Kocik in SF, Noel and Burger at Pilot in Seattle

Two great events below, both of which I'll miss due to being out of down. This is certainly turning into the week of kicking self for not being someplace where important things are happening.

Prior to the newsletter announcements below, a word on Kocik's Nonsite Collective talk/discussion. Which can also be said of what's occurring in Seattle's small poetry community lately, by the way. An urgency and vitality I really admire, much of it spurred by longer-time Seattle poets such as Robert Mittenthal and Nico Vassilakis, much of it picked up on and done with by a newer, hungry crowd of politically invested artists.

Anyway, regarding Robert's work. It was Kocik who, along with Amber DiPietra, Thom Donovan, and Eleni Stecopolous (among many other Nonsite participants), if I remember correctly, began focusing in on somatics a few years ago as part of a "disability" and poetics curriculum (series of events). It was this curriculum that got me deeply interested in the Nonsite Collective, and thus eventually involved. I felt that the questions being asked and the activities which resulted from the Collective (see the website for curriculum materials, essays, etc) were vital on myriad levels, but what I appreciated most was a radical sensibility that showed its vulnerabilities, that desired to critique its own positions while also focusing in on problems that I felt to be the most urgent and often least asked in regard to the relationships between art, sociality, and the political. "Cross disciplinary research" hopes to defend against specialist power brokering and stagnation. Each person involved, regardless of background, was and is committed to asking questions central to making aesthetic practice through cross-disciplinary research a practice, an ongoing field of honest discovery and mutual care-making, which, as Kocik notes in one of his talks up at Nonsite Collective's website, in a sense defines aesthetic practice as that which opposes various forms (systems) of oppression.

Post-ableist poetics and somatics were, and are, central to my work, first in performance and the physics of labor organizing years ago, and second, as this body developed a deadly degenerative disease--one that I still have trouble embracing, even dealing with, especially now as this mouth tries to speak fast for a performance of Maledetto and often can't make it--and has thus largely turned to more sustained acts of writing and stillness. Through all of that Robert's work has spoken to me: his commitment to social change (which involves interrogating what we mean by "social change") is very, very real. It demands of us a collective doing, an active collective inquiry. His multi-genre book Overcoming Fitness was one of the additives for the fuel that first got me writing Occultations--the first few strokes years ago--and attending to performance again, believing that there are more physical acts I could perform. Amber DiPietra and Petra Kuppers have also been vital in this regard, and by late 2007 I could say the same regarding Nonsite Collective, as a self-sustaining whole, as well as each of the participants, as they circled around what gets counted as "disability" and why. These honest conversations had me hooked, for lack of a better vocab.

So as the commons curriculum (last summer's curriculum) developed itself, what emerged again was an interest in a relationship between post-abelism (disability activisms and poetics) and somatic practices. Both Thom Donovan and myself honed in on this relationship in different ways for our talks/discussions. Robert also contributed an awesome essay on commoning ("Stanzas in Commoning") during this time, which also discussed somatics-commoning inseparability, sending it to Thom and I, among a few others, over email--available now by way of the Nonsite Collective front page--which I then gave "analysis" (response) to by way of a poem written (started) a week later during a hospital visit. I mention this because Robert stresses not just orienting around "sorely needed" and missing services, but poets giving up proprietary relationship to the body by way of, among other things, gaining extra-poetic, or even non-poetic knowledges, developing understanding of the terrain of other fields (such as that of the post-industrial medical complex, or property law, or domestic spycraft, etc), to anyway move from the myopia of institutional concerns--even writing per se--and towards developing critique of and participatory alternatives to the oppressive features/arguments of just such analytical systems (using what strengths we have, perhaps writing, perhaps not).

In hospital a week after Robert's call, it was more clear than ever how opaque our understanding of this vast complex really is. What small learned practices have I at my disposal to make visible and visceral this opacity? Language arts, obviously, but with that skilled labor also comes quite a bit of experience with research techniques, observational and otherwise--but most importantly, the time--here--to impassively witness. To turn site into nonsite. That and turning nonsite back into site is what Robert's work here helps clarify and expand. As often enough what gets counted as "expert analysis" or sorely needed specialty (cf medical discourses, the gaze, the creole of insurance "options") under neoliberal capitalism amounts to those in power stealing resources and excluding the vast majority of us from even understanding the terrain enough to form an immediate response (which is why "transparency" though important often means little), and there are ways both to expose and remediate some of this were poetry (and of course any other field) to move outside its own sphere of exchange. We need become better interlopers, better cross-disciplinary collaborators, in other words, into specialist worlds, to know these systems and their languages--these oppressive institutionality--in deep, not just gestural, ways. And conversely to use what strengths we do have, by way of what we practice with one another, to do so with, for, and as one another (as common body).

For my talk, and in previous email discussion with Robert, we were both excited by the potential for the body to be- or become commons. For the body (or "a body") to be the initial site of radicalization, giving over, laying bare to another or others for subsistence, mutual care. To deprivitize the body as moment one in an activist process. But how? Under what conditions? For whom? And in what ways that do not make for a Borg-like living room scene (pardon the Trek reference)? Regardless, to begin with a body, I think Robert, Thom, and I generally agreed (as have many others in Nonsite and elsewhere), is to acknowledge this as necessary condition for any enlarged aesthetic-political set of actions--for further commoning, for organizing, and so forth.

So Robert, now after several months of further thinking, making, and self-critiquing (I can only assume), comes back to the questions we were circling around during the summer curriculum and (I'm obviously excited to see) challenges us to do, to find some direct routes and go--to haul ass (OK, my words, not his). To use our disadvantages to our advantage (so to speak). Not that we weren't actively making or collectively doing over the summer and since, but I love the directly stated urgency of Robert's blurb-invite below. And no doubt there will be some much needed re-thinking and extending of prior suppositions, activities, statements, etc. Because Robert, I've come to understand, does not sit still--even a little. He doesn't languish with an idea. I so wish I could go to this. I'll be with my father and brother over the holiday, so if interested in attending, please contact Nonsite Collective. And look out for further info/talk excerpts/links etc on Nonsite's website (front page).

NONSITE || Robert Kocik's "Offering Up the Body As Food".

Please join us this Wednesday, December 22nd at 7pm for a conversation with visiting architect, artist, and poet Robert Kocik.

Robert writes of his thematic, "Offering Up the Body as Food," "I'd like to place together (as they are inseparable) two major Nonsite concerns: commoning and somatics. Perhaps the discursive is getting us down (it's so little of what we are and what language is). It's hard to get the commoning meetings to get us anywhere (just as when I work with the Phoneme Choir or teach saw-sharpening or voice, if I don't cut the talk and just 'do,' there is no transformation.) Spread-thin is the mode we're all in and need to use to our advantage. Let me introduce INSTEADS (instead of what we'd be doing otherwise, instead of our recognizable artworks, instead of the status quo and to some extent instead of homesteading (in that all the land is already owned) as clear (well, luminous) objectives to be carried out. Wholly speaking, somatics is tripartite: bodywork and then offering up the energized body as activism and I-lessness (the ultimate protest against privatization). Thus commoning, though seemingly an objectiveworld practice, comes from emptying and quickening of compassion within. What I see with I aside (what hurts most and offers the greatest alleviation): Planned Pauperization Of Almost Everybody (PPOAE) and the need to translate the green of the forest of the commons of old as today's money — like water or air, nobody should be able to own a billion parts to another's one. Taxation is an unsolvable distraction — preemptive maldistribution is the work of poets. Vowed to change, as it is from the power of vow that means arise."

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POETRY AT PILOT:

Sunday 19 Dec 7p at pilot books

219 Broadway E - Upstairs in the Alley Building
http://pilotbooksseattle.com/

Melanie Noel writes poems, often in correspondence with musicians, visual artists, and filmmakers and their work. She lives in Seattle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjDji5amSWQ

Mary Burger is a writer, visual artist, and landscape designer living in the Bay Area. Right now she’s wondering aboutRobert Smithson’s relationship to environmentalism.
http://www.maryburger.com/bio.htm
http://www.maryburger.com/selections.htm

++++++++++++++++++++

From an introduction at subtext in 2006:

Burger balances what might be an inherent need to make meaning with a “rigorous skepticism about a fixed privileged subjectivity” and acknowledgment that language controls us as much as or more than we control it. Meaning is thus “something negotiated between participants, not something absolute.”

…

In an interview (http://www.maryburger.com/burger-interview.pdf) she talks about wanting to resituate the confessional. Instead of relying on an extremely simplistic point of view, she wants to embrace the “complex, almost inconceivably polyvalent context in which any utterance exists.” To explore different registers of language and utterance – and experience.

Your Golden Gate

The obligation of the living? Verify, in solitude, the veracity of perception. Resolve the discontents of desire and repulsion. Find value, pleasure, and significance. Or anything at all.

I labored through undergraduate Heidegger, I romanticized high school Camus, and I believed in the achievements of the mind. Did I understand then that the obligation doesn’t end? Illusoriness of perception. Disorientation of desire. Disruption of time. Infinite potential, infinitely vulnerable. Each realization the seed of its own demise.

Rob Halpern's Review of Occultations / PhillySound Feature

I'm really so touched by CA Conrad's attention to Occultations, by how hard he worked in concert with Rob Halpern, Brenda Iijima, J. Townsend, Thom Donovan, and Jules Boykoff, to put together the interview, the featured poetry, and, of course, the community commentary. All the mini-reviews were touching, deeply so, each so insightful if a little too kind. I do want to draw your attention to Rob's review for a very specific reason: in the midst of a move (tenure track job!) to Michigan, Rob wrote a really in-depth piece, one that were he interested in credit, could have been published in a journal someplace, so thorough and investigatory it is. I want to thank him for this. He emailed me a pdf of it a couple days before it came out, and of course I didn't get back to him in any timely way whatsoever (my M.O for emailing). So I don't think Rob's piece gets the props it deserves for sheer amount of time he took to ponder the work, write it. Rob doesn't do things half-assed, which I admire. His compulsions end up making others happy.  I hope Conrad doesn't mind, but here's Rob's review, which were it a review in the sense of "hey read this great book," I wouldn't post here. But as per Rob's work overall, the review is rather an essay thinking through issues both of us, and I take many of you, are interested in. Many thanks to all for the feature! That I post Rob's writeup here is no reflection on how good/touching each of the pieces are. 


Link to the entire feature is on the right side of the blog here, under Book Info & Reviews. 

Re-Printed from PhillySound , Feature by CA Conrad

ROB HALPERN
Militant Bodies, Common Bodies : Some Notes on David Wolach's Poetry

It was David’s affect that attracted me first — open, vulnerable, patient, disarming — all the qualities a queer boy like myself longs for in other guys, whether there’s some amorous prospect to be realized or not. This was several years ago, but the impression remains fresh. David and I introduced ourselves to one another in a dining commons at Bard College. We both had summer gigs teaching in the Language and Thinking program, a scene of deep collaboration around poetry and pedagogy, which would become the setting for our new friendship.

There is a critical militancy that complements David’s affect — permeates it — augmenting, rather than contradicting, all his qualities that move me. Within a few minutes of our meeting, we got to talking about student activism at the Evergreen State College, where I had spent some time as an undergraduate, and where David currently teaches. We found common ground discussing campus politics — always a distorted mirror of larger social forces — and how our various political engagements, both there and elsewhere, changed our lives.

David’s militancy moves from the union to the classroom, from the clinic to the street, through institutional zones and practices where our collective well-being — the commons — is always being stimulated and suppressed, aroused and seized.

I don’t use the term “militant” casually or commonly, but I like the idea of linking it to the commons. Against the grain of dominant “common sense” — grotesque ideology — militating and communing are not at odds. The militant body may even be consonant with the common body, at home in it — the body as commons? Habeas corpus — to have the body — becomes our common ground, if only because of the hostile social processes that disable, subject, constrain, and debase all our bodies commonly. And yet the body also potentiates a resource in excess of anything we can currently name.

In his introduction to the recently translated Genocide in the Neighborhood, a work that emerged from Argentine activist groups responding to the situation of the disappeared, Brian Whitener notes “ ‘militant’ doesn’t mean military […] militant signifies a stronger commitment to politicized collectivity”, and this may get at the sum of David’s practices, pedagogically and poetically. Whether in a classroom or a waiting room, a poem or a chant, a community of friends or a union of laborers, David’s writing and person activate this commitment to collective engagement, while militating for an enlarged politics.

At a recent Nonsite Collective event where David facilitated a discussion on “The Commons and the Body”, I quickly cribbed a few notes to help me introduce his poetry to the group. I wrote: “In David’s writing, the body becomes an occlusion in common sense.” The phrase came unexpectedly. What was I getting at?: the body as resistant to any regime of knowledge — be it medical or military — that would make of it a ward.

The body manifests in David’s poems not as an object, but as a situation where too many social processes, institutions, and apparatuses converge — medical, military, labor, financial, environmental — in often hostile ways, despite whatever benign appearance. David’s body is a body in revolt from the object status to which these apparatuses subject it, and his poetry is nothing if not an agitator in the interest of this revolt.

This is “the body-as-a-hole” (Occultations 77). This is the body struggling to affect a radical displacement in orders of common sense that determine what can and can’t be seen and said. This is the body as supplement and void — in excess of what counts and thus not legitimately here — challenging everything that serves to enforce orders of state. This is the body as nonsite of the commons, the commons being what is not here, the only thing we can share in truth, a set of social relations we’ve failed to actualize, a blank of pure potential, where we’re always dying, and always becoming. This is the body as an assemblage of intensities linked to multiple scenes of power that contain all our utopian and dystopian possibilities: all the vicissitudes of care and harm. This is the body as the critical situation of our undoing: the body as a commons in the way failure is a possibility we don’t know what to do with.

Tortured body. War torn body. Environmentally ill body. Ecstatic body. Immolated body. “What work this dying is,” he writes. David’s poems consistently make the occulted links between various scenes of the body’s expropriation perceptible. And while the poems affirm not knowing what a body can do, they nonetheless register what the body can’t do insofar as its flows have been obstructed, expropriated, owned, and forced to persist in irresolvable conflict with militarized production, environmental degradation, and geopolitical debasement.

David’s writing portends the body as a kind of “dissipative structure” — (according to chaos theory, a form of organization that resists its own conditions of dissipating energy and eroding resource) — a body at once vulnerable and resistant to every form of social erosion, a vulnerability and a resistance commensurate with the struggle to organize under conditions where the commons and the body alike go on sliding entropically toward exhausted resource.

Organize what?: a community, a union, a classroom, a collective, a poem: “organization” being a dynamic movement between all these organs. Prosody as organized pulse.

In David’s poems, the body-in-pain — chronic pain, constant reminder of mortality — is lived like a third world niche market — frontier of development — where the only lexicons available for speaking or singing of first world illness collide with the perverse semantics of the so-called “developing world”: the body as casualty — what can’t develop any more — sung in “the language of paper / cheap and easy,” when all you can do from here is “hold yr breath & pray / for the lynched.”

Under these conditions of ongoing war and environmental disaster, what has been occulted — nonsite: withdrawn from view — is as much the war-torn body, or the flood victim body, or the fallen militant body, as the memoranda that make these bodies possible, all of which are inseparable from the sick body here,wherever we might call home. 

David’s writing proposes to resurrect the failed body as potential and resource. And in this sense, too, his work proposes a perverse model of our occluded commons — body-as-a-hole — the body that fails to count within dominant regimes of visibility. This is the body as “collateral damage”, and it shares what can’t be shared with the militant body fallen in the streets of Gaza, and with the transgendered body violated here on Mission Street.

Just as the commons may be thought of as a nonsite whose history is the story of its own expropriation, this body is a disappearing act: negative ontology of our only common resource. This is the commons as the blank in history — history of the future that haunts us now — and David’s poems propose “degraded lyric as convergence of [these] aporias / The strange tremor of unusual poverties / Of not knowing what will come of this” (Occultations 117). The militant body — the body as secret agent of our commons — hangs on that not, the withdrawn secret of a counter-capacity waiting to be activated, waiting to surge.

This may be our occultation: the militant body as site of common refusal, zone of uncharted futures. This is also the body whose patiency suspends all property relations, to one another and to our life processes — “giving oneself over as shared resource” “given over to community” (David’s notes) — rendering the corpus open, disarming, and vulnerable to forms of unanticipated care, while resisting any form of knowledge that would further subject it.

Here is the abundance of the patient body — “a capacity without limit” — whose unruly excess persists in revolt against a grammar of proper agents and objects, a system that disables, limits, constrains.

David’s writing is the militant affirmation of this patiency.

Stephen Vincent's Haptic

click images to enlarge

As response to my Nonsite talk / conversation on commoning & the body (post & Nonsite web contribution coming soon), on the heels of a reading the night before (chronicled on Michael Cross's blog), Stephen Vincent made one of his beautiful "haptics." These are energy translations, or in his terms, made by picking up on the energy of the voices/poetry in the room & letting the pen move without picking it up from the paper. The relational results are beautiful. As is this one, which Stephen sent me. Really touched--many thanks to the absolutely lovely, genuine Stephen.

I sent the haptic to Clay Banes for his tireless efforts to support Occultations & the small presses over at SPD. The below is what he sent back. Love it. Circuit complete. 

From Nonsite Collective: EE Miller

Michael Cross just posted notice of EE Miller's visit to SF.  I'd love to be able to go, and, perhaps, some of you feel similarly.  If so, head over to Nonsite Collective's website, where, as is often the case with Nonsite curricula, discussion around this performance and talk will also occur online (or at least online discussions will likely ensue).  Check out Miller's work, too, if you haven't already.  From Nonsite's front page:

Join us Saturday, February 27th at Get Lost Books (1825 Market St., SF) for an evening of collective imagining! Artist EE Miller brings "Facilitate This!" to San Francisco, a multimedia group investigation into the "meeting" as the landing site of our fears and fantasies about collective possibilities. Facilitate This! specifically considers representations of group behavior in queer imagination and history through film screenings, presentations, and conversation.

Festivities begin at 7:30 pm. Don't miss this crucial discussion!

Michael

PS. And click here to view (and print) our late winter events calendar!

Book Received: Remember to Wave by Kaia Sand (Tinfish Press)

In the rush to finish a ton of things, including a spring course on public space, dissent and guerilla poetry, a reprieve: the beautiful Remember to Wave by Kaia Sand just came in the mail today. My very own copy.  I only had a  chance to glance at the work so far, thumbing thru the thing & stopping here & there, but it's hard hitting, transporting, & gorgeously designed - and beauty here takes on many forms, not least the "zine" feel to a lot of the adverts, and other found signage that Sand uses here to help re-map the not-so-beautiful understructures of Portland.  Wow, this is a cool book.  And just in time for me to include at least part of it in my syllabus for spring, and just in time for Kaia's and Jules Boykoff's PRESS Event talk/reading at Evergreen (post below) on Thursday @ 730.  More on this book soon.  For now, back to working on lecture for Wednesday: aptly, Ranciere, redistributon of the sensible, Nonsite Collective, & other autonomous / radical pedagogical models.   

Last post I forgot to add links, both of the upcoming reading from my books Occultations and (the multi-media) Prefab Eulogies at If Not for Kidnap Poetry, as well as the No Tell Motel Best Poetry of 2009 Holiday List (to promote the small presses & poets who have published work this year).  Jen Coleman, who I met for the first time at EconVergence Conference, will be reading at If Not for Kidnap Poetry (when/where/what info in the post below).  Have been a fan of Jen's work since I first ran into it on the web circa 2005, so it'll be a treat for me to hear more from a manuscript she's working on (really cool, how to call them, miniature radicalized allegories?), to talk some more while, or perhaps after, hearing what sounds like what will be some good live music.  The visual artist's pieces are also very interesting, but one only gets so much of the experience of an installation from looking at small photos online.  So, looking forward to it.  

As for the No Tell list, my picks are up now.  I tried to pick works that hadn't yet been picked by others, and, of course, books that are in print (not online).  This was difficult, as the list could have gone on for at least 50 titles, longer if I actually read a lot, or fast, which I don't.  Or if I'd taken the time to get input from other Wheelhouse editors or contributors, which I didn't.  

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In the coming weeks I'll put a schedule of readings (city/venue/date) up here; just getting that stuff together now, so right now the calender reads like a 4am television program listing.

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After being slowed by health issues--not just me this time!--Wheelhouse is getting back on track, working on finishing books by Felino Soriano, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Uche Nduka, Laura Carter, Stan Apps, as well as Wheelhouse #9, which is beginning to take shape as we begin the process of deciding which pieces sent to us we'll be using.  We plan to release both the new issue and the first two chapbooks--by Soriano & Switaj--in the coming weeks.  That is, in time for an early winter release.  Shortly after that we'll be rolling out chapbooks 1-2 at a time, and prepping for some more PRESS events, including regional performances, and later, a reading/talk by SF poet Eleni Stecopolous and Seattle poet/editor (of Bird Dog Magazine) Sarah Mangold.  Meantime, if you haven't already, head on over to Wheelhouse & read the PRESS Anthology, which comes out of the PRESS Literary Conference, which as part of PRESS, occurs every other year (as long as we can get the funds for it, and given the state of the economy, grants are going to be hard to come by for next year).

Which reminds me to thank David Buuck, on behalf of Wheelhouse AND The Evergreen State College, Slightly West Literary Journal, and other co-sponsors of PRESS, for his incredibly generative performance/reading/discussion/talk.  A great turnout & now several students interested more than ever in poets theater, work that has a real stake, both politically and aesthetically.  

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Also, if you are in the Bay Area, check out Nonsite Collective.  The upcoming talk/performance by Marcus Civin I wish I could go to; the work is right up my alley, it seems.  From the announcement:

...join the Nonsite Collective this Saturday, November 21, at 3:30 PM for work by Marcus Civin (performance and talk) in discussion with Chris Nagler and Real Time Ethics.

935 Natoma Street, San Francisco

between 10th and 11th Streets

and between Mission and Howard

close to the Civic Center BART Station

and the Van Ness MUNI station

From Chris Nagler:

Marcus Civin’s performance work asks questions about bodily politics, and puts together serial kinetic phrases about his own. He reframes that old contested territory, the ordinary, or ‘pedestrian’ body. His teacher, the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, wrote, in 1968, of her own work as “a control that seems geared to the actual time it takes the actual weight of the body to go through the prescribed motions, rather than an adherence to an imposed ordering of time. In other words, the demands made on the body’s (actual) energy resources appear to be commensurate with the task . . .” Does this equation balance in the ordinary body of today, when the ‘prescribed motions’ are often obscure, charged with impossible simultaneities, or shamed with distant, mechanized heroism. And what to do with all that ‘seeming’ ? 

In his words:

My everyday life reveals my cowardice, my normalcy, my difficulty.

Every time I do my ritual, it is slightly different. I think about what

I would do in an extreme situation. I assume, I would know what to do

in an extreme situation, but I need practice.

Some possible issues and questions that may arise:

What kind of athlete or non-athlete is the contemporary American citizen?

The slapstick histories of multitasking

Do the body’s economies (sexual, affective, energetic) reflect/counter/react to/empty into The Economy? How. specifically?

Is ‘survival’ a performance, a fetish, a nostalgia, an ordinary reality? Which for whom?

Is represented labor still labor and is labored representation still representation? Who says so?

___

From Marcus Civin:

"I had been so confident and now I had an awful feeling that the war had gotten out of my hands" 

                                    --Gertrude Stein as Alice B. Toklas (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas)

With the Nonsite Collective, Marcus Civin will project, re-build, perform gestures and utterances that riff on themes from his recent performance work — performance work that lands a poor, rough tramp behind enemy lines and forces the poor, rough tramp to decide: am I a killer, OR am I a clown?

Or: "In a series, objects become undefined simulacra one of the other. And so, along with the objects, do the people that produce them." -- Jean Baudrillard (Simulations)

I handle an ax, matches, a deck of cards, a spear, drips of water. I make a bathtub. Am I a bathtub. Or: I make a small black painting.

Or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30&feature=related

Or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcx9BJRadfw

Participants might enjoy watching:

http://www.archive.org/details/busterkeatonfilm (SAMUEL BECKETT, FILM)

and/or

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8727552817849141561# (BUSTER KEATON, HARD TIMES)

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Ritual No. 6, from Occultations:

6. (muted domestic pornography)

 

We must insist upon the idea of culture-in-action, of culture growing within us like a new organ, a sort of second breath: and on civilization as an applied culture controlling even our subtlest actions, a presence of mind  --  Artaud

 

Never so held in held

Suspense  : the long

 

Disease is pornographic

Graphic despite I knowing

 

What will come of this

This narrative as usual

 

As so much desolate

Hunger there is some I

 

Tensing with a perverting here

Here the sheen of a slowly open

 

Curve a depth I’ve seen this before

Before I roamed corporate clinics

 

My holes are a constant testing 

Ground perpetual breaks of strata

 

In continuity becomes continuity : I 

I here cannot see is a here with yet no

 

Name his delivery system holds I up

Up by its penis a story halos above

 

It : degraded as a convergence of aporias 

The strange tremor the unusual poverties

 

Of not knowing what will come of this this

EcONVERGENCE FOLLOW-UPS

Pre-script: One of the most important (and by "important" I mean honest, full, and resistant and lovingly so) conversations about the use value of poetry, and the stakes of being HUMAN, that I've come across online--it's up at PhillySound.  A conversation between CA Conrad and Dale Smith.  Rarely do I find an online conversation to be intimate, or "life-giving."  Let's face it: all this blogging is usually a bunch of bullshit if it isn't something for which this artifice SHOULD have been designed: alerts to people about interesting things.  Anyway.  Please read.

---

So, I'd meant to do this earlier here, but, hardly at the computer as of late for myriad reasons...  

For those of you who were not able to get to EconVergence (judging by the size of the crowd, most of you at least on the west coast did), there are a couple of places where you can go for some fairly thorough write ups.  I'll say here that Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand did an incredible job working poetry into the conference--from the main reading event to some amazing panels--and so my deep thanks to them for their hard work seeing that EconVergence was just that much more vibrant.  And the conference as a whole, as far as I could tell (with so many things going on and so little time to be able do anything other than catch glimpses) was energized and energizing, with most reports coming back as extremely positive--a good, important start for an integrated reup of left activism in the region and beyond.  

Go here, to Nonsite Collective for my write up, and write ups from others, including Kaia Sand, Rob Halpern, and David Buuck.  Nonsite's blog is set up as interactive and self-organizing, and the write ups are meant as jumping off points for further discussion, especially as EconVergence relates to larger discussions on the difficulties bringing "activists" and "artists" (so-called) together in non-traditional ways.  

(For below, in both cases you'll have to scroll down a bit--or, as recommended, read the newer stuff first as you work your way to the discussions!)

Go here, to PhillySound, for a wonderful discussion (recursive interview style) between Frank Sherlock and CA Conrad, who cover their experience of EconVergence (and wow: they seemed to have gone to as many panels, workshops, etc as anyone at the conference).

Doubtless there are other places online one can find coverage of the work being done at EconVergence as well as the work that has come out of it.  Important conversations insofar as we have a lot of work to do.