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...

Susana Gardner's Third Factory Mini-Review of Occultations

Huge thanks to Susana Gardner for writing a mini-review of Occultations, including this book as part of her list of 2010 book recommendations/short reviews for Third Factory's Notes to Poetry. Kevin Killian, & now Susana. Both of whom I admire. And like Killian's list of reviews, I love Susana's. Elizabeth Bryant's wonderful Nevertheless Enjoyment) and Kaia Sand's Remember to Wave, one of my favorite books out this past year, gets props too. If you don't have Sand's book, get it!  Again, many thanks to Susana.

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.

Occultations Reviewed in Jacket 40 & other news...

Just a quick note: Matthew Landis, member of the New Philadelphia Poets (a pretty fabulous collective of socially concerned poets), just reviewed Occultations in this latest issue of Jacket, No. 40.  

First, a heartfelt thanks to Matthew, who I only know thru his very good poetry and criticism (check out a longer cycle of poems in the latest Critphoria, or his new chapbook, or critical work online). The review, like many reviews in Jacket, tho rarer elsewhere, is explorative and generous, doesn't focus just on the book but contextualizes it within contemporary poetry, poetics, sociopolitical landscapes, and thus goes more macroscopic. And I really like how Landis reclaims meaning-making in it, doesn't give you too much analysis (both as a reviewing convention and as a counter-move to his sole complaint about my book--the procedural notes at end). Instead he lays out a poetics and overall arc that I think is rather spot-on--especially as he begins discussing the body as tool of power, i.e., thru Foucault & biopower.  

Ok, so I'll stop here and just say thanks--lest I begin reviewing the review, which, come to think of it, might not be a good concept at all for a future anthology. 

Do read the rest of the growing issue, the last until (the irony wasn't totally lost on me) the journal itself moves over to Philly: work by Michael Cross on Scalapino (amazing), reviews of Nicole Mauro's latest, a fantastic Silliman feature, work on Elrick (by yrs), etc etc. Big, full, juicy.

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Also, re Occultations, another thanks to poet-editors Elieen Tabios & Reb Livingston. Tabios listed Occultations as "recommended summer reading" on the No Tell Motel blog, which, as usual, is featuring a process whereby contributors spread word about acts of poetry that otherwise might go unnoticed. The lists are varied and really helpful. Or unhelpful when you are busy and want to read poetry but are busy laboring at other things. But helpful, very helpful. Helpful for us at some point, in the moments we can get our hands on our own and each others' affective labors. Thanks much to both.

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Sam Lohmann, Evergreen grad, Wheelhouse contributor, and one of Portland's Spare Roomies, also happens to edit a very fine LETTERPRESSED!!! journal. And the new issue of Peaches and Bats is out. Check it out, some kick-ass contributors:

Peaches and Bats #6 is now available! It's a 64-page handsewn chapbook with a letterpressed cover, featuring adventurous writings by:

Taryn Andrews 

Aaron Barrell

Bill Berkson

Meredith Blankinship

Norma Cole

Beverly Dahlen

Joel Felix

Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi

Rodney Koeneke

Kimberly Lyons 

Joseph Mains

Scott Metz

Hoa Nguyen

Deborah Poe

Dan Raphael

Stacy Szymaszek

Dana Ward

Mark Young

Peaches and Bats #6 is available for $5.00 (including postage in the US). It can be ordered via PayPal at http://peachbats.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-issue.html , or by sending a check, payable to Sam Lohmann, to 4025 SE Taylor St., Portland, OR 97214. Back issues are still available. Thanks for your time, and happy summer

Mark Wallace on Book Reviews

Speaking of reviews (given my review as below), Mark Wallace has a nice piece about why he reviews books over at Lemon Hound, what he thinks the purpose of the review is.  Review as mini-essay is where Mark starts, and I can't possibly agree more.  Why else write reviews other than to delve deeply into a work and its context, and dance with it, so to speak?  It's play time and the result is a mutual becoming when approaching reading this way--as a praxis.  

ROB HALPERN READS TOMORROW, WEDNESDAY NIGHT

My Review of Disaster Suites here:

Disaster Suites by Rob Halpern

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
If, as in Halpern's (and Brady's) Snow Sensitive Skin, to hear is, in deliberate and painstaking (and painful) ways, to listen to what one's ear hears and does not hear, Disaster Suites is the broken music box of worlds of distances that feel our suppositions of the most intimate proximity to catastrophes that are, in fact, unFELT miles away. The distance between "I" and its supposed referents; the distance between disaster felt and disaster thought, then said; the distance between a lyric of simplistic lament or needy wonderment and the radio-dialer's war-ruptured provisioning of what, limply, the singer has just heard (or witnessed) from afar. Disaster Suites ruptures and eviscerates, then acknowledges its comparative inertness as typography on a page in a book in your hands. It does so unrelentingly, and this is the ugly and beautiful ways air shapes time. Hence, this is a music unearthed, then dismantled.


View all my reviews.



Rob Halpern at Evergreen May 27th (spread ---> word)
An Evening of Reading & Urgent Discussion With

ROB HALPERN

Poet & Founder of Nonsite Collective

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

8pm @ The Evergreen State College Library (Underground)


Dear Friends,

Please join students & faculty of Experiments in Text, Prolegomena to a Future Poetics, and Book Arts: The Organism that Literature Demands in welcoming poets Rob Halpern and Sarah Mangold. To kick off this year's PRESS Literary Arts & Politics series, Halpern will read from his poetry, including his newly released Disaster Suites, and Mangold, editor of Bird Dog Magazine, will introduce Rob and the evening's events by reading from her work. The reading and discussion will continue the PRESS series focus on the intersections between contemporary art and the larger socipolitical frames. The event is free and open to the public, but donations are welcome. Proceeds from book sales will go to the UFE Student Solidarity Fund, a fund set up by the faculty union to help defray student tuition costs.

WHEN? Wednesday, May 27 @ 8pm

WHERE? The Evergreen State College Library Underground (refreshments provided)

We're very pleased that Rob Halpern has come to Evergreen from San Francisco – a kind of “coming back” as Halpern is an alumnus of Evergreen. And we're happy to have Sarah return to Evergreen for a second reading. If you missed her during the first PRESS Literary conference, don't miss her work this year!

This reading is dedicated to Ernestine Kimbro. Without her, like many things important in this life, the reading would not have happened. Thank you, Ernestine, for helping us to "follow our fears."

In Solidarity
David Wolach & Elizabeth Williamson


ON THE ARTISTS:

Poet Tyrone Williams writes of Rob Halpern's Snow Sensitive Skin: “Snow Sensitive Skin is a remarkable collaboration between Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern. Beautifully designed by Michael Cross for Atticus Finch, this black-on-black chapbook, as dense intellectually, as culturally 'thick' as many, much longer, books of poetry, is really a collaboration between Brady, Halpern, Cross and the inspiration for this meditation on the 2006 Israeli bombing of Lebanon, the music of Lebanese musician and artist Mazen Kerbaj. Brady’s and Halpern’s alternately terse and lapidary lyrics acknowledge the distance between them and Kerbaj, their sense of culpability and impotence, even as it rages against these 'individual' reactions and conditions in order to situate the war within and as a function of global economies. And always, always, they return (as did the bombs, the commands, etc.) to the body .”

Rob Halpern is the author of several books of poetry, including Rumored Place (Krupskaya Books, 2004), Snow Sensitive Skin (a collaboration with Taylor Brady, Atticus/Finch Chapbooks, 2007), and most recently Disaster Suites (Palm Press, 2009). He’s currently co-editing the poems of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the first which, “For a Realist Literature,” appeared in Chicago Review. An active participant in the Nonsite Collective, he lives in San Francisco.

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Sarah Mangold is founder and editor of Bird Dog, a journal of innovative writing and art. Currently working as a Program Coordinator at the University of Washington Extension Program—after seven years in a private library. BA University of Oklahoma; MFA San Francisco State, 1999. Recipient of an Individual Artist Award form the Seattle Arts Commission and residencies at MacDowell and Djerassi. Her books include Household Mechanics, Parlor, Picture of the Basket, and Boxer Rebellion.