I'll be giving a talk & reading from 2 new books--Occultations (Black Radish Books, forth. April 2010) and Prefab Eulogies (BlazeVox, 2010)--at Pilot Bookstore as part of the Poetry At Pilot in March series. It'll be great to work alongside Reg Johanson, who I haven't seen since our 2008 PRESS Conference, and whose work I deeply admire. As umbrella series and venue, Pilot is teaming up with the curators of Big Pelt Talkie, which will be hosting Reg and I. Thanks much to everyone at Pilot and to the curators of Big Pelt. See you there.
Big Pelt Talkies are a series of readings and comissioned essays by poets. No villiage explainers. The March reading is wrapped up in small fest.
& for those of you that missed Cris Costa & Emily Fedoruk in February, video of their poetics statement is up on yourkeyed.
David Wolach is founding editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, & curator of the series devoted to the intersection of experiments in texts & radical politics, PRESS. Wolach’s most recent books are Occultations (Black Radish Books, forth. 2010),Prefab Eulogies Vol 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox, forth. 2010), and Hospitalogy (Scantily Clad Press, forth. 2010). His work has most recently appeared in or is forthcoming from 5_Trope, Aufgabe, Jacket, No Tell Motel, & Little Red Leaves. Wolach is professor of text arts, & poetics The Evergreen State College & visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking.
Reg Johanson is the co-author, with Roger Farr and Aaron Vidaver, of N 49 19. 47 – W 123 8. 11 (PILLS 2008). Courage, My Love (Line Books, 2006), brings together a selection of works that have appeared over the last decade in W magazine, the chapbookChips (Thuja, 2001), and in the anthologies Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury, 2005) and Companions and Horizons(WCL, 2005). Critical work on, and an interview with, Marie Annharte Baker has appeared in the anthology Antiphonies (The Gig, 2008) and in The Capilano Review 3 / 10. Work on Standard English as a classist and racializing disciplinary practice, and on the political economy of “cheating” and plagiarism, has appeared in XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics and as “Working Papers inCritical Practice #1” (recomposition.net); other essays on “the radical” in poetry, on representations of missing women, global urbanization, and radical pedagogy appear in West Coast Line and The Rain Review. Selections from the chapbook Escraches (Left Hand Press 2010) have appeared or are forthcoming in Matrix, W, and the second volume of Capilano University Editions (CUE)Open Textanthology series.
Thanks to Pilot Books, and poet-curators such as Will Owen, Nico Vassilakis, and Robert Mittenthal--the latter who will be at Evergreen for a PRESS reading/discussion in March as well--I will be reading for the BIG PELT TALK Reading Series along with Reg Johanson at Pilot Book Store, March 21st. Might not yet have Occultations back from the printers, but will have the other new book of poems/essay/whatnot, Prefab Eulogies, with me to peddle (book swap!). Nico put his thinking cap on and sent along this list of readers for March at Pilot, and what a fantastic lineup. If anywhere near Seattle, please join us -- not just myself and Reg Johanson on the 21st, but for as many of these dates as your recessionary schedule can fit in. Thanks again, all, for setting this up.
My book of improvisational poems/inter-poetic conversations, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses, is now available for purchase. These are some of my earliest poems, some written as early as between 2003-4, with yet several others written as late as this winter.
You can go here, to the BlazeVox website and order directly, or you can order the book thru Amazon or SPD, both of which are linked on the BlazeVox Prefab Eulogies web page.
Also on that page you can listen to a live recording of some of "Nothings Houses," a polyvocal work for multiple media (live voice, tape, typewriter, yellow stickies, and large film screen). A short excerpt of this multimedia work is in the new book as transliterated material. Check out the recording here.
Other more dubious poems, telephone calls, ritualistic behaviors transcribed, songs sent to senators/congress-people, drawings of the inside of various body parts, and some essay, follows.
This is a transitional book in many ways--though coming out now, much of it is earlier than the poetry I've published in more recent chapbooks. Hence, the book reflects (if anything) a transition from installation and performing arts into the questions of contemporary poetry, with which I'd been engaged for those years, but which I'd only written about--until falling ill, which really meant, for me, being unable to move in ways that I'd been used to in performance and in daily life. Of course I'm still undergoing that transformation, so this is no huge proclamation on my part, but something I've been reflecting on since last week when I got the proof in the mail.
Anyway, enjoy.
A huge thank you to poet & editor of BlazeVox [books] Goeffrey Gatza, as well as to Linh Dinh, Amy King, Jules Boykoff, Catherine Taylor, and everyone else who either edited, commented on, or otherwise helped get Prefab Eulogies out the door.
And please help spread the word that Prefab Eulogies is now out!
full book cover proof, Prefab Eulogies Vol 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox, forth. 2010)
Several projects are coming to a close, and as I now settle into teaching after a semester off, some trees are going to be sacrificed. I'm not sorry given the tiny number of poetry / poetics books that are sold. For instance, I expect to sell only about a million copies of Occultations, an artist book (designed by Jill Stengel & Mark Lamoureux) from Black Radish Books (Collective) that I've now got a release date for: April 1, & available thruSPD a couple weeks later, mid-April. And given what Neo-Liberals have done to save the economy, I suspect I'll only manage to sell six hundred thousand copies of Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox).
I'm happy to find out from Geoffrey Gatza at BlazeVox that the final proof is now off to the printers, which should make the book available for purchase very soon; early Spring I'd imagine, at latest. I'm really happy with what Geoffrey did in helping design the cover--taking my crap collages and making them legible. So, my sincerest gratitude to Geoffrey.
And my sincerest gratitude to LinhDinh, Amy King, Jules Boykoff, and Catherine Taylor for writing too kind blurbs for the back of the book & website.
I just found out as well that Lourdes Vazquez found a home for an essay I wrote on her work a couple years ago, now part of a book I'm slowly working on--Necrophiliology: Aesthetic Practice During the Bush Regime. She submitted it to and got it placed in the Brazilian journal of literature Sibila, edited by Charles Bernstein and poet RegisBonvicino (English/Portuguese/Spanish). That's cool: I've never had to do so little (nothing) to share my work with you.
Finally, a sincere thanks to Carlos Soto-Roman (post below), for formatting and re-formatting--basically spending too much time--my poems for Elective Affinities. I've been working my way thru the pieces. Really digging on Frank Sherlock's long poem at moment.
Finally finally, it's been a long haul, waiting on various pieces to arrive, making sure our chapbooks are able to come out with and soon after, but the new issue of Wheelhouse is nearly ready to be uploaded by designer-editor, Eden Schulz. Excited for this issue and for the chapbooks, work from UcheNduka, Stan Apps, & contributions to the journal from an amazing group of folks.
Last, finally. The newON: A Journal of Contemporary Practiceis coming out! I'll post on this again when it is published. Editors Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, and Kyle Schelsinger put out an amazing constellation of critical writings on contemporary poetries in the first issue. I've read some of the work from the new issue, and I'm certainly going to be ordering a couple copies asap. Of course, they're beautiful art objects as well, with Cross (Atticus/Finch) and Schlesinger (Cuneiform) some of the finest book artist around.
In one of the earlier posts below I entered into that very strange (for me, semi-hermit living at the northwest edge of the continental U.S.) set of arguments, restricted it seems to me almost entirely to the blogosphere, that make up the ongoing flarf/anti-flarf virtual smackdown. This isn't so much a tisk tisk at those engaged in this set of debates (e.g. me last week), but rather an acknowledgment on my part that I'm unsure what the stakes are. If flarf, as I mentioned briefly last post, is not particularly new in terms of strategy, procedures that (in part) generate the poem, etc., then there is no real categorical disagreement to be had. The question is, then: what is the poem doing? How is it working, and in what ways does it speak to, or speak under, the larger context? Perhaps I'm too much embedded in my own habituated reading framework, but I'm always inclined to ask, regarding the statement "flarf is [insert epithet]" - Which poem(s)??? . Same goes for the quote end quote flarfist who makes a categorical claim on one movement or another, or one supposed movement or another. And that, to clarify, was partly what I was getting at in pointing to Nada Gordon's post on what she dubs (mainly west coast) "docu-po." Not to deny that there are different poetics, and with a poetics, comes a set of formal and otherwise commitments, but "kinds" of poetry sounds like so much set theory, and to again reference LW: I challenge you to define for me what a "game" is.
Also to clarify, because Gary Sullivan wrote an extremely thoughtful response to my previous post, my aim wasn't or isn't to rag on Nada, or to hold her up as one of the main culprits in poetical type-token "fuck [insert abstraction as definition of, here]." Not at all, despite the looseness of my writing--"idiotic" in reference to the blog post I wrote about below (I was thinking, tho vaguely, about how to turn around Nada's once speaking of her work as a poetics of idiocy, which I found terribly interesting). Rather, I linked to this post, and made it one of the focal points of my discussion because it was so uncharacteristic, in my estimation, anyway, of Nada's work--which, both the poetry & the criticism, I often love. It IS characteristic of a lot of online discussions, tho.
In going back and reading some of Nada's newer work (eg, the wonderful snippets of Folly up at Shampoo), and the work of others with radically differing poetics (during this couple hours of working on my partner's lecture re performative poetries), and due also to some of the questions Gary poses below--as both he and Nada are constantly, and admirably, looking for, very simply, new, exciting ways to collaborate in text arts--I'm inclined to think about how amazing it is that any of us can continue to produce interesting works, consistently, in an environment where poetry's (art's) use value is nearly completely occulted by the market from which our work emerges, the dominant pressures of capitalism. (Note: I'm aware that this is no deep interrogation here, but rather, a moment of baby-drooling awe). So how is it that our online discussions are often so categorical? Perhaps this is a feature of blogging, one of its built-in grammatical understructures? A sort of tunnel-vision-space to play, to be loose, to playfully snipe and all that, as a sort of essaying towards more succinct discourses elsewhere? That a clubbiness is so pervasive in the arts, especially in poetry, that this clubbiness spills out beyond the materials of java script & xhtml, tho, means that there are broader, socio-economic elements to this phenomenon (duh). (And by clubbiness I don't mean the existence of differing poetry communities or movements, ones that end up demarcating because of a shared, sharply defined set of aesthetic questions & commitments; I mean the sort of mob-ish, knee-jerk protest or support of categories, types, whatever non-existent set-term you want to invite here). In a country where art is so minimized, so unsupported institutionally (thinking here about the constant fight teachers have to put up to maintain some art education in schools), the divide and conquer strategy manifests in myriad ways, including our recapitulating those divisions once accomplished. And the internet, specifically blogging, allows us to become closer while maintaining an unnecessary distance--the common areas are places where we meet but don't meet...
Next post I'm going to throw around some of the stuff I discovered the other day--make sure to point you (me?) to specific pieces of art that have been sent my way or that I've bumped into, that I think need our attention. For now, I'll end with the below, as I realized--also thru Gary's response--that I'd been categorical too, crafted my earlier post in such a way as to seem that I, too, am categorically anti-flarf/conceptual poetry, etc. Tho I do hold to the thesis that there is nothing particularly new in the scrounging of flarf (cf. poetic terrorism al Hakim Bey), but that some moves to democratize and de-construct capital P Poetry (an impulse of a lot of Nada's work, which I love) threatens to fall into recapitulating the virtual Alexandrian fire without radical intervention (and yet this, too, for most pieces, such as Nada's Haromonity, from Folly, can be challenged--the lifting of the work and shining a light on it, so to speak, might be considered a radical re-narration in itself). As Gary points out, the three of us, in this particular discussion, "aren't all that far off." And I agree--tho my poetics differs pretty substantially, we're all interested in reconfiguring lyric, deeply committed to rigor thereof, and my work, too, involves a great deal of appropriation: tho I do not work much with the web, my poems tend to be overheard and found, or sought, as an intertextual/polyvocal poetics. The similarities need be noted just as much as the differences, and in the service of understanding how particular works work, where their use value lies.
In the spirit of blurring demarcations--but also to undo what I think may have sounded like a lame pitch to buy my forth. book of poems/essay--below is a few small parts of the essay from Prefab Eulogies to which I referred in that last post. I think it fleshes out a bit where my interests are--in the use value of particular radical poetic strategies and their citations, not so much in "kinds" of poetry per se.
From "Example of an Essay: Power Point Poetics," Prefab Eulogies (forth. 2010, BlazeVox):
·"Things arrive in the forms they’re given" -- Rae Armantrout
·Prefab Eulogies also seeks to critique via submission capitalism, militarism, and neo-liberalism, the prefabricated power structures from which the poems brought under the projector in Volume 1 have emerged. In this way, Prefab Eulogies is also a critique of pure celebration (on the one hand) and pure lament (on the other) of our contemporary poetic lives--the gift economy that is our defaulted situation. Infected by the structures into which these poems are born, the gifts that make up the poetic gift economy are very often attempts to overcome tropes of "fitness" (Robert Kocik, Overcoming Fitness) that confront them (via chancing, new lyric, and other decentering poetic modes). Insofar as this is true, the poems that Volume 1 is in conversation with (as well as these poems here), as inversely analogous to the prefabricated news loops on our televisions, are therefore, also, evidence. ...
·Some years back I wrote an essay called “Marxist Poets Dining With The Deans” as part of a symposium at Columbia University on “art” and “social change.”Poets speaking to poets about poetry.Visual artists speaking to poets about visual art. It was an exploration of the observation that some of us (myself included) use Adorno’s ideas about the division of intellectual labors to sleep well at night (where the graven is the terminal node of a project of dissensus) & where, in institutional settings, the obvious divisions between “artistic-writerly” and “activist-political” practices are often spoken of as problematic, yet in the speaking the divisions are reinforced, e.g., in the way this sentence is reinforcing such divisions. Someplace in the essay I wrote
·“We need to learn how to organize others to interact with our work without sterilizing the work itself.It won’t, I’m afraid, happen spontaneously.Nor will it happen via overtly simple sloganeering—the crude protest poem, as it were.Nor will it happen via abstracting away, attempting to dive into the illusion that the poem can detach itself from its conditions of production. This is to say we need not change our poetic practices but change the way we invite others to take part in them.” ...
·I’m still after the question. Why should one engage with “poetry” in the first place? And how to invite, where access to a very specific set of discourses is increasingly difficult?
·Where “one” is “person x engaged in organizing for social & economic justice but who might not have any familiarity with contemporary poetic practices.”
·Where, here, poetry is assumed to have use value beyond itself.
·Where there’s a gulf between the arts, especially many contemporary poetries, and left political engagement—that very assumption.
·At some point I began to think of poetic practice as connected to, but only contiguous with “poetry” often construed.I began thinking of poetry as a power point presentation.In two, contrasting senses (warning: false binary below).
·Of, on the one hand, derivative structures left wanting, forms empty
·Of faith in their impetus, dissensus.And on the other
·Of often occulted social-poetic practices, larger poetical environments, those which fuel the scribbles in this book – work that activates in myriad ways, from ambulatory guerilla projects such as Frank Sherlock & CA Conrad’s PACE or David Buuck’s BARGE, to critical-creative interventions such as Laura Elrick’s Stalk, to workshops, and discussions a la Nonsite Collective, ON Journal, Tangent, Essay Press, the Belladonna Series, or Palm Press – just to name a few.
·Of militant sound & site investigations.Or, to put it in Buuck’s own terms, maps for further exploration in the service of complicating dominant modes of discourse, seeing, sensing.
kari edwards’ work comes immediately to mind here as a crucial example of a political-poetic avant-garde which has, for many years, influenced a growing number of poets interested in text arts as radical re-narration, and done so (unsurprisingly) with little acknowledgment among both the workshop crowd and those inclined to take only a cursory glance at the contemporary poetic landscape and proclaim it “post-avant.”
·The Power Point presentation 1) implies but does not ultimately signify (it admits of, and revels in, its emptiness, or hopes to passively con us into a system of belief) and/or 2) is the evidence of extra-typographical activity.
·Regards (1), there has occurred more than enough sterile, vacuous, albeit “enjoyable” poetry over the past decade that has mimicked Language Poetry so-called (or other “difficult” and now semi-canonical forms) such that one taking that cursory glance could think that is all that’s out there—poem after poem that revels in its open lines and hard returns, each anchored in nothing but publication desires and reification strategies-as-ad pitches.
·David Baptiste-Chirot, though writing on work (Jenny Holzer’s) that, to me, does not necessarily succumb to a kind of corporatization, nonetheless captures this phenomenon as part of a discussion on how some “conceptual poetry” (if such a thing exists) might operate (capitulate), thus allowing us to imagine that the conceptual poem is not to be read but “presented,” perhaps via Power Point:
·“The Concept of Conceptual Poetry…is one that resembles a form of training for the embrace of working in bureaucratic and corporate settings as an "impersonal" manipulator and mover of masses of material in the form of words…a "discipline" for the production of "well adjusted functionaries" carrying out the "boring" tasks of filing, copying, sorting and arranging word-data. The "unoriginality," "impersonality" and boredom raised to the level of "Conceptual Poetry" is perhaps a way to aestheticize the dystopian existences of millions of "lower level" workers in globalized corporations and bureaucratic State apparati.”
·Kenneth Goldsmith’s “definition” of conceptual poetry echoes Chirot’s: “Language as…something to be shoveled into a machine and spread across pages, only to be discarded and recycled once again. Language as junk, language as detritus.”
·As part of an anti-capitalist poetics I’m sympathetic to this set of gestures of submission – the act or ritual of dictation brackets and highlights the tyranny of wage laboring, then plays with its joints in the very act of composting.But there is nothing in Sports, for instance (the end product as opposed to the ritual) that reveals or activates other than the one-off acknowledgment of its existence as reminder of dead labor and its waste, its product as more junk, its lateness. What Goldsmith’s Sports (as opposed to, in my opinion, his work with the 9/11 tapes) gives us, it seems, is a poetics without the poetry.A poetics that I find politically appealing for projects of radical re-narration.Without the radical re-narration (or the transcription ritual as book, in favor of something more cleaving post-ritual) this power point presentation threatens to recapitulate the norm and not much more.Goldsmith’s is partly a critique of any possibility to escape the spectacle, as it were, but a potentially coercive one in its veiled circularity.
·It is the extra-typographical activity of (2) above that I’m interested in emphasizing now as a way to avoid (1), but unlike Goldsmith, I am deeply committed to the possibility for the results of this activity—the “type,” the page, the poem often construed—to be itself a crucial site of activation.
·Or: it’s that which goes into or results from the poem often construed, this part of the poem, which makes the poem an environment, an ecosystem, a site of activation and social practice, rather than a terminal node of typography or “solitary” graven activity, some product of the illusion of reification. However, that typographical node is a crucial area of triangulation, often the motor which runs conceptual projects, or the results of those projects, results which activate yet other projects.
·The extra-typographical activity of (2) may or may not involve using large-scale materials, and may or may not be a largely expropriative project.The project may indeed be page-less.What matters is whether and how to matter. ....
Quote-end-quote conceptual work that is grounded in counter-narrative (David Buuck’s BARGE, “Buried Treasure Island” is, I think, an excellent example), that has use value beyond itself, offers the worker-writer(s) multiple triggers of engagement, hence further development of a radical politics, allows for a sharing of radical social experimentation to occur, including fully participatory critique of the project’s consequences, its framing, what it reveals and what its revealing hides. ...
Had a really nice time reading for the If Not for Kidnap Poetry Series, curated by Jamaliyeh (spelling) and Donald Dunbar. Notice that I did not include Jamaliyeh's (sp?) last name in the previous sentence, nor in this sentence, as I don't yet know it. We traded info, as her books from Octopus and Pilot sound really fascinating. Once I hear from her, I'll correct this post, and point you out to her work, which she says is online in various places. Both curators were lovely hosts, and the house--the living room the size of a small gallery--was warm and inviting.
I read from three books, soon forthcoming--from Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses; Hospitalogy (chapbook); and Occultations.
Was great to hear Jen Coleman read again, and to hear her read for longer than when we read last at EconVergence Conference. I really love her work, its revelry in sub-dominant languages, its word play, its subtle yet cleaving allegories. I'm going to have to get one of her books asap, knew that before last night, REALLY know that now.
Was also great to see old friends who turned out: Jules Boykoff, Wheelhouse editor Lionel Lints, and amazing poet Allison Cobb, who generously helped with the reading, by contributing to Occultations by being the pivot of an on-the-spot occultation, writer thru a set of prompts. Since finishing this section of the book, I've been trying out various modes of a) performing the polyvocality of it, and b) decentering its prose further than it already is on the page by asking "audiences" to generate text, to actively be "authors" of some of the bracketed lyrics that circle round, sometimes overlay, the central block of prose. This time Elizabeth Williamson performed both dominant voices, read straight thru, & I indicated a break in the prose (where the bracketed lyric begins) by taking a photo of some detail in the room. I got a pretty good record of what Donald et al. keep in their home, what books are on their shelves, etc. This could make a nice coffee table book: "The Dunbar Home." Any case, while E read & I photographed and indicated by my body position, Allison was given a small audio recorder with earphones that had a recording of other parts of Occultations on it. She was asked to press play, then write whatever came to mind as she divided her attention between the public & the private reading. Once the recording would end, Allison would then stand & interrupt the reading, give a reading of what she wrote. Not everyone in the room knew that Allison was an amazing poet, so when she read (about half way into our performance), people were audibly stunned. "Finally, some good poetry!" went their eyes. It was very cool, & I'm really happy she agreed with good humor to be part of it. Oh, & here is what Allison wrote:
this documentary has been leaked from a muscle a marriage line as largesse of spiders wants. A room the room that can't hear you reflecting on on on eyes as eyes weaponized. Your line. It shined. Refleshed. Large-ish. You look fit! I was just trying to be slash funny. I wanted you all to think backspace we control-z I mean I had said something shiny looking into the heart of light, the appendix. Now, now. Now will I draw you a picture you can't squeeze inside your eyelid even if you wanted to be a neo, neo -- nevermind. Scratch. I wrote that just as Elizabeth said it. Last time something like that happened a plane p p p plane ran into a building. True story but it's a long one. I'll wrap this one up.
Without the rest of the text, this writing seems a bit out of the blue, so... Also realize that this was a distracted Allison writing without editing. Since it makes for compelling poetry in its own right, perhaps imagine what work is spun when she has time to work a poem, to be deliberate, to sustain a thought. If you haven't read any of her work, I'd highly recommend doing so. So, it was a fun night, with some really good live music between the two readings. Thanks much to the curators for inviting me.
The wonderful Reb Livingston is featuring 5 cycles of poems this week at No Tell Motel, 1 cycle per day. All but the last from "modular arterial cacophony," a section of a forthcoming book Occultations - Black Radish Books 2009.
I'm oddly thrilled to announce the imminent publication of two books, each of which represents a constellation of preoccupations: the written as dross, eulogy, or shaped data of poetry (an anarchist poetics of sorts that starts with Whitman's "I am the multitudes" and goes from there); and the medical industrial complex irrupting as and interrupted by body, confession - the doctor-patient discourse as confessional.
I've written on the latter set of preoccupations in another post. That Scantily Clad Press is willing to pick up the chapbook Hospitalogy (a full-length collection of the same name is a project I promised myself I'd finish this autumn) is a testament to their willingness to take on experiments (confession, lyric) that could, at first blush, seem very tired. So, thanks to Andrew Lundwall et al. for their patience (pun intended?).
The former preoccupation is related to, in a sense a meta-poetics of, the book I am finishing right now for Black Radish Books, Occultations.
Goeffrey Gatza & BlazeVox [books] has picked up my Prefab Eulogies for a release of sometime late fall to mid winter of 2009. Prefab Eulogies, I dare say takes on conceptual poetry while in some ways recapitulates it. It's a project that I've been working on for almost 4 years, and is deeply multi-media, work that is performative and collaborative, employing (beyond the book), polyvocal recording, video, and live gesture.
Geoffrey Gatza is truly outstanding. He's been wonderful to work with - I thank him for his incredible editorial support in shaping the book such that the damn thing looks a lot better than when it first landed in his lap. Which is to say that, aside from helping me with what is often mediocre upon first draft, he's somehow helped me put into book form what started out, and for 2 years remained, a live performance. So, the translational aspect of this process has been fun, generative, challenging.
Now begins the process of setting up readings/performances at venues throughout the year (something I very much enjoy) and figuring out how or why to plug my own work (something I dislike in a sort of mundane way). I'll be reading, thanks to Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand, at The Tangent's Econovergence Conference offsite reading (post coming in a few days on the Econovergence Conference itself). Meantime, for more info on Prefab Eulogies, the book & the larger project, here are the websites: 1) Prefab Eulogies 2) Post-Avant Power Point Inc.
I'll write a post in the near future concerning two other book projects. One of these is Black Radish Books, the new poetry-artist book collective that will begin releasing its first in a series of full-length, beautifully designed books of innovative poetry, this December.
Meantime: if you have a reading series and are looking to fill a space, contact me. I might even bring my music box collection. And meantime meantime, here's a poem from Prefab Eulogies.
{eulogy for scrape}
after linh dinh
missing c voweling to play cf side
board air bag you can bet your $$ you
don’t have or export letters sending
post-haste, and if outsource then aleatory
emoticon, and if air left, bag of prepackaged
economic parlance your macros on, desk you
bashful top then pillow me zoned for backpage pleasure hunt
--interested in the discomfort in contemporary poetry of the poem as obsolete tekne, the accompanying dialectic between long-term practices and the modes by which such practices do or do not do what they set out to do. Not that poetry is obsolete, nor to condone yet another sweeping end of art thesis. Rather, unlike an anxiety of influence, which seems a bit on the wane in American poetry at this moment, there is, to situate the problem in the positive light of sheer possibility, a seemingly restless urge in experimental poetry and poetics, one in which poetry seeks to work out its own discomfort a) within the confines of the normative book page(s), and b) with all the toys electronic that are at our disposal - that do, certainly, open up possibilities for the poet. This seems to occur at intervals, often in parallel with the advent of another toy, or the obsolescence of once-functional materials now ripe for poetical appropriation. The page will not be exhausted (remember the Lettrists? For them, the page was exhausted at Victor Hugo), nor will the materiality of the book (remember the 90s when Drucker was interviewed like a million times about why the book will not simply vanish from the poetic toolbox?), nor will any one particular language game for that matter (cf Derrida's rather badly misinterpreted, but for our purposes useful, interpretation of the later Wittgenstein).
However, the impulse to explore technologies has been, not surprisingly, tempered in the past ten years or so by the swift commercialization of these technologies, specifically codes and platforms that were once open source. Open source work was absorbed by The Spectacle nearly as soon as various groundbreaking scripts - Python, XHTML, etc - were interfaced with the internet. And the neat/terrifying thing about information technologies is that their inventions speed up by orders of magnitude the rate at which The Spectacle absorbs and appropriates them. So, from the basic online journal editor to the new media artist, today's politically engaged and formally risk taking poets find themselves, it seems to me, wanting to exploit various technologies but concerned with perpetuating a corporatization that has every bit to do with class, access, power. How to make intimate, thoughtful work in new media when the very medium is now unavoidably malignant. [CF BLOGGER]
--also interested in product versus process: seems to me (again, a sense I get from my own eye corner) that we are in an exciting period in poetry. The avant-garde is increasingly interested in collaboration, translation, and ephemerality. These are pluralisms I can certainly live with. And again, these are interests that seem to wax and wane at intervals, as the (diverse) interest in specifically socially conscious interrogation of poetic language games in the 60s and 70s birthed, of course, one of the most vibrant poetry movements, that of LANGUAGE (too broadly speaking), North America has ever seen. Globalism, as opposed to globalization has done at least one good thing: it has sped up our interest to cultivate new, diverse, relationships across borders. And process-oriented work, a focus on how we do what we do, and who we do the writing with, taking some of the stage away from the poem-product itself, interests me insofar as it opens up the possibility for a new collectivism in experimental poetry. Yet, again, my excitement is tempered by the appearance of collaboration, connection, human interaction that falls outside normative interactions, the appearance of the discursive and dialogic, when often we are substituting information technologies and ease of the "communique" for the difficult work of the face to face poetic negotiation. We blog and chat and publish online at speeds unimagined a decade ago, and this is exciting, yet is also potential barrier.
And this plays out in the pastiche of some new forms, the un-self-reflexive use of digital creoles instead of the appropriation of such creoles with a mind towards imminent critique, doubt as to whether the hyper-non-closural empties itself of the disruptive-interrogative seen, say, in the earlier New York schools (1 and 2). There is a lot of cute visual poetry, especially cute hypertext and Flash work, work that for all its actual movement (like moving letters) has very little actual movement (like making the reader move, even move away from the poem itself). There are wonderful visual works as well, of course, but there are many, many hybrid and new media forms that are playful but do (and cause) a tenth of the work that, say, a Robert Duncan, or a Zukofsky, or a Tina Darragh poem does - each absent buttons and buzzers and ironies and mouseover acrobatics to which I am sometimes drawn.
With all of this threading in my head, spooling out as real-time quandary, the section I've added involves working from paper book to online medium, wherein the book's section "Emergent / Tense" plays with code-as poetry, plays with the visual, aural, and kinetic aspects of the languages that are often hidden from online viewing (the guts of that which we use, as it were), then links (via website prompt) to online pages, each of which houses a poem written in a quasi-lyrical mode, one that explores the language of the book artifact, the artist book, as it were. One such short example (spacing and formatting absent/messed up due to blogger limitations):
coctaeu=high>
me=scale value , moral =noborderfence>
ame=wmode va lue= transparent lies>
e=bgcolor value=#black/hispanic > +++
00000>
uality=high scalingfence=noborderelectricfence warmode=transparent colorbarrier ="#000000" with="384" height="288" type="application/x-blacks/hispanics"
pluginspage= "http://tensepresentvirtuephysic.blogspot.com/? P1_Pro d_
Aversion=Show
ckwaveF lash out">< / e mbed>
Were the poems to work as poems, it wouldn't matter, of course. Who (and this is a semi-rhetorical question, but only semi-) will read a page of a book in their hands, then type in a web address to read its counterpart, then go back and do it again, say 26 times? (CA Congrad did it once in his Deviant Propulsion - & I did contact you, subsidy included $$$!) I am interested, though, in the potential for the book to make the whole body move (or at least more than the eyes), to, in effect, make large the bodily movements we often find ourselves trying to control when in the act of reading/meaning making. Regardless of outcome, the experiment thus far, and far from never having been done before, has been, from a process standpoint, agitating and worthwhile. Of course I've just begun, and these pages and links and etc. are mockups. Perhaps I will think differently about the whole whole in the morning.
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