Call FOR ACTION

Another fire, another day.... for the whole article, go here.

A United Nations panel’s decision to remove sexual orientation from an anti-execution resolution is “shameful” and may encourage murders of LGBT people, gay rights campaigners say.

The body voted this week on the amendment, which was passed 79-70. The vast majority of countries in support of the change were African or Arabic.

Veteran gay rights activist Peter Tatchell said the move was a “shameful day in United Nations history” and would give a “de facto green light to the on-going murder of LGBT people by homophobic regimes, death squads and vigilantes”.

Gay rights group Stonewall also criticised the move and said the government should “lead from the front foot” to end homophobic persecution...

Susan Schultz on Writing --> Attention

From Susan Schultz, a thoughtful musing on what we teach when we teach creative writing. I use "we" here as that tenuous but proverbial bunch of misfits who do poetry, if even for a semester; and especially now, as students in my poetry & radical pedagogies course are (more deliberately and overtly than usual) teaching their own courses at moment. I like that Perez is blogging in real time with students, working to understand his work's implications with him. I've yet to try that. Susan has come to Evergreen for Leonard Schwartz's courses, last when I first arrived at Evergreen, and for public readings, and so like many poets she's workshopped with students directly. Yet the remote but at-the-tip-of-your-fingers way of doing things is something I think worth approaching as well. I also like that Susan zeroes in on attention and/as perception being the critical-creative mode that we're in a sense performing, or doing, or making, actively and together. And that we do this over and again in various text-attentive ways. That this is in large part what we are facilitating I think is a smart, direct way of tackling at least a good part of that what are we doing anxiety (wouldn't be an anxiety but a puzzle, really, were it not for a "market" that finds little commodity value in teaching anything other than basic and specialized, i.e., grant, writing). Worth some looking at & thinking about (back to back dangling operators, ha! I end parenthetically, ha!).

Dusie, Gardner, & The Altered Book Post I Altered and Posted

Collaborative altered book, photos courtesy of Curtis Richardson. For more photos, click HERE.

above: one of the inside pages. below: cover. bottom: some of the book artists consider their next move

altered book pg, from Occultations

Susana Gardner's Dusie Press was just featured in Poets & Writers as one of a handful of innovative presses--"Indie Innovators." Susana designed the cover of my new book Occultations, along with helping out quite a bit with the internal design of the thing (as noted by Kevin Killian in his review of the book at Third Factory's Attention Span, "a major headache" for designers, Mills book artist Kate Robinson the principle designer on the internals & visual elements with me). Glad to see Gardner's getting the attention she deserves for several years worth of designing, editing, and curating Dusie Kollectiv. So many fantastic chapbooks over the years, most of them available for free as pdfs online as well. Here's a short writeup regarding her work in relation to the alter(ed) book and the digital art-i-fact. Wrote this before Gardner helped with Occultations, so I suppose several months ago now. So I guess this is the expanded, updated version of that now famous post. I post this as well because now again in my current class (poetry, poetics & radical pedagogies), students have broken into groups of three and are now offering/teaching their own text arts courses, one of them centering on creating a collaborative altered book. Lucky me I got to sit in on that class yesterday. Photos of the insurrection, facilitated by Curtis Richardson, Norma Alicia Pino, and Laurel Smith, are above. Photos taken by Curtis. The insurrection also involved a taking up a collection of dictionaries for Books to Prisoners. And my older post, now updated says something like.....

After Linh Dinh went to great lengths, for his journal The Lower Half, formatting a long excerpt of my altered book, Living Rooms, a section of poems originally part of my book Occultations (and now stand-alone, i.e., dross, tho some of it ended up as the section book alter(ed)), I've been thinking about the altered book as - beyond an artist book - a performance of text, hence the performativity of reading made tangible/concrete. That the work, in this particular case, is constructed (in part) via statistical software I've been tweaking, questions emerge, not necessarily fully formed. The altered book in one sense is a killing off of that which, often enough, one either dislikes in its originally published state or loves beyond comprehension--for why otherwise alter that which one is inclined to attach "ironically (or otherwise) bad, i.e., disposable" (reason 1) , "usefully outmoded," where "useful" here means "for appropriation, " (reason 2) or "aura-laden, ripe for ritualistic and/or intertextual appropriation" (reason 3) in the first place? Such murderous retrofitting is also admittedly an erotic endeavor--this sort of impulse (or compulsion?) a poesis of collision, performed violence. Nonetheless - to take the notion of "killing off" here and situated within an erotics/and or ritualization of the book, the act seems like so much sacrifice (on the one hand) and attempted resurrection (hope for rebirth) on the other. Of course, I'm a Jew, and a secular one at that, so I'd caution the earlier sentence with this one: what non-Judeo-Christian paradigms might we think of in relation to reading practices ostensibly ritualized? Rendered visible thru (visual) art practices as ritual? Reason I hang my hat on this line of inquiry is that much has been written in regard to the artist book's status viz. commodity aesthetics, as "hybrid work" (the term so problematic in my estimation), and so viz. bricolage, collage, Duchampian & etc.

What interested me this time, in this writing--after doing a few book alterations already--was that the added use of machine meant that I turned a kind of otherness into otherness. Hell, after I wrote the program, and until I began to sculpt the thing, I simply pressed a button. Only after that did I shape and reshape the results, turning sentence into line, line into particular line, etc. And so viz. performative poetics on which I've written a great deal, the term "performance" was, through this process, complicated. Reading to self is a kind of making or doing, and a kind of performance, I'd argue, albeit of a not-so-elaborate or public sort. What kind of performance is the alteration process absent (or missing for much of the time) its author? It isn't, as in the case of much of the performative poetics on which I've written in the past, seeking the liminality between "poem" and "poem event," this anxiety the poem has of its status on the page, its book as no-longer-enoughness - or, the moment the poem becomes aware of its own discomfort as potentially obsolescent tekne. No, here is a reaching for ritual, almost a devolution back into the practices of the sacred (or sacrilegious). Or, since I am a Jew: its regression back into the room of rooms, The Book, as Jabes might have had it, the Talmudic practice of continual self-reimagining within the space it is (was) afforded.

Needs be more thought here, tho in reading and performing (now a very public version of above) Gaburo's Maledetto, doing so for the Radical Philosophy Conference last week, in response to a comment regarding Gaburo's deconstruction of commodity aesthetics I quoted LW: "I destroy, I destroy, I destroy." Which, in itself, is a religiously-inflected frustration with the impulse to masturbate, sometimes quite literally. And when the machine began to pray....

Anyway, speaking as one who likes to work with physical objects (the book in the hand, say) but has been niched as a digital composer & editor: It's certainly very difficult, if not impossible, to apprehend the altered book from the vantage point of the digital snapshot. Not to say that Drucker's repository, for instance, is not an incredible resource, doesn't provide an approximating kind of information, as well as a prompt toseek out. But artist books, as most altered books are, rely on their 3D, sometimes tactile, materiality -- that is often the necessary condition for a work's being an altered book as opposed to, say, a used and marked up book. Many examples of this exist in the world (Jenny Holzer, eg) - see Drucker's repository and seek out - but one clear example that is in my head right now, that of the necessary condition of a fuller notion of materiality than the e-book, its un-reproducibility online, is this: last year a student in my class (ours - when I teach book arts I teach this course with fantastic book artist Steven Hendricks) "scented" her book object, a handful of altered pages from Beckett's Trilogy. She did several other interesting things with the pages, as did the other students, but I pick this out out for obvious reasons: the altered book, altered by the scent of a particular flower, cannot be smelled differently online. Not yet, anyway.

Sometimes exceptions breed whole new sub-categories (noting that categories are always negotiable despite what the advertisers and snake oil salespeople may say - let's just call them "phenomena"). One phenomenon I've become increasingly interested in since delving more deeply into online work, or work that has been scanned for various purposes (kari edwards' Iduna, how one can manipulate the work differently online than in hand comes to mind) is that of the digitally altered book artifact - a form of altering via scanning, typographical erasure, warping, hyperlinking, among other things, that allows for the appearance of materiality. Or, more precisely: the digitally altered text that gives the appearance of depth. Since, in reality, the digital artifact is also sheer materiality, such that this clarification highlights the obvious fact that change in medium or materials is a change in the work, with the underlying question (or challenge) being: of what traces of the former can be retained or exploited in the later, and why may the exploitation of the trace be interesting? Susana Gardner's ruby large enow from her Dusie Press, a book that may come out as part of a full-length work later on, is the one of the best examples I've seen lately of the altered book, digitally scanned, that retains depth of field, the sensation of perforation, shadow, erasure by brute force or excision, etc., that the work-in-hand has -- an aura, of a sort. And this appearance is not simply mimetic -- if that were so, it'd be something like "an attempted copy" or akin to the "reproduction" in painting. The work's apparent tactile elements cause a direct tension with its lacks - precisely these elements. It also causes the tension between its lacks and its typographical content -- the characters, typeface, & line structure. We have what I'd call "a performance of the text" in a double sense -- the initial alteration of EBB (the work from which ruby large enow emerges) and its digital iteration of itself. Gardner, it seems, is aware of these tensions, as the poetry anti-communicates (in Herbert Brun's sense of the term) its dissolution out of surgical maneuvering and scanning...

-----------------------------------------------

BACK FROM EUGENE

Performed Maledetto as one of the two performances curated by the Radical Philosophy Conference, this year in Eugene OR. In many respects I had a wonderful time. Many thanks to the organizers of the conference, the workers who accommodated hoards of us making messes throughout the campus. First, tho I myself was off--flubbing several lines--the performance on the whole was pretty hot, and the discussion period after was both generative and giving. Social ecologist (among many things) Ignacio Valero (Art Institute, SF) was one of several participants who both read the piece beautifully, hitting on the politics of the Gaburo's work, its effects on an audience, its performed violences and performed complicity, and gave us ideas for interpreting the work anew. He noted, as did others in a less direct way, that he wanted to throw something at me, specifically his water bottle, during the performance. Which is superb, because that is precisely what Speaker A is meant to elicit--drawing you in only to annoy and anger you after about the first 5 minutes of his hyperbolic droning. Others at the conference--whose names I didn't catch, unfortunately--also had great insight into the work. One, for example, brought up the work's musicality (as language becomes less sense and more sound via tempo, muffling, and other conventions); another brought riffed on how Maledetto, within an academic setting (the lecture hall within the student union building at U Oregon) both fought against and went with the ambient sounds: during the silences the sounds of footsteps outside, the sounds of laughter out the window in the distance, etc. That observation wasn't something I particularly considered, at least not as something Gaburo was interested in exploring, and yet now that I think of it in relation to Gaburo's interest in social ecology, the riff could easily have been a jumping off point for another piece were Gaburo himself one of the folks there.

Any case, very happy that our hosts were so gracious, that the panelists were so interesting and (as we kept commenting over and again during the weekend) committed to real world problem solving (not very common among philosophers in the west). Hence, I'd recommend anyone go to the conference if it comes to an area near you--for info on that head to their website, link in a post below. My only regret is having missed so much of the weekend: with teaching, waking up late, and general social anxiety (something I'm fighting at moment, as friends who I usually correspond with will know), I barely got to experience the whole shebang. Next time.

Oh, and going on the road with others (gigging, as opposed to going on a poetry reading tour), this has been a treat. And stealing away in a crappy motel 4 to a room, it reminds me of grad school and before, a time when I was doing a lot of collaborative performing arts. And, too, being in "a band, man," in high school. Very punk. Still got bedhead and a bad attitude. Off to write a song about it...

Last, in hunting for performance stills, I hit on artist/instrument-maker Warren Burt's blog--which, in my few minutes of looking around, I think has some pretty thrilling photos and other things compositional/musicological, related to the cross-disciplinary work happening at UCSD in the late 60s-early 70s. A history many of you know of, some even a part of. If not, tho, and if interested in further background (background not from me, considerably removed), from Burt's blog:

...UCSD was a very collegial place. An example of the interactive attitude that pervaded the place in the early 70s is shown by this 1972 picture of John Silber, Kenneth Gaburo and Pauline Oliveros (back to camera) lunching together at the Matthews Campus snack bar, just across from the Music Department offices.

John Silber, Kenneth Gaburo, Pauline Oliveros - UCSD, 1972

Nonsite Collective Event, Jeff Derksen...

NONSITE || Jeff Derksen: After Euphoria--Art and Organization in the Neoliberal Crisis

The Nonsite Collective invites you to participate in a discussion with Jeff Derksen on Sunday, November 21, 2010. We will meet at 2pm at:

Nicole Hollis Interiors
935 Natoma Street, San Francisco
(between Mission and Howard, and between 10th and 11th, accessible from Van Ness and Civic Center MUNI/BART stations)

Our discussion will emerge from Jeff's recent research and documentation of activist cultural work around issues of financialization and culture, contradiction and conflict around neoliberal metropolitan planning and development, and the place of affect-production in culture-worker collectives. We hope to use this occasion to develop prompts for ongoing inquiries and actions by the Nonsite Collective and other collective formations in the Bay Area, including a series of concerns that might help to animate our upcoming group collaboration with SF Camerawork.

For further details, and for related texts and resources, please see the discussion's workbook page.

We hope to see you there, and we hope you'll join us as well for Jeff's reading with Tisa Bryant at 21Grand later the same evening!

You ever wanna thoroughly enjoy yrself while making friends while reading yr work to a poetry loving crowd of lovely lefties, go to Portland. Specifically any number of readings, especially long-running fixtures Tangent, Spare Room, along with promising upstarts such as If Not for Kidnap Poetry Series. I get a warm feeling reading Rodney Koeneke's Warsh post, which includes a list of poets who have performed, collaborated, & etc just in the past month or so. This time has coincided with particularly bad times for me, so when reading late last month with Rachel Zolf & B.T. Shaw for Tangent, I was as there as could be. And not there at all for any of these other readings, including what I understand to be an awesome night with Lorraine Graham & Mark Wallace. Any case, thanks again to Rodney, Jules, Kaia, & David, Maryrose, The Spare Roomies, Donald, et al. and everyone else curatorial, all who have made Portland a dynamic place for new poetries.

New Issue of Blue Fifth Review

Thanks much to editor Sam Rasnake for including an older poem of mine, from my unpublished manuscript Hospitalogy, in the latest issue of Blue Fifth Review (one of the oldest online journals of poetry/poetics, if I am not mistaken...).

Full list of Fall 2010 contributors: Featured writer: Marcus Speh. With Bob Bradshaw, Pris Campbell, Mark DeCarteret, Toby Einhorn, tova gardner, Julia Elizabeth Guez, Rich Ives, Bruce Lader, Bobbi Lurie, Dennis Mahagin, Mia, Joe Mills, Meg Pokrass, Andrea Potos, Gary Percesepe, Charles Rammelkamp, Amy Riddell, Tree Riesener, Jeanne Marie Spicuzza, Susan Tepper, Ann Walters, David Wolach, and Bill Yarrow

Art: Cheryl Dodds, Leslie Marcus, and Mary Hillier

Rachel Zolf's PRESS Reading/Q&A Now Available For Download

Here's the audio recording of Rachel Zolf's PRESS reading. Opening for her is upcoming & very talented poet out of Seattle, Paige Clifton-Steele. The reading includes what I think is a rich discussion (Q&A) at end.

This recording is going to be edited down a bit and put into its own, direct link, and put up at the PRESS blog.

For now, press "download" to download the reading/Q&A thru Google Docs. You'll need a google docs/reader capability to do so. Many thanks to Rik Kedziorski, one of the editors of Slighty West, Evergreen's lit journal, for helping with the reading in my absence, including handling the recording of the event.

----------

Speaking of readings, check out this awesomeness. From, and at, SPT.

SPENDING IS GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY, REMEMBER? A Few New Books Received

Wow, since I haven't really corresponded with any of you other than thru blogging since my mom died and reclusiveness has been particularly strong, I've nonetheless received some beautiful gifts that I hope to blog about, if not downright fully "review" in the coming weeks. This is the first of a couple posts, as these aren't all the books, but the first I pulled off the pile. So more to come... Of note here:

--the complete (or close to) series of works by Portuguese & Spanish-language poets, translations by  Chris Daniels, distributed thru his press Cultural Narcissism. Particularly interesting so far is a chap collection from poet, Orides Fontela--"Collected Poems."  

--Chris Daniels's own work, the poem cycle Porous, Nomadic. From Artfoil, letterpress cover. This book is intimate while still being a political gut punch. The density and range of the work makes me want to use the word "beautiful," and so I will, where textual form ranges from the found to the lyric to the reportage and back. And neither is it didactic. Some of the sections are simply gorgeous. And the work, tho when you first read it might look collagist, it isn't. It's more tightly woven than that, and one hears that, so read aloud friend. I had the pleasure of hearing Daniels read the whole chapbook when we brought him to Evergreen for a PRESS event. 

--Anamorphosis Eisenhower by Sam Truitt, out of Lost Roads. Now, I haven't read this book yet, but knowing Sam's later work (Vertical Elegies, the series, is full and maximal), knowing Sam (who is thus likewise, and much more!), and knowing that Peter Gizzi writes a blurb on the back that's about to come off the page with excitement, I'm looking forward to it. BOLO: we're hoping to get Sam and his Eisenhower out here for a PRESS reading sometime in the later spring.

--Vocoder by Judith Goldman out of Roof Books. I've read a few of these poems and they are as eviscerating as they are inventive. Goldman's work is important to my own, has made a deep impression on me over time, and so I expect Vocoder will be another such book the forms and concerns of which I try to imitate to no avail.

--Zine Chapbook by Lara Durback, the book sent to me by David Buuck, who thought I'd love it. Well, I'm just looking it over now, so I won't say much till I write on this manifold work in another post. Suffice it to say it's one of the reasons I am wide awake at moment. This book is exciting. A union organizing committee meeting in which leaked memoranda are discussed, strategies for the oncoming anti-union campaign are developed, inoculation occurs, etc--all of it written out, filed along with the memos themselves, then translated into essay on labor and the corporate body, then distilled into poetry, then transliterated back again--several times--until all these categories are replaced by the words "sensuous indictment." What a fucking book. Speaking of which, last line (sorry to give away the ending): 

            A corporation and a body.

Thanks, David. I'll email you soon to say the same thing. And that your fantastic piece "Side Effect Master" is not easily performed. It does go well with Gaburo, however.

Finally, a new book I haven't yet gotten, but one that I will get. From Christian Peet of Tarpaulin Sky Press, the chapbook "Pluto: Never Forget." Published out of Interbirth Books. Here's some of the info, from Christian:

"Pluto: Never Forget," published

by Interbirth Books in very limited, hand-bound hardcover and soft editions.

http://interbirthbooks.com

Interbirth's book are gorgeous. Check out their catalog. Be on the lookout
for their next, too...

Somatic Poetry Exercise... on a bus....

Mainly for my students--who, beyond doing a week on somatics & poetry, also last year took over the 41 Bus & turned it into a weekly poetry reading venue--here's CA Conrad's wonderful new (soma)tic poetry exercise. Try it on the 41!

Stephen Cope's Conference of the Birds...

Allow me to belatedly direct your attention to a excerpts of Stephen Cope's amazingly inventive, beautiful, allusion-packed creole manuscript, Conference of the Birds. Robin Tremblay McGaw recently posted a pdf of this work over at X Poetics. Highly recommended. If you like, check out our latest issue of Wheelhouse Magazine (Issue 9), which likewise plucks from ...the Birds. Cope's podcast of the same name (rare music from around the world), which is intimately tied up in the structures and concerns of the poems, is also of considerable interest. Link to that website is at the bottom of the links list to the right, i.e., keep scrollin' friend.

AV Expectorate

Audio & visual work, a couple more straightforward readings, & some multimedia as well, is now available as link-archive on the blog. Including work from the Occultations/Hospitalogy series, work that, as David Abel likes to say "probably needs exist in the air rather than in a book." Available as list to the right. Many thanks to Elizabeth Williamson for making the archive. Feh.

Gaburo's Maledetto, Performance Report/sound files &...

Reposting this writeup here, with some further commentary, something I posted a month or more ago otherwise. Because last night was the first among (so far) 5 performances of Kenneth Gaburo's Maledetto to be performed thru the late winter. One of only a couple nice reprieves so far during this very bad, very sad month. Grandmother died last night during the performance, found out today... But on a conversely happy (or warming) note, it was beautiful to see so many people come out last night in the heavy rain, especially those who I worked with on this piece last year, the students who performed this work as their poets theater project for the semester. Many thanks to those who participated...

The program runs about an hour and a half, with our ensemble performing our own short works for about 30 minutes, then intermission, then Maledetto, which runs at about 55 minutes. Our short pieces are as various as our backgrounds: composer, poet/multi-media artist, theater / performance historian, students, alumni. Mine I'm still plodding along with and are 4 short pieces, two transliterations from my book just out, Occultations, 1 a riff on David Buuck's "Side Effect Master," and another from Hannah Weiner's The Fast. For Maledetto, since I'm Speaker A, and not a particular good version of it either, I am voicing a "lecture" (un-self-reflexively getting off on what amounts to the screwing of people by social orders--post-colonial capitalism--) that seeks to be undermined by the other 6 voices in various modes--round, choral fugue, etc. Speaker A does not stop & ranges from 70 words per minute to almost 300, often switching tempo abruptly and in synch or at odds, with the tempi of the other entities. So, if there's one thing I'm sure of, that I've discovered, it's that it's NOT a particularly good idea to take my allotted medications, many of them "downers" i.e., to do anything else than what I did last night, which involves taking the meds that keep me alive an hour later than scheduled. Which is fine. Some pain involved, a little seat o the pants, but that works well with the violent and non-self-reflexively boorish speaker that A is, the proverbial scholar-of-screws, the pedant who remains speaking, at various tempi, for a full hour lecture on the history, function, shipping sequence, and etc., of the screw (doubling as both noun and verb form). Or, the "endless screw" as, at one point, A calls a particular sub-set of this device AND (again, un-self-reflexively) social (& social-structural) action upon another.

Performance, which was a friendly crowd of about 100 here in Olympia, went well. This was our first audience, and was billed as rehearsal, which it certainly was, given that by no means did we (pardon the pun) nail it. But very happy with our progress decoding this difficult score. We'll see how things go in Eugene, or next stop, Saturday (performance for the annual Radical Philosophy Conference). A bit more about Gaburo the composer, from a prior post on the subject:

I'm working in concert with six others, including usual partners in crime Arun Chandra & Elizabeth Williamson, in crafting a performative panel discussion, principally for the 2010 Radical Philosophy Conference. This year's conference, in Eugene Oregon, is devoted to discussing violence, oppression & society. Broad set of issues, but narrowed thus (from the conference website):

With the US engaged in imperial wars around the globe and amidst the collapse of the most recent mode of global capitalism, we at the Radical Philosophy Association have found reflection on violence both timely and imperative. The theme for our upcoming Ninth Biennial Conference will, therefore, be “Violence: Systemic, Symbolic, and Foundational”. Unmistakably, violence shapes our social world. Oppressive systems are founded in and maintained through violent action. Capitalism demands and enforces conditions of starvation, brutalization, and alienated experience. Patriarchy thrives on the threat and reality of physical and sexual assault and pervasive psychological debasement. Racist and colonial structures demand occupation, enslavement, and incarceration.

We want to both riff of this rather full thesis and complicate it, composing as well as performing extant work that discusses a notion of violence as emerging from, a la Benjamin, lack or closing off of opportunities, access. Yet complicating that now widespread causal position. In Minima Moralia, Adorno notes that "every potential work of art is a crime to to be committed." Where, in performance, we hope to express that the inverse is also, especially currently, true: that every crime NOT committed is potentially a work of art.

In parallel with this conference we're working on Kenneth Gaburo's Maledetto, Lingua II. Which we all feel embodies the concerns and quasi-positions we're testing. This is the very piece my students last year performed for our poets theater week (at end of our poets theater/guerilla poetry class), and performed beautifully--so, bar is high. I actually liked my students' work on the piece better than I do Gaburo's own (1974) version, the very good (but a bit slow) version on UBU WEB. Still, both provide interesting contrast to the rehearsal tape excerpt I have here.

This piece for seven virtuoso speakers is challenging, and I'm loving it. The large score (which serves as prop during live performance) is something to decode, is deeply unconventional--a work of art in itself. Rehearsals are becoming reprieves. Of particular difficulty is the varying tempi needed to be kept in mind while syncopating the voices. The work itself is what we might call performed violence, and though Gaburo's work in cognitive research and linguistic expressionism (not to mention seriality and minimalism) might appear to be "purely formal" and (as I'd thought when I worked on this piece for the first time around) disembodied, Maladetto is rather deeply political and subtly embodied--embodied in the sense one might think of Beckett's Not I as embodied--the shorn body present in its absence or furious neglect.

Gaburo himself was a deeply influential (even if not well-known) composer who worked mainly out of the University of Illinois, though he also did crucial work with Lingua (also founding Lingua Press around this time) while at UC San Diego. A self-described feminist, Gaburo was an anti-war activist, an ecologist, as well as an instrumental member of faculty unionism in the 1970s and 80s. I read Maledetto as principally an anti-capitalism, feminist piece, a work in which six voices perform their own failure to undermine a main lecturer, a foil of a pedant expert in "screws" and "screwing," (this is my voice) the various glottal voicings of the other six under constant siege, in fact, oscillating between protest, complicity, and internalized resignation to their positions as bodies to be raped, voices to be made sublingual, or at least sub-cognitive, in effect sub-human. "To screw" thus becomes the metaphor around which several social planks driven turn. Of course, as an avant-garde composition, and a procedural piece, Maledetto is by no means didactic. Even here--the description I give regarding the work's concerns--is defying the work's invitation to say something not yet familiar or normative about social orders, contexts, and composition, sound, voice, etc.

So I think embodiment in and of this work, and Gaburo's work more broadly, needs be explored in ways I'm not sure it has yet. A very different piece of Gaburo's, RE-RUN, was composed after 20 hours of self-imposed sleep deprivation. Gaburo, not unlike myself for various pieces (in Occultations & Hospitalogy as series), explores both extremes and subtleties of bodily subjugation or vulnerability, corporeal practices' relation to compositional process and output. Why?

To get at that question, I'm now beginning to work on a piece for live voice and taped voice (2 channels) that hopes to read RE-RUN, or translate it, as text--to do a poetic reverse engineering on it. Never mind that my audio is not cooperating at moment. The lovely thing is that unlike many of my venues, this one in Eugene I have pictures of (sent graciously by the curators of the conference). This way scouting can be done, and the piece can utilize the aspects of the (very large) room. How we translate the tailored work for the ensuing tour becomes another problem--a good one to work on as (yikes) I prepare for teaching this week.

After Eugene we'll hit Seattle, Portland, and then, hopefully, SF. Then home to Olympia for a final performance.

Last, here is part 2 of the performance rehearsal excerpt of Maledetto, Kenneth Gaburo; where here polyvocalism is denser and I've plucked various parts I think you, dear readers/listeners, would find the most interesting. Check back here for upcoming performance dates.

Poetic Terrorism on the Rise 3

Whoa, just in time for the holiday...

EXCELLENT questions posed and prodded re hauntology. Damn David Brazil always compels. Check out the talk as reproduced by Michael Cross HERE.

Graham, Wallace, & Sampsell for Tangent, Nov 6

Am trying desperately, tho it will likely not happen due to personal tragedy + state budget cuts (personal tragedy), to have Mark Wallace & Lorraine Graham read at Evergreen once again. They've been integral to PRESS as a series, reading/performing work at our first large conference in 2008, both incredibly important writers to me (and to many of you). Luckily the two plus fine poet Kevin Sampsell will be hosted this week by Tangent, one of the stalwart Portland reading series. PLEASE GO if you are in or around the Portland area. This evening will be a treat.

Tangent is pleased to host a cross-genre reading of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction on SATURDAY, 6 November at 7 PM. Portland-based writer and editor KEVIN SAMPSELL will be joined by Southern California writers K. LORRAINE GRAHAM and MARK WALLACE. The event will take place at the Open Space Café in Southeast Portland (2815 SE Holgate).

Tangent presents:
KEVIN SAMPSELL, K. LORRAINE GRAHAM, & MARK WALLACE
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6 at 7 PM
Open Space Cafe, 2815 SE Holgate (corner of SE Holgate & 28th Ave) Portland, (503) 233-6736
www.thetangentpress.org/readings.html
Admission is free. 

KEVIN SAMPSELL is the author of the short story collections, Beautiful Blemish and Creamy Bullets. His newest book is the memoir, A Common Pornography. He has been the publisher of Future Tense Books, a micropress, since 1990.

K. LORRAINE GRAHAM is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books), and her visual work has appeared in the Zaoem International Poetry Exhibition at the Minardschouwburg, Gent, Belgium, and the Infusoria visual poetry exhibition in Brussels. She lives in Carlsbad, CA, with her partner Mark Wallace and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet. You can find her online at spooksbyme.org.

MARK WALLACE is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism. Most recently he has published a short story collection, Walking Dreams (2007), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008). Forthcoming in early 2011 is his second novel, The Quarry and The Lot. He teaches at California State University San Marcos.

(Half-Parenthetical) Post

the "smoking critic" persona photo, originally for Prefab Eulogies, "examples of some author bios."

(Notice how I'll ignore the outcome of the elections the other day. I will admit a certain smug satisfaction bending into horror at the thought of Republicans in power, but that's just leftover transference, the residue of belief in the myth of even a TWO party system, so: horror as banality or... misplaced dread slash depression--where'd it go? Ah, here it is... )

Since I'm gearing up to write review-essays on Eleni Stecopolous's Armies of Compassion and CA Conrad's The Book of Frank, I've been re-thinking the review-essay. In a wandering sort of way, anyhow. In my short thought bubble re negative criticism down below (which is to say back then--Remember when directionality of online reading [up/down vs. left/right or right/left] was a question a lot were interested in writing about? Scroll DOWN once in the 2009 archives fora brief discussion re hypertext), I didn't realize (this is how CURRENT I am with regard to contemporary debates about poetry going on online) that Kent Johnson's short note I was referring to (at former Harriet Blog) was occasioned by a larger essay ("Some Darker Bouquets") by Jason Guriel, outlining why he feels negative criticism so-called should be part of the now-literary-landscape, which itself occasioned a larger roundtable of responses at MAYDAY. Which is all to admit that what I was responding to was the dragon's tail, not the whole beast. So, for further reading check out the links here. For my original post check out the links here. 

Ultimately, tho I'm not hot on Johnson's call to axion (note how, say five years ago, and maybe now, Johnson's satiric provocations lead to much of the contemporary criticism being written, er, published, and was by and large not itself negative criticism but meta-conversation/debate?), couched within this series of overdetermined anxieties born of careerism (nb: editorial comment),under all of this whether negative conversation is that vital question: what are the potential and actual functions of contemporary criticism? Since I've always taken my short and longer writings to be essays on works I am drawn to, this question still applies. Where "criticism" often means "essaying" on one's contemporaries. Not surprisingly I'm drawn to, as noted before, Donovan's "desiring criticism," a criticism that is generated from desire to synthesize with a particular work or aesthetic event--to take it on its own terms and also on one's own, to in effect create a tertiary object that speaks to the larger aesthetic landscape, and yet still, potentially to conditions that made the work possible and that the work conversely helps (if minutely) alter. To close read in a desiring mode, then, I take not to be some recapitulation of what Johnson and others are critiquing, but a different mindset altogether, one not so dissimilar from Kristin Prevallet's short response at MAYDAY. The critical object, the close reading, will take all manner of forms, but all nonetheless approach works with an interest in not only trying to "understand" their internal logics and ways of making meaning, but jump from the work and turn outward variously, often recursively or dialectically. 

For me the most enriching pieces are close readings that have an enlarged field of discussion, where both the poetry and the critical objects become immeshed dialectically--where the tertiary object is for neither author but for other potential readers. Not unlike the way Rodrigo Toscano envisions the ideal blurb in his MAYDAY piece. Poetry can do this too (and so can other non-discursive modes). My work is often a close reading of another's. Both Toscano and Prevallet I write thru in a section of Occultations, for instance (it was Tom Orange who reminded me when getting blurbs to, if the blurb must exist, find contemporaries, i.e., potential or actual collaborators, with whom you have affinities, not a list of folks scratched out based on what "big" name could legitimize your work). 

Both of these desiring practices are not new, of course. They are a central part of the ethos of the Objectivists, with the epistolary practices of Williams, the close readings (and the epistolary) of Zukofsky, and the incomparable intertextuality of Oppen, especially in his OBN. Just examples, mind you. One I'll draw you to, not to compare myself here, but one piece I co-wrote that I hopes creates a tertiary synthesis, that involves both close reading and (and as central to) an expansion of ideas, moving from the works into other works, into the world, you can read here. From Furniture Press's (Chris C.'s) The Dialogue's End journal, a piece Emily Carr and I wrote this past July. In their archives is another of these "inter-re-views," by Marthe Reed and Chris McCreary. This format, and Chris C's at that, come from a similar interest in figuring out ways to close read, to avoid the merely laudatory PR piece in favor of a writing for "readers...[interested] in larger conversations," as Kristin Prevallet aptly writes. I think these pieces, and especially the pieces in the offline ON Journal, reflect several of potentially nearly infinite number of possibilities an essaying that is neither negative nor positive (overall) can take. Just because one is not interested in the negative review, this doesn't mean one wants to or does write the positive review analog. It's that the terms of the debate are different, in fact the debates are different simpliciter. Radically different outlooks on what the critical piece/essay is. What the, i.e., review is or can be.

 

Regardless of the questions I was after in my short earlier post, those regarding why write the critical object-response in the first place, Johnson again helps spur some conversation while avoiding (not that he hasn't written any) the negative, the eviscerating, the [...].  FYI: Thom Donovan has at least two excellent pieces on these questions over at his blog, WHOF, in addition to the offline work mentioned.

Poetic Terrorism on the Rise 2

Public poems in washable chalk by students in my radical pedagogy/politics/poetry course began this weekend with directions for the foxtrot. You take the lead. Parking meter follows. Chalk series by Kaylani, Kate, & Daniel.

Black Radish Blog: Heather Momyer responds to Mark Lamoureux's Spectr...

Please check out the latest review-response to Mark Lamoureux's Spectre @ the Black Radish Blog. Funny, weird, beautiful--excellent...Black Radish Blog: Heather Momyer responds to Mark Lamoureux's Spectr...: "Hecate Leaves Muddy Footprints at the Crossroads: Heather Momyer Responds to Mark Lamoureux’s Spectre I am not a model reader. My name is f..."

I Do Mind Dying*

old Amtrak Station; old playground...

Now nearly "done" with this book I've been writing, Hospitalogy, which is to say, given that I am, for now, "done" with western doctors (till I collapse or change my mind), I've begun, perhaps accidentally, perhaps fallen into, a manuscript that employs rather messy formal "grafts" to write thru various pasts and futures of my hometown, Detroit. The primary graft is Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, which I saw for the first time in Detroit in 2007. This isn't an accidental pairing so much as it occurred to me in a really vivid way the last time I saw the picture (at Bard College, screened by fellow L&T faculty Marie Regan), that a) the political-social world of 70s Watts district (post-riots) has great affinity, as depicted, with current-Detroit, which is a 1970s Detroit, which again is the future American city. A city that exists as a future for, eg, Chicago. This became especially apparent when during class discussions of the film, students wanted to discuss the film as an ethnography (a common first impulse), and yet would say things that I found particularly telling, namely that "back then" things were pretty bleak. Now, I take the film to be both bleak and not, but I also take Watts of the 70s, and Burnett's focusing in on labor and economy here help facilitate this, to look much like parts of many cities in the U.S. (and of course elsewhere), especially those "post-industrial" towns of the midwest. That is, the film looks, to me anyway, very current. And b) Burnett's formalism--lyrical, highly structured in relation to its famously troubled music, the neo-Dada/European filmic conventions--lends itself to a jagged, kaleidoscopic textual form (oscillation, eg, between poetry & essay, one interrupting or negating the other, or their mixing or lying as parallel, like train tracks...), one that shapes the specific sites of past and present Detroit in a way that might (not to say I'll accomplish this mind you) intervene in such a deeply metaphorical, but also very real, disjointed, and segregated, topography. A topography pocked with holes, blindspots, lacks both real and allegorical of market magic. I wrote a novel years ago--it's shit, and so it's never gone anyplace--that tried to move between the experiential / familial, and Solnit's (among other very good) sociological-historical accounts of this post-67 "arcadia." 

NOW: I write this because partly what I'm interested in FROM YOU, DEAR READER, is CORRESPONDENCE--EMAIL OR BLOG POST--responding to the simple prompt: WHAT DOES THE TERM "DETROIT" CONJURE UP FOR YOU? WHAT DOES IT CALL TO MIND? Real experiences, imagined musings, whatever--please send. Backchannel or here. I'm leaving the prompt as open/simple as possible, and I'd like, if this goes according to plan, to see how such correspondence could be used (with permission), if at all. An experiment for now. THANKS!

 

*Highly recommended: I Do Mind Dying: Detroit, A Study in Urban Revolution -- 1970? 71?

EFCA Not So Much

Going back to my first blog post, I found this. A plea for each of us to make some calls urging Congress to pass The Employee Choice Act. Fast forward 4 months, and I write about how that worked out. More each day the Unabomber lifestyle, well, minus the bombing, makes a little more sense. I think now when I get nostalgic about organizing--a vocation I had to retire from once falling ill--I will read these posts, then perhaps some Common Dreams, night cap it with some Fox News. My arm is numb. I hope this does not kill my whiffle ball career.