Occultations Reviewed in the New Press 1

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

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.

New from Black Radish Books: Kathrin Schaeppi's Sonja Sekula...

Kathrin Schaeppi's new poetry collection from Black Radish Books is now available: Sonja Sekula, Grace in a Cow's Eye: A Memoir. Wheelhouse Magazine (Issue 9) featured excerpts from this wonderful book. So for a teaser, take a look. The book is beautifully designed by Schaeppi, a book artist, with each page responding to artist Sonja Sekula by way of performative text. Sonja, while involving a great deal of visual arts (I hesitate to call the typographical moves "visual poetry") does not ever feel to me gratuitous. At times the book is achingly lyrical, retaining at every turn a spirit of fervent experimentation. Sonja is also a deeply original book; and by this I mean it doesn't read quite like anything I've come across. Schaeppi is a detail person too, nothing haphazard, and I know this from experience, the poet having helped early on with Occultations, giving me some great advice on layout etc. So, do check Sonja out. Dive right in. More on this work in the next week or so as Wheelhouse shines a spotlight on it (cf the Wheelhouse Spotlights writeup for David Brazil's Meet Me Under The War Angels below, also excerpted for Issue 9).

Books also from Black Radish include Occultations (full print run coming soon!), Mark Lamoureux's Spectre, and Marthe Reed's Gaze. Several titles are in the works for 2011 and beyond. For further info, check out the Black Radish blog and website.

from Hospitalogy (in-progress)

Border Crossings

Best Western, Eugene OR, Nov 11, 2010

dear

x or y,

id imagine

this ekphrastic

apology as shared

best western

oil wants.

(low impressionism

with a hi-fi feeling:

resolute nose /

gay skin grafts to

swaths of bloom

like my xes bodys

inner wish is

a west banks

pre-occupied

constitution, its page

has.

as of yet no

either/or

(charter for a

forest

of senses, design-

nation ephemeral)

ive allways been

a femme tuckd

performing jim

lehrer never

re-assigned, some

times whitmans

civil soldiers felld

gives one hope.

like yr wish

for strategic gunfire

on this lurching cog,

for a desird maiming

in-sured

to be one

by erasure

or an-other,

to be that held who

not in the frame.

a dis-membering /

a surgical proposition

theres mauve here, some spit,

off white, why not re-cover

in xis arms

to speak visible?–

this line is yr potential

for now the here

opens as a fixd

complex.

an armory pro-duces

lasers that retro-fit

only parts like hands

to paint with,

hewn road in black-

green, a boring scene

of aversion

where ad place-

meant is fore-grounded.

but a high yield _____

those who listen

to the torsional

birth of certainties

inside that tissue

sequencer, fortune

cookie, hammard

wedge, a thousand

incessant blows driven

darwin wrote of–

will have us passd all this

then, before the dock

jammed up with damaged

strykers & rats

reservd for want of work

in need of want,

no a no name

thing, a life

as elliptical

as a motel body