1) Why do poets dislike language? Poets dislike language.
2) The altered book: a violent exploration of the (violent) reading process
3) Movement on the page: like a musical score or like music? A difference?
4) The recipe is most often the stationary command to move in a set, ordered, way
5) Nelson (the UDP book): the dissolve of 1 particular history / 1 particular author
6) Gardner's altered book is more a critique/attempted erasure of its found materials
7) The meaning, where's the meaning? Especially in the altered book: what does it matter, in certain cases, what book you choose?
8) Attempted generation of otherness in the writing process using certain procedures and prompts: perhaps this is performing text, or that is the outcome, but the unearthing of otherness or the "alterior selves" is an illusion. We cannot escape our histories, our (imposed) identities.
9) The problem of the found work: is Osman's argument dialectical or one-sided. In the end are found materials that use the language of mass media, appropriate these materials, doomed to perpetuate the schema of mass culture? Do they always necessarily add to the excess? Is being American one reason these images and tropes and procedures "attractive"? (Vecunia). Or are we able in some small way to investigate and deconstruct the spectacles around us by appropriating the languages that appropriate us every day? (No firm conclusion in class or in the reading...)
Showing posts with label performative poetics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label performative poetics. Show all posts
Friday, April 24, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
"David Wolach" Does Not Deserve This Poem, Whoever (S)He Is(n't)
POST-SCRIPT RE OTHERNESS:
Setting: EVERGREEN CLASSROOM
ME: "blah blah, otherness, blah blah..."
STUDENT: "try being a transgendered asian american in the northwestern woods and i'll show you otherness."
FIN
--------------
Upon returning from more healthcareful fun, I found in my inbox waiting for me a poem by Amy King, dedicated to me, which (my addition) is to say, us. This is neither the time nor place (do they exist here?) to perform an exegesis on Amy's poem. Rather, I was really touched, and the poem itself is beautiful - jagged, open lines that subtly torque the personal pronoun and gender such that the reader/writer/worker comes out, in such a careful (and politically fist pumping) way as (in trying to find the right way to describe it) this poetic acknowledgment of a "familiar other." From "What Is Is Not There":
I will fall for one woman
when his heart’s got the right circuits on board.
I till the fields till then.
For all the talk and writing and etc regarding torquing pronouns and obliteration (attempted) of the myth of the stability of selfhood, the tyranny of the subject treated as objective in poetry since god knows when, I think one only begins to find that this talk, so many books dedicated to voice, etc., are hitting on something not just politically important (libertarianism be damned!) but phenomenologically true when something happens such that the reading of it is supplemented by the getting it. Lately I've been discussing my illness with Amy, and Amy has been so deeply supportive and present as a human being that I've begun to come out of my shell regarding being sick. More importantly, I think it takes something - maybe not getting sick and having the body rebel on you, but maybe something strikingly mundane, like a simple thought fart about one's sense of self or lack thereof, to feel the otherness of oneself, thus helping one to acknowledge the importance of that otherness on another. Amy King's poetry does so many wonderful things, but what I often find most striking beyond the sheer [new] music is how her work plays with these multiplicities as up against normative notions of identification and nomination - the dangers of "the fit."
Just the thing I needed after a bad week. And who says people can't form connections online? Oh, I do. But you can certainly make those connections stronger via simple acts of human recognition. Human: there's a category I think I'll keep, self-identify with, at least for awhile.
Setting: EVERGREEN CLASSROOM
ME: "blah blah, otherness, blah blah..."
STUDENT: "try being a transgendered asian american in the northwestern woods and i'll show you otherness."
FIN
--------------
Upon returning from more healthcareful fun, I found in my inbox waiting for me a poem by Amy King, dedicated to me, which (my addition) is to say, us. This is neither the time nor place (do they exist here?) to perform an exegesis on Amy's poem. Rather, I was really touched, and the poem itself is beautiful - jagged, open lines that subtly torque the personal pronoun and gender such that the reader/writer/worker comes out, in such a careful (and politically fist pumping) way as (in trying to find the right way to describe it) this poetic acknowledgment of a "familiar other." From "What Is Is Not There":
I will fall for one woman
when his heart’s got the right circuits on board.
I till the fields till then.
For all the talk and writing and etc regarding torquing pronouns and obliteration (attempted) of the myth of the stability of selfhood, the tyranny of the subject treated as objective in poetry since god knows when, I think one only begins to find that this talk, so many books dedicated to voice, etc., are hitting on something not just politically important (libertarianism be damned!) but phenomenologically true when something happens such that the reading of it is supplemented by the getting it. Lately I've been discussing my illness with Amy, and Amy has been so deeply supportive and present as a human being that I've begun to come out of my shell regarding being sick. More importantly, I think it takes something - maybe not getting sick and having the body rebel on you, but maybe something strikingly mundane, like a simple thought fart about one's sense of self or lack thereof, to feel the otherness of oneself, thus helping one to acknowledge the importance of that otherness on another. Amy King's poetry does so many wonderful things, but what I often find most striking beyond the sheer [new] music is how her work plays with these multiplicities as up against normative notions of identification and nomination - the dangers of "the fit."
Just the thing I needed after a bad week. And who says people can't form connections online? Oh, I do. But you can certainly make those connections stronger via simple acts of human recognition. Human: there's a category I think I'll keep, self-identify with, at least for awhile.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
The Altered Book as Performing Text?
After Linh Dinh went to great lengths, for his journal, formatting a long excerpt of my altered book, Living Rooms, I've been thinking about the altered book as - beyond an artist's book - a performance of text. 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 bad" (reason 1) , "usefully outmoded," where "useful" here means "for appropriation, " (reason 2) or "aura" (reason 3) in the first place? The murderous retrofitting is also admittedly an erotic endeavor--this sort of impulse (or compulsion?) to mix somewhat violently. 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 what do I know?
What interested me this time--after doing a few book alterations already--was that the added use of machine meant that I turned otherness into otherness. Hell, after I wrote the program, and until I began to sculpt the thing, I simply pressed a button. 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 performance, I'd argue, albeit of a not-so-elaborate or public sort. So, the term can stretch in all sorts of ways, and definitions are not particularly interesting to me. Rather, 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 form. 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. I think this has to do with 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.... Hayles came out with another book.
So: more later - interested in thoughts. Meantime, from Linh Dinh's The Lower Half (thanks, Linh):
Excerpt w/o drawings & schematics [altered book: S. Weil, "Surgical Anatomy," 1901]
--------------------What interested me this time--after doing a few book alterations already--was that the added use of machine meant that I turned otherness into otherness. Hell, after I wrote the program, and until I began to sculpt the thing, I simply pressed a button. 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 performance, I'd argue, albeit of a not-so-elaborate or public sort. So, the term can stretch in all sorts of ways, and definitions are not particularly interesting to me. Rather, 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 form. 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. I think this has to do with 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.... Hayles came out with another book.
So: more later - interested in thoughts. Meantime, from Linh Dinh's The Lower Half (thanks, Linh):
Excerpt w/o drawings & schematics [altered book: S. Weil, "Surgical Anatomy," 1901]
(relaxation, amplitude >16mz)
we rind round the spines & gutters
of the ischia
“won’t go much deeper than”
line B
drawn from
the anus as is
line A
as are lines D
E
F etc
gerald stern?
billy collins?
loop of bowel?
3 different volumes of robert frost?
herniated groin?
necrotic striations at the right upper tibialus?
three thousand clams for 15 min “visit” w/o happy ending
“Demands lateral incisions!”
“Implies lateral promotions!”
“Suggestive of lateral sclerosis!”
“Definition is always a pity!”
go to the rack
go in the direction of the C D
the pelvic fascia
the M P 3 the inject-able dialec-table
gizmos
that aren’t
here
ad hering to
the base of the body
“The baseness of the body”
“The baseness of any body”
“The baseness of anybody”
enter orbital
house
or if thresh-
old keeps
questions & visions
make do
& like-
wise find no-
thing approxi-
mating barthian
bliss why is it that poetry is
at best
dialysis?
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