March 05, 2003

from Geoffrey G. O'Brien

[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

Posted by Brian Stefans at March 5, 2003 03:55 PM
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