first fruits" rush-jobbed in time for a reading). Scarcity should never be exploited to drive up exchange value. At such time as an author's Dogma '01 publication turns out to be a valuable commodity (i.e., quickly reselling for inflated amounts soon after issue), that author is obliged to produce ever-larger editions to compensate. Should demand exceed the author's production capacity, that author is obliged to withdraw from Dogma '01 and either go with a mainstream publisher, or become one. This is the only excuse for going with or becoming a mainstream publisher.
4. Publishing in journals is kind of a gray area, on which we do not care to pronounce. Without it, Dogma '01 would risk becoming a solipsistic enterprise, with a readership as tightly circumscribed as that of any corporation's report to its shareholders. On the other hand, the wider an author's public, the harder it will be for that author to remain within the bounds of Dogma '01. The same goes for anthologies. Nor have we come to grips with the question of later reprints of Dogma '01 productions. Entering contests is fine, unless you win one.
5. Dogma '01 is not a bid for elite/outsider status, but the affirmation of a literary and artistic sphere of exchange unmediated by the apparatuses of market capitalism. (Except does the post office count?) Authors need not lose money to qualify, though they assuredly will. Dogma '01 authors are to maintain cordial and friendly relationships with mere writers. No Dogma '01 clubs or juries are to be formed, and no one whose work meets these Dogma '01 criteria is barred. You will know it when you see it.
Dogma '01 is no guarantee of quality. Without going so far as to abolish the category of "artistic merit," it is our stance that 1) the above criteria are more important at the present moment in the history of writing, and that 2) they lead to better work anyway aesthetically as much as ethically speaking.
Please note that the above rules cannot be bent to include unqualified authors whose company and fellowship we may covet. For example, the book "Scram #2" by Mark Gonzales and Cameron Jamie with Raymond Pettibon photocopied in a signed and numbered edition of ten and sold for fifty dollars apiece last year at a gallery in Hollywood cannot be claimed as a Dogma '01 production. (Too bad, because it's the summit of the half-sized booklet form.) It will also be noted that Dogma '01 is hard for novelists and writers in non-fiction genres, though we would be delighted to see someone try.
You are invited to reproduce and disseminate this manifesto freely. We will not rest until the earth is encased in a rustling jacket of paper. Oh wait, that's already happened.
Oakland, Calif., 10/6/2001
On behalf of Dogma '01
LRSN
[Once again, I'm refraining from commentary as I'm about out the door, way too tired -- had drinks with John Wilkinson, Bruce Andrews, Marjorie Welish, etc. yesterday after Craig Dworkin's reading at "A Taste of Art", not too late but did have to be at work by 9. So here's a post from Patrick Herron of Lester's Flogspot and proxmiate.org fames and other fames -- just noticed that I don't have his blog on my blog roll, but will soon.]
"The Creeps wonder why, in a culture that has public enthusiasm for artists like Matthew Barney, Ornette Coleman, and Cindy Sherman, all of whom are taken to be defining cultural figures of their time or at least "artists," poets who are similarly disruptive and experimental are often not noticed, and not missed. They wonder why the poetry world is not as interested in the "edge" as the art and music worlds.
They don't consider themselves outsiders, the "marginal," and hence never of any use to mainstream thought. On the contrary, they take interest in many of the greatest debates of our time, particularly over globalization, cultural memory and the goal of human agency. Their distinguishing feature from writers from the mainstream, and also the writers of "Elliptical" verse, is that they expose, are exposed, and do not recognize any glass ceilings in terms of what can go into a poem, nor some safe, predefined notion of the "self" as their subjective limit."
Disruptive. De-egoized. Anti-manifesto. Concerned with information overload & technology. Challenging notions of self. How to synthesize agency with post-structuralism. Wondering where the edge is in poetry. Finding barriers just to dash them to bits.
You know, this really nails it for me personally. Particularly in my efforts to get Lester's _Be Somebody_ published (the book is on one of the CDs I gave you). I've been having an extended discussion with a well-respected poet and writer about Lester's book, that it toys with the notion of seducing the reader. The book gets perhaps downright unfriendly at times. I mean, seduction in writing is something I'm personally into, but it is nonetheless a will-to-power author-dominance function that maybe could be criticised in just one damn book of poetry? Just one? And that's what Lester wanted to do--challenge the assumptions of author-dominance through gestural play of linguistic dominance and submission, and still remain somehow poetic. Poetry seems more than any other literary field to depend highly on the AUTHority and AUTHenticity of the AUTHor. In retrospect Lester's book is a sort of 4th stage Baudrillard, all simulation--simulation right down to who the pronouns reference. A simulation of getting personal. A simulation of authorial integrity and authenticity. Gestures towards the book itself (repulsion) invert the author-reader hierarchy. And so on.
And interestingly the other half of our discussion about the book regarded its use of longer fractured lines. I don't write that way so much anymore, but I did so quite heavily two years ago. Trying to cross Spicer with Whitman, Ginsberg, and Giorno and turning blue in the process (blue emotionally and physically). I felt I had to sort of defend the practice, you know, and explain about shifting frameworks & subjects, and the way such writing speeds over a sonic, imagistic and/or logistic landscape. There's not a great deal of the longer-line form in the book, but it, like so many other tropes, sticks out when set against its context not only within the book but in the context of the po-world.
Some very big ups to this writer-friend of mine--one of the things I did not have to defend was the relative lack of "poet's voice"--he rather enjoyed the looping structures and widely varied poetic tropes. The post-modern aesthetic doesn't have to be defended. Some of the less readily apparent syntheses of subjects and formal issues and critical theory, however, do require such defense. Your statement helps take the pressure off me a little.
Mostly though it's gotten very good responses, and all of them at least have been strong, whether in favor or against it. And it has definitely been disruptive. And it is certainly obsessed with information. I am scratching my head, now realizing I finished writing that book in 2000. And it still does not exist--you know, the proverbial tree falling in the uninhabited wood. C'est la merde.
So perhaps I should not admit it but you might have me pegged too. Or at least have Lester pegged. The "danger" with pegging Lester is that he's a parody of himself in his "frank-talking" way. He's not above his own criticism. He was already parodying the info-hound mode back in '99 and 2000. And maybe he still does. He's more interested in testing the divide between a poet and hir poetry, a sort of zen whipping. But I think you compensate for and encompass that possibility in your essay, too.
I'm not so curious anymore about why poetic edgework is not considered relevant, though I was maybe a year or two ago. I realized a few months back just how much poetry is a burled wood and 30 year old Port-meets-Ben Shahn pursuit, a profession that is dominated by the over 40 settled class. Painting and music and photography professions all realize that creative genius generally peaks in the mid to late 30s and they don't want to miss that output when it's happening. They capitalize on youth and trade on youth. (It's not above criticism; we all know the art and music worlds exploit that youth frequently.) Poets are much more conservative and much more dependent upon authoritative critical opinions. Those opinions happen to move much more slowly in the po-realm and are less widely distributed than in painting, music, photography. Poetry perhaps also potentially poses a little more of a cultural/political threat than music, painting, photography. Language is very immediate and dangerous, unlike images, (words can conjure non-imagistic ideals, rallying cries, etc.) but the poetry industry ensures all must come through them and slowly accepted before even a trickle is to come through.
When we look at the lives of so many poets, they were nobodies up until their late 30s and each gets a sort of big break or phat association or something. Olson was a nobody when he became Rector at BMC, just to give one example. And he at least had Ivy on his wall to make it easier for the authorities pick him. I think something like only ONE poem of his was published before he became rector. That sort of visionary foresight exemplified by BMC is of course still delicate and rare, perhaps even moreso fragile and infrequent today. I dare say there is NO modern-day equivalent.
Shit, even radical improv music listeners have WIRE to read; artists can read Flash Art; and so on. But poetry? What, POETS & WRITERS? I had a gift subscription to that for a year, and every time I received a copy in the mail either it was already covered with cobwebs or someone's set of false teeth fell out of it. It was so incredibly fogey and safe. Full of saccarine platitudes about the lives of writers. I developed back pains and grew gray hair just in reading the first issue. It's OK to be fogey, but why be fogey to the exclusion of youth?
The study of modern american poetry is the study of settled aging people. We young poets are apparently not mature enough; we too are told to wait like everyone else to be published. Yet it is difficult to imagine that I will have anything left in me by my 40th birthday.
Chris Stroffolino's had the same sort of experience that Lester has had; having the "nice" stuff published while the more confrontational work languishes. And I think he's struggling to have his most recent book published, which is absolutely absurd considering how good his writing is. Art in poetry languishes.
And yeah, performance too...it was fun to read with Lee Ann last year because we both will do some sort of singing when reading. Shamelessly entertaining but what else can we do?
I even don't mind having Thom Yorke (the requisite pop-cultural figure) as a referent in the naming of this. You know, two years ago, so much of the sensibility of Radiohead's "OK Computer" really summed up so much of my own will to articulate. That album formed a sort of musical representation (a very incomplete one) of some of my feelings at the time.
Okay, I'd personally dissent with some minor points of your essay: I guess I'm very much FOR community BUT against "interactivity" (which is a sort of proxied intimacy and anti-community in some respects), and devoutly committed to epistemological issues. I can't separate heteronymity, notions of self, ambiguity, poetic artifice, and barrier-breaking from epistemology. The very necessity for a heteronym is an epistemic consequence of my own personal experience of the act of writing, or, rather, my non-experience of it. I don't think that really creates any sort of problems for what you wrote, however. You're describing a landscape that describes my yard. Just because my yard might have a patch of sand here or there doesn't preclude it from being forested.
I have to admit that at the same time I am a huge admirer and ardent reader of manifestos I also remain highly suspicious of them. Manifestoes require yet another hierarchy, and their concomitant big egos. I rather like the workman "play the part on a team" aesthetic implied in your essay. I don't see the serializeable and substitutable parts notion as a consequence of capitalism: communist countries used interchangeable parts as well; they have factories (look at China). Anarcho-syndicalist organizations might have production lines as well, just so long as participants 1) have a sense of humor about work and 2) are legitimately vested in the produce of their labor. I rather like the flexible anti-hierarchical structure implicit in your notion of the Creep. And even if such a structure is capital-derived, then it can co-opt, outpace, and overcome the problems of capital by its very nature of subjugating capitalism's needs. Why be so puritanical? Given the Darwinian flavor of Marx's writings it makes little sense to advocate leftist revolution, even in art. And we all know how ugly right-wing revolution is (look at America in the here-and-now).
Kasey's analysis in a certain way makes your position more attactive, not less. You see, being invisible and flea-like as a writer ain't so bad. It's anarchism and anarchism requires that people voluntarily come forward to do what they love, to play their parts. It kind of, um, clips the wings of those who feel the need to dominate others. It cuts down on the asshole factor. Assholes might be found in golf shirts making corporate deals on cell phones in their khaki dockers, but the assholes might also be dressed in hemp pushing print versions of their revolutionary manifestoes. The asshole factor is everywhere someone or other wants to dominate, lead, or didactically instruct.
So many things in your essay resonate. It's folks like you who make a huge difference to poetry. Well, you make a difference to me anyway. Keep it up.
Patrick
[I've been mucho busy and can't put in appropriate links etc. a la Ron Silliman but here's an email I got from Geoffrey O Brien regarding my Loose Notes on "Creeps" and the Stigma 2001 "manfesto" which are both locatable via the sidebar.]
Dear BKS:
just wanted to say that i loved your spoof of LRSN's Get at me Dog '01, tho i found it light on the spoof and heavy on the transferred application (not a quibble, a gladness). here comes the inevitable however/but/yet/also. however, i wanted to respond to both 3.3 of it and one of your points about Moxley (both quoted at bottom of email), which i think share an assumption i'd like to trouble slightly.
it seems to me that "th inr sanctum of th author's memry and sentmnts" (why didn't you alter "sanctum" or "author"?) is/are the ultimate repository of FOUND TEXTS and would remain a useful part of poetic practice if the things found there were not seen as "stemming" from a space but as repottings of nonspace (or some other gardening metaphor i've avoided knowing). poetry isn't about losing or recovering affect within content choices and avant-garde reuptakes so much as it's about DETERMINATIONS on the form-content axis, a point you quite rightly make about Moxley in re her relationship to particular precursor texts and historical style-moments.
in this sense, how Moxley feels towards her practice (which itself "feels" towards myriad other practices) carries affective charge, and so does anything by Jackson Mac Low or Christian Bok for that matter, since their choices/subsequent determinations vis-a-vis dominant and marginal practices (both past and present) graphically, flagrantly constitute their texts.
There is no poetic material that is not already a transformation and, for me, no transformation that is without history, no history without affect. Not to mention the charge of devaluing time itself by running it through the author and reader function where not very much money, even in LRSN's hated perfectbound economy, changes hands (the same can be said for transactions in virtual country).
Moxley's poetry seems to me, as limit-case, to express the inadequacy and narrowness of the found text concept or to limn it in a humility it neither deserves nor needs. Her text is certainly found and it carries affective charge bc we read its oscillations in re its own discoveries, and in part bc there isn't a single source or sanctum but only, and ultimately, an unquantifiable texture, a set of readings, or Barthes' Text (tho why he capitalized i'll never know--it's always seemed to me like trademark protection), which "here" we can call I/you/we/they-reading-Moxley-reading-Victoriana or a recombinatorial host of other names. or we can call it nothing at all.
i'm taking many shortcuts here, but you inspired me to say a purposeful hello. and thank you for Circulars, another great found text.
best,
Geoffrey G. O'Brien
[In the interest of found art, web avatars, chance procedures, self-googling, and the all-around Ashberian culte du moi, I post the following two poems by people who share significant aspects of my name from the Poets Against the War website.]
David Stefansson
29 years old
Reykjavik, Iceland
bio: Two published books of poetry, 1996 and 1999.
Upbringing, Mr. Bush
Tell me
just this
one small
thing:
how
am I supposed to teach
my children
tolerance?
[If I may venture an answer: try googling your name at Poets Against War and reading all the poems that come up that you haven't written! -- bks]
Brian Kim
15 years old
Seattle, Washington
bio: wassup...im brian...this poem was for english class...
My Prayer
This nation should not go to war,
Because we want less death, not more.
We aren’t sure what kind of weapons he has,
He could have nuclear missiles and gas.
President Bush does not have a clue,
I think he’s got a bad case of the flu.
Our nation has to be real smart,
Because in one decision, it could all fall apart.
War will not accomplish anything,
Saddam will still be hiding many things.
He’ll do anything to cause harm to others,
But let’s not let that happen; protect our brothers.
Preventing the war will save millions of lives,
So let’s do our best and keep others alive.
Whatever is done, will be in God’s will,
So let’s just pray, that not one will be killed.
[I think this poem is quite good until it gets to the "brothers" and God stuff -- but after all, that's closer to the language of national policy than most of what us "poets" put out, not that anyone's listening, to me or to Brian "wassup" Kim. -- bks]
[Kasey Mohammad recently wrote a longish essay in response to my essay called "When Lilacs Last in the Door," which appears on Steve Evan's Third Factory website. Ron Silliman has posted a response to Kasey's essay on his blog (David Hess did also, though I haven't read it), and in turn, because I have this bad habit of responding to "assignments," I have constructed a few hastily written thoughts which I am sending off to Kasey and Ron in an email, I guess with the hope that it will be posted on their blogs.]
Hi Ron and Kasey,
I try not to respond to writing about my writing to avoid the “echo chamber” effect and also to curtail any elevated sense of self-consideration about what I am doing, since, after all, like everyone else I probably think a bit too much about what I am doing, what people think I am doing, etc. Better to pretend it's not happening, like in that Roy Lichtenstein painting of that woman drowning, and the thought bubble saying “This is not happening.”
But nonetheless, here are a few quick notes to clarify and hopefully further confuse the situation.
I should mention, first, that I have translated the essay into synthetic Scots and that it appears in Fashionable Noise: on digital poetics, forthcoming from Atelos. The poems are also translated into Scots, though in what I hope is an absurdly literal fashion, illustrating what I elsewhere describe in the book as the vulnerability of digitized text to algorithmic processes, but also the possibility of “teleactive” literary activity in web culture -- the ability to participate and influence the distribution of ideas and even the management of “cultural capital” in real-time from great distances (it seems Silliman's Blog confirms the efficacy of this formulation). So, I am trying to make Kevin Davies known as the great Scottish poet, as he damn well should be.
Also, the essay was a direct response not only to the substance of Steven Burt's “Ellipticist” essay but to the style. I wanted to explore a rhetoric that I hadn't previously used, or at least signed my name to, and also to test whether such an absurd term as the “Creeps” would ever actually be adopted in the critical world -- all of this is stated in the essay.
On lists: I am generally against lists as a critical strategy, whether they be the lists at the end of Harold Bloom's books (The Western Canon, most obviously) or, yes, the ones prefacing In The American Tree and The Art of Practice. The reason for this is that it is much more easy to include a writer whose work one has not read or even ever enjoyed on a list than it is to write insightful comments about this writer's work -- a list takes easy advantage of the Adamic power of “naming” without doing the heavier, more threatening work of going out on a limb in support of the project of another writer. It puts one who has not been named in the position of waiting to be “named,” whereas many of us choose -- by instinct -- to avoid responding to such scholastic perspectives.
But also, the kind of writing such a list engenders in response is almost always of the “why is so and so in, why another out” variety, which I find not productive (this goes as well for anthologies). Ezra Pound's list of Imagists was in fact quite short, and very imperfect, but his dogma -- I like dogma better, believe it or not, though lie as often in my dogmatic statements as I do in my lists -- seems to me to have had a more lasting, usefully provocative effect. There is a mistaken assumption that the list of names is more democratic -- has closer ties to some concept of "freedom" -- than a more didactic, overdetermined prose, but I feel that the latter method, when used well, creates more opportunities for useful proliferation of ideas -- it is engendering.
That said, lists are fun, and I do believe all of the poets (or rather, the books) belong on that list. I think of the list as a rebus, and leave it up to the reader to figure exactly how the individual element belongs within the parameters being described in the body of the essay. And all of the books were published since 1996 or so (I don’t remember what I wrote), and I’ve enjoyed reading them much more than I enjoy a similar list of books published around, say, 1991 -- the “New Coast” time, which, for me, was a rather diffuse time for poetry in the United States. I'd rather hear useful, engaging rhetoric that is nonetheless incorrect (think of Rimbaud's Lettre du Voyant) than anything that could be mistaken for indifferent, even "even-handed," prose. (That said, I'm actually quite a nice guy in person.)
This is going on too long... I'll just hit some points, in defense I suppose.
I'm always amused by people who tend to see Jennifer Moxley's work as some sort of “return” to emotion, affect, sentiment, and how few people really think that there is an underlying humor, even irony, to her use of archaic tropes, etc. One can look at the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads to see that the motion of JM's writing is neither backward nor forward but both: maybe a "smart" (as in "smart bomb") pinpointing of that one cataclysmic moment when the Enlightenment and the "cult of reason" turned into Romanticism (and its attendant cults).
People seem to think that Jennifer’s work singled that it was ok to be “honest” and “candid” again, when it strikes me that -- compared to, say, the later poems of Williams, like “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” which I feel much of The Sense Record responds to -- the apparent emotional complexity of her work is actually more attributable to the drama, in the reader’s mind, of trying to determine how exactly she feels toward the language she is using. Most of the salient features of her poems can be attributed to her reading of books, even dictionaries (like Mullen’s Muse & Drudge language coming from Clarence Major’s Dictionary) and how she feels, as a woman who identifies with the working class, utilizing these words. (A similar drama is at play in Pamela Lu's novel, I think.)
If that's what you mean by epistemological issues, then I guess you have a point, but I guess my point is that the flavor of Moxley's writing is a far cry from that of Burt's essay -- which, again, is partly what this is a response to -- in that her project is conceptually cleaner (she is not knocked off her pedestal with every opportunity for a pregnant white space or a curious paradox) and she follows through with the premises of her poems (the Apollinaire riff, for example, or any metrical base note that she decides to declare in the first ten or so lines) that is absent from the more free-wheeling style of the "elliptical writers." There isn't any "magical realism" in Moxley's work much as there might be in, say, Michael Palmer's, and there is always a sense of pushing toward something "candid" in JM that attempts to critique the very artifice being employed while -- in the fashion of "emotional exhibitionism" as I write elsewhere of JM -- giving herself very much over to it.
It's also a form of "camp" -- John Wilkinson links her writing to John Wieners in this fashion -- that, were I to have thought of it, might have been a useful term to employ in the essay (though I don't think Darren Wershler-Henry, for instance, is writing in any sort of drag).
Ok, I'm getting tired... I wish Kasey would post his essay online somewhere so I can cut and paste a few things from it. The phrase "spectacularly unusable" seems a useful one, for example, and the "trope of getting it wrong" is also provocative -- he (you, Kasey) accurately, for me, described how the essay was both bosh at heart but useful to describe, which is I suppose something I try to achieve in my "writings on poetics".
As for community: my sense is that I am involved in an international community of writers and artists, and that, in fact, I am much closer in spirit, and even friendship, to some writers in Toronto (in terms of the digital stuff) and the U.K. (at least when Miles Champion was there) than I am to many of the writers here in New York (but, of course, there are hundreds of those, many of them close friends). Nonetheless -- and the project of Circulars has brought this to the fore, to me -- we've all been "in touch" with each other, even if talking past each other, since the internet took off, and that, in "moments of scandal" (as I write in the essay), there is a sort of contraction that occurs among these poets no matter how geographically and even aesthetically diverse they are.
I am on the verge of believing that, in politics, one can point to the presence of virtual countries -- not just communities -- that are already operating in a fashion directly contradicting the legal fashions as laid out by the government-entertainment complex (file swapping being the most salient feature, but also indy media sites that are more read than, say, the NYTimes site), and that these people will be able to behave in unison, in a coordinated fashion, regardless of how the governments of the members of these virtual "countries" are constructed. This may seem like science fiction for now, but my sense is that there is a hot lava working under the hardened bedrock of governments and any sort of institutional structure that accepted as legal, productive, useful, etc. and that it can behave as an organism in times of crisis to terrible effect. (Pardon the awkward metaphors.)
What this has to do with the "Creeps"? I guess I'm just pointing to how one can be "invisible" and "flea-like" and yet not feel so terribly small, since after all our lateral acknowledgement of each other across the horizon of today is far vaster than can be understood within the paradigm of looking for the "break with the past", pointing to singular phenomenon like "New American Poetry." I'm more interested in Caroline Bergvall, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Tom Leonard right now than I am in New Americans, but also in Dagmar's Chili Pitas, Aurelia Harvey and Ivan Brunetti, silly as that sounds. (This weekend, I am being interviewed by Giselle Bieugleman, a Brazilian digital artist, about my "hacktivism," as another example.) To break out of one's community has nothing to do with becoming part of a "mainstream" so much as becoming a node in larger cultural structures that are not given air-time in anything that could be considered a reputable media venue.
I don't think this is so pathetic as you make it sound, nor do I think that there is any sense among my peers that we don't know what we're doing here (but I love the fact that you know the song, which isn't in fact very good). My sense is that, were one to collect all of the various statements about what Language poetry was supposed to be "about," as a gesture, a coherent aesthetic moment, one would see more holes -- more porousness -- than unity, making one wonder whether the dictatorship of a Breton (which, after all, spawned Guy Debord, another useful aesthetic dictator), was more seminal in the long run than the all-inclusive good vibrations, but ultimately contradictory and even, to some, substanceless, project of Language writing -- at least Breton was a moving target, a "body" of thought that, if only coherent within itself, was something to throw bricks at and hear a clang. There was an endgame in Surrealism and Situationism that doesn't exist in Language writing, since it seems, finally, that the point of Language writing was to make books and live forever in the minds of mankind, much like most writers do. How argue with that?
But I'm not the first one to suggest this; I'm only pointing to the fact that replies are coming in, but in terms that move "below the radar" (another Creeps term). One must be an achieved cultural polyglot to have any sense of "what's coming next."
[Looking back at your blog post, this line -- "Sure sounds like Sartre’s vision of serialization & capitalist atomization to me, a series of infinitely substitutable parts that can be popped out of a box or anthology – like a chess set composed entirely of pawns – and dropped into any theory one wants." -- is particularly vulnerable to critique specifically because you have had a tendency to make lists, create theories for them, then make lists that operate nearly as disclaimers to your theory -- an equally good list could be created for such and such a theory is practically a trope in your writing. Isn't a singular, no-holds-barred theory better than one that gives away before it's gotten off the ground? But I don't believe Sartre's description is very accurate anyway, or that this hasty comparison is particularly persuasive.]
Oh, this is way too long...
Lastly, let me just note that, ridiculous as the Creeps essay was, some phenomena that followed long after it was written fit right in. First there are the books: Lytle Shaw's book The Lobe could have been a member of the list, as could Toscano's more recent work, Kim Rosenfield's Good Morning Midnight, the font work of Paul Chan (whom I didn't know at the time), etc. "Flarf," the school of poetry invented by Gary Sullivan that is currently all the rage in the Left Bank, seems quite Creep oriented to me, as does the phenomenon of Blogs (Jordan Davis's blog is full of solipsism, haranguing to invisible congresses, etc.) and metablogs, like the "Mainstream Poetry Blog" -- "arpeggiated squeals of Moog fanfare without justification or apology" to use another of Kasey's phrases.
That "moments of scandal" are like the torches that light the bats in the cave seems also accurate to me -- I noticed that more people read Tranter's Jacket when something controversial, even mean, appears there, as more people probably read your blog for the same reason (viz. the Canadian controversy a few months back). This suggests not a porousness and a replacibility so much as an unwillingness to show one's cards unless forced to, and with any luck the present war crisis will bring more and more poets into searching for ways to harangue -- the public, the congress -- while reserving the right to retreat into "rugged individualism," the comfort zone of sitting behind a PC, in touch but, yes, not. To be invisible is a useful property in times when one might be targeted by the government -- or critics! (But alas, I am a critic too, and without apologies... just strong reservations.)
Ok, too long... knowing me, there'll be a postscript forthcoming. Thanks for the notes, etc.
best,
Brian
Oy... so I made the valuable mistake of checking the other blogs to see if there was any commentary on my grouching about blogs a few postings ago. I got caught in the labyrinth -- what a weird echo-chamber, interesting experience to see what you have written recounted back to you (Song Against Sex, Jordan?) -- hee hee. I editorialize so rarely that I never realized what a component this is of blogs -- addressing not your "readers" but your assessors, directly.
Anyway, Kasey and I had a small email back-and-forth about the Poets Against War venture and his posting Acknowledged Legislators: A Rant, concerning a Washington Post article that I didn't read prior to writing him. Kasey said that he was going to post some of this on his site but hasn't yet, and so I will step forward and put a little bit on my site, not out of impatience but in an effort to procrastinate yet further, and because my assessors seem interested in this topic. (BTW, please check out Carol Mirakove's latest bit on Circulars, it's a hot one.
My hope is that my position on this is not seen as settling old scores, as being for or against some particular aesthetic, etc., but merely questioning whether it is accurate to say that replacing the terms "poets" with "birdhouse makers" (I used the term "bakers", becaues of Jim Baker) settles the idea of what it means to operate as a collective will against this war (to be). The fact that "poets," as a group, have managed to co-opt some mainstream media space is great, but isn't the game, still, to be writers and articulate, be articulate, in a way not open to writers of petitions, or to movie stars, etc?
Ok, well, here's the back-and-forth. I've taken out all of the hellos and goodbyes but we were very decorous, promise! I hope nonetheless that my tone didn't put Kasey off, or that my ratherless humorless, leaden prose puts you off -- but I'm writing all of this garbage from work:
[bks to ksm]
I think you get it all wrong though, on some level. The idea, for me, is not that poets are just trying to avert this war -- it would be quite remarkable if the Bush administration pulled back from this war, decided to mend relations with the entire European community, went in on various international treaties on the environment, sent AIDS drugs to Africa, took a stance on Palestinian rights, etc. not to mention decided not to bomb North Korea and continue to taunt Iran, etc.
I think that's where the criticism of Hamill lies -- that there is some idea that poets are merely against this war because they're against war in general, but are otherwise not mindful of the larger political universe and are not going to make more significant changes in how they view poetry andor poetics -- it's all subsumed under a humanistic/pacifistic viewpoint that stops once the drama ends.
This is certainly not an argument in favor of what you accurately portray as a sometimes curmudgeonly and ineffective old avant-garde stance, but my sense is that a new sort of running commentary has to be created, a new aesthetics for this, etc. and that it might be worth discussing once we figure out a little more how this is done (the art would have to come first, as usual).
I think the blog andor web phenom might play some part of this -- Heriberto seems most on this case. I'm not against the Hamill project myself, but I do see how it barely imagines how the poetry community will behave once this issue of "the war" has passed -- that's why I don't use the term "the war" in the subtitle to Circulars, it's really going to get much worse, much more intense, almost regardless of what happens.
[ksm to bks]
Naturally I agree with everything you say about the problem extending far beyond the present "drama" with Iraq. And granted, the Hamill project, even if it should prove wildly, miraculously effective in contributing to increased public outrage against war plans, will most likely do little in and of itself to change either the politico-economic base that is the fundamental problem, or the aesthetico-poetic status quo of the mainstream cultural scene. I am treating this from a pragmatic perspective, with two chief considerations in mind:
1) Any social action that might possibly help to prevent the mass bombing of Iraqi civilians is justified and necessary regardless of whatever political or artistic compromises have to be made in the process and regardless of its extended efficacy in any larger context.
2) If such a social action should succeed, it will confer greater popular credibility on the mass of its participants overall, whatever their individual disagreements and inadequacies. This may be cynical, but really, Joe and Doris Blow don't know the difference between an Iowa Confessional Poet and a Radical Oulipian and don't care; if they get up one morning, however, and read in their newspaper "POETS HELP AVERT GENOCIDE," it might increase their interest and somewhere down the line lead to the possibility of more public forums in which poetry can sort out its intestine issues. Sure, it's a trickle-down theory of poetics, fine. But point one is the really important one.
I'm just not sure it's true that, as you say, the art will have to come first. I don't know if life works that way. I'm completely in favor of any "running commentary" or "new aesthetics" that might emerge (and web culture does seem like the arena in which it could happen), but neverthess these things feel much less important to me right now than local solutions to present problems via broad public strokes. If this is short-sighted and naive, I don't see any more reasonable alternative.
[bks to ksm]
I still think the "poets as blunt tool" argument is not a very good one since it detracts from what the true force of being a "poet" is -- not that one is part of a cultural phenomenon that has been there for ages called "poetry," and which, as a unified force, is going up against the war, but because one, as a poet, has found a unique way to argue against this anticipated war, a way that has not been found among writers who are engaged in other practices but which is needed.
In other words, were we merely to be a "blunt tool" we could very well suffer the same sort of fate that that blunt tool of the Vietnam Era, Hanoi Jane Fonda, did when she took a seat in that anti-aircraft gun turret -- just simply get booed off the stage, labelled some effete know-nothing, but worse, never have been listened to anyway.
I've seen this happen around the Lincoln Center event, people using the very idea of "poetry" against the "voice" of the poets because, after all, we are the flourish, the icing on the cake, mostly quite useless to society but a testament to how open things really are -- Rupert Murdoch telling us that Noelle Kocot can say anything she wants and we should be thankful (so long as she doesn't own any newspapers).
So in terms of point one -- sure, anything is justified if it's done correctly, but it a little unclear to me whether that is the case. I have no better solutions myself except to hang back and wait (or start a website!).
If we persist under the rubrik of "poets" as the term has been understood in American society for the past several generations then we are pretty hopeless since we've rarely been turned to to speak on anything of grave importance that does not have to do with the arts. It's too easy to paint what "we" mean in journalism because of this, so, sure, if the folks at Poets Against the War play the media game well enough then there's always the chance of effectiveness -- but if not, then that one gesture of defiance is lost.
We should have the poetry to follow up should the idea of "poets" not do whatever magic it's supposed to perform. Otherwise, we might as well be "Bakers Against the War." (Nothing against bakers, of course.)
I don't quite understand all of point two -- "greater popular credibility on the mass of its participants overall" -- do you mean people will trust poets more? But, yes, of course, I don't expect anyone to care about our little tiffs, I never have (though I think some of them are at least as important as whether Picasso painted a better geranium than Matisse). "Poets Help Avert Genocide" -- this applies much more to Africa to me than to Iraq, which, realistically, will not be a "genocide."
I think something inside of me is reacting negatively to the blog phenomenon... I can understand Heriberto's view that blogs -- like websites in general -- have the ability to shift cultural capital around regardless of what's happening in the cultural capitals -- New York, Mexico City, etc. -- themselves, but I'm not sure that's what "American bloggers" are trying to do.
The idea of a "lateral community" is intriguing but at the same time might be a fancy way of justifying people talking past each other, not to mention putting a fancy sheen on vanity publishing and rushing things to print. But alas, some people derive great comfort from the sound of many voices chattering (except, of course, that blogs are largely silent, literally).
I unreservedly think it's great that poets are getting into the web and learning how to utilize it effectively, not to mention developing some really interesting prose styles, and using the web to create drafts of what will, someday, be more refined work.
But it seems that, rather than creating cooperating "communities," there is very little actual collaboration going on -- it's like slipping notes under the doors of the twelve people you think might want to read you and waiting for a response (another note slipped under the door).
Blogs are acquiring status symbol value, like front lawns -- one brags of one's "autonomy" by filling it up with pink flamingoes, because, alas, one has the right to. But if the only people who see these flamingoes are those on your block, then how does this rearrange or redirect cultural capital, or help to circulate new ideas?
I've abused my net privileges more than anyone -- in fact, I revel in doing things that nobody has asked me to do, in not waiting to be asked -- so the shame shame is geared at myself as well. But... having posted this -- do I now check other blogs for the next several days to see if there is a response. How is that better than a listserv?
Are we satisfied that our audience is largely composed of insomniacs -- other bloggers?
I used to have a blanket called my "smelly blanket" when I was a kid. Maybe I need a smelly blog. I can't quite explain what I mean by that but it's the most autobiographically revealing thing I've put up here, so we'll let it stand. Please don't mind me, I'm in a bad mood.
[I just sent this off to Kasey Mohammad regarding his recent post Acknowledged Legislators: A Rant. I'm only including it here because I haven't had any new content for this blog in ages.]
Hi Kasey,
Just read your recent blog post and would like to post it on Circulars -- sound ok? It'll link back to you.
I think you get it all wrong though, on some level. The idea, for me, is not that poets are just trying to avert this war -- it would be quite remarkable if the Bush administration pulled back from this war, decided to mend relations with the entire European community, went in on various international treaties on the environment, sent AIDS drugs to Africa, took a stance on Palestinian rights, etc. not to mention decided not to bomb North Korea and continue to taunt Iran, etc.
I think that's where the criticism of Hamill lies -- that there is some idea that poets are merely against this war because they're against war in general, but are otherwise not mindful of the larger political universe and are not going to make more significant changes in how they view poetry andor poetics -- it's all subsumed under a humanistic/pacifistic viewpoint that stops once the drama ends.
This is certainly not an argument in favor of what you accurately portray as a sometimes curmudgeonly and ineffective old avant-garde stance, but my sense is that a new sort of running commentary has to be created, a new aesthetics for this, etc. and that it might be worth discussing once we figure out a little more how this is done (the art would have to come first, as usual).
I think the blog andor web phenom might play some part of this -- Heriberto seems most on this case. I'm not against the Hamill project myself, but I do see how it barely imagines how the poetry community will behave once this issue of "the war" has passed -- that's why I don't use the term "the war" in the subtitle to Circulars, it's really going to get much worse, much more intense, almost regardless of what happens. [Think MEDIA STRANGLEHOLD -- ed.]
Anyway, but I appreciated your post...
Cheers
Brian
[This is from artist Paul Chan's National Philistine -- Combat edition, where you can read the complete set of posts he sent while in Iraq, along with a series of photographs.]
I find myself here, today, in an impossible situation.
I must speak to you--the press--with you and through you, using your kind of sentences and leaps of reason, letting you sell me like a precious but marginal commodity, so I can say what everyone already knows but a few vaguely important people in this city are unwilling to admit: that no one wants a war; that an attack against Iraq is no attack against terrorism; that an attack will in fact make the United States less safe; that the Iraqi people do not want a war to liberate them because they will not live through the liberation; that as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, "if we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight." I must convey all of this to you, sell it to you, all the while knowing that I find you despicable.
The wild dogs of Baghdad have more dignity and sense than you. You travel in packs and think the same way. You mistake quotes with facts and facts with meaning. You lack historical imagination and intellectual empathy. Your sentences are short and puritanical. In Baghdad you step over children and knock over speakers, reduce subtleties and ignore contexts. An American newspaper journalist in Baghdad told me with a gleeful sense of pride that journalists are lazy and under pressure to write, so issues and ideas have to be reduced into sound bites in order to function as media. Pathetic.
History rarely reads like a press release. And history is being made right now by those who have no time to issue statements. Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I think we are going to stop this one without you.
Thank you.
I haven't had time to post to this blog nor to read the others. Blog culture isn't quite doing it for me these days, though I'm working on a anti-war, multi-authored blog that should be up and running soon -- more on this as it develops.
But I did spend a good deal of the morning -- I woke up at 5:30 with my cat whiskers at full-mast, if that doesn't sound obscene -- reading through some of the comix that Gary Sullivan has so graciously lent to me. Lots of stuff to report, were I to be the reporting type, but let me tell you that Marbles in My Underpants, by Renée French, is one of the more disturbing things I've come across.
I'm not sure if it's the old humanist in me that wishes there were some socially redeeming value to this material -- there probably is, but it crosses over into the icky beyond what my significantly debased sensibility generally finds comfortable. These effects were mostly felt long after I had put the book down -- regardless, I highly recommend this unreadable read.
Let's just say there are a lot of surgical body probes, dreamy pre-teen girls morphing into hairless, one-eyed potato mammals, a fair amount of group masturbation among the parentals, severed body parts that become embryos for other sorts of narcotically-enhanced creatures -- all tinged with a note of innocence (cute talking bunny rabbits, Rimbaudien feelings of purple prose abandonment, a genuinely decent mom calling you in for din-din while you're out in the back yard accidentally stepping on the head of a mole, your only friend) that makes that bridge to the subconscious all that much dangerous... what was I saying?
Ok, must stop musing...
These two sites swam across my ken in the past two days, one answering to Nada's expressions of nostalgia for Japan, the other sharing one word of the title of my blog (and first book of poems) but actually having something to do with the art of illustrated narrative as practiced by Gary (see blogroll at right if you don't know who the ty*dk I'm talking about).
The first is a site devoted to Japanese emoticons -- you know, these things: ; ) . According to the propaganda: "The Japanese set is read vertically, while the western ones are read horizontally. The Japanese ones also tend to be more complex, and therefore convey more nuances. The compiler of these icons speculates that the reason is that "while American (alphabet) letters in computer are 1 byte, Japanese letters in computer are 2 bytes, so Japanese letters can have more characters." Guaranteed several minutes of amusement.
The second is a single-artist run site that looks like the work of a team of specialists. I've been reading through these for a couple of minutes now, very well drawn and taking great advantage of browser screen space. The site is called Electric Sheep Comix, and it's all designed, written, drawn, etc., by one Patrick Farley. Ever heard of him? I prefer the science fiction ones the best, like Delta Thrives, even if the narratives are a bit cosmic. This is a high-bandwidth site, but there are several pieces, such as Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything, that work fine on a 56k modem.
Here's an article about the uses of avant-garde art to torture prisoners during the Civil War in Spain. Courtesy Christian Bök on the ubulist.
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Anarchists and the fine art of torture
Spanish art historian says they put enemies in disorienting cells
Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Monday January 27, 2003
The Guardian
A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country's bloody civil war.
Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well as the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend Salvador Dali, were said to be the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centres built in Barcelona and elsewhere, yesterday's El Pais newspaper reported.
Most were the work of an enthusiastic French anarchist, Alphonse Laurencic, who invented a form of "psychotechnic" torture, according to the research of the historian Jose Milicua.
Mr Milicua's information came from a written account of Laurencic's trial before a Francoist military tribunal. That 1939 account was written by a man called R L Chacon who, like anybody allowed to publish by the newly installed dictatorship, could not have been expected to feel any sympathy for what Nazi Germany had already denounced as "degenerative art".
Laurencic, who claimed to be a painter and conductor in civilian life, created his so-called "coloured cells" as a contribution to the fight against General Franco's rightwing rebel forces.
They may also have been used to house members of other leftwing factions battling for power with the anarchist National Confederation of Workers, to which Laurencic belonged.
Hidden
The cells, built in 1938 and reportedly hidden from foreign journalists who visited the makeshift jails on Vallmajor and Saragossa streets, were as inspired by ideas of geometric abstraction and surrealism as they were by avant garde art theories on the psychological properties of colours.
Beds were placed at a 20 degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft by 3ft cells was scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards, according to the account of Laurencic's trial.
The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals which utilised tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress.
Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving.
A stone bench was similarly designed to send a prisoner sliding to the floor when he or she sat down, Mr Milicua said. Some cells were painted with tar so that they would warm up in the sun and produce asphyxiating heat.
Laurencic told the military court that he had been commissioned to build the cells by an anarchist leader who had heard of similar ones used elsewhere in the republican zone during the civil war, possibly in Valencia.
Mr Milicua has claimed that Laurencic preferred to use the colour green because, according to his theory of the psychological effects of various colours, it produced melancholy and sadness in prisoners.
But it appears that Barcelona was not the only place where avant garde art was used to torture Franco's supporters.
According to the prosecutors who put Laurencic on trial in 1939, a jail in Murcia in south-east Spain forced prisoners to view the infamously disturbing scene from Dali and Bunuel's film Un Chien Andalou, in which an eyeball is sliced open.
El Pais commented: "The avant garde forms of the moment - surrealism and geometric abstraction - were thus used for the aim of committing psychological torture.
"The creators of such revolutionary and liberating [artistic] languages could never have imagined that they would be so intrinsically linked to repression."
Hey poetry bloggers...
I don't want to be a bully, an innee or an outee, but don't some of you want to taste the fruits of movabletype.org. I'll be honest and say that it's a bit harder than the blogger blogs to set up, but once you get to the premised land you'll be a pretty hippy with it.
Carol Mirakove instigated an interesting discussion on poetry anthologies in one of my comments boxes. But of course, as things go on blogs, these discussions tend to move down the totem pole and into obscurity. But here it is.
Ok, Eno's out (see below). I don't think I want my book to seem some sort of appendage to the Eno mission, but perhaps I'll use the photo inside, I'm thinking toward the end.
So now it's a toss between green and blue. I like the green better. These aren't clickable.
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Hey kids... which one of these do you like better as a design for the cover of my new book? The Eno cover would be my choice were I able to secure permissions. The other one uses a photograph that a Japanese tourist took of me and two friends when I was in Korea in 1996 or so - he thought it was an autofocus camera.
Click for enlargement, and leave your vote in the comments box.
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I wish I had something, anything, to write today. I don't. An article on Alice Notley should be appearing on the Boston Review site soon, an interview with John Cayley on the Iowa Review website, and my bit on Carol Mirakove is coming out in Quid, which won't be online but is elsewhere on this site, in part (and in ebonics). That's about it.
Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon noodling around with Final Cut Pro, the software that I thought I'd have down by now when I bought my iMac early 2002.
I basically took some footage I had shot of my friend Boaz Barkan, the Israeli butoh dancer, and a guy named Zack -- an actor but also a butoh dancer, I had first seen him perform on the roof of P.S. 1 with Min Tanaka, one of the greats of the genre -- doing an improv in a mah-jong park in Chinatown.
Zack, who is a ghostly looking guy with long stringy hair and would have fit in nicely in The Crow, was wearing a tux for the show; Boaz didn't realize there would be costumes, so he ended up with the role of the female -- no problem, of course, Boaz often dances in wedding dresses, flouncy summer hats, etc., and in fact androgyny is a key element in a lot of butoh (b-dancers often look like something out of Genet's The Maids).
Anyway, to make a short story yet longer, I had shot this performance on my sister's Sony Digital 8 cam, a piece of shit (don't tell her I said that), but only because it is not true dv -- the footage actually looks all right, but it was even better when I stretched it out to run half its speed, tinted it a ghoulish green and blurred it up so it looked like I had a vaselined lens.
Boaz and Zack then looked like figures out of some horrible phlegmy dream, the red of Boaz's jacket managing periodically to break through the green tint [note: must learn color theory], and Zack himself some long spindly thing in his tux like an Edward Gorey cartoon.
The soundtrack, also stretched out -- and did I mention that the footage was all reversed -- was quite beautiful as well, though I relish the day when I will get my hands on some sound editing software and learn to noodle with that as well.
But enough of that.
I've read three or four interesting books in the past month (I've been considering posting the names and covers of all the books I've been reading lately, but have been too lazy to do so):
Citizens, by Simon Schama, a "chronicle" of the French Revolution that I highly recommend for its portraits of cultural phenomena (such as the little Bastille castles carved from real Batille stone that were the hot item at the time); Science is Fiction, an MIT book on the films of Jean Painleve, who was the first to make scientific studies of underwater creatures such as seahorses and who was much lauded by the surrealists, especially Battaille; Sarah, by JT Leroy, a Junky-era Burroughs-ish tale about a boy prostitute in West Virginia who works with his mother at a truck stop
[sorry, someone walked into my office. By the way, I'm coming down with something nasty and am feeling a bit feverish, hence the chatty triviality of this entry, a sign of delirium when it's not in perfect iambs.]
...at a truck stop...
...at a truck stop...
...at a...
...Burroughs...
...b-b-b-.,...m,...,
Oh, forget it. I recommend Sarah though -- read a friend's copy, it's only 150 pages and can be lapped up in about 6 hours. I'll tell you about the other books some other time.
Meanwhile, I highy recommend you look at the site of the Language Removal Society, a group that takes recorded speeches -- or the recorded speech, rather -- of celebrities and removes all of the words, leaving behind only the sounds of inhalations, gurgling, sighs, etc. Some of it's pretty sexy, I much recommend the Marilyn Monroe one:
I also just read (about an hour ago -- my "at al" bit above reminds me of the Hollow Men) Louis Menand's essay on T.S. Eliot and anti-semitism in LM's new book American Studies. Not quite Charles Bernstein's "Pounding Fascism," which I think is a great essay, but some subtle distinctions made therein and useful history of TSE's relationship to such people as Charles Maurras -- I think less of TSE after reading it, though not of the poetry.
Did you know that Ezra Pound was from Idaho? I did, but never realized how f-ckin west that is. So to call Robert Duncan the west coast's answer to Ezra Pound almost doesn't mean anything (did it ever?). He's the west coast's answer to Idaho, which is like saying Joel Lewis is New Jersey's answer to the poets of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery gallery.
When do I start making money?
I've finally put some pictures online of the mini digi fest.
Unfortunately, due to my ineptness with my still somewhat new digital camera, these pictures are mostly blurry. I must have changed a setting or something because I couldn't get the shutter speed faster, and hence there was a lot of camera shake recorded. And I didn't want to use the flash.
This is basically what I could cull from the mass.
www.arras.net/mini_digi_pics.htm
If for whatever reason you want to see more I can drop all of them into a directory and you can pick through them, though they have pretty abstract file names.
I also have video of the event which is hi-8 but at least it's from a mounted camera.
Thanks again all of you who were there and who participated!
I haven't had much to post lately. Just trying to finish up the new /ubu series of .pdfs for Kenneth (yes, he's Kenneth now) Goldsmith's site, which will feature new collections of poetry by Michael Scharf, Jessica Grim and others, along with reprints of classics like The Age of Huts by Ron Silliman and What the President Will Say and Do!! by Madeline Gins. Between these two categories are to-be-classics like Darren Wershler-Henry's The Tapeworm Foundry, published 2 years ago as a book by Anansi, and Kevin Davies' Pause Button, which is his first book from 92 or so, don't quite remember. And then there are the plays -- one by Richard Foreman and one by Mac Wellman in this first run. We'll see where all that goes.
Other than that, you can view my bank account here and my credit card account here. My student loans here and pictures of me with long hair here.
My blog templates need to be fixed -- as others have noted, some pages come up in ALL CAPS. Kind of like Alan Davies' emails.
There's also the Mini Digi Po Fest that I've been working on for Nov. 23rd as part of the Segue Reading series in NY. Featured artists include: Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Impermanence Agent fame, The Prize Budget for Boys (Neil Hennessey and Jason LeHeup), Angela Rawlings of LOGYOLOGY fame, Aya Karpinska, Paul Chan of alphanumerics fame, Patrick Herron of proximate.org fame, The Pet Shop Boys (only kidding), Holly Hunter (just joshing), Kiki Smith (now that was a joke), and John Cayley and Loss Glazier if they make it.
Other big news: ergonomic furniture has freed me from those "Patrick Rafter-like" pains and unlike the tennis star I will not be retiring from my chosen profession any time soon.
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 think it's been a little too fashionable to knock on the English for not producing too many "great" poets in the 20th century, and certainly if one is going to look through the frame of "speech based" poetics one will not find many satisfying English writers -- Charles Tomlinson, for example, who was very close to Williams' poetry never really, to my mind, understood the implications of his metrics. And certainly if one doesn't enjoy Gerard Manley Hopkins, probably as great an innovator in my mind as Williams, then one is really going to be hamstrung when it comes to reading poetry that has any attention at all to a formal tradition that goes beyond "speech based" poetics.
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.
What have I been reading -- well, just finished The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, an intellectual history of the late nineteenth century focusing on William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Peirce and John Dewey, though the real stars appeared to be the minor characters, like Chauncey Wright, who died at 45, and whose main interest philosophically was in a disquisition on the weather -- a Bergsonian, real-time weather, not the cyclical weather of a "pre-Modern" sensibility" -- and how it works to create progress because (in Menand's words) "animals have no power to develop by themselves." In Wright's words:
Changes of growth are affected by those apparent hardships to which life is subject; and progression in new directions is effected by retrogression in previous modes of growth. The old leaves and branches must fall, the wood must be frost-bitten or dried, the substance of seed must wither and then decay, the action of leaves must every night be reversed, vines and branches must be shaken by the winds, that the energies and the materials of new forms of life may be rendered active and available.
Well, this seem "just poetry" out of context, but in the context of the burgeoning discussion of pragmatism it's potent stuff, especially as it incorporates and builds on Darwin's then-new ideas about species development.
The weather in New York today seems moderate from the perspective of my desk but alas so much shitty news is coming down the pipe, whether of Senators, snipers or Chechens (and it's not because of this that I post this excerpt but it struck me), that any philosophical discourse that could act against the gloom is ok with me.
[I was invited to the University of Maine, Orono to give a poetry reading and informal talk about arras.net. Australian poet John Tranter of Jacket fame was the other reader slash speaker. I didn't actually get to read the piece below, but that didn't bother me as I had only spent about an hour writing it. It's pretty silly, my New American mode, but I think there are some good points made therein.
One thing that came up was the vanity press aspect of blogs as a whole -- Steve Evans was particularly concerned with this issue, as he had been thinking of starting a blog but couldn't get over how self-centered it seemed -- but though he didn't quite reconcile this issue, he noted as I did myself that the "blog community," people who spend time reading each other's blogs for whatever reason, seemed an important aspect to consider. One got the sense that there was a communal impetus toward responsible forms of communication with this sort of network of interested reader / writers / commentators.
Well, I'd probably be inclined to shut down my own blog if the only thing I could think to do with it was to post my own writing, but that seems to be what I'm doing so far! I'll figure it out... but for now here's this thing.]
There is certainly no grand theoretical gesture that I wish to make that has led me to create a website, to create works of “poetry” through the use of software and programming languages, or to engage in public dialogue via listservs and blogs. Usually, I’m not quite sure why I do it, and in my quieter moments, when I think of the books I could have read, the movies I could have seen, the poems I could have written, during the time I spent programming, I grow depressed, confused, I don’t know where I am anymore, I can’t remember a single phone number and I find that there is nobody around anymore to help me eat, pay my bills or put on clean socks. On top of that, I find my shoulder is filled with Patrick Rafter-like aches.
The digital arts are very young – there is no high tradition associated with them, there are no Bressons or Benjamins, no Shermans or Stravinskies, no Calvinos or Cunninghams. Those of us who have spent time looking at digital art are aware of several artists and artist groups who are destined to be acknowledged as geniuses and pioneers, but for the most part there hasn’t accrued that musty odor of middle-class respectability around artists such as Mouchette, turux, Aurelia Harvey (entropy8), jodi, Yong Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Jeremy Blake, Giselle Beiguelman, Lisa Jevbratt and Mark Napier – just a handy few that leap to mind – not to mention digital “poets” such as Stephanie Strickland, John Cayley or one of my personal favorites, William Poundstone.
There is a good chance this may never happen – it rarely happens for poets, certainly not of our ill-bred ilk, though it has happened to "poetry" – but this “middle-class” respectability is what invariably makes it possible to brag about one’s acquaintance with the films of Tarkovsky at a cocktail party and not of one’s acquaintance with LyingMotherFucker.com.
James Schuyler wrote in his statement for the New American Poetry that “anyone in New York knows the big thing now is painting” (or something like that), but I don’t think anyone is saying that poets all know that the big thing now is digital technology – not outside of Toronto, at least. Which, of course, is fine, this leaves the field open to those of us – John and myself and others like the ubu/alienated crowd – to make of it what we will, even while being mostly ignored by the “other” digital literature, hypertext fiction, who have been more concerned with a “poetics” of the internet but not the poetry – we’ve heard that before! – or poetry that we can associate with any tradition of poetic forms, such as the sonnet or the sestina.
Where digital poetry – let’s loosely call it that – meets with poetry that traditionally is disseminated on the page or in performance, whether as a play or reading, is probably somewhere in the realm of the poetry of “facts” – poetry that uses found materials and source texts, but also the poetry of “situations” in the, ah hem, Situationist sense, which is to say poems that might not be poems at all but call attention to the social forces, whether political or architectural, at play in the creation and experience of the art work itself -- a poem as linguistic gesture rather than formal artifact.
This isn’t to say that the lyric, or the poem of personal sentiment, has no role in something called “digital poetics” but that it doesn’t need anything that digital technology has to offer – lyricism on a blog, for instance, comes off as being exhibitionistic, while the artful marginalia of John Wieners has the resonance of gospel. But a poetry of facts can be exponentially more powerful when allied with the encyclopedic, disorganized yet rigid structure of computers, especially the internet.
But importantly, this poetry of facts can be strongly tinged by personal affect, a prime example being Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, which pulled most of its distinctive vocabulary from a dictionary of African American slang and yet is composed of tight quatrains. Pound’s Cantos would be another obvious one, as would Browning's long poem The Ring and the Book, practically a documentary based on a box of trial records he discovered in a pawn shop. I would even count the poems by Ern Malley, the "hoax" poet, which thrown together based on whatever was on the desk at the time, as successful to the degree that lyrical strategies came into play.
In fact, I would argue, a poetry of facts, including a poetics of disinformation, becomes even more reliant on a strong, true lyrical sensibility the more it opens itself to the possibilities of algorithm, of seemingly limitless information, idioms, etc. One could then view -- with some reservations -- the form of an internet site such as arras as something of a poetic form.
My sense is that the internet becomes a “field” in much the same way the page become a “field” for Olson and Duncan, and that the properties of this field must be somatically acquired – a sense of timing brought into the nerves, a sense of audience intuited as strong as one might have at a public roast, and a sort of linguistic understanding of the applications and programming languages involved – before any really interesting work can be done on it. The white page has thus evolved into the placeless, ahistorical terra nullius of the http protocol, which isn’t too bad if you have the coloniser’s instinct of a computer geek and choose to become the code warrior's version of a polymath. Releases into cyberspace thus become analogous to the strike of the typewriter across the page, with a similar sort of vulnerable permanence.
In terms of artistic mandates -- and any strong web site has one, as should any art project -- I think atomizing language, making it purr or bubble, or propagating scandals, whether in the name of Malley or Mayakovsky, are not enough – to be strident is good, but stridently uncaring and solipsistic, is a waste of precious attention, especially if the idea is to further the art, or to be an artist at all.
This statement is merely a rough way of explaining why I haven’t abandoned poetry “on the page” for digital literature, and also might suggest why the field of “digital poetry” is relatively undeveloped, and that’s because, in my mind, many of the practitioners today have sacrificed a lyrical sensibility for a robotic one, on the one hand, or a terroristic one on the other, forgetting that the cyborg – a feedback loop between human and machine – is implicated in the tradition of poetry, in both what it writes and codes.
I was actually scolded by my own blog this morning for not writing to it -- there are so many things to learn when you have a young blog, such as how to pay attention to it, how best to plug up the electrical outlets in one's home -- but now my blog has uttered its first words back to me, oh joy. It was a complete sentence, too -- and how it managed to fill out the comments form I'll never know. But now I have $5,321 worth of gum and Flinstones vitamins, not to mention Barney dolls and Darth Maul action figures, charged on my credit card -- so I'm punishing the blog. From now on I will only write...
in Ebonics.
Clinton Says He Backs Tough U.N. Resolution on Iraq Inspections
by ISIDORE ISOU
Call me old-fashioned, but don't you get a little suspicious when a reviewer uses a phrase like "Ashbery circle jerk" and calls George Oppen a "B-list Modernist"? Everybody has a right to be bored and coy (yawn), but I somehow think the Voice's art reviews editor would have pruned a little here and unpacked some of the graduate school garblese... ("...the intimate collisions of romantic exchange to subvert the gendered poles of self and object." Huh?) Nonetheless, great to see Jennifer's book reviewed, and Hong does effectively, and not indifferently, place it in some context -- though it seems more in the politics of art than art and politics.
Oppen Sesame
by Cathy Hong
(originally appeared in the Village Voice)
The Sense Record and Other Poems
By Jennifer Moxley
Edge, 78 pp., $12.50
With an iron fist, avant-gardists soundly thumped poetry of lazy sentiment by scrabbling verse into Steinian fragments. Now with these poets manning the academic mothership rather than hastily stapling chapbooks, a younger generation is imploding invention by returning to the lyric. We have bards from the Ashbery circle jerk whose jottings are inevitably couched in (yawn) pastiche. Then there is Jennifer Moxley, whose first book, Imaginary Verse, was hailed by her Language-spawned colleagues as reconfiguring the lyric. With her follow-up, The Sense Record, Moxley rigorously digs deeper into the tradition—a good handful of the poems are in blank verse and a couple of them are sonnets—but more striking is her regression to romantic sentiment.
Moxley's dense stanzas are in restless, helical winds that track her "untenanted cloud corridor of. . . indistinct thought." She refashions sentiment into fashionable philosophical discourse: "Eros tell me why, without love,/without hate, listening/to the softly falling rain upon the rooftops of the city,/my heart has so much pain. What I write in truthtoday/tomorrow will be in error." The pathos of her poetics is not tied to humdrum humanist narratives; she prefers to bandy abstract yet aching questions that ask whether solitary imagination can synthesize with the material world's relentless data.
In her essay "Invective Verse," Moxley quips, "There is a specter haunting poetry and it's not the Paris Review," saying that what holds poets back is their own political lassitude. As social critic, Moxley takes cues from B-list Modernist George Oppen (his opus "Of Being Numerous" is mentioned in this book's first poem), though her project is unlike Oppen's concern with grand collectivity. Often using the apostrophe, she prefers to investigate the intimate collisions of romantic exchange to subvert the gendered poles of self and object. The more specific dragons she slays, however, are too close to her circle as she questions the ersatz Marxist and male-driven fin de siècle: "The soi-distant Avant-Gardist builds a pyramid scheme, a last ditch pitch to the lure of Empire." Her digs are well founded. But given her inspiring talent coupled with her passionate beliefs, I expected her political vision to have more girth. In subjects of reflection and intimacy, her poetry is a wonder. I only ask for more invective in her verse.
The painting at the right, btw, is by Wyndham Lewis, English Vorticist. I don't know the title of it -- if anyone does please email me.
