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SEGUE READING SERIES AT THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB
308 BOWERY, JUST NORTH OF HOUSTON
Saturday, Nov. 2, 4-6
$4 admission goes to support the readers
Curators:
Brian Kim Stefans & Gary Sullivan
Deirdre Kovac, a one time Detroiter, now lives in Brooklyn. Her work has most recently appeared in 100 Days (Barque), Crayon, and The Capilano Review (Boo), and is forthcoming in Shiny. Her first book, Mannerism, is indeterminately forthcoming.
Lytle Shaw's books include The Lobe (Roof, 2001) and Cable Factory 20 (Atelos, 1999) as well as several collaborations with the painter Emilie Clark, with whom he co-edits Shark, a journal of art and writing. Shaw also curates a rival reading series at the Drawing Center.
Essay: http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket10/shaw-on-ohara.html
Poems: http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket10/shaw-poems.html
I've been given a cease and desist from the New York Times regarding the use of their images and homepage design and the use of their advertiser's images in my Raoul Vaneigem series.
I knew this would happen eventually, and don't see any real need to argue with them as I didn't intend these detournements to be anything more than graffiti on a wall, subject to the elements. I'm taking them down in 5 days -- they requested they come down in 10 days, but I'm being a nice guy.
However, I'd like to give anyone who wants the chance to download the page for their own private viewing (not to put on their website).
I should explain that I didn't actually write any of the text that appears in these pieces. Anything that was not part of the original NY Times article was taken from the writings of Raoul Vaneigem, the French Situationist, either from The Revolution of Everyday Life or from Contributions to The Revolutionary Struggle, Intended To Be Discussed, Corrected, And Principally, Put Into Practice Without Delay. Both of these texts can be found at nothingness.org
Blair Presents Dossier on Iraq's Biological Weapons
Daschle Denounces Bush Remarks on Iraq as Partisan
Clinton Says He Backs Tough U.N. Resolution on Iraq Inspections
[The new addition to this site is courtesy bannerart.org, a site that collects work conforming to webvertising specifications in terms of file size and dimensions. Here's some info on the site, recently revamped. Brandon Barr, who runs the texturl blog (see right), is one of the creators of this site.]
The Banner Art Collective has implemented a new design created by Garrett Lynch. The new design brings a vast number of improvements to the site, which collects and distributes net.art and poetry created according to the limitations of WWW advertising.
The collection is now database driven and easily searchable. Each work is presented on a separate page, and more artist information is featured next to each work. Viewers have always been able to access cut-and-paste html tags to place works from the collection on their own webpages, but now the site also offers users a php-driven script that, when added to any html document, serves randomly changing banners from the collection.
In addition, the new design automates the submission process with an online form which artists can use to easily upload their works to the collection. There are also new frequently updated sections which contain news, links to host and sponsor sites, and links to related research and art projects.
The collection now includes works by:
arte_comprimido (Argentina)
babel (Canada/UK)
Brandon Barr (US)
Ji Bêt (France)
Bruec (US)
Christophe Bruno (France)
Agricola de Cologne (Germany)
Catherine Daly (US)
Tom Dannecker (US)
drivedrive.com
Roberto Echen (Argentina)
Joshua Goldberg (US)
Lee French & Barry Small (UK)
jimpunk (France)
Kanarinka (US)
Tamara Laï (Belgium)
Jessica Loseby (UK)
Garrett Lynch (UK)
Gerhard Mantz (Germany)
Joseph Franklyn McElroy (US)
Millie Niss (US)
Alexandra Reill (Italy)
Michaël Sellum (France)
Antoine Schmitt (France)
Ana Maria Uribe (Argentina)
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.
SEGUE READING SERIES AT THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB
http://www.segue.org/calendar/calendar_index.htm
http://www.bowerypoetry.com/
308 BOWERY, JUST NORTH OF HOUSTON
Saturday, October 26
4 (sharp) - 6 PM
$4 admission goes to support the readers
Curators:
Brian Kim Stefans & Gary Sullivan
::Jackson Mac Low::
Publishers Weekly once called Jackson Mac Low "America's most indefatigable experimental poet"‹he's also been one of the most influential. The long-awaited, 250-page Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces 19552002 was just published by Granary Books. A nice selection of his work can be found at: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/maclow/.
::Maggie O'Sullivan::
Publishers Weekly may not have called Maggie O'Sullivan anything, but she is one of England's most indefatigable experimental poets, having published fourteen books including Unofficial Word (Galloping Dog, 1998) and In the House of the Shaman (Reality Street, 1993). She edited Out Of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (Reality Street, 1996).
[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.
[Here's the kind of poem you write when you are sitting at your desk at work, thinking about war, trying to be a good Situationist but ending up somewhere between wistful magical realism and dreaming if dim Guadelahara. Or maybe Frank O'Hara, or Rimbaud in Harar. In any case, this poem is hereby dedicated to my blog, Bloggity Blog, who didn't appear to enjoy my previous Beefheartish offering.]
I had that idea, too.
Write the life but according
to principles not usually associated
with life, such as...
And shut off all
auto-correct features.
There is the sound of straining
from the other room. That was the one
vacated by the terrorists. They were brothers
from a little village in Italy. It is now
occupied by an opera singer
with chronic constipation.
Same thing. Taking the pleasure
out of your work. I had serious reservations
about my own writing before I started
this. This talking.
Sometimes it is just
the hands hanging from twin flagpoles
emanating from my breasts. I could shine them,
wax them, spit on them, but they
don’t write,
just hold out for the rest of the day
until I couldn’t brag of them any
longer – usually by mid-afternoon, say 3 pm.
I’d drink more coffee then, check my emails,
play some on-line Yahoo! games, like backgammon.
My flagpoles not buckling in the wind.
My flags empty of wind.
My hands dangling there like flags.
AT THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB
www.bowerypoetry.com
308 BOWERY, JUST NORTH OF HOUSTON
SATURDAY, October 19 FROM 4 - 6 PM
$4 admission goes to support the readers
Curators: Brian Kim Stefans & Gary Sullivan
Gregory Whitehead's voiceworks and radio plays include The Pleasure of Ruins, Pressures of the Unspeakable and The Thing About Bugs. His writings on language and electronic media have been widely anthologized, and he is the co-editor of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press). He wants to talk about squid.
Bio, bibliography, selected work:
www.location1.org/artists/whitehead.html
If we think of Bill Berkson as bi-coastal, it's only because we were so smitten by his recently re-published collaborative work with Frank O'Hara, Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings (The Owl Press). But, yes, to be fair to him -- and the west coast -- he has, for many years now, been one of the Bay Area's brightest shining stars, with an oeuvre that includes everything from art writing to the poems and prose of Serenade (Zoland Books). Don't miss his rare east-coast visit!
Interview:
www.twc.org/forums/poetschat/poetschat_bberkson.html
[Here is a fairly old, kind of slapdash review of Tim Davis's first book, Dailies, that I had written for Tripwire magazine for their Winter 2000-2001 issue. I'm posting it because Tim is now writing regular poems and reviews, or poem-reviews -- he calls them "Photems," which I think suggests they are also photographs -- for the website artkrush.com. I'd always wanted to revise this review and someday I will, but for now here you have it in its raw glory -- huge citation from Bataille and all -- though I've corrected a few basic errors and given it a nip and tuck. I take a few cheap shots at a particular poet in this one because of another book that had been released about that time -- not the one mentioned -- for which I ask your indulgence.]
Tim Davis
Dailies
The Figures
111 pp.
ISBN: 935724--77--X
Writing of another city poet, Baudelaire, Jean-Paul Sartre describes an ethical and aesthetic background (or battleground) against which a description can begin of Tim Davis’s unique idiom in Dailies:
In order for liberty to be complete it has to be offered the choice... of being infinitely wrong. It is therefore unique in this whole universe committed to Good, but it must adhere totally to Good, maintain it and strengthen it in order to be able to plunge into Evil. And he who damns himself acquires a solitude which is a feeble image of the great solitude of the truly free man. In a certain sense he creates. In a universe where each element sacrifices itself in order to converge in the greatness of the whole, he brings out the singularity, that is to say the rebelliousness of a fragment or a detail. Thus something appears which did not exist before, which nothing can efface and which was in no way prepared by worldly materialism. [...] The deliberate creation of Evil -- that is to say, wrong -- is acceptance and recognition of Good.
This may seem an enormously oversized frame in which to place a poet who is often noted for his quirky neologisms, improvisationally resonant (very American, part bee-bop part-Olsonian) rhythms, stream-of-consciousness near-hysteric joke-making, and desire, it appears, to mask a natural sincerity behind a hard-core urban irony, but that is because we are not living in a country known for its attention to a complex (and significantly contradictory) moral/ethical universe, or at least one that is not easily thrust into parody by the note of a sexual scandal or backdoor money, or subsumed under the blanket term of “pragmatism.”
Davis, like all poets of roughly thirty years of age in the United States, was an adolescent during the Reagan years, when the Christian right were pulling the marionette strings of American politics, and in which the idea of flattened, readily-accessible “good” was infiltrating public-speak in the nefarious forms of both “family values” and the “politically correct,” a virtual minefield against which any significant detail -- any dive beneath the glass floor of narrowly ethical expression (or shall we say being?) -- was rendered perfectly visible and per-fectly condemnable in a single gesture.
Against such a background, any adolescent wary of the terms of socialization -- and in some ways any member of the marginal classes who happens to be situated in a non-marginalized social sphere (like a college) -- becomes “something... which did not exist before,” that which, by not dissolving into the background of the social fabric being described, endlessly, through channels as diverse as aerobics commercials and U2 videos, could only situate itself on the side of “evil.”
But America also has a rich counter-cultural tradition, one in which Davis finds a place. The names of Lenny Bruce, Ed Sanders, and Frank Zappa are often heard of when discussing Davis’s work, and it is perhaps on this seamy side of comedy, rather than in “evil,” that one would want to situate his writing (not to mention his author photograph, of the author hanging naked from a Joshua Tree).
The problem, of course, is that Davis is a poet and not a comic, and he uses words, lines, sentences, often in fragmentary forms, the entire machinery of which rebel on the page against this dissolution into the fabric of the whole (there’s a bit of Mallarmean melodrama in any poet who strikes out against the dominating whiteness), and so the category “comedy”, and even “satire”, does not extend wide enough through the universe to contain what is happening there. Hence the recourse to “evil,” at least in the Manichean sense -- productive evil, or the detail that is found in and against the void -- which is not a native product of the United States.
So the question, then, is regarding details. The work is called “dailies,” the reference being to the uncut film shot during a production as it observed after a day’s work on a movie.
Oddly, two other books of poetry were released at about the same time with references in their titles to the same activity. Perhaps there is something in the zeitgeist that is asking, after so many years of “non-referential” writing (which is how Language poetry is often, inaccurately, described), there is a desire to touch ground with the physical and personal (as if it were that easy), and hence a return to the “lunch poem” ethos of Frank O’Hara or the heroic “dailiness” of Mayer’s Midwinter Day: what I see matters, this little ephemeral moment which I will alchemize with my training with words can, itself, be a poem.
There is a need to break past the epistemological torments and sublimities of the “French lyric,” or the post-Marxist syntactic social subversion that seems difficult to discern while easy, and prestige-enhancing, to describe. Hence, I will write one a day; after two years I will have 730, most of which will be kept in my underwear drawer until they are discovered by loving peers.
This sort of bravado -- “moral exhibitionism” in Benjamin’s term (describing the surrealists) -- becomes the sad activity of bankrupt literati when it decides to stay within the frame of O’Hara (or Ashbery or Koch), not even adopting the full range of possibility that these New York poets pointed toward but adopting their symbolic value. David Lehman’s Daily Record, in fact, seems to derive entirely from one element of one single tone of one of O’Hara’s poems, and never leaves that safe area lest it risk being a unique, sovereign poem.
Davis, conversely, only touches down with O’Hara in an oblique instant, perhaps somewhere from the heart of “The Day Lady Died”; from that point on, he is traipsing off into the wilderness, a maximalizing effort outside of (though not above, which would be hard to do) O’Hara’s urbane and catty scripts. His details, then, are not Coca-Colas, the names of his friends and De Koonings over the mantles, but the pantheon of poetic techniques and political contradictions that have surfaced since the fifties in a world of increasing globalization.
The rush of comedy and torquing of reference takes on a tone of invective despite itself; it becomes the harsh discord that Adorno describes in serial music, that scream that is the natural speech of the post-Romantic crisis of subjectivity. Yet this is not “dark” work in the manner of Baudelaire or a German Expressionist, but because there is no room for it (in the offices of New Directions, where he was working at the time and where he wrote the poems), the “oppositional” tone of invective seems to take over, at times.
Here is the entirety of “Shy Riot”:
history pimps itself it
depletes itself I say
history is a selfmade man -- and worships its creator
history hanged itself to avoid the daily task of dressing
like mackerel by moonlight it
shines and stinks
[germany sent seven thousand gasmaks to Israel today]
history is a despotism tempered by epigrams
there is no other granola like this
on the board of who am I incorporated sits
lists deposed by history’s inquisitors
times you’ve yelled you whoreson zed
times it befell the three little sows
trade in houses for hotels and
heft the rent
[flying tigers]
why should men eat shrimps and avoid cockroaches
methodology of the fucker [flying
tigers]
history is the worship of jackals by jackasses
pickle-herring in the puppet show of history
say steering clear -- all arks are off
nobody can beam and warble while
chewing pressed history and diabolical mustard
fresh baby cranium peelback [context]
dust on the saga
basta
We are nearly entering the rhetorical universe of Pound’s “Usura” canto, here, but whereas the modernist found a central theme, even an area of placidity (in the Platonic perfection of forms) against which to judge the failures of history, Davis is flying into the open: “why should men eat shrimp and avoid cockroaches.” There is kind of an inversion in all of the Davis’ poetry, each sentence (or line) turning back in on itself so as to avoid any chance of easy comprehension.
“Shy Riot” is one of the easier ones to “understand,” it seems to point outward to coherent “meanings,” but in general Dailies is a drama of never quite breaking away from the language and soaring to the next thought, the next “utopic” vista, the satisfaction of the abstract promise of... abstraction.
Nothing is very abstract, the philosophical words take no hold, nor do ideals ever surface beyond the things (from “Smart Poets Society”):
(rodrigo’d get a village reargaurd hard on)
1-800-COLLECTIVISM side of fries
the body is (quickly, fill in “duck-billed raven”)
a place for forest fires
if not full on fusion (tear it torrid)
The complex of Dailies is that it seems to exist in contradiction to the basic tenants of pragmatism and the “good works” of our Puritan forefathers; it doesn’t want to succeed as product, something that can be added to the great heap of American literary achievement (the literary equivalent of a green lawn), and yet it chooses the daily over the ideal, parataxis and improvisation over the formal seductions of the “well-made poem.”
There is a New England moral tone resonating through these poems, and yet this tone can never escape the clanging, equally opinionated units of phonemes that suck it back into language. It is as if E. E. Cummings put away his tab and space keys and instead plunged into the heady intoxications of hyper-referentiality before getting down to the tale of the anti coprophagic Olaf.
Sometimes the book is difficult to read because of this; one waits for Davis to soar -- into invective, fiction, reverie, lyricism -- but because meaning is never surrendered, and because the erotic, sophisticated and, perhaps, comfortable semantic slippages of deconstructive poetics are never explored, one feels as trapped in the details of history, culture and the ceilings and floors of the ethical sphere as Davis, the “selfmade man who envies its creator.”
Perhaps this is true freedom, or the closest one will get to it, not as a solipsism but with a sense of oneself as “detail,” that which stands against the whole and creates but which, then, cannot speak but through inverted or negating gestures.
[I don't have anything really new to publish today except this bit that came through the Net Art list announcing a new addition to the entropy8zuper site. Haven't checked it out yet myself.]
'Tale of Tales' is the new game-design division of the ever-morphing entropy8zuper.org. Currently, tale-of-tales.com hosts plans for a Sleeping Beauty-based project entitled '8,' scheduled for completion some time in 2003. More substantive is a bulletin board focused solely on the theory and practice of game development. Michael (zuper!) and Auriea (entropy8) regularly post on topics ranging from low-res, 3D aesthetics to non-linear, plot storyboarding. Add your own insights to the dialogue, or just lurk & learn. Art as play as narrative as environment as play as play as play. - Curt Cloninger
On Carol Mirakove’s Poetry
[Yesterday, I wrote a longish article about da poetry of muh homie Carol Mirakove fo da English poetry newsletter Quid, edited by Keston Sutherland. When I get order-in infomation fo dis issue -- which be devoted ta work of three American women poets, Carol, Heather Fuller and Laura Elrick -- I post it heea on muh blog. I can't give ya da whole article (and fo those of ya wonderin why it's in Ebonics, see below) -- but heea is da first few paragraphs. "Suzanne Dathe, Grenoble, France," by da way, be da first name on an anti-war email petition dat I received about 30 times ova da course of da week leadin up ta da writin of dis article on 10/11/02.]
Some kind of argot –
not entirely given ova ta da track star at Mineola Prep model – these poems is worked – but nonetheless somewheea in da sprawl of William Gibson’s Neuromainecer, jacked-in but runnin freely through da night dat could be day – "muscle a language / monumental / & free" – tryin ta move foward – avoidin da snipers – scannin da roadside – refigurin da spectacle less as a saturatin, unlocatable ethos but as an array of robotic effigies, da divisible choruses of ad agents, secret agent men, agent oranges, and agency debilitators choked up by da nefarious database and becomin Senators – I guess one might suggest she turns it [da language game, or Debord’s "game of war"] inta a video game, L.A. freestyle, fusin Flash sprites from dis heea-cleitian noize – but she’s hired da best animators (pals of David Choe), best screen-writers (dat would be da poets she’s read and emulated, several includin Rod Smith and Heather Fuller from DC days) and her softwis has pledged strict allegiance ta grassroot copyleft principles – da "anxiety of influence" of choice fo code writers once known as "hacks" –
[I plug allergens… inta da engines… of Audiogalaxy Satelitte… and da repository... from which I stream… one frisson... undivided… wit listservs… and Rasputina… fo all…] – etc.
Our speech will occasionally be struck by a flyin neutrino and da social glue of da lyric will turn inta shards – "chewtoy collidin somewheea wit dust" – we somehow get back inta it, thankin da machinery [melancholy?] of da page, espe-cially Nurse Ratchett’s syndicated tab key (keepin da runaway spaces in check) – high skoo disciplines includin Projectivism (Olson, but I champion Morley) and perfomainece poetry’s post-hip hop [?] "new fusion" [!] yawp, but also Pound’s clear imagistic coins and Bernstein’s sonic popsa empurplement – ta wrest control and even a momentary classical stasis from a datachick’s tendency ta mallarmé one’s way across da white amidst da throes of chance which is fo real da underlyin op sys gone sluriously bonkers –
The heartfelt themes minle freely wit da ironies – da "TV mainetis / placin her neck on da guillotine" wit da "fuck ya I pray / fo a big soundtrack" – da rape wit da camp – [these is poems from 3 cities, as Carol has infomed me in an email: DC, LA, and NY – so der’s somethin followin her everywheea] – we call these… "metastases," in Wilkinson’s sense, da sites of pain dat appear in different poems and draw our attention ta da borders of da lyrical-corpus-as-somatic-graph as they is limned by acute punkts –
Fake punk bands, two of three eyes on da market, seem ta want ta say: anyone ova 25 looks so old – but we is all ova 80 and struggle wit a defomin language of impressions, experience, and cultural obsolescence [their omniscence] – dat nature’s legs lag behind da further we grow from da Modernist moment and self-creation be moe individualized than ever, which be ta say da older is farther from yath but closer ta da old, sterlin Futures shisd by a mobilized communal imagination. Now [these is da conversations muh homies and I gots] der seems a dearth of major dreamin in da follow-up generations, one symptom of which be dat they can’t find utopian mo-ments when brinin it down a notch – "devoid of drapes / and bedspreads / da clock’s on pause / da window part of / da outside / eyes da surface / dis / just beneath just / beneath " – dat New York strategy ["habitus?" asks R. Toscano] of bein da darkest, hippest thin on earth though writin about flowers, Sunday morn-in and lovin Jimmuh Schuyler – [z.b. I saw Richard Hell at two St. Mark's memorials dis month, fo Kenneth Koch and John Wieners, which isn’t surprisin but might be chaos theory fo some wit docal dividends] – and conveyed through language un-cluttered by mainenerist elaborations [I’d like dat ta be da crunk new magic but I’m waitin fo da ovature ta end… ] – American plain-song, of course, a clean slate fo micro-tonal aesthletics…
- aww yea foo.
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
SEGUE READING SERIES AT THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB
308 BOWERY, JUST NORTH OF HOUSTON
SATURDAYS FROM 4 - 6 PM
$4 admission goes to support the readers
Curators:
October/November--Brian Kim Stefans & Gary Sullivan
October 12: Carol Mirakove and John Wilkinson
Carol Mirakove is the author of WALL (ixnay press, 1999) and a founding member of the subpress collective, with whom she published Edwin Torres' Fractured Humorous (1999). Her forthcoming book is titled Temporary Tattoos, to be published by BabySelf Press in Brooklyn. New work is featured in issue 11 of Cambridge, England's QUID.
Poetry: www.theeastvillage.com/t12/mirakove/a.htm
Interview: home.jps.net/~nada/cmirakove.htm
John Wilkinson is also visiting us from England, and is the author of Oort's Cloud: Earlier Poems (subpress, 2000) -- a "kaiserschnitt of sovereign dismemberment" to those in the know -- the great Flung Clear (Parataxis, 1994), a kaisershnitt of six book-length works; and most recently Effigies Against the Light (Salt, 2001). This is a rare New York appearance.
Interview: angel-exhaust.offworld.org/html/issue-9-10/Wilkinson.html
Review: www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket09/brady-rev-wilkinson.html
[I haven't been at my work desk all weekend, and haven't had anything obviously significant to post, and yet in an effort to maintain a line of communication... a poem I've been working on that might be of interest to those of you who have ever curated a reading series. I actually had a great time introducing Bruce Andrews and Drew Milne this weekend, but this piece -- which was started more than a year ago -- seems to have found some new relevance now that I'm back in the driver seat again.]
UNCOMMENT
Apollinaire,
argue with,
art binary breakdown
— but enough to derail,
— but I’m in a rush.
Chance,
come into play,
comes out of his/her mouth,
concentration on the words on the table.
Consider my very private
constant movement,
Debord —
I am the system,
I can’t say
I am not,
if only slightly.
I walk into a room.
I would do it in improvised locations.
I’ll spare the examples.
I’ve wanted to create a paragraph
walking a lobster,
walking into a room.
It’s not that I’m uncomfortable
meeting people
perhaps at odd moments of the month and week,
perhaps on purpose.
Nuances
of the bureaucratic —
of written text into the real-time
"on schedule,"
one among many.
— Perhaps "dictator" is better?
— Perhaps, a series of paragraphs?
The bodily/abstract (
The public/private (
The troubles,
The written stuff
— there is a page of wasted prose.
There is no exact.
Well,
what else happens at a reading?
When the time seems right (
You become the “boy,” and those who have nurtured private opinions of your essential servility suddenly come forth with demands —
through thick or thin,
to be gazed at as a single artwork —
not to mention potentially transform thinking in fashions that writing itself could not alone do —
they are just demands —
they are mostly petty,
(think of Bourdieu)
which is to say that the most loyal curators will never be taken too seriously as poets.
A “gentleman,” but really a slave) —
a certain looseness,
as did the behavior of Rimbaud,
as he/she does,
a poet’s actions in public (
a series hanging in space at the same time.
Can one say “being” of the work that you have produced,
— determined warrior-poet who has attempted to inflict on me the natural aspect of the superiority of his views but who has not
become part of the record? —
becomes animated for me?
And when they have just produced some tremendous work that I am sure will change everything,
even organizing —
even the use of proper names —
ever so slightly —
for instance,
for the possible in what,
for what —
for whom decisions have a sort of finality —
I somehow think this is all meaningful.
I think it is discussing this particular strand of my behavior
— I try to shave at least in the week prior to the reading —
— I have just completed a two-month run as the “curator” —
— even approached mastery of the social rules such that such a challenge could even be humored past the first move,
in fact.
And if it weren’t so much work —
and only with poets I am most excited about,
and quite alone
— and so, for that reason I will “curate” only infrequently.
Promises:
quasi-elitist self-training as a poet
— setting the parameters,
since it is then,
so much more revealing in my writing,
syntax even —
talker —
that a particular aspect of poetry
that begin with this sentence
that is lacking in the creation of a “schedule”
— not to mention my own social distractions
of cultural capital,
will be my expression of revolutionary will,
writer,
yes.
All of the vicissitudes (
and I promised to myself that spontaneity,
accidentally or purposely ignore,
actually enjoy the microphone,
(inchoate as it seems)
including reviewer —
interpretation —
issues of mutual respect —
— it is the French who have most theorized how the agent in the field
invariably makes an impression on Nerval’s works (
Playing in a super-literary fashion invariably changes not only what has been written
but the trap of filling a role —
—
But then I am reminded that this form of politics smacks.
But what is to be written?
by chance (
etc.
These run up against these more fluid inclinations of mine,
(this is a key word here)
this visibility is good —
though I have sought to master it by pulling some of the strings —
— that you take orders,
— that you are perfectly polite (
the “iron hot,” if that doesn’t sound ridiculous.
And I would have thought I’d have gone out of my way to avoid the “public” as much as possible,
and though I have no terribly urgent thoughts on the matter,
how many idiotic challenges have I faced from a headstrong
I am not just in the system.
I am political just when I said that being political is the natural next step past being an aesthete.
?
In which I can most suitably begin a sentence:
— Three-dimensional world are often thwarted by a haughty attitude toward the rules themselves...
To read in private —
whom I might chance to meet?
— more so now than in the headier days of life/
— that which one is intended.
That you behave in fashions that suit your role?
These opportunities for continuing the discourse,
(why can’t I spell that? —
agreed-upon term for this role in the poetry community,
— but it doesn’t have the prestige of that figure in the visual arts.
— But it somehow becomes a determinant in the reception.
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.
U.N. Weapons Inspectors Seek Open Access in Iraq
By ASGER JORN
[the latest NYTimes detournement]