Experiments In Text :The Literature That Organisms Demand

Quick On-the-Road One-Handed Note: The Rumpus for My Birthday

2011-08-02T17:16:00.000-07:00

Learning to write lefty.

And to peck
at the keys like
a poet.

The political consequences of the shift. Minutely felt as they are...

Many thanks to The Rumpus editors, as well as poet and reviewer David Peak, for publishing a kind, insightful review of Occultations. I was alerted to the review by friends, and reading it offered me new insight into what the hell I was or was not doing. The close reading is gracious and welcomed. Thank you!

Such wonderful poets have new books out. I will now have to wait till teaching in New York is over to see these new works (each of which I've read parts of, and have deeply been affected by):

--Susana Gardner's Herso - Black Radish Books // finally Gardner puts down her amazing book arts talents, others' manuscripts, and releases this difficult, spectral, book of poems.

--Sarah Mangold's An Antennae Called the Body - Little Red Leaves Textile Editions // I love LRL, the work they publish and the time they put in curating works. I also love Mangold's work, have for several years ever since reading Household Mechanics. Can't wait to read this book.

--C.J Martin's Two Books - Compline // Speaking of LRL editors, Martin's work has had an enormous impact on my thinking and writing. One of the most well kept secrets in contemporary poetry (well, not for much longer). And to wit, Michael Cross's new press (hot damn!) has published the book. That's celebratory.

--Carlos Soto-Roman's Philadelphia's Notebooks - Otoliths // I'm super excited about this. Speaking of well-kept secrets. At least here in the US. Whereas in Chile and elsewhere, Carlos Soto-Roman's work has been widely circulating. This work is bound to be....

Philadelphia's Notebooks (book)

Print: $14.95

Carlos Soto-Román writes from the center of Empire with a sense of play (game pieces included) and clinical examination. His book is the work of an artist/world citizen who critiques the daily interrogations that come with being a new immigrant. The fun fact that Ellis Island was greatly expanded with landfill in the late 19th -early 20th century provides a basis for Soto-Román's signage marking poetry's place in a disposable culture. There are workbook exercises that encourage creative ways to answer the calls for loyalty oaths with a demand for radical possibility the host country includes in its PR material. This work also includes what the USA brand doesn't advertise—isolation and moments of utter despair. It is a truly American poem in that it's internationally inflected, from George Perec to German cinema to self-immolators from all over the world. "Philadelphia's Notebooks" could not be a more artful and timely reminder that “Every heart is a revolutionary cell.”—Frank Sherlock

--Oh, and here's a photo of my grandparents Alimelech and Tzivia (Kazakhstani). According to my aunt, they were active leftist revolutionaries, until one or both were swept up in one of the region's pogrom's.

Two: 2

2011-06-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

Recommended, two in-depth interviews with two fabulous poets/editors:

--the intrepid rob mclennan asks 12 or 20 questions of Marthe Reed's work. Her Black Radish title Gaze was the press's first. The book continues to stun me whenever I read it or part of it, disrupting my sententially mediated life.

--Jennifer Bartlett, a poet and editor I've long admired, is interviewed by Michael Northern for the current issue of Word Gathering. Among her other work, Bartlett and Northern discuss Beauty Is A Verb, a wonderful, diverse anthology of disability culture/post-abelist-related poetry they plus Sheila Black have edited, and which is forthcoming from Cinco Puntos in September.

Carrie Hunter's The Incompossible

2011-06-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

From SPD, so you can if you desire go back to the site and order, below is info on the release of Carrie Hunter's long-awaited The Incompossible. Another incompossible title from Black Radish Books, turning out beautiful works at a remarkably steady pace. I had the pleasure of proofreading/editing an early draft of this book, and I agree with Conrad (below): the work is haunting, language made strange and close reading made procedural -- where procedural here is redacted by the reading's output: short prose poems linked by the theoretical magic of the senses, and by a dystopianism that one can revel in and "reverse."

The Incompossible

Carrie Hunter

Publisher: Black Radish Books

PubDate: 6/7/2011

ISBN: 9780982573136

Binding: PAPERBACK

Price: $15.00

Quantity Available: 44

Pages: 120

Add to Cart

Poetry. "Every once in a while there's a collection of poems that cancels my way of thinking for a better way. Carrie Hunter's THE INCOMPOSSIBLE divines 'The decapitated head of Lack.' Over and over she does this, 'To say we are reversed now.' She admits, 'I can see you and see through you' and those superpowers are invoked by the reader only through the reading, a gouged track in the soil of our minds for the trickling, soon rushing images renewing our senses. Thank you for the superpowers, thank you for the poems of the new mind"—CAConrad.

Author Hometown: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA

About the author: Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the now defunct Poetics program at New College of California and edits the small chapbook press ypolita press. She is the author of several chapbooks, including Vorticells (Cy Gist Press), Kine(sta)sis (Dusie), The Unicorns(Dusie), A Musics (Arrow as Aarow), and Diary (Dusie). She lives in San Francisco.

Reviews:
ypolita press

Scrawl: Hospitalogy from TSKY in 2012, updates, thank you

2011-06-17T18:37:00.000-07:00

Been quiet here, here I mean.

Reason: lost function of my hands, or "these hands" -- so, more walking, less writing.

But much has happened in here (let alone simpliciter) since my last post. It's gotten to the point at which I need peck at the keys:

--Woke up a couple days ago to find that Tarpaulin Sky Press selected Hospitalogy and Claire Donato's Burial (I'm keen on this title combo) as their Fall 2012 titles. I'm thrilled to work with Christian Peet and all at TSKY, and am honored to have had this title selected, especially as situated among such beautiful books & authors as company (see the shortlist). Thank you, TSKY eds!

--Great to see CA Conrad when he came out here for a short reading tour. Spent the day eating chocolate and various organic chips. The reading at SPLAB (Seattle) was spectacular. Conrad's new poems, book forthcoming, are gorgeous. And would like to point folks to the Jupiter 88 Special edition, commemorating Allen Ginsberg for his birthday, with several poets discussing their first interactions with Ginsberg or his work.

--Also many thanks to Conrad for doing a Jupiter 88 issue of me reading from Hopsitalogy. I love that Planet!

--Just got the complimentary issue of the new Aufgabe (10) in the mail. As usual: big, beautiful, awesome poetry, art, and review--with a special section of French poetry in translation, edited by Cole Swenson. Awesome. Huge thanks to E. Tracey Grinnell, Julian Brolaski, & Paul Foster Johnson for putting together a must-read.

---Wonderful time on the road, teaming up with Eleni Stecopoulos at Evergreen (where she read with the amazing David Abel - awesome night, packed room), then to Philly, reading and doing a performative "interview" for the new c/c reading series curated by Nicholas DeBoer & Jamie Townsend. It was very much like (as it always is) coming home. Great to see CA Conrad, Debrah Morkun, Carlos Soto-Roman, and many other wonderful human creatures... Eleni read from some beautiful new work--spare and jagged--and from Armies of Compassion (Palm Press), one of my favorite books of all time...

--Read a week later with Sam Truitt and Maryrose Larkin at the KSW. Many thanks to kind, fantastic Jordan Scott, Kim Duff, and Cris Costa. And to those who participated in the evening. Too short a stay, as usual, but left feeling sure about returning soon. Sam read in Seattle for an Evergreen/Seattle Poetry team-up, via poet/curator Will Owen, and we had a lovely evening.

--Discovered Rob Halpern's forth. Music for Porn now has a page at Dartmouth's Press. Exciting. Soon. Nearly imminent!

At Last...

2011-05-03T16:11:00.000-07:00

Wax Buffet: Double Book Launch
Robert Mittenthal * Wax World * Chax Press
Donato Mancini * Buffet World * New Star Books

with film from Brandon Downing
Tuesday 3 May 8pm
Gallery 1412
1412 18th Ave (just north of Union)

@ Harriet: Donovan Talks With Halpern & Stecopoulos on "Somatics?"

2011-04-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

First, many thanks to Rob Halpern, Thom Donovan, and Eleni Stecopoulos--whose poetries and critical writings, social engagement and radical pedagogies a la participation in Nonsite Collective--I am deeply indebted to. Indebted in the sense of communis--the reciprocal gift, i.e., receiving and giving care--that perhaps needs occur for an ethical sociality, a common body to emerge from, and as alternative to, the rubble of neoliberalism. Rob and Eleni respond to Thom Donovan's questions as part of Donovan's ongoing series at Harriet regarding a poetry of/from "somatics." Rob and Eleni give several of us--among countless others they note can be named--mention with respect to the question of what somatics might mean as set of practices, as set of common and yet importantly overlapping investigations and collaborations. Thom's work here, like the engagements I've been part of, perhaps, is shaped by critical interaction and participation in other media, as well as broader social concern. For me, from labor organizing alongside participating in auditory and acoustic live performance, gestural and live art--and from years of living with "disability" as defined by an ableist culture. For Thom, I suspect, and related--thru his engagement with dance and the visual arts, contemporary conceptual and land artists. And I think Thom and I probably both felt that Rob's opening remarks (followed by other gorgeous ruminations by he and Eleni) registered deeply. From Rob:

To be honest, Thom, I don’t know what “somatics” means. And if “somatics” means something to me and my work, this can only be because it has some collective resonance, if only as a provisional frame of loose reference for investigating together the relationships between body, language, and social space. Somatics seems to be about working collaboratively in a range of areas to link very different practices by way of some shared concerns around embodiment: from poetics to choreography, psycho-geography to medicine, body work to translation, community history to political militancy.

Prior to publication of the interview with Rob, I emailed Thom about, I believe, his first post at Harriet regarding somatics, what I too take to be a constellation of becoming social relations and direct and indirect collaborations, not a term or field--an emergent set of rather diverse responses to what amounts to a crisis of the living: aesthetic practices that nonetheless all house within them the poison seeds of disembodiment, erasure, obsolescence, and violence upon this construction called the body. I emailed Thom thanking Thom for what I felt he was crucially getting to as part of these Harriet posts, and importantly thru interview, problems of discourse somatics begins to confront, or come into tension with, discourse in the sense of sedimentation, fixity, taxonomy, expertise, locality, and potential devaluation, via, rather than "return" to the body in CAConrad's sense (which is a finding of infinite excess and a social relation), a referent for something like a universal singular--something, as Stecopoulos notes, could resonate as replacement for or analog of "voice," hence, enclosure.

Related, lurking here is always (for me) a blurring of the important distinction between "a body" and "the body." I've wondered also about those of us who seek to articulate that heteronormative blurring, deconstruct it, and then reconstruct it on other terms--a project of gender negation. At what point does "somatics"--as term denoting a multitude of practices, as it stands--potentialize that blurring but also potentialize occluding or precluding it, making of "a body" a sort of tradable good, an articulated (even designated) membrane beginning to harden contra lived relations and their unavoidable contradictions (and high stakes)? Thom, Rob, and Eleni, I felt, help address for me the complications and contradictions of bodies in searching contact in this regard. And of course so have so many others--those souls Rob and Eleni write about (David Buuck, Brenda Iijima, CAConrad, Brandon Brown, Amber DiPietra, Robert Kocik, Daria Fain). Something Rob writes I think warrants a great deal of lingering on:

So much has been made of “the body,” and yet it feels as though it’s always about to become a bland fetish, a hygienic fixture, an allegorical trope, rather than a set of messy stakes and real consequences. Brian Whitener and I were talking about this on Sunday afternoon at the “Movement, Somatics, and Writing” Symposium. What is not being talked about when we talk about “the body”? Whose body? Can it ever be definite? Can it ever be singular? Brian was referring to false intimacy, and the porousness of skin, and I was thinking about our vulnerability to penetration—be it by flesh, prosthetic, or bullet—and an unsettling line at the limit of Music for Porn: “My cock hardens in a soldier’s wound.”

Rob importantly locates some of these practices that have been called "somatics" within a concretized (as well as future-anterior) social frame of "messy stakes and real consequences," later quoting both MLK from his "Letter" and Bruce Boone from his Century of Clouds. The immediate complicating of meaning and practice here with concrete stakes is, it seems to me, to "confess" to the vulnerability we have with one another and to discourse, to "confess" perhaps to the discomfort of unwitting, inevitable, or potential complicity in the mechanisms of identity reduction (to commodity and to the obsolete) that "somatics" emerges from, where to make visible always has tactical downsides (I think here of Dean Spade's "Trans Law On a Neoliberal Landscape" as a treatment of the militancy of relative invisibility, its power as organized and cloaked counter-intelligence--"under cover of darkness.").

Enriching Rob's important acknowledgment of the contradictions and stakes of real bodies, Eleni's remarks register, for me, a malleable framework for thinking about bodies and bodies thinking us anew (as our senses become theorists and conversely) that I take to be crucial for we who seem, at this moment, to be collaborating:

Recently the poet Patrick Durgin asked, “Is ‘somatics’ the new voice?” I thought this was a very interesting question because it raises the implication that poet-critics who invoke the term may be turning to the body for the same reasons that voice gets valorized—for uniqueness, authenticity, immediacy—the metaphysics of presence. But for me, the answer is “no.” Because my sense of somatics ultimately leads me away from the individual body and toward the interdependence we learn from disability culture, the microcosm and macrocosm we learn from Chinese medicine, where the individual body is always porous to the whole, toward environmental medicine where the highly sensitive prefigure the condition of the oikos—as I once heard Mei-mei Berssenbrugge say, “we’re not the aberration but the vanguard.”

I don’t look to the somatic for authenticity, but rather native estrangement. In a Poetics of Healing colloquium I curated with physicians and poets on the subject of listening, the medical historian and emergency medicine physician John Tercier said something that has stayed with me: “Poetry is language made strange, language that draws attention to itself. In illness the body is made strange. One of the things that privileges poetry [as therapeutic] is that there’s a certain relationship between the body made strange and language made strange.” But also I would say that in illness the body recognizes itself as strange. And in healing as well. One’s body becomes other, in the sense of care—you have to care for yourself as an other, or allow yourself to be cared for, which is also a kind of care. It’s the way that “therapy” derives from therapeutes, the attendant, the one who waits on you, serves you, treats you in the drudgery and abjection that sickness brings—treats you without any certitude, without knowing whether you will be cured. Lately I think it’s precisely in this labor—this experiment in the dark, this art of composition in real time—that the poetics of healing lies.

Here's to these labors, and to three writers, and their/our countless friends, for whom the stakes are too high to allow for common sense to be anything more or less literal than it is: to sense commonly, which can only come thru "this experiment in the dark," a lived relation vulnerable to estrangement, a "strange" thing, paradoxically emerging from dissensus, ultimately from ruptures in Common Sense. Messy and real.

Vincent in NY

2011-04-15T20:06:00.000-07:00

This is truly exciting. Many of us have loved and been fascinated by Stephen Vincent's "haptics," drawn energy grids of event cum hand & body, and in May Stephen's work will open in New York. The details are below, stolen from Stephen's blog. A congrats. And a thanks again for his two haptics he sent me, from readings/discussions in the Bay the past couple times I was out there. Check out the blog, too. Especially if you are not in/around NYC in May.

I am pleased to announce a new May show of my drawings and unique accordion fold books at the Jack Hanley Gallery in New York. If you are in the City during May, I will be delighted if you can check out the works! I will be there for the opening weekend and Reception.
Gallery Details:

Friday, May 06 – Saturday, May 28 2011
Reception, Sunday, May 08,
6 – 8 pm
(Gallery will be open both Saturday & Sunday, 11 – 5; it is Gallery Week in Tribeca!)

Jack Hanley Gallery, 136 Watts, New York, NY 10013 (Tribeca)
http://www.jackhanley.com/show.php?show=1378

(For directions to the Gallery, etc.)

DiPietra & Leto's Waveform

2011-04-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

Please check out the new addition to Thom Donovan's Others Letters. DiPietra and Leto's collaboration is fascinating, gorgeous. I love the intersection of collage, epistolary poem (lyrical and terse), private and public here, body and repetition, body and struggle, body and machine. From Thom's announcement of the installment:

"When you have a chance, please check out this excerpt from Amber DiPietra's and Denise Leto's wonderful "epistolary poem,"Waveform, now up at Others Letters:

http://www.wildhorsesoffire.org/index.php?/archive/amber-dipietra--denise-leto/

Others Letters publishes the correspondences of contemporaries--especially those articulating problems in contemporary practice--on an ongoing basis.

If you have letters or email you'd like to share, by all means do so! I would love to hear from you....

Hope all are well,

--Thom"

Review of The Arakaki Permutations

2011-04-10T19:39:00.000-07:00

Richard Lopez contributes a generous review-close reading of James Maughn's startling The Arakaki Permutations, now out from Black Radish Books. Check out the book and review HERE.

Galatea Resurrects & BR Books

2011-04-06T15:44:00.000-07:00

As usual, Eileen Tabios has curated a veritable tapas of book reviews for Galatea Resurrects. Among the books reviewed are James Maughn's newly released Arakaki Permutations and Kathrin Schaeppi's Sonja Sekula: Grace in a cow's EYE: A Memoir, which garnered two reviews, one from Tabios. Also featured are new poems from Marthe Reed, author of the BR book Gaze. Enjoy the issue. And many thanks to Tabios.

Arakaki Permutations and Worldbook:http://galatearesurrection16.blogspot.com/2011/03/2-books-by-james-maughn.html

Sonja Sekula http://galatearesurrection16.blogspot.com/2011/03/sonja-sekula-grace-in-cows-eye-memoir.html

Marthe Reed, three poems http://galatearesurrection16.blogspot.com/2011/03/critic-writes-poems_25.html

CAConrad & Halinen, End of April

2011-04-06T15:38:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Greg Bem of SPLAB. Please join CAConrad for a special (soma)tic poetry workshop or a reading. But why not both? Click on the image to enlarge for full details. I'm personally very excited to see Conrad again. He's reading and workshopping on my mother's birthday. In the skin.

Synchronous Excesses

2011-04-04T17:55:00.000-07:00

Synchronicity, thinking of KPrevallet's notion of. It just so happened that... Or did it?

At Michael Cross's The Disinhibitor blog == a set of translations, encirclements by Brandon Brown. Of Baudelaire's "Obsession." Did not close that window,

instead (as the week of searing labor rallies reaches its dangerous pitch--"dangerous" because I still fear mistaking non-immediacy for non-effect) "minimized" it. And opened onto Bhanu Kapil's this:

I want to think about performances that stem from a text, where a text has reached the limits of a verbal capacity. The scene that exceeds the book, or cannot, in the book, be redistributed [re-dreamed] ...

I take this out of context. But think even so this moment of reaching (jumping? as in: with eyes closed?) is worth the meditative operations of B.B's B's Ocean. So as to.

Since also I have so far gone inverse, from the gestural deep into the text. As deep as the seam will let me.

Beauty Is A Verb Cover

2011-04-01T19:18:00.000-07:00

I love it. The cover for the forthcoming anthology (post describing it below) of poetry & essay on/of disability & post-abelism, Beauty Is A Verb. I'm not sure who designed the cover, so no attribution yet--until I email lovely editor-human beings Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northern. Which I will do today.

Week of Action & Solidarity - Workers in Oregon, WA, and BC, Canada Rally for Worker Rights

2011-04-01T18:05:00.000-07:00

Mark your calendars. And please join us. In response to increasing attacks against state workers, and workers generally, by unfettered corporations and/or legislators. April 2nd marks the beginning of a week of actions. Schedule below.

   SATURDAY, APRIL 2 -- 2 p.m. at Peace Arch Park in Blaine -- This international rally will bring together unionists, students, activists from Canada,Washington State and Oregon to extend hands across the border in solidarity with all workers. This event will be co-sponsored by the British Columbia Federation of Labour; the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO; and the Oregon AFL-CIO. Please email Lori Province from the WSLC about mobilization efforts.

   MONDAY, APRIL 4 -- 5:30 - 7 p.m. at MLK Memorial Park in Seattle -- The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. in Memphis, Tenn., where he was standing with sanitation workers demanding their dream of a better life. Today, the right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a middle-class life are under attack as never before. Join in this National Call to Action on April 4 and stand with other civil and human rights activists, union members and supporters, Latinos, Asians and immigrants, religious supporters, environmental, student and women's groups -- as we stand together across the country against a political agenda that is attacking working families, their human rights and their dignity. This event, sponsored by theCommunications Workers of America, will be at 2200 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Seattle.

   WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6 -- 12pm/Capitol -- Washington Community Action Network will bring hundreds of community activists and students to Olympia in an attempt to find the sacrifices that the Legislature will make the bankers and billionaires pay to get us out of the economic crisis. Contact:jill@washingtoncan.org

   THURSDAY, APRIL 7 -- Time/precise location TBA -- Health care unions, led by SEIU District 1199NW, will mobilize health care workers in Olympia to demand that the Legislature fix the deficit problems and to look into the faces of the victims.

   FRIDAY, APRIL 8 -- Noon at the Capitol Steps, OLYMPIA -- This is the big one! All union members and supporters of public employees and quality state services will rally in Olympia to demand answers on how the Legislature will share the sacrifice by extracting a price from the bankers, billionaires and CEOs that got us into this mess, and how will they create jobs. In our state we will not allow workers' rights to be stripped away!

Roy & Heavy Chemicals

2011-03-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

I believe it is possible to have one identity in your thumb and another in your neck. I think identities can travel between persons who have an unusual mutual sympathy. -- Camille Roy

<-----This resonates, as does the rest of Camille Roy's "Experimentalism. Why." as re-published by Michael Cross over on Cross's blog The Disinhibitor.

I come late to the hoopla (can hoopla be used to denote an exciting to-do without sarcasm? I hope so) -- above/later on Michael's blog is Part 1 of Roy & Cross corresponding (also deeply worthwhile), the interview marking the pre-engagement to Roy's forthcoming book of poems. That series of essays, from Narrativity, is on the whole eye-opening. Pieces by edwards, Roy, Gladman, and Halpern, and others, I've assigned in my poetry/poetics courses, each time spurring surprising seminar discussions. So, thank you Michael & Roy. For your giving instigation at the sound of the opening bell (computer turning on), which would involve, as the evening progressed, needing to work on the second semester of my course on poetry, poetics, and resistance to neoliberal enclosures. The Disinhibitor dis-inhibited once again, proving (proving? No. Something else, something something) that a smidge of online procrastination is potentially generative, this post, e.g., allowing me after reading it to engage in a comparatively articulate conversation with myself about "succinctness" in relation to writing evaluations of student work, an end of semester activity I long-windedly participate in three times a year as part of teaching at Evergreen. A pep-talk for the inevitable tremendous and indulgent failure that would ensue. I had fun.

///
.
.
.

[ I looked in the mirror when I got up and said aloud: "you are a motor vehicle today." Then began looking at the face, so-called. ]

Action Alert: More Union Busting Legislation

2011-03-28T15:51:00.000-07:00

We've just received word – anti-worker legislators in the House are about to make it much more difficult for railway and airline employees to form unions.

House Transportation Chairman John Mica – who has taken more than $620,000 in campaign contributions from the airline industry – quietly slipped a provision into FAA reauthorization legislation that would count non-voters as "no" voters in union elections. So even if there are more "yes" votes than "no" votes, the "yeses" could still lose. Can you think of any other election that works that way? It's as outrageous as it is shamefully undemocratic.Congress could vote on the provision as soon as WEDNESDAY – we need to make sure they know Americans are actually paying attention!

Tell your representative: The only votes that should count are votes that are actually cast!

Last year, the National Mediation Board established rules based on fundamental fairness and democratic principles for workers in the rail and airline industry. Now, those workers have the right to vote "yes" for a union or "no" against it.

Beauty Is A Verb

2011-03-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northern for bringing several of us together, who are interested in discourses around "disability," and then spending much of this year editing our collected contributions of poetry and essay to the forthcoming anthology, Beauty Is A Verb: An Anthology of Poetry, Poetics, and Disability. Of course I've yet to see most of the specific contributions herein, but knowing many of the current contributors' work more generally, I think it safe to say that this anthology will, as Jennifer notes below, be wide-ranging within the largely contested bounds of disability studies as examined poetically. Many thanks too to those who contributed to Nonsite Collective's curricula on somatic practices, the commons, and disability/post-abelism. The curricula span the years 2008-present and each suite, as intersecting with the others, has influenced my thinking/writing thru "disability" -- perhaps more than any other one transitory locus of activity. (See the curriculum pages for past talks/discussions/performances etc.)

More on the book as it takes shape. For now, below is Bartlett's note:

Great news! The anthology I have spent the last year co-editing with Sheila Black and Michael Northen, Beauty is a Verb, is coming out in September from Cinco Puntos. It's a collection of poetry and poetics by/on poets with disabilities including Norma Cole, Brian Teare, Dannielle Pufunda, Michael Davidson, Jim Ferris, Larry Eigner, Josephine Miles, Cynthia Hogue, Denise Leto, Hal Sirowitz, and so on.

Please help us spread the word. We believe this is the first such collection, and it crosses the genres of Language poetry, narrative poetry, New York School, Disability Poetics, and so on. If you know anyone who might be interested in reviewing the anthology or having a reading or university visit - please by all means, let us know.

Non-Paragone

2011-03-23T19:05:00.000-07:00

Mazen Kerbaj: Notebook 2.1
Rob Halpern & Taylor Brady: Snow Sensitive Skin, forth. from Displaced Press (expanded from Atticus Finch chapbook, 2007).
Stephen Vincent: Haptic of Halpern/Brady reading from Snow Sensitive Skin

Pairs of pairs. Try them
at once.

Cannot Exist Chapbooks! & Cannot Exist 7!

2011-03-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

Difficult to contain my excitement about this news. A new CA Conrad (soma)tic chapbook--on the heels of having read The Book of Frank and worked with Conrad's (soma)tics in my class the last 3 weeks. A new issue of Cannot Exist (a wonderful mag edited by Andy Gricevich, of one of my favorite troupes The Nonsense Company), and Sara Larsen's new chap, poems of which I've read and LOVE. Beautiful. The details, from the Cannot Exist blog:

special pre-order deals on new CANNOT EXIST CHAPBOOKS and CANNOT EXIST no.7

We are overjoyed to announce the first four volumes in the new series ofCannot Exist chapbooks, helped into being by editors Andy Gricevich and Lewis Freedman:

MUGGED Into Poetry by CAConrad

Bridge of the World by Roberto Harrison

The Hallucinated by Sara Larsen

How's the Cows by Jess Mynes

and also the imminent appearance of Cannot Exist no.7, featuring astonishing work by:

John Coletti

CAConrad

Corrina Copp

Beverly Dahlen

Connie Deanovich

Laura Elrick

Mike Hauser

Hailey Higdon

Sara Larsen

Kit Robinson

Ron Silliman

Dana Ward

All this will be coming in APRIL!

Seeds in Cars & Houses

2011-03-21T20:19:00.001-07:00

for Brenda Iijima

Frame|d milk on brown

Oval ply|wood o monu

Meant. Pour moi poor

Moi pic’d the doors

Jam|ed the hole|d

Spaces in me say and

Say for stay|ed

Wood. Ward. Ave.

Cars enshrine|d the yearly

The early drive slow|ed

To see the grammar of engines

Post-Fordian low hum names a

Time|d for skill|ed death these

Scratches [escratches]

Never snapp|ed shots

Like the eye this is,

Drinks some re verbs

This statue|d can I talk

To a 74 chevy novas

Imagine|d registers

The monetary value

Of my mother said

Stead. Read. Drink

Up before the sun

Comes unhinge|d

For strong bones

To with|stand to cup

The shear of History

Pavements a bust of pre

The ave|s sponsors

In|stalled a deadhouse

After house says xe says

Frame|d how each

Mile we drove we

Drive stands in

For a future WORD

Speed ometer reads us

Crystalline, milk|ed still. Sill. Steel.

Comp in

The margins

Log of names a chasse

What writes itself

A question comes apart

Slows as pour|ed us may

Be back fires burn

Outs in wait for shows: what

Rises to the surface is

All ways has been a has
Been in the interval?

Keep the Pressure On: Wisc. Judge Issues Restraining Order Against Anti-Worker Legislation, Rallies Continue

2011-03-21T17:09:00.000-07:00

This is a cross post from the Wisconsin State Journal

A Dane County judge Friday issued a temporary order blocking implementation of Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial measure limiting collective bargaining rights for public employees, saying a legislative committee likely violated the state Open Meetings Law when it rushed passage of the bill March 9.

Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi issued the order around 10:30 a.m. in a lawsuit brought by Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne.

The ruling bars Secretary of State Doug La Follette from publishing the law, the last step before it can take effect. La Follette had planned to publish the law on March 25, which would cause it to take effect the following day.

Walker, who signed the bill last week, had asked La Follette to publish it sooner. But La Follette said he saw no urgency to move the law ahead and wanted to give legal challenges a chance to run their course.

The crowd kept growing today as thousands marched on the Wisconsin state capitol to support the right of workers to bargain for a good life.

from Occultations @ Greg Bem's Stale Attitude, Plus Heroldo de Campos

2011-03-19T18:53:00.000-07:00

Greg Bem (co-curator of The Bredline Performance Series, to the left), I've discovered, is another person who seems to have an endless well of energy, and more importantly, a desire to start trouble in the best ways here amid the growing Seattle poetry communities. He's curating many things, helping out with others, and got his sleeves generally rolled up when it comes to making stuff. After we met and talked at the Hedreed Gallery reading awhile back, he emailed me the devastating de Campos poem "Transient Servitude." And asked if I would send him the poem I read from Occultations, "song for neighborhood watches," first published in Elective Affinities....

Greg has kindly published it here. Regarding the limitations of the body: I think we don't know what the body as a body desires. Or, maybe: "the body" is an empty picture frame. Only certain people can hold it up or hook it with an "=". Corporate persons, mirrors, ghosts. I am curious about the functional substrates of the marionette. What can't we do?

//

Charles Bernstein has written of de Campos that unlike the latter's concrete poetry, the lineated work and prose poems can't be translated other than radically, due to their multicultural/syncretic and citational "thickness." Properties which come from de Campos's particular practices of radical translation: an appropriation that resists export (hence commodified reduction thru translation) and also a notion of import that is tied to fidelity and autonomy (where translation bows in citational exactitude to its source material, its found authors, as "greater than" rather than for the love of...). Since I do not read Portuguese (or speak it), really since I don't know de Campos's work very well either, I would not know what to think of this claim in relation to others that can be made of the poet's poetics and politics viz. translation and appropriation. So I think, instantly, of translator-poet Chris Daniels as one source for enlightenment here, someone who I need contact to hear more. Regardless of "accuracy" tho, I can see why Bem moves from de Campos to the talk we had, and the couple poems I read as part of that talk, but more so to the body and its status as pain-sensor and refractive collage conscious of its own desires, the consciousness dependent on social triggering and long-term administration (Grosz, "Bodies and Cities"). Questions about limit, sovereignty, and share-ability (perhaps what can only be translatability) of senses, desires, and the constative-performative polyglot aspects of utterance heard in shared vs unshared context. Under what conditions is that Poundian prima facie violence of rending--radical translating--not a kind of expropriation or subsumption of voice? In both Pound and in de Campos, and also in Zukofsky and in (my mind wanders) Cage, and early 20th cent. American and European composers such as Krenek, the ethos of radical translation is made possible, perhaps, by building these appropriational structures on a foundation of intimacy, i.e., solidarity, with that source. And by solidarity I mean to muddy the waters: I'd hope that to avoid expropriation or subsumption there would need be an affinity with people whose works one mines, but clearly with Pound that's not so tout court. His lack of solidarity with some of the people whose work he cites might be matched only by his solidarity with their poetries--which, however contradictory that may be, is also a typical position for modernist authors convinced that poets were potentially separate (I say potentially because Barthes hasn't become fashionable yet) from their poems (with the proviso that when one likes the person and the poetry, the two are exceptionally one). "Penetration" and "touch" as contiguous I think as I write this, relating these initial flickers back to both Halpern and Finch on Oppen, where I take Halpern and Oppen to be especially nuanced with regard to being concerned with care (of bodies, of thoughts, of texts) on the one hand and staging of dissensus via submission and vulnerability, on the other: in both the either/or here collapses, the hands come together so to speak.

Exciting Read O The Day: Williams on Toscano on Williams on CPT

2011-03-17T01:16:00.000-07:00

[I cannot watch the news any longer. The images are too much. Panic attack earlier I think precipitated by them. On in background as I heard first in the morn about the traveling radiation. Selfishly thought about my mother. Went back to bed. Then: The death toll, as of my return tonight to this, the afternoon break-from-work post, is at 13,000 and rising in Japan. And the discussion over the numbers and images is what this means for the American and global economies, which is to say the stock market... Panic does you no good my grandpa used to say in the showers before going in his retiree complex pool... afraid not of the pool but the showers, toxic I used to know they were toxic to us.]

///

Doing my once-a-day break n read, then write, I came across new responses to the Labor Day 2010 event now on that event's blog, which as I write this, "event's blog" feels productively problematic in relation to the conversation that had me getting up from my chair and pacing several times in a row (first time that's happened this week). I've only read one response, the others later, but the Williams-Toscano piece is a deeply exciting one. I suspect Alli Warren, Suzanne Stein, Brandon Brown, David Brazil, and Sara Larsen (and contributors to) will not mind me excerpting what I take to be one of the disappearing axes of Tyrone Williams' piece on Toscano (or Toscano's on Williams, or the two as they morph thru each other):

CPT (even the small part I witnessed at Miami University, Ohio in early 2009) relentlessly puts forth the dilemma of articulating positions for resistance, if not opposition, and the seemingly impossibility (or difficulty) of locating positions for resistance, and yet the radical non-site of CPT suggests that this indeterminate (in space and time) resistance might be more potent than any kind of localized/specified politics of opposition since the “opposite” itself has been annexed by capitalism/imperialism and the historical failure of a Marxism contorted into “premature” states—a prematurity that resulted in totalitarianism. Would these histories serve as warnings for what is posed at the outset of CPT, that “premature truncation into social discourse in general”? Would poetic discourse, here, serve as a kind of anti-absorptive obstacle and reserve for a culture and economics founded on the innovation/obsolescence dyad?

Rodrigo Toscano from (New Resistant Subjects [Bot to Bot]} part 4 of Conditions of Poetic Production and Reception

One way that [kari] edwards invited the precariousness that we‘re talking about (―not an avant-garde that must think itself in relation to an ‗outside‘…or one that plays in sandboxes of semiotics forever either‖) was by incorporating biological-physical death as an inbuilt limit to key life-making processes (labor, art, sex); and by extension, the ―freedoms‖ that these processes suggest, that they must be embraced as completely as possible. But I would suggest too that these same ―life-making processes,‖ – that they too, be understood as constrictions to yet other life-making processes, ones that are as yet unidentified. This would suggest a rather strange embrace of anti-―purpose‖ (even as voluntary degradation!) so that we have to make curiosity, make the chimerical, make the evanescent even, that is, in contrast to ―research.

There is not only translation of a poetics into a space there is only translation of the body into the body in another space even if—especially if—the body is the “same.” This body typing this today, 1/18/10, MLK Day, a “national holiday,” is not the same body that will soon arise from this chair..

Williams' and Toscano's (re)turn to the body here is crucial for current and future political-poetic (aesthetic) engagement. The body as first site(s) of resistance and transformation, of becoming; and the absorptive economy that blocks and threatens to block a return (or turn) to the body as such. There's more than an analogy between labor organizing in the concerted, more directly goal-driven way one thinks of such organizing, and the CPT discussion Williams and Toscano engage in here (not to mention Williams' poetry, and in CPT itself).

It's that "getting up from my chair" or "arise from this chair" moment, the determinate coordinates of that getting up or not getting up, and the indeterminacy-potential of that motion, that I'm interested in. In Williams' beautiful reminder of the little deaths each of us undergoes in the moment the body rises. But also in the parameters (perceived and "actual") in the moment between starting to rise and having risen into (unto?) something else. Here getting "stuck" in that middle position can be thought of as an affective disability now re- or de-articulated as liminal strength, as capacity of/thru the as-yet and the un-named. I'm interested in this. And in relation to Williams' wondering whether CPT enacts thru its continual moments of release-time (where bodies under stressful reaching--these entities--desire us to release them for more pleasurable future positions), an indeterminate resistance (and tension) that might be "more potent than any kind of localized/specified politics of opposition, since the "opposite" itself has been annexed by capitalism/imperialism."

[ Toscano and Williams discuss edwards' commitment to the possibilities the body's embrace (as acknowledgment, as limit, but as therefore possibility-making) of its own death in this regard, as to embrace life-making processes of labor, sex, art, to truly hold onto them, is to allow for the body to translate into another, for these little deaths to occur along the way (a letting go and return, a continual dispersal and return, an urgency there in this process). And what edwards' poetics and activism might afford us here (a gorgeous right-on connection come what may), and my thinking of the counter-commonsense involved in that giving over to another, in a kind of death of self and so its return but transfigured, this embrace (presence), instancing a poetic that closes gaps between just-then and just-now, between representation and non, between bodies (life-giving contact and giving up of propriety in a sense, a more than acknowledgment, in each instance, sex, art, labor, speaking of de-privatization), where radical liminality, even disappearance or non-legibility at moments of contact (not in general but in these generative moments of greatest urgency, intimate) can be counter-intuitively a potent resistance of indeterminacy, becoming--hence a making or opening up to what Toscano senses these processes might be constricting? I don't know... I think of edwards here in relation to Dean Spade lately, having just read the work of both, together...]

That unexpected difficulty--prima facie impossibility, for some--of getting up (where "to get up" isn't an abelist or normative notion, but obviously metaphorical of any social or other movement) I take as the zero-moment of resistance, hence central to the problem with what reads, to me, in an otherwise uncompromisingly nuanced piece, as flat distinction between local political opposition on the one hand and indeterminate resistance instanced as "non-site" by CPT on the other (this reading, of course, hinges on what Williams means by "local," not so much on what counts as as oppositional). Or: that "political opposition" is not also potentially laden with indeterminacy in that praxis-oriented or dialogic way that CPT opens up and that "hides" from inoculation by capitalism. Not that I take Williams to be asserting this near-binary tout court, or not that I take CPT to be recapitulating it either. Since rather than an assertion, a deduction, we get "warning" here. As resistance to categorical splits, to border generally, the positive articulation of that warning perhaps, i.e., part of the poetics of CPT.

I've felt the very illegibility of unhousing fixed self, felt the tiny death, these small chasms in my risings, and felt them as not poetic, not in political organizing, not either--but in/as both. Moments of radicalization. But also a legibility or fixity inherent in, or as possible consequence of, that (repetitive) motion of rising up from my chair, feeling the exposure of that (a feeling of completing the task, as it were, that is this body's enclosed shape to the world, body-snapshot). I've felt its compliment, not getting up (resistance lacking), or mistaking not doing so with doing so, via the virtualization of the motion, which is to say in failing to get stuck, the increasing likelihood of mistaking the motion of clicking into as getting up or as getting stuck, going somewhere- (becoming some I-) else, mistaking virtualization as social becoming rather than the next legibility-making position (the next release) to occur, ["click-ing/link-ing/scroll-ing"] mistaken often enough as something other than monument to its prior iteration. A fixed body, or isolated body, or body that becomes slowly and alone, stills until it is monument to your future you. The thinking ahead that the body parameters in CPT (these tension moments) induce in me, a compression and/or a projection of subjective times... feels markedly different from the virtualization of action (the virtual rise writing this) in its inverse-ness (its lack of potential for projecting ahead, with no-thing to project ahead to, non-expectation in a negative or void sense), and yet the inverse relation is not not obviously so maybe, but I've felt it, from my experience of CPT the several times I've encountered it, that very projecting ahead Williams writes about (or is it Toscano?). As sitting audience. The experience for me also speaks to Toscano's notion--which Williams enacts in his own writing a world in On Spec--that "our languages need to be freed for us to be free... in a sense." And so the book gives way to radio play, radio play still not "enough," the thing needs wiggle out into the live-gestural. There's an after-effect (affect?) of CPT participation as audience (but more so as entity perhaps) that I think hopes to undermine the stranglehold of privatized language (the languages of globalization) but also privacy (online activism, a mono-linguistic non-gesture eg) has on us. And so CPT is agitational. Agitation for the agitators. But then the "is" maybe drops away in favor of another illegibility. Or I should say: another bug. (Williams' hope for less de-bugging, riffing on Toscano's boogie and sexualizing it, this erotic multi-coding is something necessary, I think. For Toscano's delineating differences between strikes and orgies is also to talk about their contiguity, their shared aspects. --- in "Strikes & Orgies," Wheelhouse PRESS Anthology 2009, also in Try Mag Issue ?)

Elsewhere I've written (in relation to CPT too) that organizing is (or often is) poetic in its indeterminacy and potential for constant becoming and embrace (or gift) of death ("even self-degradation!"), contiguous with the array of poetic motions of resistance. Though the poetic "of" organizing (of local political resistance with an eye towards non-border) is often enough pointed out to be threatened by the sedimentation of fixed opposition (hence exclusion and all else), not unlike the either/or moment of getting up/clicking over, that threat is pervasive, not of course unique to what we might think of as local political resistance (unless, by chance, such resistance is localized insofar as it willingly or unwittingly fortifies tactical, strategic, or social borders). What strikes me as the challenge here, is: how to translate into without raising the specter of necessary distinction above (potential binary) when evoking what is at least alluring for me--that the the poetic of organizing can be that "anti-absorptive obstacle" Williams sees CPT as pointing towards. Perhaps instead: organizing as potentially part of, and catalyst for, a diverse (trans-national or trans-) spectrum of un-activated possibilities ("as yet undefined" "life-making processes") the social in general carries around like a heavy shadow.

And that for organizing, Toscano and Williams' crucial challenges here seem to be: what might an organizing of indeterminacy with resistance to the things that block non-border look like, i.e., concretely? Or as pervasively as to no longer be legible as such? Or as I think of it: how might the organizing conversation (linguistic and non) itself (the poetic intentionalized), a social form Toscano is intimately familiar with, inform, making less demarcated, the larger political frame? ----if one asserts the mechanics of these conversations to be potentially right there in the name: dialogic, indeterminate, trans-bordering and so trans-national, not legible as system of binaries and partitions but as organized opposition or resistance to structures and systems that seek to kill that becoming? I suspect I may be reading Williams and Toscano wrongly here, taking this conversation a bit far afield (tho it hopefully speaks to the spirit of their larger works, at least), with perhaps my presupposition--that political organizing can involve both resistance-as-becoming as well as be oppositional (or resistance) to what would make that conversation illegal, and still not necessarily be a social form that's closural or sedimented enough to be, almost definitionally, necessarily subsumable by capitalism/imperialism. Which would make the organizing conversation potentially contiguous with other ways we can take up (or try to articulate) indeterminate spaces, CPT among them. Nonetheless, CPT and Williams' work I've taken for some time to be pressing on the seemingly intractable problems of articulating a social resistance of trans-localism (in the narrower sense of the local than I'm using above), indeterminacy viz. what, so to speak, Lenin famously calls the "temporary dictorship needed" (instrumentalized concession) to get to Toscano's getting "somewhere else." And not just the seemingly intractable problems, but the concrete paradoxes and contradictions seen especially in goal-oriented sociality under capitalism/imperialism.

Turning non-site into site (to continue the Smithson/Nonsite reference made by Williams), or performing the contiguous arc of living poetically via making new language forms, then organizing from them, and again, etc., treating these as contiguous poetic activities, or a contiguous activity, seems on the edges (or maybe is one of the hidden vortices) of Toscano's CPT. And Williams' On Spec. So, then, what happens "after" we "get up" from our chairs after interacting with CPT's Pig Angels? A question, again, that assumes we do get up, that the body translates into the body--necessarily? Can we imagine circumstances in which this is not the case? Or only not noticeably the case? And what of the relationship between CPT and Toscano's other work in the labor movement? How do these motions inform and transform one another, translate that body into another, and then another, and so forth? The question isn't about authorship. It's about the potentially generative "oscillation" of activities, or maybe more precisely, the contiguous movement from CPT to its related union organizing, as, for lack of a better way of saying it, a becoming of recursion.

The Future of Working

2011-03-15T20:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I read Juliana Spahr's thoughtful blog post/talk (and loving challenge to each of us), "The Future of Writing," on the increased privatization of poetry landscapes, many she has helped build and nurture, landscapes that are made up of readings of various stripes, conferences, presses, collaborations, ephemera, political engagements, friendships, books, blogs, coteries, various and varying commodity forms and institutional systems of patronage--an increasingly virtual landscape made up of what Spahr aptly calls "psychosocialsexual poetry scenes." Not that I necessarily experience poetry communities this way, but the potential for things to feel or become increasingly privatized, notes Spahr, is out there. And for Spahr, who has done a lot more poetic traveling than I, does feel an increasing fragmentation and dispersal...READ THE REST HERE.

Catching Trains 2: After Blindness

2011-03-07T02:15:00.000-08:00

That part of us
That has no name

Is who we are.

*

After the dogs
Take over.

After the dogs
Have taken shelter
Inside our skin.
Inside our skin, they eat

A vaulted darkness.
The roof is smooth, the
Marrow inside bones
A stucco arch.

The dogs they say
Can smell the after

--Math of crisis.

*

Sacks hang light
What lanterns
That we are

And are read from.

The grammar of death
Makes our names

Turn pink
In snowdrifts [I didn't do nothing. I watched hir hang from the stars. I watched them hoist hir up. I sat on the steps of the old railyard where in the time of other wars

a Wobblie lay draped like a rag. A book says he had his throat slit there, and that the cause was. Infectious

For us.]

*

(No huddled
Forms us.)

*

Xe is powerlines someone said. Xe is the undertow of the Detroit. After this time of dogs I will walk to the river for you. But not nothing. A necessary condition of doing nothing

is the realization of utopia.

*

Who would have known
The rain would make us

Weep, wander into dead
Streets, into dead
Houses, into washed

Hands.

The pulse they say
Has no heat. "Come in. Come in! This is your home now! Come in. Come. I can hear the dogs. They're getting closer. I can hear them in the absence of cars. In the mono-rail's function as a wrecking ball. I can hear them in cyclone fences. I can hear them on the news. In the groundwater. Come."

Notes from Wisconsin's Streets @ Montevidayo

2011-03-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

A really uplifting dispatch from Wisconsin by Brenda Cardenas. After you go to the AFL-CIO or the Working Families Party and hook into the nationwide rallies and/or petitions, check out the rest of this piece. From Cardenas (at Montevidayo):

"In the past several weeks, I’ve made about six trips to the Madison Capitol to protest Walker’s “budget dis-repair bill” and biennial budget. On the first trip, I found myself among 10 or 15,000 others. By day three, the crowd had swelled to 30,000 who were flooding the elevators, hallways, and stairwells to the third floor, trying to out shout any possible Senate vote when, in a surreal moment, thousands of “Shhhhh’s” flew across the rotunda like a flock of swallows. Then the news that the 14 Democrats had fled the state to prohibit the corrupt vote. The roar that followed erupted louder than any I’ve ever heard at any concert or sporting event, even those filling stadiums, perhaps because it was a desperate roar, one born of ransacked hopes and hearts."

Catching Trains

2011-03-05T19:47:00.000-08:00

It is horrendous, this world's condition of dying. Loss of life is the most arduous vista of pain. Let us honor Akilah's life and legacy, and honor her advance toward death as "a field of investigation" by writing a poem....While on your back fold your fingers with fingertips pressing into your chest, this way you conduct the flow of energy back inside you. Occasionally PRESS your fingertips deeper into your chest to better sense your recycled circuitry.... Let the poems and music become an entirely new PLACE you go to. When the CD ends light a candle. WRITE THESE PARTICULAR NOTES BY CANDLELIGHT ONLY!... Notes about death, notes about living with death, notes about the topography of grief, of darkness, isolation, forgiveness, and what it means to give and receive mercy. For the next week keep your notes on you at all times. Walk everywhere with them and BE READY to add to them, or to begin PULLING them and kneading them into a poem, a poem you write for the living who are dying everyday. And STOP sleeping so much! We sleep TOO MUCH! --- CAConrad, excerpted from Akilah's Legacy, (Soma)tic # 55

This body is constructing a plexiglass box, 8 by 5, that it can get into via a hatch n lock system above, needs knock to be let out of. I've been told there is a magician who is named Chris Angel and that he is a "Mind Freak." A student said to me that this Chris Angel places himself in suchlike contraptions. And people stare in awe at how he is able to fit into these spaces, how he can endure the cramped extremes of his own doing for so long. Ok, I said, but I was taking the construction of this box--sitting in the middle of my office/bedroom in lying sheets--as a place of banality, making visible the sort of enclosures we're married to most of the time. A place from which to write and a place to stare out of. Suspicion of blind-spots to the cube I inhabit. I will move at the end of the month into a house the bank has owned for two generations. Some enclosures are larger, where still we perform invisible, intimate, virtuosic, acts of production--like organelles, say, for a nervous system guarded by board members. What's magical about living in a box? Maybe a lot, if the question is what COULD be magical about living in a box?

I am from the midwest.

The Amtrak station has not been
what it names for a long time
now. It's a clenched limb, monumental cut in the horizon for the sky that breathes. [A gag system also, that sings. The throat of grief. And me pissing in a bucket projected silently on a screen behind the live me pissing in a bucket. I say to E that public incontinence is as rare as public grieving. It's not a matter of who will strain for you, but who will strain with you. Of a once-was. In an is-shape. Post-industrial tape choking off air as it wraps the gullet is also love. "Why?" "The sound is tremendous. Shared and tormented the wind and the skin cohere, so we collect and backlight the voices

resolve. This restoration of our electrical current. We will each have mended spines at least once."] A deco foot trapped in a boot of fences.

One time playing postwar there an Israeli named Zvi fell thru the rotted floorboard to the mezzanine. He didn't die. But it was dark inside, and that fantastic echo, and magic really could steal your fears.

Thank you Robin Tremblay-McGaw!

2011-03-03T17:29:00.000-08:00

It certainly would have been great, during my visit to the Bay, to catch up with poet-essayist-fine coffee brewer Robin Tremblay-McGaw. But our paths didn't cross. Blame capitalism. More specifically, Right to Work (not write to work) laws like those being forced down the gullets of working people in the midwest right now. Work getting in the way. No matter how much one enjoys one's job (a rarity, but I suspect we both do), it still sucks that our lives become so truncated and often desperate... Anyway...Then, oh, yesterday I believe, I wake up to see Robin's written a mini-exegesis on Occultations, quoted from it, and overall had some deeply giving and insightful things to say (again, the question of writing publicly thru doubt, and in common, comes up--writing under constant, common yet also commonly illusory pressures--the forms that make our bodies legible as such, and conversely, and that shape, then, the form our conversations take, and conversely...).

I'm touched by Robin's gesture--a public, extimate "missing" of a friend. And yet I'm not surprised. Robin is in a constant state, it seems to me (at least within the circumstances of our friendship, teaching at Bard College L&T together and us responding to one another via blog, email, etc.) of giving her energies over to others in ways that call up for me the term "care." She's looked after me quite a bit at Bard (I'm comparatively a mess, of course), me hearing the constant and important friendly refrain: "how many coffees HAVE you had today?" She's got a calming presence, one that draws folks together. And then puncturing them with her exciting poetry and prose during readings. Carrot and stick, eh?! This calm giving comes thru in her really wonderful close readings and honest attention to peers' work, or to readings by folks who blow thru town and that she's managed to catch. At SPT. At 21 Grand. Wherever. XPoetics being one of the blogs I go to for close, careful readings that also revel in their own subjectivity, the results often startling, encouraging us, for instance, to go back to familiar texts and re-create them, let them dance with McGaw's wreading. Which, by the way, she outlines rather beautifully over at Bard L&T's new blog, a fantastic post about cross-wiring of reading-writing, the altered state one enters when writing thru X rather than simply and only talking about X, etc, hooking these suggestive ideas up to non-normative notions of community. Anyway, the blog does its thing, like Robin, without pomp, without banging around. I hope very much to see her next time we're in the same town. Meanwhile, I thank her for the shout-out!

Another Box Link for Your Sock Drawer

2011-03-03T04:09:00.000-08:00

Distraction Zone Staging for Hospitals and Clinics ("Room" transliterated for Occultations, now part of the performance pieces for Hospitalogy--the two "books" were at one point to exist together as one). This work is part of a multi-media performance (audio composition with live voice and video projection) that was initially commissioned for The Electroacoustic Music Festival, Olympia WA 2011. The audio here is still unfinished (see note below). This is the 2nd in a series of electroacoustic pieces that translates extant text for performance, both so far translating parts of the section "modular arterial cacophony," which is to say that they are really one piece in two movements, each designed for a different site (the whispered text carries over and is finished in this piece). Said found text was published as watermarked pages in Occultations a few months ago, with new print-run/edition out soon. The other "movement" is available here as link under "Selected Sound and Video Poetry Online" and is called "Wave." Eff Why I.

Note: really the only way for the piece to be as grating and grungey as it would sound, say, with huge theater speakers, would be to listen via headphones. Or so I've come to experience it anyhow.

Details/Specs: 4-Channel Composition using statistical recursion software and decay modulation using manual reverbing (one recording is played back into a microphone, then again, and so forth, four times). All manipulated sounds aside from the voiced text source from recording the inside of the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) Machine during test (of brain and cervical spine). Recording from 2006. Ambient noise (what may sound like static) comes from the ambient sounds of the room--tech voices, footsteps, body moving/adjusting near the machine, etc. This work is still in draft form: each layer still needs be filtered more so that the original recording (necessarily low quality) can be maximized for high quality resolution speakers.

Video components include a "silent shadow" of the live actions: a live reading during slow compression of the neck by use of ducked tape that is wound round the throat and cervical spine as subject lies on folding table. The live voice's capacity for projection is thus suppressed until it is no longer audible over the recorded layers. Video projects same, but inside the room I did not leave for 2 months, save to go to work, and once to a reading. I was thinking about neoliberal enclosure enclosures: the enclosures that we build within neoliberal enclosures, recapitulation, miniature zones of constriction that pass as entertainment and domicile. Or something.

***

In other news, I got to hear a helluva concert this evening, despite my sadness of not being able to head to NY this week--still feeling poorly, so glad I made the "right" choice, but still. The concert was darn good distraction from that disappointment tho. I read some work with E, participatory, fun to have use of the experimental theater and be with lovely (and deeply exciting!) composers. We, poetic interlopers! Stephane Brun has gone to our ensemble's rehearsals while in town, has been so kind and helpful in critique--such a lovely person. Check out his work in performing arts (out of Chicago, Urbana, where for years now some of the more exciting cybernetic composition and other performing arts collaborating has been going on--a quick google of his work aught to be well worth it). I'll write a "review" (debrief/overview) of the evening's guest composers' work in another post. But for now just to say the evening was great and that the ensemble I work with, their stuff I thoroughly enjoyed (was nice this week to be more on the periphery, more audience to the art-making). I liked how poetry met musical composition tonight, rarer from the "music side" of things than one would imagine (these folks from Urbana, like those out of Madison and elsewhere, many involved in The School for Designing Society and The Nonsense Company respectively, these folks are rather special in that their interests are wide-open, their aesthetic production isn't interested in categories or commodity, and their enthusiasm for collaboration is infectious). New work from Arun Chandra was fantastic, first time I've heard this new piece he's been working on. But of all the work put forth by our ensemble (again, more on the other composers' work later), I have to say that the highlight for me was a "Cagean" work by Ben Michaelis and Molly McDermott, Ben an Evergreen alum and Molly a current student. They performed a work for kitchen utensils, metallic beads, calculator, keys, water, and voice--that had me (oddly) fist-pumping. The score itself is pretty gorgeous, so I'm hoping to borrow it to scan it in here at a later date. It was/is, perhaps, the most astonishingly fresh piece of the evening. And of course I had to read poetry right after them!

Quite tired, long day, but glad I was dragged out for a bit to hear new work tonight. But now... now I can't sleep. 4:08am. G'night.

NONSITE || "Common/Ground" Town Hall Discussion

2011-03-02T15:25:00.000-08:00

The Nonsite Collective invites you to participate in a Town Hall discussion at SF Camerawork on Thursday, March 3, from 6-8pm. We will explore the implications of San Francisco's Sit/Lie ordinance, Prop L, and plan a city-wide day of action in March in which we will incorporate our cameras and our words towards reversing Prop L.

Common/Ground is part of Nonsite's ongoing residency COMMON/USE, throughout the duration of SF Camerawork's show, As Yet Untitled, (running January - April, 2011).

Thursday, March 3, 6-8 pm, in the SF Camerawork gallery
657 Mission St, 2nd floor, San Francisco
www.sfcamerawork.org Nonsite's Common/Use events:
http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/993

The Space of Doubt @ Mrs. Maybe

2011-03-01T20:33:00.000-08:00

My sincere thanks to very fine poet Lauren Levin--who I found out my first time in the Bay went to school with E!!--for her kind and thoughtful blog post on the SPT reading I was part of last week. Levin interestingly identifies connections by way of doubt and its public spaces, to assert doubt performatively. I'm quite taken by those connections/questions and their counter-assertions, as they seem to clear up some of my fuzzy thinking (while also complicating it quite a bit) regarding the emergent "themes" of the evening (a few posts below). Any case, check it out. And do check out the forth. Mrs. Maybe (Levin's mag), which will feature Lara Durback's work, among that by many others.

What is Electroacoustic Music? It's Not the CD of Rain Falling You Use to Fall Asleep...

2011-03-01T18:06:00.000-08:00

If in or around the Olympia area, please join us for this special engagement, curated by Michaud Savage and Ben Kamen. I can't say that the work I'll be performing will be mind-blowing (eh, finishing it momentarily), but small works by others from our Performance Research Ensemble are really shaping up and quite excellent. And, of course, the other composers who will perform new compositions tomorrow eve are, well, always rather mind-blowing. I've had the rare pleasure of hearing Truax's riverrun in one of the few area theaters equipped to play full surround 8-channel compositions, and I can remember that experience like it was tomorrow...

The announcement:

May I have your attention please!

"Electroacoustic" is a broad term referring to music resulting from the manipulation of recorded or generated sound, emanating from loudspeakers, without an obvious human performer. Electroacoustic music is rooted in the mid-20th century, particularly in the work of two groups of composers, Musique concrète in Paris and elektronische Musik in Cologne .

Wednesday, March 2nd, Students for Contemporary and New Music present a collection of performances from Ben Kamen, The Performance Research Ensemble, Jenny Magnus, Arun Chandra, and Barry Truax. This evening of electronic, acoustic, and electroacoustic performances begins at 7 in COM 110, presented to you by Students for Contemporary and New Music.

Barry Truax is a Professor in both the School of Communication and (formerly) the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University where he teaches courses in acoustic communication and electroacoustic composition, specializing in soundscape composition. He has worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and has published a book Acoustic Communication dealing with all aspects of sound and technology. As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system which he has used for tape solo works and those which combine tape with live performers or computer graphics. A selection of these pieces may be heard on the recording Sequence of Earlier Heaven, and the Compact Discs Digital Soundscapes, Pacific Rim, Song of Songs, Inside, Islands, and Twin Souls, all on the Cambridge Street Records label, as well as the double CD of the opera Powers of Two and the latest CD, Spirit Journies. In 1991 his work, Riverrun, was awarded the Magisterium at the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, France, a category open only to electroacoustic composers of 20 or more years experience. He is also the recipient of one of the 1999 Awards for Teaching Excellence at Simon Fraser University . Barry is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre and a founding member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community and the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.

Jenny Magnus is a Chicago-based performer, writer, director, producer and teacher. Founding member of the Maestro Subgum and the Whole, Magnus' voice is front and center on just released, Songs From Shows. Magnus has contributed to cultural life in Chicago for 25 years as a founding member of The Curious Theatre Branch. Magnus produces her original work, produces and contributes to the annual Rhino Theater Festival, and tours her work internationally. She has performed recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art , teaches performance and writing at Columbia College Chicago, the School of the Art Institute, and many other schools.

The Performance Research Ensemble is a loose amalgamation of students, faculty, and community members. Our collective work began in Fall 2010 with several performances of Kenneth Gaburo's Maledetto, and has continued this season with compositions based on David Wolach's Occultations. Group members for tonight's performance are: Arun Chandra, Terra Glick, Molly McDermott, Ben Michaelis, Clayton Norman, Willy Smart, Elizabeth Williamson and David Wolach.

Arun Chandra and Ben Kamen are both music faculty at Evergreen.

There is no charge to attend the event.

Best,
Michaud Savage

Poetry in THE NEWSPAPER!

2011-02-27T19:53:00.000-08:00

Despite the hostile corporate takeovers that have led to layoffs, mergers, and bad news -- the plague that has swept thru just about every locality in this country--there is something still alive in the newspaper trade (and it ain't my laid-off grandpa). It is what comes from the hard work of editors such as B.T. Shaw, who, rather miraculously, is the POETRY editor of the Oregon daily The Oregonian. And a talented poet I might add. I sent her some poems awhile back, after both of us read with Rachel Zolf for the Tangent Series, and this weekend she featured a poem from Hospitalogy. I've grown to understand how hard-working B.T. is in holding down the fort and providing a space for new poetry in a daily paper. My thanks to B.T. and the rest of the poetry staff for printing the piece and also providing it online--do look at past contributors' work, diverse work from poets in the Northwest and beyond.

Video of Hedreen Gallery Reading & Talk

2011-02-25T21:34:00.000-08:00

Wow, my deepest thanks to Summer Robinson, curator, poet, and owner of the landmark Pilot Books in Seattle, for shooting this video of the reading and talk I gave for Seattle University's Free Lunch Series (curated by Will Owen). The poems: one each from Occultations and Hospitalogy, both in conversation with two writers I admire greatly: Robert Kocik (his work on commoning) and Laura Elrick (her video poem Stalk). The reading and talk was for the anniversary of the Seattle General Strike. The video is beautiful and makes my work palatable! If you perchance are blowing thru Seattle, go to Pilot Books. You'll be amazed, drooling, and leave with weird little poetry books.

Also:

Here's another link to the Seattle University Hedreen Gallery reading & talk I gave as part of Hedreen's Free Lunch Series, audio upload and hosting courtesy of Greg Bem, a poet whose work I really admire, now in Seattle, and prior, a member of The New Philadelphia Poets. Many thanks to Will Owen & Co. for the curation, to The Hedreen curators Whitney Ford and Jessica Powers, to Summer Robinson of Pilot Books who taped the event, and to those who turned out and participated.

The discussion was really productive for me. In fact, it helped solidify my conviction, given the interest and suggestions, to send out a call for ideas soon about forming a coalition of laboring poets/poetry curators and others, committed to labor organizing in some way--whether thru organizing the workplace, or less intensely, attending a labor institute workshop or participating in the many other labor-oriented micro-communities in poetry & poetics. Not sure yet, but that's what the call would be for--to see what interest there might be and to hear ideas from folks.

Regardless, it was a generative discussion among friends new and old. Next week Robert Mittenthal and Nico Vassilakis, two incredible people/poets, will be reading and hosting a discussion. I'm hearing they'll be running thru a work in 4 acts. Susan Schulz will also be in town for a reading and talk. If I weren't headed to SF I'd certainly go. So look out for these and future Free Lunch events.

I should add this was my first reading/talk since my mom's death in October. And so it meant a lot to me to have folks in the room--my friends--who really embraced the afternoon, welcoming me with such warmth as we arrived.

Rally for the Working Class: if in or around Seattle/Olympia...

2011-02-25T21:03:00.000-08:00

Come to the Saturday rally in solidarity with the state workers of Wisconsin!

Come join unions and coalition partners this Saturday (Feb. 26th) at noon at Tivoli Fountain at the Capitol in Olympia. Look for your UFE colleagues at the north side of the fountain and WEAR RED to show solidarity with our union brothers and sisters in Wisconsin!

2011-02-25T20:39:00.000-08:00

Laura Goldstein on the amazing Gaze by Marthe Reed over at Black Radish Blog. Please visit, read, and read.

Challenging Categories & Movement of Mind, But Grief: Akilah Oliver

2011-02-25T20:32:00.000-08:00

The exploration of grief--as choking, as being rendered silent by death, "the body as holder of a terrorizing silence" as a sort of default space. "What happens when there is no public space for grief?" she asks in a book that's influenced so many of us, A Toast in the House of Friends. I've come back to it recently, in my own paradoxical and contradictory grieving gestures this year. And again at PennSound, these sound files, including the Segue recordings I quote from above, registering this conversation just now in relation to her friends and family, who I am at moment thinking about. Hear here.

Michael Cross @ The Disinhibitor

2011-02-25T19:59:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Michael, for the kind remarks -- the recollections of moments during last weekend's reading for SPT. Agreed that it was awesome. It certainly was refueling for me. A reminder to check out the broadsides at SPT. Each made by a guest artist, the proceeds (so inexpensive given the labor that goes into making them) going towards SPT programming.

Akilah Oliver

2011-02-24T13:18:00.000-08:00

Very sad to hear that Akilah Oliver, an amazing poet, not to mention everything else she has been for so many friends, has died. Rachel Levitsky has posted some remarks and links to Oliver's work on Coffee House Press's site. Here.

Postscript: Movement, Somatics, Writing--

2011-02-23T16:27:00.000-08:00

[POSTSCRIPT regarding links narrating the symposium: another intense entry from Bhanu Kapil is here. I'm drawn to her question, or the problem, of "knowledge-based" somatic practices. Power & power. & assertion. & place. 29 degrees & 1 ft of snow on the ground... off to class, a term I use & dislike intensely. On the "transgressive" body & somatic practices/bodywork. & Writing. In some ways redundant these terms we use. In other ways immeshed in conflict, contorting the presence of human touch. To archive like that. Why do we do it? To ~~testify~~ trans-port has colonial roots, perhaps... Re Rob's gorgeous proposition: My organelles, I can feel them, the breath truncated when transported by another's intimate gesture of "here" - mitochondrial DNA deletion. My body is on the outside of my body. Always ~~living~~ on borrowed social time. Is this becoming in constant meditation? A kind of knowledge? To have written this, also redundant, deadened too. In both senses...]

Somatics, Movement, and Writing Symposium...

2011-02-22T20:35:00.000-08:00

The only downside to being in SF this weekend was missing the Somatics, Movement, and Writing Symposium in MI, put together, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) by Petra Kuppers and the organizing team listed below -- who helped the workshop participants and performance folks during the weekend. I would imagine several others were involved in organizing various parts of the weekend. This poesis, given a multiple media/performance background, an interest in the politics and poetics of the corporeal, and engagement in post-abelism, that is really close to my heart (for lack of a better way to say it at moment).

Given how far away I am, I would have had a difficult time getting out there even if. Because I've been hoping for the time/money to fly to MI anyhow: simply, I miss my dad a lot and would really like to see him.

I'm just thrilled the symposium happened. I remember Petra announcing it during my last visit to the Bay, during our Nonsite commons discussion. And I wait enthusiastically for the post-symposium reflections to start flowing. A couple have already emerged on the web. Some wonderful photos taken by Thom are up at Wild Horses of Fire. Many are of Brenda Iijima's dance/movement workshop/performance, the same event Bhanu Kapil dreams from, and writes about, over on her blog. The combo of photos and dream journal piece by Kapil give me a small sense of how f-ing amazing Brenda's piece was/is. Darn.

So, if you have some reflections on the weekend that you don't plan on putting anyplace like your blog or in a journal, just comments, notes, or what-have-you, I'd love to hear them. Live vicariously thru you. So feel free to post here or email backchannel. Here's to hoping the symposium occurs next year!

Conference Team:

Amy Sara Carroll, Assistant Professor of English and American Culture (Latina/o Studies), UM

Clare Croft, Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, Assistant Professor of Dance, UM

Thom Donovan, poet and essayist, co-editor of ON: Contemporary Practice and the weblog Wild Horses Of Fire

Kate Elswit, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow (Drama/Dance), Stanford University

Bhanu Kapil, Assistant Professor, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University (Cross-Genre Narrative and Poetics)

Jina Kim, PhD student, English/Women?s Studies, UM (Visual Culture)

Petra Kuppers, Associate Professor of English, UM (Performance Studies)

Eleni Stecopoulos, poet, writer, educator, curator of the Poetics of Healing project at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University

SPT Audio File, from Occultations

2011-02-21T21:13:00.000-08:00

For anyone interested, here's the audio composition I composed for SPT; it was one of two I performed during the evening, layered by live reading. It's a google-docs downloadable file, compatible with i-tunes (it is an i-tunes file). An old file name accompanies it, so to hear "modular arterial cacophony walling 1" click "download" on the file named "BelladonnaLiveReadingNew." One of the channels--whispered leaked CIA documents outlining torture of detainees--was played for the release of the book, back when I first began composing this sound piece, the reading sponsored then by The Belladonna Series in New York. Thus the old file name. Specs on this piece (4:50), now finished, beyond that channel, are:

Channel 1: whispered leaked Bybee Memorandum, 2008 (courtesy of WikiLeaks)

Channel 2: Sine-Function re-composition of Brun's I Told You So (a work based on this piece that I re-composed using different software)

Channel 3: Sine-Function computer composition, "Wave," David Wolach 2010-11.

Channel 4: Recorded excerpts, "modular arterial cacophony," from Occultations

Ideal way to listen is volume on max, with earphones, reading parts of the book's section of the same title. The live reading includes taking up the walling stress position (examples found in Appendix M, CIA Interrogations Manual) for the duration. Enjoy.

Porous the Borders in the Bay: SPT, Nonsite, Motels

2011-02-21T19:58:00.000-08:00

Deep gratitude to the kind, talented and gracious Samantha Giles, and to the rest of the SPT folks for setting up a crazy-energizing (for me) reading with Laura Elrick and Lara Durback on Friday night. Michael Cross needs mention too, facilitating two in an ongoing series of beautiful broadsides, the latest one of Laura Elrick's work, letterpressed by Rich Owens. Wow, it was great to hear Laura's work in-progress. She performed a steady stream of prosodic, intense and at times intensely funny poems-of-a-cycle, each feeling like the hurried or rushed "voice in the head" part way between "pre-linguistic" para-logic (internalized impressions of things, people, systems) driven as much by sound and word-play as anything else AND the more formally subtle performative speech-act. Thus I take the work to be enacting that interest, stated in her SPT bio, of lately exploring the relationships between social time and utterance. That "inner speech" Keith Waldrop writes in relation to Stein's pre-occupations (Intro to Useful Knowledge, New Directions) is here as much coerced or inscribed by false consciousness, hence traced from imprinting political systems as it is echoes of other associative conversations one has in the head, imbued with present-tense experience, the output forming trace or shadow of that live-wiring filtered and perhaps interrupted by monetized time, a poetic speaking of what will have just passed, its affect that of opening up possibilities, to paraphrase Taylor Brady in relation to Michael Cross's work, disclosing prosodic parameters for what has not yet been foreclosed.

Lara's work was also amazingly refreshing: deeply performative and procedural, Durback following up on her WONDERFUL Zine Chapbook, played a recording of her poetic, truncated, funny and also horrifying experiences with a personal history with clothing, the politics and economics of what and how we wear, and this was underlayed by livve short thought-bursts, one after the other, each testifying to one of those thought-but-not-said-publicly moments--read by Durback from a stack of blue post-its, each of which she stuck to all manner of surfaces in the room, after and as she read from them. So the ephemeral, the honest, the political, and the found, all intermingle here in a way that's arrestingly direct and narrative. Sort of a no bullshit get off our asses and do kind of beauty to the performative work that I loved, and that complimented Elrick's work so conspicuously.

This work and mine--a sort of love letter to The Book of Frank and a sort of note to CA Conrad of thanks for existing (my notes towards my essay-review on Frank) can be found in David Brazil & Sara Larsen's latest issue Try Magazine. So many thanks to David for putting the issue together, which also features some awesome work from Cedar Sigo, David Buuck & Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young (on Weiner's The Fast !!!!), Jason Morris, Dana Ward, and several others. And my apologies to David for falling ill the night Elizabeth Williamson and I were to have dinner with him.

Was also great to see old friends and meet new folks. Great, for instance, to see fellow Black Radish Books author Carrie Hunter, whose fantastic procedural-lyrical The Incompossible is coming out soon through the press. Was so good to see Tanya Hollis, who carted E and I around all night in the rain!

***

The next afternoon Laura, Lara and I met up with other Nonsite Collective participants for a discussion about Nonsite's collaboration and residency with SF Camerawork, "Common/Use." (See Nonsite Collective dot org or the archives here for a description of the 4-month residency bringing writers and photographers together to explore and intervene in the privatization of our public spaces and commons-forming practices.) This was, I think, a really generative discussion that first caught the three of us up to speed on what the collaboration has been doing as of late and what it's planning (a documentary/investigative poetry-photography walk being planned by Ariel Goldberg and an exploration-intervention of the Sit/Lie Ordinance recently passed in SF led by Tonya Hollis and others -- both sound incredibly necessary and mutually complimentary). From getting caught up to speed we all discussed the productive challenges the residency has posed: how Nonsite, a self-organizing pedagogical collective, tran-slocal and non-hierarchical, imminently collapsible and in many was a come-as-you-are nonsite in itself, how can we now produce work that interfaces more directly with activist communities, the public, and do so in relation to deadlines, to the hyper-visual problematics of the photographic artistic? That doesn't problematically frame or archive, i.e., use or appropriate, living communities who are involved in reclaiming public space? The productive problems of forming a commons curriculum and "installation" in the gallery -- that tension between atopia and installation, commoning and commodity, aesthetics and the archival/curatorial -- was discussed, with core questions such as how we as collectively "starburst" (to quote Laura Elrick) can be most salubrious, and most helpful towards particular communities organized to maximize the visibility of their production--activists, unionists on the picket line, for example--ended up taking on a central conversational role.

All of this occurred within the gallery itself, and as folks came and went, arrived to see our work and to see some of the other fantastic collaborations, such as Dodie Bellamy's, on display as part of the larger Camerawork show "As Yet Untitled," it was clear that our meeting doubled as itself an installation. And has in the past in more active/self-reflective ways, with Jen Benka and others sitting down with the public at the common table and asking visitors to write down their thoughts in relation to specific questions, as well towards developing "common terms" lined along one wall as headers ("private," "use," "boundary" e.g.) - the participants then sticking their notecard responses to the wall under the corresponding header.

My sincere thanks toTanya again, to David Buuck, Taylor Brady, Rob Halpern, and several others who invited us to participate in this meeting/discussion. I came away feeling overwhelmed by how much the Collective has managed to do, how many productive experiments have been, or will be, tried. One question that came up was where Nonsite was as a collective now, more generally, now with so many new participants, with such activity lately, etc. A great question that I don't have any particular answer for other than the above and the below re-post of a note I wrote about Nonsite last year. Due to the localism of any on-site art installation, which this is to some degree, I did come away with some concern about the worries folks had about having to "produce" "visible results," whether, for example, that felt sense of pressure would temporarily unhinge the very careful considerations that I witnessed right then and there, and have been a part of the last couple years--the carefully considered commitment to trans-local, cross-disciplinary radical pedagogy, for lack of a better set of terms, where we have always produced a great deal, but have done so as radical, non-recapitulating compliment to established forms of art and protest (aesthetics), forms/movements/groups that are already afoot and in need of our help and that we are thus already involved in. That is, Nonsite, for me, among several other things, has been a no-place of imminent critique, or a place of counter-boundary and interrogation of already established discourses that we, as individuals, are already a part of (to support established forms, under convivial conditions, means to critique them too). The work I've been a part of so far has been a deeply-thought set of reflections, or have felt anyway like reflective and aesthetically-driven curricular explorations unearthing further possibilities, such that I slow down, interrogate my own preconceived notions, activities, and commitments, temporarily suspending all of those discursively, in order to deepen some of those notions, activities, and commitments, and to torque or even let go of others. I feel like that is still very alive here, and that the residency applies pressure to us in this regard in ways that are, again, generative. So I also think we need not worry whether we produce too little--as Chris Daniels mentioned there, he's been so radically changed and astonished by the production that Nonsite has generated and is laden with use-value for him, that change in him being maybe not easily visible, but extant.

Speaking of whom, before I re-post my thoughts regarding Nonsite (how I've worked with and come to participate in Nonsite), I must say that one of the highlights of my visit was spending the afternoon with Chris, talking over a bite about his work on a new chapbook press, one that is currently working on some more beautiful poems by David Brazil and others. Really great to see him--as always. And as always I left the Bay wanting somehow to teleport back and forth, wishing the DOD would just sell that technology to a corporate giant already.... From the blog last year:

In the past several years--since suddenly falling ill--I've been a buried bone. Collectivity and gathering had been (what?) intuitive for me, collaboration and organizing isomorphic to "this body" and/or "David's identity," my life in New York absolutelypopulated, from working as labor organizer to navigating thru the narrow arteries of traverse that New York City alone poses as challenge to any commuter.

This was initially difficult, this drastic shift in my adaptability to physical environments shaped by a dominant cultural formation. Not long after the first of several bodily changes occurred, it became clear that too often, even in disability rights circles, our failure to "keep up" with our shaped environments was/is thought of as a shift in bodily capability that needs be dealt with, such that despite activism demanding greater access services/rights, the underlying discourse negatively articulates itself viz. "what the body can do," putting the onus of adaptability too much on those for whom access is denied by not fully acknowledging the underlying inequities effecting all of us, regardless of level of mobility: of the disappearing commons, the fact of who gets to have a say in urban planning, in how we gather, and why private interests get to decide what counts as a "habitable" environment (let alone a beneficial one), etc.

My initial timidity (or disorientation?) combined with the limits public and private spaces puts on us led me to what ostensibly counted as a house-bound life. House-bound at least in contrast to an earlier bodily existence. I've since learned to get around differently. But especially a few years ago, the house-bound life, of course, meant rather severe changes in the way I socialized, especially given the far-flung nature of many of my friendships. This narrative plays out ten times a minute in this country alone as politicos play roulette with what counts as "health" and what counts as "care."

It's Thom Donovan's recent Harriet post on Nonsite Collective that has gotten me thinking here about "disability" and somatic practices again, wherein Thom describes the trajectory of Nonsite thru collecting comments from those active in it (a call to which I came late, hence feel badly for having failed to contribute something as I'd promised). I'm thinking specifically of Amber DiPietra's comments, as well as her amazing initial contributions to the Aesthetics of Somatic Practices curriculum, and all the work that came before and after it: Thom's talk on a poetics of disability, the Collective's work on a poetics of patiency, and Robert Kocik's hooking those discussions up to systemic problems of the disappearing commons, omitted social services (omitted by capitalism), and ultimately translating nonsites (systems of metaphors or narratives serving to apprehend or map occulted phenomena, such as lacks or holes or omissions) into sites--habitable spaces/structures that nourish, thatovercome, that fill extant voids. DiPietra recalls, that early on, after moving to SF and getting involved with Nonsite:

I also felt my disability being erased because I found that I was trying to emulate an avant-garde poetics (which had not existed so much on the coast I came from) and in that poetics, there was less room for the “I”, for a body’s history, for emotion around that history.

And that as she injected those feelings into Nonsite discussions (at first as blog entry), there was not only room for them, but action and lively discussion, a self-organizing pedagogy for which she was as responsible in sustaining as anyone else:

Then, one day I took a chance and wrote a blog post about this ambivalence I was feeling on the Nonsite Collective’s blog. I felt as though I were doing something risky and perhaps, not very refined. These were scary folks. They weren’t from the South (the opposite ended up being true), they were more intellectual than I and thus, had gone past the need to talk about the body (that wasn’t the case) ...But in fact, my blog post was met with an amazing response—and Nonsite events on disability began to unfold...

Though I am a participant of Nonisite Collective from afar, and though I feel I owe a huge amount of my thinking/feeling the world to friends active in Nonsite, I re-post Amber's comments not simply as a way to cheer us on, or to redouble Thom's already excellent write-up. It's rather to mention that though I am a Nonsite participant, my small contributions have been wholly online or in my own classrooms--I've never been to a general meeting or had an in-person Nonsite discussion (outside of many, wonderfully generative informal discussions with Thom and Rob, Eleni and others, far too late at night). My trip to SF in July will be my first, my reading and talk for Nonsite my first, and so my participation has been on the very outskirts of the Collective, or would be, were the collective not actually living up to what its baseline aims are at moment, that self-organizing pedagogy/set of investigations. So, this re-post is to extend Thom's collection of remarks by mentioning that it was this particular set of conversations--those around somatic practices/disability rights/poetics thereof--that saved me from myself, got me first plugged in to Nonsite discussions, that got me involved, and that ultimately got me re-thinking/feeling what the body can do.

It was at the time of my move to the West Coast from NY that I began teaching as visiting professor in Bard College's Language & Thinking Program each summer, which got me in touch, and facilitated friendships with, Thom Donovan, Eleni Stecopolous, and Rob Halpern, all of whom were active in Nonsite Collective, a collective with which I'd developed a keen interest a year or so before while doing some writing on Robert Kocik's Overcoming Fitness. I was at that time working on two manuscripts, one a book of poems written in hospitals and hotels and written forhospitals and hotels (Hospitalogy, which is ongoing), and the other ended up asOccultations, which had its Belladonna Series/Thom Donvan-curated release party as my first full-length poetry book in New York back in mid-April, and which is at the printers now for its official print run. This work is deeply informed by Amber's work, and by follow-up work from those Thom mentions in his post. My performative work before falling ill was very body-centric, very much interested in gendering and owning, and yet that work seems quite distant to me now as I recall how generative (how really intensely moving) those Nonsite discussions were. My (then) eavesdropping on the conversations that were playing out helped me re-feel a poetics, and I describe this at the end of Occutations as a sort of essay/set of notes (which I'll post in part in another blog entry as continuation/response to what I see as connection between Amber's Nonsite entry on somatic practices and some of the newer posts on commoning - can this body-as-shorn predicament be, consensually at least, a commons?).

Since late 2007 (or early 08) I've incorporated Nonsite's resources into my classroom fairly consistently. It doesn't hurt that there are to be had on the website several documents and other resources related to key questions in contemporary poetry and poetics-as-connected to social justice. More than that, though, the very self-organizing pedagogy that Thom and Amber talk about over at Harriet, it's deeply realized, continues to help model for me different ways to "gather differently," as Thom puts it, to:

explore different platforms and social milieus in which poets can collaborate, converse, and connate.

Thom adds:

If this returns us to many projects deferred and abandoned by radical social movements ongoing since the 30s, that is because the desire has not gone away to embody a form of assembly that reflects radical content.

As I wrote recently in an essay for Jacket Magazine, I don't think it does return us, precisely, to the radical social movements that have helped inform Nonsite Collective'scollective practices, from Situationsist cross-disciplinary political interventionism to Freirean anti-banking pedagogy, but in the classroom, as elsewhere, the desire to assemble differently is certainly there, manifesting as response to managerial trends in education, increased corporatization hostile to any experimentation that doesn't garner dollar producing attention. Nonsite's work, incorporated back into the institution (which is essentially what I am doing when I teach, not to mention the many other participants who move rather freely between the classroom and Nonsite's events) helps highlight how radically restrictive a lot of institutional pedagogical practices are, how, for example, even at a place such as Evergreen (where I teach), a school known for its radical co-learning (even popular educational) models, we need push ourselves to go further in cross-disciplinary research; we can, and should, push ourselves outside of the morbid professionalization inherent in how schools, say, get funded. We should (and at Evergreen I can) do so while still bringing to our re-narrations, our explorations outside of given domains, our different assemblages, a rigor and intentionality necessary to know what we are asking and how to listen for it. Thom asks:

Is gathering a form of poesis—a form of active making?

Not necessarily, is my provisional answer--there is a premium in this culture on spectatorship. There is no sense, tho, in which one can participate in Nonsite Collective and be a spectator. The organizational pedagogy necessitates gathering as a commoning, which is an active making, and so every curricular discussion that spiders out in my classroom (our classroom) is an emergent instantiation of a constantly becoming (a radically dialectical) Nonsite Collective, its making and remaking, fashioning and refashioning. From CA Conrad coming to our classroom and building with us a new (soma)tic to 25 of us wrestling with what else Kocik's commons site for "sorely missed" social services might include (architecturally, structurally, and then again, poetically), there is something substantial, not simply semantic, about the claim that Nonsite has no central locus of activity. As long as this work recursively flows back into the refashioning of the Collective's draft proposal and its attendant makers, which is to say, into further avenues of collaboration, in echo of Halpern's "no work in isolation!"

So I'm extremely happy to see that Thom's put together a series of reflections on Nonsite Collective, where it's been and where it might be going (or can go). From both the classroom to (contiguously) the development of a poetics, Nonsite Collective has en-abled me in ways I can't fully apprehend, despite being able to state that what I appreciate most, perhaps, is precisely that which Amber speaks of--this desire to actively move from site to nonsite back into site, i.e., to make use of without using. Metaphor here is not terminal, but rather takes physical form when possible, thus Thom's mention of re-imagining poetry as not for itself, but "for us," I take to be a claim about the poem itself as part of a commons, a crucial site of activation for us who assemble, forming (and taking responsibility as) an aesthetic ecosystem--where aesthetic embodies the political-social-ethical practices of constructing/narrating some future(s) contra catastrophe.

See You In The Bay Area: SPT Reading W/Laura Elrick & Lara Durback; Nonsite Residency Discussion

2011-02-13T19:47:00.001-08:00

From the SPT website. Many thanks to Samantha Giles and SPT for the invite. Very much looking forward to reading with two fantastic poets. Hope to see you there!

At the Borders: Wolach, Elrick and Durback

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Small Press Traffic

Please join us for At the Borders: Intersections of Politics and Practice
with readings and discussions by David Wolach and Laura Elrick
with special guest Lara Durback

at Macky Hall, CCA Oakland, 5212 Broadway
entrance: $8-10/members FREE__________________________________
…
David Wolach is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and an active participant in Nonsite Collective. Wolach’s first full-length poetry collection, Occultations, has just been published by Black Radish Books. Other books include the multi-media transliteration plus chapbook, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), the full-length Hospitalogy (chapbook forth. from Scantily Clad Press, 2011), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). A former union organizer and performing artist out of New York, Wolach’s work often begins as site-specific and interactive performance and ends up as shaped, written language. Recent work appears in Jacket, Augfabe, Try Magazine, No Tell Motel, and Little Red Leaves. Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, co-curating the PRESS text arts & radical politics series there, and is visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking. He’s currently touring with his Olympia-based experimental performance ensemble, performing Kenneth Gaburo’s opus Maledetto alongside original cross-media work from the eight full-time members.

Laura Elrick’s latest project is a book-length poem, as yet untitled, that explores the relationship between speed (social time) and utterance; translations and affective condensations occur in the tiny caverns between the compulsion toward language and the patrolling of intelligible expressive registers. She also recently coordinated Blocks Away, a psychogeography of Lower Manhattan, some documentation of
which will be displayed in The Skybridge Art and Sound Space at The New School in Spring 2011. Previous work includes the video/poem Stalk (“part dystopian urban cartography, part spatial-poetic intervention”), as well a set of 5 audio pieces for doubled-voice. She has also written two books of poetry: Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School 2005) and sKincerity (Krupskaya 2003), and an essay “Poetry, Ecology, and the Reappropriation of Lived Space,” which can be found in the Eco Language Reader (2010) and online at The Brooklyn Rail. She currently teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Lara Durback is a notebook writer, using handwriting primarily, and that means walking around and writing. Public transportation is a big part of that city writing. You can find recent work with and without handwriting in WORK, Try, There Journal, etc. Also look for her work on Deep Oakland.org. She is also a letterpress printer, and manages the Book Art studio at Mills College. She has recently finished printing the book Picture Cameras with Ariel Goldberg using only repurposed materials (NoNo Press).

And also, please join us the following afternoon for:

NONSITE || "Common/Use" discussion with Laura Elrick & Lara Durback

Please join the Nonsite Collective for an open discussion with visiting poets and activists David Wolach and Laura Elrick, who will be in the Camerawork gallery with other Nonsite members for a loosely-structured conversation about the commons, part of Nonsite's ongoing residency "Common/Use".

Saturday Feb 19th, 1-3pm, in the SF Camerawork gallery
657 Mission St, 2nd floor, San Francisco

www.sfcamerawork.org

David and Laura will also be reading on Friday the 18th at Small Press Traffic.

Georgia Prison Strike Petition

2011-02-07T18:19:00.000-08:00

Urgent Solidarity: Prisoner Activist Facing Violent Retaliation

Support Shawn Whatley! Stop all retaliations against Georgia prison strike activists!

Read online: http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article10.php?id=1511

In the aftermath of the historic prison strike in Georgia, inmate activists are facing systematic violence and repression. On December 9, inmates across six Georgia prisons staged a week-long strike to demand an end to endemic human rights abuses, arbitrary violence, slave-like labor conditions, profiteering and corruption, inadequate food and medical care, among other abuses. On January 12, 2011 inmate activist Shawn Whatley was handcuffed by prison guards as his cell was searched for a contraband cell phone. When he briefly spoke to his mother, Shawn reported he had been put in solitary confinement and was severely beaten, suffering broken bones and facial injuries. He was then transferred from Telfair State Prison to Ware State Prison. At least 37 other inmates were already missing and transferred to other prisons, Shawn reported. Shawn explained that he was targeted, in part, for his communications with outside support groups, which included an extensive interview with SocialistAlternative.org recorded shortly before his beating. This physical brutality and retaliation by the Georgia State Department of Corrections is their response to the historic prisoner strike last month, which they characterized as a “riot.” However, despite provocations, the strike was a completely non-violent mass civil disobedience. Prisoners simply stayed in their cells, refusing to participate in the regular routine of forced labor.

Urgent Action Needed!

We must demand justice for Shawn Whatley and other Georgia State prisoners who are being targeted and brutalized for exposing their inhumane conditions and standing up for their most basic human rights. Please immediately make phone calls and send emails and/or letters to Department of Corrections Commissioner Brian Owens, as well as Georgia’s new Governor Nathan Deal (contact info listed below), demanding “Hands off Shawn Whatley.” Also, help spread the word by re-posting this solidarity appeal on blogs, emails lists, social media, etc. If you are part of an organization, send letters and make calls in the name of your group. Please send copies of protest letters to nysocialists@hotmail.com. For more information, contact Socialist Alternative at (206) 526-7185or info@socialistalternative.org.

SAMPLE Protest Letter:

To: Georgia Corrections Commissioner Brain Owen Georgia Governor Nathan Deal

I want to express my concern and my condemnation for the brutal attack by Telfair state prison guards on January 12, 2011 on Georgia State prisoner Shawn Whatley.

It has become clear that this incident is just one among numerous unjust and retaliatory acts of violence by the Georgia State Corrections authorities against inmates in response to their just and historic strike for basic human rights.

I urge an immediate end to violence and retaliations against prisoners who participated in the strike. Until there is a clear public acknowledgement of unjust abuses already made and a commitment to end them, I commit to spread the word and take action against the injustice in your prisons.

The violence and abuse by the Georgia state penal system will not be hidden from family, friends, people of conscience, or social justice activists. We are demanding an immediate end to the persecution of Shawn Whatley, and for those responsible to be brought to justice. We demand the same for allGeorgia State prisoners who have been brutalized for standing up for the most basic human rights.

The world is watching you!

Signed: _________________________________

Register Your Protest to:

Brian Owens, Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections

Call: 478-992-5258 (This is the number for Owens’ administrative assistant Peggy Chapman. Urge her to give him the message.)

Call: 478-992-5367 (This is the Office of the Ombudsman, which is the official channel for raising concerns over prisoner treatment)

Nathan Deal, Governor of Georgia

Call: 404-656-1776

Send the Governor a letter online by clicking here.

Action: AWP Walking Poem - Belladonna Books

2011-02-03T20:05:00.000-08:00

SAYING IT: A Walking Poem Against Censorship Friday, Feb 4th from 4 to 6pm in Washington DC

JOIN US for a march & speak-out against the silencing of voices that want & need to be heard and a celebration of voices, of our voices, of your voices. 4PM GATHER outside Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, meet on corner of Connecticut Ave/Woodley Road NW. Bring signs, texts, images, costumes! MARCH on Connecticut Ave to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Monument at M Street NW for SPEAK-OUT, reading, breaking of silences.

Belladonna* Collaborative for more info contact: blueseq...@earthlink.net or visit Belladonna* at Table X, AWP bookfairwww.belladonnaseries.org

Black Radish Books @ AWP, A Mnemonic: F19

2011-01-31T19:09:00.000-08:00

Though unfortunately I cannot make it to AWP--I say unfortunately because this year I sensed I could have fun onsite and not simply off--Black Radish Books will be there. Among many friends.

Come by and visit Black Radish, pick up some books, chat, and treat yourself to a free meal (at the expense of entities not Black Radish or table partner presses). We'll be in very fine company too! From the BR blog:

Black Radish Books, Coconut, Ping Pong, and the Dusie Kollektiv are going to the AWP Book Fair -- table F19. Come by and see us!

Eileen Tabios on Schaeppi's Sonja & Black Radish Books

2011-01-30T21:12:00.001-08:00

Eileen Tabios just wrote a lovely recommendation-review of Kathrin Schaeppi's bang-up new collection, Sonja Sekula... In the piece Tabios also gives Black Radish Books a shout-out, some kind words indeed for the press. Many thanks to Tabios. Check out this brief write-up here.

Announcements: Schaeppi, Brolaski, Conrad, & Donovan

2011-01-28T19:24:00.000-08:00

1. Kathrin Schaeppi's genre-defying book Sonja Sekula: Grace In A Cow's Eye: A Memoir, is the latest title out from Black Radish Books and now available thru SPD. Published on the Black Radish Blog as of today is a 2nd reader response-review of the work, this one by Rebbecca Brown. A really good close read. Check it out.

2. Lots of exciting titles, as usual, announced as new from SPD this month--new work from Arielle Guy out of Dusie, Lisa Robertson's Soft Architecture re-released thru Coach House, etc. I'm particularly excited to see that Julian Brolaski's new UDP book is now out. This work's been coming along for some time--and ever since I heard Julian read from the work in 2009 when we were both reading for The Stain of Poetry Series, I was immediately blown away, intrigued, piqued. Copied from the SPD newsletter:

gowanus atropolis Julian T. Brolaski $15 | paper | 104 pp. Ugly Duckling Presse ISBN: 9781933254814 Poetry. LGBT Studies. GOWANUS ATROPOLIS attempts to reconcile the toxicity of the titular Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and the east river in "Manahatta" with the poet's search for the pastoral in New York City. A queer elegy for when language might have been prior to thought, where the phrase becomes the thought, rather than the other way around—so that the dystopic might become, if not utopic, at least measurable / pleasurable, "melodious offal." "Once in a while there are poems which create entire fresh terrain. And I'm saying too that it's hard to come home from it, locator dials set anew. I'm jangling from the return, like the world had descended upon me so quickly through the poems it was some time before I realized I was still in one piece, and minted with a beautiful little scar. Julian's deviance is a hazard of poems which bend the muscle of light. I can hardly wait to share our extra strength when we've all read them!"—CAConrad. LINK→

3. NEW PRINT RUN IN THE WORKS: The last batch of the initial print-run of Occultations will be available thru SPD sometime in early Feb. (along with whatever remains from the few in stock now), so pick up yours up today--once sold out, Black Radish Books will be releasing another full print-run / edition of this, my first full-length collection of poems. I appreciate people's support of the book! Those who have gotten copies, of course. And. Many thanks to the Black Radish eds. Nicole Mauro, Marthe Reed, and Susana Gardner--they have worked so hard on the press and this book particularly, and Kate Robinson, co-designer with me of the book's internals. Many thanks too to those who have written on the book within the last 6 months of its existence: from blurbers Joan Retallack, Laura Elrick, CA Conrad, Thom Donovan, and David Buuck, to the several folks who have so far written some really insightful, generous reviews--Matthew Landis for Jacket 40; Rob Halpern, Brenda Iijima, J. Townsend, Jules Boykoff, and Thom Donvan for CA Conrad's PhillySound feature (interview, reviews, poetry) of my work; Nicky Tiso for Tarpaulin Sky Reviews; Kevin Killian and Susana Gardner for Attention Span 2010; Mark Wallace for Thinking Again; Sarah Fox for Montevidayo; Joe Milford for staging the audio reading/interview for his Joe Milford Poetry Show; and most recently Susan Smith Nash for PRESS 1. Links to these features are on the links bar to the right under reviews & ordering info-->

4. The collaborative chapbook by CA Conrad and Thom Donovan, Arthur Echo, from Robert Dewhurst's Scary Topiary Press, will be debuted in a couple days in Philly--the 30th. Check out the details here.

Feeling We's Way Thru Michael Cross's Haecceities

2011-01-23T18:39:00.000-08:00

Poet-book artist Kate Robinson just posted a few Stan Brakhage films over on her blog, and it triggered in me two auto-responses. First thought is that many Brakhage films, due to their abstraction, their silences, and their length, are probably as accommodating to You Tube as any extant films made for the screen can be. I'm not suggesting that watching one of his films on a large screen in the dark isn't a different, in fact contrastingly rather magical and disturbing experience. Just that there's something about this work, most of it from the late 50s thru the 70s, that is (maybe) both context-sensitive and torsional enough to be twisted, shaped, and transported--like phonemes as they are used and then used again from word to word, and then used and used again as self-contained, prosodic units that arrive within, and as, different material sites of expenditure, but retain shape too. A solidity and a flexibility of usage--and of affective treatment.

Which got me to my second Kodak half-baked thought-moment: having just received--thank you, Michael--Michael Cross's new Haecceities, tho I am loving this book, it wasn't till I was visited again by Brakhage that I had any idea with regard to how to describe it. (Well, I had some idea due to some very good reviews, and yet mainly due to an interpretive dance by Brenda Iijima, CA Conrad, Erica Kaufman, and Debrah Morkun while I visited Philly in Aug. The dance--a cathecting response of bodily energy transformed, inscribed by the poems--is lovingly influencing my thinking about what Haecceities desires, and so really coloring my thinking here.) The linguistic popping of Haecceities presences, as Talyor Brady implies, an emergent language-labor of what has not yet been foreclosed or what does not yet disclose, where the word-as-unit of measure is often a futuristic or torsional variant of an Elizabethan item, where "words... [arise] weed-like in the interval of that vanishing" "medium of the emblem" and so a particular prosody stemming from careful etymological research treats one so strongly that all one can do is submit to the "strain" of the lines, submit and then revel, hold tight with others in a collective act of squinting, then letting the image be--where what we end up trying to make out, giving into meaning-as-this-prosody, is our own future, instigated, perhaps even shaped, by the poetic in our midst.

This sensation of submitting to the inscription of the future by letting present unknowns carry me in the aftermath of struggle at least gives me a prima facie impression analogous to experiencing Brakhage's work for the first time. In a double sense: in the sense of letting it rake us, the impressions thus becoming a future-making in lyric gestures, of the work getting some handle on us, allowing us to make things of the work's internal and referential relations. And in the sense of reflecting on the process that Brakhage became famous for, manipulating the medium directly by scratching it, painting on celluloid, and via various emulsion techniques. Cross's prosodic elements are dug out, made by casting shadows on word parts and jamming them up against other word parts, or collaging found minerals, forming what Brady points out is a rhythmic duration as extimacy, which I think describes quite beautifully how the work reads by line and as one contoured and communal poem also. And it occurred to me that Brakhage's work is analogous--only analogous, nothing really more--in its extimate movement.

Thus it's worth--after reading the book on its own terms--having one or two parts read to you alongside watching, say, Brakhage's Glaze of Cathexis. Relating, for example, that film via link to the left, with (pg 19):

the many hundred wing-lit hives

so saucily so the onerous fever kenning

the coupling come coupling bound by night

this little things strung plenty like

yield the hollow soft hem the light

It's at the level of a sort of politics, a sort of reclaimed future, that I think said analogy, as any analogy, breaks away, where Haecceities it becomes even more obvious really is an island in our making it (of course islands these days aren't impossible to get to--we have all manner of transportation for that). A unique sense of active commoning as wreading emerges, for instance. As does (alongside that commoning) an imminent critique of the very "vocabulary of heraldry" that Brady identifies, again quite beautifully, as the saying stockpile here. A critique to draw upon from "higher" ground, built out of these units that build that vocabulary, co-created by Cross. By Cross and linguistic bedrock and, well, us.

So, I suppose this speaks to even James's warning about forming hypotheticals, let alone full-blown arguments, out of the Kodak moment, the sense-impression--but I couldn't help myself.

A gorgeous, uncompromising, and singularly unique book, Haecceities.

Speaking of Mills...

2011-01-21T18:21:00.000-08:00

Kate Robinson on "Discussion Poetry" and a pdf of its broadside. Here you go.

PS: I'm really touched by Kate's comments, awhile back, regarding the "living room" in which we collaborated, she, Elizabeth, and I, and others collaborated, shot the shit etc., as part of her list of favorite 2010 moments. This is a lovely post all the way around: human moments, recollections of friendship.

Rebecca Brown on Kathrin Schaeppi's Sonja Sekula

2011-01-21T17:58:00.000-08:00

Just ahead of the release of Kathrin Schaeppi's Sonja Sekula: Grace in a Cow's Eye: A Memoir comes an appropriately dark and shifting review of the title from fellow poet Rebecca Brown. It's over at the Black Radish Blog. I also appreciate the review because it enacts the narrative problematics of Schaeppi's wonderful book without getting too much into what is just as exciting but more obvious: the genre-breakage, the physicality, the painterly. Sonja should be available thru SPD, I'm told, in the coming days.

Peaches & Bats 7

2011-01-21T17:20:00.000-08:00

Sam Lohmann seems to have done it again, editing another fine lineup for Peaches & Bats. I'll take this as an opportunity to give a shout-out to former student (studied philosophy-lit theory with me), now poet and wanderer, I believe, out of CA, Jen Burris, whose poetry shows up in the current issue. Jen's poetry is special. It's doing its own thing so honestly and in ways that pretty much every time I've read it gives me stabbing pains someplace between the back of the neck and the shoulder-blades. So, thrilled to see her work showing up in print more.

From Sam, Spare Roomie and very talented designer:

Peaches and Bats #7

features drawings by:

Dana Dart-McLean

Daniel J. Mitchell

Nate Orton

and poetry by:

Jennifer Bartlett

Jen Burris

Allen Edwin Butt

Joel Chace

Jen Coleman

Adriana Grant

Lindsay Hill

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Sarah Kelly

Sam Lohmann

Kyle Schlesinger

Cedar Sigo

James Yeary

64-page handsewn zine with letterpressed cover

(includes shipping in North America)

Order via Paypal at peachbats.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-issue.html

Two Labor Day Links

2011-01-20T22:37:00.001-08:00

Because I am SO slow to read stuff online, even stuff I'm deeply interested in and feel real kinship with, here are a couple links besides my own (written from afar, choppy, run-on) blog post, that speak to the Labor Day Event of 2010 organized by Brandon Brown, Sara Larsen, Suzanne Stein, Alli Warren, and David Brazil. One at A Tonalist Notes and another at Suzanne Stein's blog. Both in different ways mention the importance of non-academics taking the mic and giving talks about labor in relation to each discussant's poetry practices--insights those of us who teach should learn from (just as the converse, those outside academia going to or giving academic talks and learning likewise, as I used to when a full-time labor organizer--to speak for solidarity here in the same breath--has often been the case). Since any job sector is increasingly corporate, alienating, and de-humanizing, the questions here have shaken out as both unique to poetry and typical of binaries that have emerged, between work and personal time, out of the 70-hour work week: how might "we" gather together and think, write, and act--plan for action with regard to labor and, and of, poetry & poetics? To make room for our vocations to paraphrase Larsen and Brazil? To organize across-differences? Poetry's role (or non-role) as investigative, even labor-activist, here?

Awhile back--archived as pdf here and to the right under "critical writing online"--I wrote on this set of discussions in part because I really am glad these questions got asked in such fullness, and cross-generationally too. The tenured professoriate hasn't had much luck with their often less interested tenured colleagues, when trying to do so, in re-distributing resources internally or services externally. Most poetry teachers are contingent or casual workers, don't have much power in this regard and yet are interested in such shifts, and in numbers do the have organizing power to accomplish quite a bit. And what about for those who do have institutional power, those who aren't academic "interlopers" or otherwise casual, or part-time? I take it as not surprising that most of the flourishing faculty unionism and alternative pedagogy in higher ed is contingent or otherwise non-tenured faculty-led (or if not led, then very much co-created). And that, again not surprisingly, much of the bridge-building between academia and beyond, i.e., much of the interest in how to think anew about the politics and community of poetry pedagogy, comes out of non-full-time faculty working with folks from all manner of backgrounds who are poets, curators, critics. One can get stuck in the classroom. Especially when one doesn't have office windows.

I've made it no secret that (and this is my experience organizing, among many workers, academics) I find way too much complacency and lack of solidarity in academia. Too much myopia with regard to what engagement is or can be, too much interest in self in this short-term way, in actually self-defeating, pedagogy-defeating, colleague-defeating, and public service-defeating ways (careerism taking the place of wider engagements--and in many ways understandably: very few members of any faculty have any real job security, especially in the non-union private sector). Tho I caution myself at the same time here not to make wholesale generalizations: writers who are regular teachers such as Mark Wallace or Jules Boykoff or Juliana Spahr or Kaia Sand or Susan Schultz, and any number of others, have been tireless organizers and community activists. I myself am a regular teacher of text arts, mainly poetry, and an activist, albeit not a very effective one (choose your pick as to which "one" I'm talking about, ugh). And not to pretend that academia is any more complacent than many, maybe most other job categories. But especially at academic departments with prestige, whatever that means, and/or with writing MFA prorgams (mills rather than the more unusual small, more radical program such as Mills--capital versus small "M"), most faculty interested in labor and workplace, hence pedagogical radicalism, feel like a handful of folks in a sea of otherwise less-than-active folks. This felt especially true when organizing with adjuncts and teaching and research assistants at Ivy league institutions--the tenured faculty there were largely (not wholly) useless. "I'm supportive, but I have to go home at 5pm" seemed to be the motto.

Since momentum is in part a numbers (density) game, I should point out (to myself as well as anybody else) the myriad dejections workers have faced in the past decade of casualization--anti-union rulings by national boards, huge budget cuts, etc, all of it has made organizing that much more difficult, has amounted in the past 20 years to academics, especially at private institutions, where unionism was systematically made non-binding by Reagan--where institutions did not need anymore to legally recognize their faculty unions--rather disengaged and all the more careerist. So I suspect activism would haven been higher in academia, making those walls more permeable, had there not been such an historic loss of momentum. Luckily--however, due to some really even more difficult times--things are changing slowly. But for poetry the consequences have been very profound. Just as they have been in other job (and job-volunteer, i.e., unpaid job) sectors, where, again, organizing density and momentum is (and has been for even longer) staggeringly low due to corporate (managerial) resistances. At least this is part of the story anyhow.

Anyhow. Two really excellent synopses of these cross-job-category labor and poetry talks and discussions, covering much of these pressing concerns, are on the other side of the links above--great quotes from notes. Wish I'd checked these out sooner, but alas. They provide more thoroughness that I did, and, I'm sure, more accurate reportage.

Persons

2011-01-19T16:00:00.000-08:00

Incorporated so what

Masked. Screen-

Shot, written to not now

Worn. Does this re-

Mind me

Of vacant houses

And the people

Who knock and re-

Turn without distance.

Spring Course 2011 (description)

2011-01-19T03:16:00.000-08:00

For those interested, either because you read the course blog or because, and especially, you are a student at Evergreen, here's what's up for spring. Special thanks to those participants in Nonsite Collective's project on the commons, including those such as Kaia Sand, who have contributed to commoning discourses over at Nonsite at other times, under different--of course quite connected--curricula.

Experiments in Text: Art And The Reclamation Of Public Spaces

Faculty: David Wolach wolachd@evergreen.edu

Days & Times: 5-7p Wed & 4-6p Sat

Location: TBA

Enrollment: 24

Web Site: Course Blog: http://blogs.evergreen.edu/wolachd/ David's Public Text Arts & Politics Blog:http://davidwolach.blogspot.com/

This course will focus on creative writing, but it will examine other art forms (critical writing, performance, visual arts and activist movements) that are concerned with the reclamation of public, lived spaces in the wake of increasing privatization and corporatization--creating "landscapes of dissent." From the investigation of institutions of education to artistic-activist collaborations, from treating the body as site of resistance to discussing its use and misuse as object to be commodified, we’ll ask whether art, and very often poetry, as poet and critic Thom Donovan writes, can “model the commons — how might [art and poetry] provide experiments in the practical organization against anti-democratic social hierarchies and the expropriation of labor, land, and natural resources?” We'll respond to this and similar questions by building individual text arts portfolios and by collaborating in small groups on more sustained text arts projects that seek to experiment, dissent and intervene.

Since one important function of this course will be to develop projects that can serve to both investigate and confront neoliberal (often corporate) enclosures, we'll be moving from the abstraction of the page to the streets. We'll therefore interrogate the “artistic” and "poetic" in relation to the “political,” stretching our understanding of both activism and creative writing. We will do this both by making our own creative works and by looking at the examples provided by other writers, visual artists, and scholars, such as Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand, CA Conrad & Frank Sherlock, Robert Kocik & Daria Fain, Kristin Prevallet, Laura Elrick, Amy Balkin, Sylvia Federici, Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young, Jacques Ranciere, Karl Marx, George Oppen, Brenda Coultas, Tonya Foster, Stephen Collis, The Situationists, Nonsite Collective, and several others. This course will build on some of the material introduced in “Experiments in Text: Transgressive Art & Transgressive Bodies” (Winter 2011), but it is notnecessary to have taken the previous course—nor is it necessary to have any prior experience in creative writing, art, or literary-critical theory. This is an all-level course.

Marathon Reading: The Maximus Poems

2011-01-14T19:09:00.000-08:00

Reminder to all out here in the NW: Spare Room Collective is co-sponsoring the marathon reading of Olson's The Maximus Poems in Portland this weekend. Going on now thru the 16th. I hope to get down there on the 16th (teaching otherwise). Do check out the marathon if you have the chance. From the Spare Room Collective website:

Joining the celebrations of poet Charles Olson's centennial that have taken place around the country over the past year, Spare Room has organized a three-day/three-location marathon reading of Olson's book-length epic, The Maximus Poems.

Locations, times, and readers are listed below. (Readers are listed in scheduled order, which is subject to change.)

For a compendium of Olson resources, including links to recordings, interviews, essays, and other documents, see the Olson pages at SUNY Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center and the Poetry Foundation.

Occultations Reviewed in the New Press 1

2011-01-14T18:50:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to the editors of PRESS 1, Arlene Ang, Jordan Schilling, and Valerie Fox, for publishing Susan Smith Nash's review of Occultations in the latest issue of the journal. I'm just now cracking open the journal to check out the new poetry inside, which as usual, lives alongside some vibrant visual art. From Nash: Wolach creates a frame of “body maps and distraction zones” which suggests how poetics represents the way in which the body becomes a zone of invasion that parallels the meta-politic...

Washington State Book Awards

2011-01-13T20:02:00.001-08:00

Many thanks to Black Radish Books, The Washington Center for the Book, and others for nominating Occultations for the 2010 Washington State Book Award. Got word a few days ago but it's been the first week of our semester--so my apologies for just getting to this now.

The Three P's For a Fair Budget: Party, Performance, Picket

2011-01-13T19:33:00.000-08:00

Please join us Jan 15-16 for the first annual Fair Budget Fair (doesn't that name indicate how sorely you're needed?). Talks, performances, and readings will occur throughout the day and night, with full schedule available at the OlyBlog and the where/when below. I'll be reading/performing Saturday Jan 15 at 630, and several members of our performance research ensemble will be contributing work throughout the two days.

The First Annual Fair Budget Fair

Start: Jan 15 2011

End: Jan 16 2011

From today's inbox:

Brought to you by the Olympia Coalition for a Fair Budget
THE FIRST ANNUAL FAIR BUDGET FAIR
...an urgently needed community response to the continuing -and worsening- cuts to the state budget
Saturday 1/15 11:00am --- 8:00pm Sunday 1/16
The Eagles Hall (bottom floor)
805 4th Ave E
Olympia, WA
The governor's new budget proposal calls for the elimination of Basic Health, the only source of healthcare for 66,000 people as well as eliminating healthcare for 27,000 children. 49,000 people with disabilities will lose state assistance. K-12 education is losing $2.2 billion, and higher education is under attack again too, with higher costs and lower quality.
Community groups, artists, musicians, activists, and anybody else who wants to participate are coming together to inform and get informed about the cuts and to make plans for saving our jobs, and all the public services so many of us need and rely on. There will also be information about local resources for meeting our needs as funding for state programs are whittled away.
COME JOIN US FOR EDUCATION, DISCUSSION, ART, MUSIC, POETRY, AND A RALLY TO ACTION!

It's January of the New Year: ALL HANDS ON DECK

2011-01-11T20:17:00.000-08:00

As my old union Local 2110 UAW celebrates its 25th anniversary (before that it was part of the storied--and just as radical--District 65 UAW), we enter another year of budget cuts and potentially precedent-setting worker victories in just about every sector and job category; and yet we need recognize that these cuts, from layoffs to decreased wages, rights and benefits for workers, don't share a simple cause-effect relationship to the recession. The recession, though a very real consequence of two wars and other disastrous neoliberal policies, in my experience as organizer during the current crisis and just after 9-11, is used as an effective excuse to bust unions and deny workers rights, as excuse to cut services in the public sector (education, here in WA, or in CA, for example), and as a corporate pressure point in lobbying for more Wall Street bonuses and fewer (no) controls.

This isn't cynicism--this is the day to day operation of huge law firms like Proskauer Rose LLP, representing NYU administrators in their battle to deny teaching assistants and research assistants there, and at Columbia University (not to mention countless other workers in other fields) the right to form legally recognized unions. This is the day to day operations of in-house counsel working alongside PR firms and upper managements who are wanting to maintain a level of institutional control, and a lifestyle they are used to, on the backs of folks who are not them but who they owe. Increased commodification of workers is coming in wave after wave of proposed legislation. See Mark Wallace's latest post regarding proposed Cal State cuts and its faculty association letter warning against the cuts, which of course come in the wake of huge cuts to the UC system (and in preparation for future cuts at UC). The new proposed budget cuts to education here in Washington represent not only an existing reality for current union contract negotiations such as ours at Evergreen, but will continue to be used at every turn as an excuse for demanding furloughs, hiring freezes, and tuition increases, but also the rejection of proposals for worker safety, curricular freedoms, educational outreach, stronger grievance procedures, financial aid programs, and so forth--since management and state labor lawyers know very well that such rights and services are a tougher sell to voters facing the rhetoric as well as the reality of a worsening economy than they usually are--who are facing similar from counsel at their workplaces. See Labor Notes' (link below) expose' on systematic cuts to public sector labor and services this month--and the Building and Trades predictable complicity here--as an example of an unwillingness to bargain in good faith and come up with collaborative, collective decisions that can ensure all are shouldering responsibilities equally, i.e., in relation to their stake at their workplace, as well as in relation to whether it'd run if these folks weren't working there: that is, policies that ensure both worker benefit increases and long-term "fiscal sustainability."

Impossible? Nah. Been done before--and under worse conditions. It may prima facie sound legitimate that steep cuts in a state's budget, or a downturn in the private sector, should translate into cuts jobs, in worker pay and benefits, but such arguments rely not on logic or even economic soundness (most often this is a modification of trickle-down saving strategies--Reganomics) but on fear: "we don't make cuts here, you'll be the one to carry the burden there." Fear, as in divide and conquer--on site, and between sectors. One look at the general decline of unionism since the 50s, or the widening gap in wage to cost of living, or the drastic decline in production, and one can see the flaws in such corporate rhetoric. Things haven't gotten better for the vast majority of us--the real economy--since at latest the 75 gas shortage, so why should continuing to agree to the same worker cuts, giving in to the same divide and conquer strategy, or otherwise caving on the same free-marketeering rhetoric, produce different results now? The same folks who tell us we have to spend money to make money say we they have to save money to make money. Which is it? And what, pray tell, are the states' priorities? Education? No. Healthcare? No. There will be no long term administration--let alone thriving--of a population sans systematic resistance to policies that afford no distribution of wealth.

As bubbles form quicker and pop quicker too, as commodity gets purer every day, we are asked to form the surplus value of what is otherwise a brokering shell. More money for no service becomes the public motto, shell out becomes the private one. Why'd we tolerate buying nothing, or less, for more? Which in education, eg, amounts to paying more each year for fewer services (cf the rise in for-profit educational enrollments, the increased enrollments at sate institutions despite drastic increases in cost)? Because the phraseaology has a built in ethical demand: help your struggling economy today and you'll go to heaven, or at least feel good about yourself, tomorrow. Whether that means contributing to the sub-prime student loan bubble because you're out of work now or because it's time to go to college, alongside the pressure of such "investment" by the de-regulated marketplace, is a rhetoric that feels quite "natural" but is, in fact, wholeheartedly manufactured: "things are bad everywhere--schools have to raise tuition; they must layoff workers/cut services. What else are they supposed to do?" This is a manufactured rhetoric that says: this temporary moment of buying nothing equals charitable giving.

Below are some places to start, for any of those interested in further resources and news regarding your labor's movement, and yet know not where to begin. Just a few starter links (I focus here on education somewhat because of recent education-related legislative and other developments, but the AFL-CIO link alongside the Labor Notes link--the latter who often, and sometimes quite rightly, criticize the AFL--should get those interested started, with Labor Notes, eg, linking to several radical Marxist-anarchist organizations that aren't, eg, affiliated with the AFL, and conversely):

AFL-CIO BLOG & WEBSITE (see different departments, with links to UC's UAW local, tuition-hike resistance coalition, etc, and links to petitions and ways to help organize)

Labor Notes

Education: UAW (United Auto Workers), AFT (American Federation of Teachers), LOCAL 2110 UAW (radical union, one of the leaders in higher ed organizing) - each of these have action campaigns to hook into.

For Writers - The NWU

"To School An Intelligence And Make It A Soul..."

2011-01-09T17:37:00.001-08:00

Am writing the essay-review on it as of this week, and then this. This is Frank. This is right.

Imaginary Syllabi

2011-01-07T19:55:00.000-08:00

Been excited about this project since hearing about it when I first met Jane at Bard College in 2008. Now out is the Sprague/Palm Press ed. anthology, Imaginary Syllabi. As one who regularly teaches a course on radical pedagogy, poetry, & politics, this will certainly be on my, ahem, syllabus next time around. And as one who is often confused by the rhetoric around the (to me) unnecessary--or imaginary--divide between academics who write poetry and those who work in other fields, I think this series of complications will help clarify (in a non-discursive way) the structural, systematic, i.e., impersonal crisis of American education, that cleft between the simple and conservative cost-benefit economics of the corporate university and the yet-to-exist radical potential of the critical pedagogical environment (so, by "academic" I don't mean the tenured power-wielding asshole, the department chair, the staid game player, the complicit manager, but--as is usually the case--the contingent or otherwise power-less faculty, every bit as contingent and often as alienated as those outside the university). Yet I think this will be a book important for anyone invested in the social-political potential of writing and writing pedagogy, those who are paid faculty and those who are "teachers" or "co-learners" in a different, perhaps more generative sense--since what I just described I take to be one aspect, or set of concerns, among myriad others covered here.

Nonsite Collective & SF Camerawork Residency

2011-01-06T19:23:00.000-08:00

As announced by David Buuck on his blog, thus reminding me to do same, Nonsite Collective and SF Camerawork have embarked on a 4-month collaborative residency focusing on various questions and problems related to the disappearing commons and commoning, as part of As Yet Untitled: Artists and Writers In Collaboration. The opening was yesterday. If even to check things out in Feb, I hope to participate in this exciting collaboration, but due to living out in WA and, frankly, due to recent personal tragedies, I've been out of the loop on this important work. So, now that things are underway, I'm again excited by tonight's opening, and what's to come for this partnership/set of collaborations, actions, and etc. Go to Nonsite for info about the ideas/problems being wrestled with here, and then head over to SF Camerawork for details about the whole project, aesthetic objects beyond this collaboration that SF Camerawork sponsors, curates, etc.

IWW Halo? I'll Take Two

2011-01-05T22:21:00.000-08:00

Will Owen, Seattle poet and curator of last month's show of spatial poetry "An Opening Is Nothing" at Ver(a)rt Gallery, sent me a photostream of pics from that evening, among them some great shots of work by Nico Vassilakis, Jeff Derksen, Bethany Ides, and shots of our ensemble performing Kenneth Gaburo's Maledetto. In the email Will pointed out that the Vera Project logo just above my head shares design (and in some ways political) affinity with the IWW logo. What do you think? I think that were I to want a halo of something, it just might be that consisting of the IWW logo.

New Series @ The Common: Brown, Spahr, Fitterman

2011-01-05T21:50:00.000-08:00

I'm very pleased to have received this, the below, from amazing poet, translator, person, Brandon Brown. A pretty great way to kick things off too! If in or around the Bay Area, check er out...

I'm thrilled to announce a new reading series in San Francisco at THE COMMON (1077 Mission Street at 7th. ONE BLOCK from CIVIC CENTER BART). The inaugural reading features JULIANA SPAHR and ROB FITTERMAN. It all goes down THURSDAY, JANUARY 13th at 7:30 p.m. It costs $5. This is a good one!

I hope to see you there!

Robert Fitterman is the author of 10 books of poetry including: The Sun Also Also Rises, war the musical, Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge Books), Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Press), Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon Press), This Window Makes Me Feel (www.ubu.com). Metropolis 1-15 was awarded the Sun & Moon “New American Poetry Award (2000)” and Metropolis 16-29 was awarded the Small Press Traffic “Book of the Year Award (2003)”. With novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa, he co-authored the film What Sebastian Dreamt which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival (2004) and the Lincoln Center LatinBeat Festival (2004). He has been a full-time faculty member in NYU’s Liberal Studies Program since 1993. He also teaches poetry at the Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies at Bard College.

Juliana Spahr lives in Berkeley. Her next book, A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (co-edited with Stephanie Young) went to the printer this week

More Blood Sport

2011-01-04T17:52:00.000-08:00

CA Conrad relays an account of another case, so it seems, of bullying difference to death. Whether the boy at his former high school had been bullied to suicide because he was gay or whether due to autism, or both... matters and doesn't, Conrad notes. Because here is what's so goddamn important. I felt this in Detroit too. A BIG city. Here is what is important, in any case. From Conrad:

I'm sad that the sharp taste of blood is still on the tongues out there in rural Pennsylvania. Taste for destroying the different. It's easy to be transgressive in such a repressive environment.

It's easy to die transgressing out there. What to do?

It's easy to transgress out there--one false move, absolutely. Matter of life and death, not a fancy choice, is it? No answer to his question, of course. It's worth attempting a response, tho. Transgressing in numbers, or to feel one is doing so, should I think be generated via an organizing-as-support structure, and rarely is. I was beaten pretty badly by a bully jock in high school. After he broke my cheekbone and smashed my face in he joined the Air Force. Then he told everyone he was a sexual deviant too! And quit a few years later. Or now that I think about it, was probably kicked out. I didn't feel much in common with him then, or after. Or now. So I guess my response to Conrad's all important question is: What caused this person to be a violent homophobe? What was it that led me to avoid that all-too-easy self-loathing and destructive behavior? In many respects we were (maybe still are) quite similar. Quite. I don't suffer from the delusion that there's some simple causal relation to be had. And am glad about that. But there's something that Conrad's TBOF, its world, allegorizes: not necessarily lack of love, but lack of thoughtful struggle with and support for, a support which can--and often should--manifest as outrage, or perhaps less normatively, militancy in the sense that the boy who beat me didn't get from the Air Force, or, apparently, from the satisfaction of making somebody else besides him bleed for it. It's the lack allegorized in TBOF which, on my reading, heightens a feeling of urgency for it. Of aching for it. An unrelenting lack transforms allegorical figures into their ghosts. Lacks thus making invisible the pulsing lifeblood of the place, its very meager subsistence. Precisely the inverse of the real world Conrad's in a rush to co-create, not by proxy but by poetry--i.e., the poetic, which is to suggest a way of becoming in and of the world that is both loving and militant, grounded in the every day and filled with magic. How to get there? How to organize for it?

Hold It

2011-01-04T17:01:00.000-08:00

I'd like to thank Lindsey Boldt for adding the reading Rob Halpern and I did at David Brazil & Sara Larsen's Life Long Dream Come True Series as one of her favorite things of 2010. Now, I also want to thank Lindsey for kindly holding it till the very end--the climax, as it stands--of the evening. I mean, if there is one way to define the poetic I think it just might be: an action of a transitory decor for which one would sacrifice life, limb, and glandular plosive, when necessary, up to and including holding it, as in its fullest expression, participation in said action is equal to or greater than the regenerative force of a painful laughter, and/or the damaging effects of the pee pee dance.

I would add that a night after our reading (I think? Or two.) Lindsey read with David Brazil, which for sure is one of my favorite moments of 2010. Or any year. Both readings were awesome in really different, but oddly complimentary, ways. I wrote on that reading back in Aug, so available in the archives. Boldt's prose-PT mixture narrating the hostile takeover by a hundred-foot Goldie Hawn of downtown SF, and the Goldie of Overboard no less--fabulous. Which, by the way, for those uninterested in following the IMDB link here, gives this as the movie's official tagline:

Rich bitch Joanna hires country carpenter Dean to build a closet on her yacht. When the two don't see eye-to-eye...

Reading it to self aloud in the movie trailer guy voice (you know, that voice) doesn't help here. The only marginal salvation of the tagline is in the hardly veiled double-coding gatcha of the metaphors, "closet" and "closet," etc., as the IMDB--Amazon-like hetero corporate giant it is--kickoff for this movie's page...

Stephen Vincent's New Haptic Book

2011-01-03T20:47:00.001-08:00

Speaking of Stephen Vincent and his haptics--as I did in my thank you note below--got word of Stephen's new codex-like book of Haptics, big & beautiful judging from the photos. Really amazing work. Check out his blog for those photos and a full description of the project. And for the beautiful smaller haptic he did of my Nonsite talk, re the body, Occultations, commoning, I thank him again for that lovely gift of an aesthetic transliteration. Meanwhile, below is mini-description of the book and how it came about--a teaser from his blog:

In December (already last year!) during my Djerassi residency, for several hours each day I roamed up, down, over and around the 500 acres of forests(Redwood, Oak, Pine, Madrone), late fall grass meadows, rocky mountain tops (from which I could see the Pacific Ocean some 10 miles away), deep canyons, and a deep creek filled canyon. Light varied from luminous to the darkest of Redwood forest shades. With me I carried an array of pens and, at the start, a blank accordion fold book. Composed of 46 adjoining panels, each one 3.5 x 11.5″ (vertical).
In advance, without exactly knowing where, I decided go to 20 different sites and make 2 haptic drawings for each site.

Quote of the Eve...

2011-01-02T19:00:00.000-08:00

I used to internalize others' fear of poetry as an aggression against me. I see poetry fear now as a fear of magic, terror that meaning will be thrown up in the air, juggled, and then spilled on the floor like balls, or like bananas. Code orange for the poetry terror level.

---Susan Schultz, from her blog

Cuneiform Press Turning 10

2011-01-02T18:45:00.000-08:00

As Cuneiform Press celebrates its 10th anniversary, Rob McClennan interviews editor (and co-editor with Thom Donovan and Michael Cross of ON: A Journal of Contemporary practice), Kyle Schlesinger. I've been an admirer not just of the press and of Kyle's poetry for some time, but, like many of us, what he does as book artist. He and Cross work rather beautifully together--and as individual designers. Good terrain covered on the Cuneiform blog and via the interview by Rob. So. Do check out the incisive discussion here.

Thank You

2010-12-31T20:48:00.001-08:00

I haven't been blogging over the past few days, save for the abbreviated acknowledgments below. Over the past couple months, since my mother's death, I realized a while ago that I'd been using the blog, among other things--TV, internet searches for random stuff, and the like--more as way to avoid moving through this particular discomfort. Not that the sort of sociality of the blog doesn't provide me a means of accessing the poetic. Not, that is, that the transmission and thinking/feeling thru that the poetic affords here isn't itself restorative, or healing, because it is. But I realized that instead of corresponding also directly with those of you who'd reached out these past couple months, even in order that this space may be social, even additive to the social, I've largely kept it here. Which is a sort of hoard of such pleasures and curatives--beyond an avoidance of responding to you who have reached out, which is, beyond what friendship entails, also deeply restorative.

Besides poetry, teaching, and performing Maledetto & other works as part of Performance Research Group--contiguous activities that simultaneously gave me pleasure and escape, and under more ideal conditions a kind of actionable reconstitution--I avoided doing much else demanding that I interact with others, if even over email as follow up to you here, or as activism, etc. I've long been a social but rather solitary person, not particularly paradoxical, I think; the pain of my condition, and perhaps more so, its fatigue, I'm still somehow ashamed of? I must be, because instead of tell close friends I couldn't get back to them, to you who reached out, for several days or weeks because I was feeling unwell, or instead of telling friends or family that I hadn't gone out to the reading, say, because of the awful fatigue, I'd not say much of anything, contact when I could, and even then felt bad doing so--inadequate? Too late? A shitty friend? It's a complex set of emotions, and I think this is why I have trouble describing the phenomenon to the person who feels well, especially those who seek to care for and about me, especially since October. These social anxieties inevitably become part of the terrain as far as I understand the arc of unremitting illness. In any case, it was my mom's death, not just that she died but how she did, that she died so suddenly while I was on the other end of the line talking with my father, that I could hear the personnel come into the house and begin working on her, that I could hear it happening, that gave me a kind of excuse--?--to go from slow correspondent to off the grid save for the blog. That I think caused me to want to socialize but yet not, a state for which blogging is rather perfect--i.e. it's this aspect of blogging, not the interaction with the transformative that does happen for me, that can make such spaces far emptier than they need be. In short I was just sunk.

I don't write this as attention-seeking, nor does it fully explain my ego and all of those contradictions that define me, my relationship to you. But I was aware of what was happening, and yet it wasn't till recently that I woke up to the fact that it has been you, each of you--not to mention, literally mention, all of those who have cared so much for me, and do so still, regardless of whether you've contacted as of late--but each of you who have been so militantly watching out for me, who give me reason to write and do here--and elsewhere. Caring for and about me, looking after this body that's failed to reciprocate or even, at times, respond. Thank you for getting me through this shite time. Thank you all whose work I have written on here in the past couple months--the restorative potential of the poetic is, in part, its political valence, and despite my ineptitudes in correspondence, I feel better piece by piece for having written what I have. But there are other ways of becoming one can try to ignore without success, so here: thank you to those who have taken care of me lately and who I've largely failed to acknowledge. Thank you.

Thank you to my father and brother, Grant and Michael, for loving my messes.

Thank you to Elizabeth Williamson, for putting up with me for years, then caring for me as my partner--for letting me lean on you when I leaned on nobody else, and not just running away as I might have.

To Eden Schulz, the longest best friend I've ever had, for giving me a place to crash--my other home--and for taking care of me for a year when I first fell ill.

To Rob Halpern, for checking in on me like clockwork in that patient, loving way that I so admire, and sending me that amazing talk of yrs. I am lucky to have your friendship and your trust.

To Kate Robinson for taking such good care of Elizabeth and I and calling us and being there when we've needed you most. A sixth sense. For not killing me when co-designing Occultations!

To Maryam Gunja for also taking such amazing care of Elizabeth and I--your friendship means more to me than one dinner in NY this year, and I hope you know that.

To CA Conrad, for your loving support of me as person, not letting me get away with small talk this month when you knew I was forcing it--your love is too great for this planet, thank gods for aliens. I cannot possibly thank you for all you've done for me, writing in those huge CAPS when excited, or this month, worried for me.

To Brenda Iijima, for the long correspondence, that back and forth getting me thru the first two weeks of October--as if you knew exactly what I needed when. You did, and thank you.

To Thom Donovan for including me in every project discussion, all those invites, and for all those things you "like" on FB of mine--a way, I know it and am thankful for it, of saying, "glad you got out of yr head for awhile, keep it up!"

To Dottie Lasky, who is never far behind in your facebook likings, and never one who doesn't make me laugh--somehow, and on purpose, of course.

To David Buuck, for sending me books and all manner of correspondence--I always knew you weren't really grumpy. I DID know you were a good friend with a very decent heart.

To Jody Kohn for all those ridiculously corny E-cards. Honestly, I can't stand them. But you are too good to me, so things balance out.

To David Abel and Chris Daniels. I love both of you and have such respect for both of you and show quite the opposite. I love the friendship you two have developed over the years. I'm sorry for having not written you Chris and saying that, thanking you for all those beautiful books, not least yours, and that kindness when we took a walk in SF after you came to the Nonsite talk, for sharing with me words that resonate so deeply still; and David, for allowing me the opportunity to postpone dinner twice now, knowing we'll get there, all the while you keeping me in the loop just in case I come around.

To Eleni Stecopoulos, for your beautiful letters to me, and your beautiful book--your patience waiting for me to get to reviewing what should be in everyone's hands. For your Armies of Compassion.

To Mark Wallace and Lorraine Graham for your friendship, yr well wishes, and your understanding when I totally dropped out on hosting you in October.

To Leonard Schwartz for sending me condolences during difficult times--your friendship out here means more than I let on.

To Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand and Rodney Koeneke: your persistent kindness is only matched by your political convictions. You gave us reprieve during a bad time, such a necessary one, and with such little fanfare. Thank you for being there.

To Sara Larsen and David Brazil, for your loving hospitality and the way you live...for friendships, poetry, social justice. I love that you both sign off with "Love," and mean it.

To Kevin Killian for thinking to send the photo and getting my good side.

To Nicole Mauro for continuing to work the Black Radish magic, publishing others' amazing books and yet still working on my book despite my near total absence on it as of late.

To Maida Rosenstein, my labor organizing mentor, for the note of condolences. This year Local 2110, with Maida as President, celebrated its 25th anniversary! Congrats. As one of the few radical left-wing unions led, for the most part, by African American and Latina women, I'm proud to have been a part of many negotiations, strikes, and recognition campaigns!

To all those Black Radishes who have provided much needed conversation, collaboration, cheerleading, and new-found friendships this year.

To Jane Sprague for telling me not to belittle my poetry--my labor.

To Thomas Bartscherer and Rebecca Smylie for being so patient and understanding waiting on what I promised to get you over a month ago now. Both of your notes were so kind.

To George Quasha for your new friendship and your new forthcoming book--to be able to meditate on your preverbs, how, like the stones, they balance impossibly, those lines that are visible and those that aren't.

To Sam Truitt, for your kindest wishes and your humor and your unfathomable "positive vibes." Above average, as you say.

To Catherine Taylor and Stephen Cope--for the love you've both sent over and again. It's an understated love for you on my part I apologize for, as understated as you are about your poetries. I'll cut it out. If you do.

To Debrah Morkun and Jamie Towsend, and Matt Landis, and Carlos Soto-Roman, you inspire the best in me. One of the last great times I had was with all of you--and it's a fantastic accident of history--or maybe Conrad and Frank's magic--that you've befriended each other, and you me. And all of you of NPPs, thank you.

To Michael Cross, Taylor Brady, and Tanya Hollis of Nonsite Collective, and all in the Collective, for your warmth and inviting me into the fold with open arms.

To Stephen Vincent for the beautiful haptic. I will always treasure that.

To Amber DiPietra and Petra Kuppers for your stunning work as poets and activists, and equally, for showing me that I should probably get off my ass and do.

To Frank Sherlock for your patience with my (non) correspondence. For your baritone and your psychogeopolitical and poetic drifts, real and imagined.

To Geoffrey Gatza for your patience and your understated work for BlazeVox, not just on my multimedia transliteration, but on all those books!

To Emily Carr for your beautiful insights and your directions for flying and that lasting image: smoking with Jack.

To Nicky Tiso. Thank you for your calls and emails. You are an amazing person. Let your love be known.

To Rachel Levitsky for reaching out to me over and again, and especially your kind check-ins these past weeks.

To N. Stephens for your letters: they are so rich I feel like publishing them. And they come unexpected, like most wondrous things.

To Rachel Zolf for everything this Oct. So patient and supportive. I wish we'd have had the time together to catch up and etc that I'd planned on. Next time.

To Laura Elrick for writing on my behalf, and with such incredible depth of relating. I look forward to meeting up in Feb.

To Joan Retallack for supporting my work, and for your mind, and your modeling for so many of us a pedagogy that is irreplaceable, though should be free. Thank you for all that administrative slogging on our behalf, and for your taking the time to write for me. Here's to a better and better time of it!

To Kristin Prevallet for your small, unexpected reprieves--and for showing me so much, always. For opening up all these friendships via Bard L&T. And most lately for your note and just before that a dinner during which the realization that "we're all fucking contradictions" made such sense to me I now keep that in my back pocket as one of a handful of mantras.

To Arun Chandra for gently pushing me out of doors as one of my few close friends here, helping us with so much despite no expectation for even a thanks, and so often--I secretly share in *some* of your skepticism of *some* contemporary poetry, and more importantly, I openly fist-pump your clarity and courage as a composer, and your unapologetic politics--the belief that art has a social function that isn't wrapped up in commodity fetishism.

To Tonya Foster for your note. Here, again, is to wishing us a truly happy new year.

To Erica Kaufman for your lasting friendship. Seeing you is rare and so good for me. Let's do that more often--since neither of us "do" email very well.

To Maryrose Larkin for inviting me into the world of Spare Rooms. For the back and forth that I know we both feel with such rawness. And so I look to you again.

To Christian Peet for your emerging friendship this year. Your loving advocacy for a just world I admire, though I worry it takes too much of you. It DOES make a difference, even if it's too slow day to day to see it.

To Nico Vassilakis and Robert Mittenthal for inviting me into Seattle poetry. I'm getting there slowly--literally. I deeply appreciate--and look forward to--our talks, even if I seem like I don't due to taking so long to come back. I-5 isn't the best excuse, so I'll stop with it.

To Robert Kocik for not just inspiring me for years now, but for your recent, kind, and so deeply considered correspondence. I apologize for taking so long getting back to you. To such a giving set of thoughts regarding what we are both obviously so passionate about.

To Will Owen for your invites and constant support of my work. And for your much appreciated support as of late. And, of course, for letting me use you as one of the windows into Vancouver poetry and politics. Reg, Aaron--such amazing people.

To Paige Clifton-Steele for last-second reading AND curating our last PRESS event, and to Megan Bontempo and Giana D'Emilio for doing ALL that running around and helping last-second for same. It fits an overall pattern.

To Lionel Lints. You are one of the best distractions. And one of the most loving people. Not a common combo. Thank you.

To James Yeary for going with the flow and collaborating on the spot with me. Great sport. Excellent impromptu performer and writer. Let's do that again?

To C.J. Martin, thanks for your well wishes, and for the amazing quotes you kept digging up.

To Reb Livingston for your note and for fixing my errors!

To B.T. Shaw for reaching out when we read together--your advice is still resonant, thank you.

To Sarah Mangold for being there from Oct onward, for your kind notes. It was great to finally see you again when you came out for the Maledetto performance. The conservative poetry anthology--I'm on it if you are.

To Robin Tremblay-McGaw for the well wishes and the updates regarding mutual friends, not to mention Bay Area poetry.

To Meghan and Caitlin Doyle for taking care of my father and I. For all the food. I'm sorry for your recent troubles. If I was a better friend I'd have known about them. Hang in there.

To Clay Banes for all your help over at SPD. And of course to everyone at SPD. But Clay, you've been so responsive and don't get the props often enough, I'm sure. And your recent note--thank you.

To all friends over at FB who sent their condolences, thank you. It meant a lot.

To everyone in the collaborative performance group--you're outstanding.

To McKenzine Carrigan for your recent note of condolences--I'm sorry I didn't write you back a much needed thanks.

And to my students this past semester--thank you for sticking with me and picking up the slack.

Because I've been so distracted and depressed there are doubtless several friends that have been reaching out to me and that I forgot to acknowledge here. I hope you know that I love and appreciate you. And that, more importantly, I'm resolved this year to express that more often, and more directly.

Sarah Fox // Faves of 2010

2010-12-31T18:00:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Sarah Fox and eds at Montevidayo for including Occultations as one of several favorite reads of 2010. Love Fox's list, regardless of Occultations' inclusion, as it offers those students in my class, for example, a quick reference to a visionary aesthetico-politics of the body. Check it out...

& Same Regarding David Buuck...

2010-12-30T12:22:00.000-08:00

Thanks too, to David Buuck for the shout-out on Michael Cross's The Disinhibitor (see post below). By the way, check out this blog (press link on the blogroll or below)--it offers excellent short analyses, and importantly, long excerpts of poetry, essay, talk. Excellent resource for those looking for new works, aforementioned shout-outs notwithstanding.

Sara Larsen's Favorite Art Moments of 2010

2010-12-29T16:53:00.001-08:00

I'm working on (and off on) a post currently as to why, save for this post, I'm not blogging till the new year. Which includes a shout out to Sara Larsen and David Brazil, and so when I noticed Sara's shout out in the other direction, the both of us yet triangulating on the same slice of space-time, I figured I'd better acknowledge that first. So, many thanks to Sarah for including the reading Rob Halpern and I did in the Bay this past summer, and our respective works, Rob's Trolley's Kind and my Occultations, as one of her favorite art moments of 2010--Favorite Things is published by Michael Cross over at his The Disinhibitor blog. Indeed, certainly one of my favorite art moments of 2010 too. Perhaps simpliciter.

2010-12-24T18:36:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Kevin Killian, Susana Gardner, Steve Evans, and commenters for collaborating to make Occultations, my new book from Black Radish Books, a frequently mentioned/reviewed title of 2010. Thanks also to Lars Palm and Ungovernable Press for publishing a chapbook of poems in 2009, book alter(ed), some of which ultimately wound up included in Occultations as parts of a section of the same title. Happy new decade, all.

Some of Us Are Old Farts Now

2010-12-23T19:09:00.000-08:00

Writer-artist Dorothee Lang and her The Blueprint Review (also editor of the Daily s-Press, and now the ongoing blog anthology Language + Place - yes, she has what seems to be an endless amount of energy) has teamed up with the folks at Tarpaulin Sky to sketch out a list of some of the earliest online literary zines. Check it out. Many of the zines are still going, and range from starting in 1995 to the early zeros. Do also check out Language + Place, also a very cool project.