Power Point Performance, Prefab Eulogies

Drum Roll Means Call Them: Three Worst US-Based Companies Are...

Three U.S.-based companies—R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Chiquita Brands International andFresh Del Monte Produce—are among the top five companies named the worst companies in the world for “suppressing workers’ right to organize” by the International Labor Rights Forum.

Got comments? Post them at blog.aflcio.org.

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.

A Poem Is Nothing - Yesterday Plus a Chax Press Postcript

Many thanks to curator Will Owen and to the other participants in "An Opening Is Nothing: Spatial Poetry" a show that opened last night at Ver(a)Art Gallery, as part of the Vera Project, Seattle. I'll post more thorough thoughts regarding the work later in the week, but for now, I want to recommend experiencing the installed poetry, making use of multiple media, each piece both responding in some way to Laura Riding Jackson's notion of the ethics of, or through, nothing (description below) while also standing alone as unique group of concerns, questions, experiments. Nico Vassilakis's installations were beautiful and absorb(ing) on the level of phoneme, materials from which the alpha-numeric emerges. He also performed a pretty awesome piece of phonetic sound poetry, reminding me (anyhow) of Robert Kocik's prosody work (his phoneme choir). And Nico had also installed visual b/w analogs of the soundings, with stills on one wall and b/w alpha-numeric closeup visual poetry on video on another wall--the video screen itself was tiny and was placed inconspicuously on a far wall adjacent steps leading down to a main room. The placement of this work was indicative of the way in which Will and poets played with a really angular / odd space, did so in a way that seemed to challenge participants to pay attention to the corners and the shadows and the ceilings etc., because there might very well be a gem of a work of art hiding on you. Hiding, such as Bethany Ides's tree of sound poems I bumped into rounding a corner--a stark, foliage-challenged small tree, the branches of which each had a small earpiece that played various polyvocal sound poems--I need to find out what the text is, etc., as the work sounded at times like Koran-as-sung, i.e., as traditionally read, and at other points like Greek Orthodox chant. A very cool work.

And Jeff Derksen's continued work I saw for the first time. For much more on the following description, go to this Nonsite Collective link, which describes Jeff's Nonsite talk, which again I heard was really good. It's a combination of research, multi-media project, set of talks, on urban corporatization, the disappearing commons, 21st century empowerment zoning (read: company town making), and last night we got a sliver of it in the form of a very large projection of color stills of shanty-towns and zones of coerced, close-quarter urban living (read: dying), with didactic but also slantedly didactic bold statements in white type overlaying the images regarding forced labor, wage-laboring under neoliberalism etc--didn't catch all the statements because we had to perform soon after arrival (we all got lost getting to the venue). Really interesting work, however, as Jeff's work tends to be most often. Finally, James Yeary performed a piece with former student of mine, a poets theater work that as I mentioned to James felt Cagean to me, and that made use of all manner of materials--from sliced apples (which we were offered) to mixed sound work, mixed I think by James, to large sheets of paper with various words that seemed to call-respond to the soundtrack and that also seemed to give the two players parameters within which to "play," to perform the work, otherwise purposefully un-rehearsed, driven by chance. The piece was pretty awesome and needs analysis. I loved the ephemerality of it and the triumphalism with regard to how it treated playfulness as against function, message, etc. I use triumphalism here, oddly, as compliment. It's refreshing to hear a work that inspires free play (within a field of constraint) and that takes these behaviors as rightly important, perhaps vital, even necessary for survival.

Maledetto itself went OK, tho we'd come back to the piece after a long layoff (due to scheduling of the ensemble, break etc) and that showed: many flubs, especially by yours truly. Since we've only been working on this score since very late Sept, and since decoding the score is an undertaking prior even to full-fledged rehearsal, I can't complain about where we are. I think as we give ourselves three or four more months with the piece, rehearsing two times a week, we'll be able to take ownership of the work, be able to perform it without big hitches, and so eventually begin to play with it more, modulate it according to the space of the performance, our whims and desires, etc. I was a little pissed at myself for my performance of the work, but then James Yeary reminded me that Gaburo and Co. took 4 years rehearsing the work before touring. Of course at that time this was a new work, new to everyone including director/writer Gaburo. Yet it was a helpful reminder that this a piece that demands virtuosic speaking, and we certainly need a lot more time and luck with the thing before we get there. Only way to do that, of course, is to keep performing at venues such as the opening last night-- so we're happy to have been invited.

Again, many thanks to Will, those who helped with the show, and of course the participants and audience (also participants). Really nice to see everyone (rarely getting to Seattle), including the lovely Robert Mittenthal (his new Wax Works out of Chax: get it!), the aforementioned, Paige Clifton-Steele, Sarah Mangold... reminds me that I need to get to Seattle more often. Somehow make that happen.

POSTSCRIPT: Chax Press

Mentioned Chax above and below, with Robert Mittenthal's book coming out, and now after posting this just received the Chax newletter. FYI, and a good time to donate some small dollar amnt in order to see these books come to print. From Chax:

Community and innovation are our central threads, and the language we use to connect the Chax community to all our friends is both of the streets and land and of the highest spire. Our upcoming books, that you will help to print with your contribution, come from diverse voices: Nico Vassilakis, Will Alexander, Eileen Myles, Andrew Levy, Linh Dinh,Jennifer Bartlett, Robert Mittenthal, Maureen Owen, and others that together form a distinct, unreplicated corps of authors whose work needs to be present in our time. At Chax, we fill a need for work that challenges, thrills, and brings together our longtime readers and those new to our community.

To donate via paypal, go to http://chax.org/donate.htm
Or send a check to Chax Press, 411 N 7th Ave Ste 103, Tucson, AZ 85705


Charles Alexander, Executive Director
Chax Press

charles alexander

chax@theriver.com

Halpern's Oppen Memorial Lecture @ The Poetry Center SF

I understand that Rob Halpern's talk for the annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture was incredibly generative. Damn wish I'd been there. And I expect that many of you feel the same. There are, I'm sure, several good sites you can go to to get the down-low on the lecture, discussion after etc. Two I've come across that I'd highly recommend are XPoetics (good amount of excerpting of the talk and analysis) and Michael Cross's blog, The Disinhibitor (ditto). The excerpting alone is incredibly rich. Check out these analyses/descriptions of the evening via the links above. And as reminder, Cross (I think thru Atticus/Finch still?) will be publishing the collected Oppen Lectures book in the not-so-distant future.

See You Tomorrow: Gaburo Performance for the A Poem Is Nothing Show

Our ensemble will be performing Gaburo's Maledetto, along with short original works this Tuesday, as part of "An Opening Is Nothing," works of live, concrete, performative, and other poetries for the gallery. Curated by Will Owen.

Here's the announcement. Please do come to this event. We're honored to be working with such inventive poets.

An Opening Is Nothing

spatial poetry.

ver(a)rt gallery

3rd and Warren. N of Key Arena

Tuesday, December 14th from 6 to 8 PM. Performance at 7.

More Info

spatial poetry. @ver(a)rt gallery Please join us for the opening of A Poem Is Nothing, an irreducible poet show. Reacting to Laura Riding Jackson's endless returns to nothing as an ethic and an engine on the virge of, and wholeheartedly opposed to, social reality. For Jackson, nothing was the poem, opposed entirely to music and art, exploding out of an unreal self, unmaking the tools and words it finds along the way, only to be realized, regrettably, by tenacious acts of criticism. With this in mind, 4 poets were asked to show work to spatialize such a poetry of or from nothing. The show will feature performances by James Yeary, Nico Vassilakis, and a Gaburo Ensemble from Olympia (performing Lingua II: Maledetto;performers are David Wolach, Arun Chandra, Benjamin Michaelis, Clayton Norman, Julie Kimbrell, Sophie Gordon, and Elizabeth Williamson) The show features works by Bethany Ides (NY) Urban Subjects: Jeff Derksen, Sabine Bitter, Helmut Weber (Vancouver) Donato Mancini (Vancouver) Nico Vassilakis (Seattle)

Now we're cooking, says Frank from the pan

About time. Two differently insightful reviews of CA Conrad's The Book of Frank have appeared. One in HTML Giant. And another in my backyard--in Seattle's The Stranger. The latter gets right to it: noting that Wave Books has been "kicking ass" for the past several years. Indeed. While the HTLML Giant review, I think, meets Frank on its own terms (if that makes sense), reads the work for the subtlety that it carries as ethical and poetic burden, the latter is kind but offers a simplistic, reductive, heteronormative analysis of 2 paragraphs, using terms that seem to gong in self-refusal like "everyman" to describe Frank, and "person" to describe Frank, and, well... but, alas it's true that Wave certainly kicks, er, ass; and so too with this new steel-toed edition of TBOF, where "new edition" (Chax the other-ass-kicking publisher of the first book) is rather substantially different, not a term d'arte or some marketing ploy on the part of Wave--several new poems makes for a richer, and quite different, read. Perhaps this is so due to the narrative and nearly-narrative aspects of these poems (yes yes, they are far more than that, but). Not that the poems sum in any definable sense: The whole, as the parts do, transgress playground rules for nomenclature, care not about the latest craze in poetic convention--haiku and story often make love like dogs and people, authors and their devices--, and otherwise rebel in ways that would drive anyone who dislikes The Metamorphosis, Kafka's or Ovid's, a little nuts. But each acts on narrative in some way, whether as narrative or as something reminiscent of what we might call narrative, and so over time the various but always marginal Franks metamorphose into and through one another, and so when you put several more in the room or at the threshold, the whole kaleidoscope changes refractory output. So it's deeply worth getting both fistfuls of Franks. With two different editions now, one can see just how contrapuntal Frank is as set of "characters" and poems (socially, poetically, and politically)--where from one to the other Conrad's pressing down a few more keys here, a couple fewer there, thus making for an interesting difference in scoring and texture. Is it strange to think of the two different books as akin to movements in an opus, rather than as editions?

Anyway, I'll save it.

I try not to read these so as to write my own review of TBOF without parroting what I'd read elsewhere (why write the same thing twice--when you can do it seven times!), but I'm both incredibly slow (those who correspond with me know I take weeks to write back due to drafting/editing compulsions)* and yet I'm incredibly curious about these things that I love.

Goodbye.

* = then why don't you edit your blog posts? you ask. Because this is my notebook and I'm an exhibitionist.**

** = shifts in tense are usually on purpose; misspellings and unusual grammars such as subject-object displacements are mostly accidental.

Maximus Marathon in Portland

From co-host of this event, The Switch, a heads up. I hope to see you for some of the Maximus Marathon in Portland. THE SPARE ROOM COLLECTIVE, who graciously hosted me for a reading a while back, and which I've written on here quite often, is the other host. Several Wheelhouse contributors, PRESS participants, and other fantastic poets will be dancing with Olson's book book. Off to NY later in the week, so I'll likely be there the 14-15 of Jan. Anyway, announcement put out by The Spare Room and The Switch reproduced in part below. Head to either site for more, other, and current info.

On Friday, January 14th, The Switch is co-hosting the kickoff day, of a marathon reading of poet Charles Olson's Maximus. It is a three day event in Portland, to commemorate Olson's hundredth birthday.Friday, Jan. 14th

4:00 - 9:00 p.m.

Olson's Maximus Marathon, Day 1, Vol. 1

poets & artists to be announced

Here is the release about the marathon:

Dear friends,

On January 14th, 15th and 16th of 2011, in commemoration of his 100th birthday, the Spare Room Collective in Portland, Oregon, will host a three-day marathon reading of Charles Olson's book-length epic, The Maximus Poems. We will read Volume 1 on the 14th, the second volume (IV, V, VI) on the 15th, and Volume 3 on the 16th.

Olson centennial events and conferences have also been held this year in Vancouver, British Columbia; Gloucester, Massachusetts; and Buffalo, New York. Olson was a teacher at Black Mountain College, the experimental arts school which also counted John Cage, Robert Creeley, and Robert Rauschenberg among its teachers and students.

The readings will take place at the following times and locations:

Maximus Volume 1 @ Switchyard Studios Friday January 14th 4-9pm

IV, V, VI @ galleryHOMELAND Saturday January 15th 2-7pm

Volume 3 @ YU Contemporary Sunday January 16th 2-7pm

Readers include:

Jesse Morse, Jennifer Bartlett, Zachary Schomburg, Dan Raphael, Laura Feldman, Michael Weaver, James Yeary, David Abel, Alicia Cohen, Sam Lohmann, Jaye Harris, Donald Dunbar, John Hall, Susan Rankin, Rodney Koeneke, Endi Bogue Hartigan, Lisa Radon, Linda Austin, Tim DuRoche, Pat Hartigan, Mere Blankenship, Joseph Mains, Jamalieh Haley

Switchyard Studios

109 SE Salmon St

Tripwire Relaunched!

It's a pleasure for me to pass along information that Tripwire, founded by Yedda Morrison and David Buuck, is relaunching. Tripwire was, and now will be, an important, innovative poetics journal that ran until 2002. It arguably changed the landscape for small presses/journals in that the work and editorial foci always combined to break a lot of ground with regard to critical-creative intervention, rethinking what politically-engaged "essaying" and "aesthetic production" can amount to for a journal--and beyond. I heard a little rumbling last year that this might happen, and so now that it has, I'm sort of popping out of my shoes posting this. From David Buuck's blog, below, the announcement. Check out Tripwire on FB and like it.

Last, before you read the below: remember that Rob Halpern's giving the Poetry Center's George Oppen Memorial Lecture--so if in the bay area, or near it, do check it out (info a couple posts below this one).

Again, from Buuck's blog:

Tripwire is relaunching in 2011, with new issues, free downloads from back issues, and a new translation microgrant. Tripwire, a journal of poetics, was founded in 1998 by Yedda Morrison and David Buuck. Six issues were published between 1998-2002, with a special supplement published in September, 2004 for the RNC protests in New York. Please check the site for more info, becomeFB friends, check out the back issues & submission pages, purchase/donate, etc!

Passing: Cami Park

I'm extremely saddened to learn--from Reb Livingston's No Tell Motel blog--that talented writer & critic, Cami Park, has died. Cami's poetry, prose, and essays can be found in myriad places, including the current issue of Wheelhouse Magazine (one of her poems from the issue, our personal favorite, is reproduced below). She was simply one of the kindest people I've worked with. She was one of the first folks who supported me as I turned from performance to more sustained writing when I fell ill, encouraging me to contribute to Night Train (the first place my poetry appeared outside my own notebooks), at which time she was one of the poetry editors. And likewise she was an early cheerleader for Wheelhouse Magazine & Press. From what I've come to know this generosity, passion and care was not isolated to a few people, but is indicative of who Cami Park was. We at Wheelhouse send our condolences to Cami's friends and family.

Family Narrative by Cami Park There was food and we ate. When we were tired, we slept. We don’t remember anger or confusion, but sometimes, fear. The times we were thrown into the air and waited to be caught. I am these boxes and hands. Rainwater windowpanes Scattered capsules. The first thing they noticed when They landed was The horizon Precise in the distance An envelope ready to fold. The second The eyes of their hosts. Convex spoons reflecting nearby fires. Dark aquariums.

Galatea Resurrects, 15

Is out. And is large. And has some insightful reviews/explorations of some wonderful books of poetry, including Rachel Levitsky's Neighbor, Reb Livingston's God Damsel, and Cara Benson's (made). Check it out.

3 Upcoming Events: Halpern's Oppen Memorial Lecture, Belladonna, Scalapino Memorial

From XPoetics, so head over there for full info, dates, times, writeup etc.

It's killing me to be here when hearing news like this. Three of the events I am most stoked about (wow, that's an old school term; and to be stoked means to KNOW of it, of course) are upon us. Rob Halpern's been chosen to present for the George Oppen Memorial Lecture; the Hejinian and Harryman Belladonna book release party is happening (The Wide Road, an experimental parallel world, politically-inflected re-narration of Thelma and Louise...!); and the bay area Leslie Scalapino memorial, an evening of reading etc is too coming up. All within the next month or so. Up next, Rob on Sat:

Saturday, December 11th
2010 7:30 pm @ the Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin (at Geary), San Francisco, $10

Rob Halpern will be presenting the Poetry Center's George Oppen Memorial Lecture : "Becoming a Patient of History: George Oppen's Domesticity and the Relocation of Politics."

Just want to say that since Rob told me he was giving the Oppen Memorial Lecture, and with regard to "patiency" (see Rob's use of the term over at Nonsite Collective), I've been chomping at the bit to ask any of you out there near the Poetry Center to go and hear it, then report back to me--please? The term "becoming" in the talk's title adds a thickness that I love, as juxtaposed to (or otherwise tied up in) "history." Though he hasn't (yet) published as much as some whose names are synonymous with scholarship on Things Objectivism, it's widely known among Oppen scholars that Halpern's studies, poetically (Disaster Suites, Music for Porn) and critically, are deeply important to the quote end quote field (for lack of a better term). I remember Stephen Cope, Oppen scholar and editor of the Daybooks, saying to me that Rob's talk (not yet published) for the big Oppen conference a few years ago, made quite a splash--and the implications have rippled out since. A few weeks later various parts of it were being cited in some of the weekend's proceedings appearing after in various venues. So, dabbler that I am, I've been waiting for Rob to publish or otherwise make public some of his essays on Oppen and agency/patiency, Oppen on the middle-later WW, etc., essays that have changed the way we read Oppen's and WW's works, from the civil war poems to the civil war poems to OBN. Well: Go--record, bootleg! No, don't do that. But take notes, lots of notes, and let us know what we missed. What I missed while teaching large parts of OBN this semester at Evergreen. Would be helpful, you know?

Anyhow, I want to thank Robin Tremblay-McGaw, intrepid editor of XPoetics, for the triad of announcements. All three arrived in one package as email from the journal/blog, and all events three I wish I could attend.

Conrad's New Mercurial (Soma)tic Exercise

Speaking of communication (post below re Maledetto & semantics), CA Conrad's got a lovely complication to all that talk, the mercurial (soma)tic exercise now--just now--up on his blog. Check it out. Perform it.

Belladonna Specials

Belladonna specials abound... Help out the small presses and take a gander. For further details, visit Belladonna's website below. Yrs, in Fuck You Holiday Style, dw

We are extremely pleased to announce that The Wide Road is now immediately available for
pre-release purchase sold directly from the Belladonna* Studio.

Choose your cover and purchase your beautiful copy today!
http://belladonnaseries.org/books.html

ALL ORDERS ABOVE $30.00 RECEIVED THROUGH DECEMBER 15 WILL BE REIMBURSED FOR POSTAGE

Our Holiday Sale includes reimbursed postage for our year long SUBSCRIPTION:
http://belladonnaseries.org/subscriptions.html

And our AUCTION:
Two more weeks left to our online auction! Items are now set at a single low price! Please consider buying priceless art by Emilie Clark, Francie Shaw, Bill Mazza and Suzan Frecon! Become a member of the Feminist Press! Buy great books! Or theater tickets! Postage included!!!
http://belladonnaseries.org/auction.html

Rough Notes on Rick Burkhardt's (Excellent) Analysis of Maledetto

The Nonsense Company performing "Great Hymn of Thanksgiving"

For Maledetto recording excerpts, visit HERE.

In the past 20 hours since returning from seeing the family, two very different yet converging conceptual puzzles arrived in my inbox, so now chewing on: 1) how to think about a Jakobsonian analysis of one section of Occultations, "modular arterial cacophony," since a semiotics scholar emailed me with some questions pertaining to this text which he's using for said analysis, and 2) the performance- and other implications of Rick Burkhardt's astounding short analysis of Maledetto, which is available as pdf here.

One of our collaborative performance group members (Ben Michaelis) sent me the link to Rick's essay, which I'd seen a long time ago when I was writing on his group's, The Nonsense Company's own (wonderful) The Great Hymn of Thanksgiving, written by Burkhardt as Andy Grecivich pointed out to me in the comments, but inevitably totally forgot about it. The essay. That it existed.

E e/-----> EAT, as in:

Here's a Descriptive Level Quote. From Burkhardt:

Of the seven speakers, one (speaker A) delivers a comically protracted lecture, one (speaker B) furiously whispers nonsensical words and phrases (“inspired, wagtail, sweetmeat, tib, prancer, thing, bite, aphrodisian”) as if they were vile insults, one (speaker D) alternates between goading and drunken, incoherent ranting, sometimes shouting out disembodied transitional words like “But” and “Furthermore,” and the remaining four (speaker group C) form a “choir” that drones congregationally, murmurs, snickers, cheerleads, argues, and parties. It’s not always clear what they are all talking about, or if they’re talking about anything. But for the bulk of the piece, the main subject of discourse is the screw. (7)

I'll come back to this later.

1. Plane Realization

After reading the essay again, now in the midst of performing the work, I realized on the plane late last night that it's precisely what Maledetto does--or more precisely what it admits of, formally calls attention to, and what we do along with it--that exposes the deep lacks in Jakobson's structuralism, which in itself isn't particularly newsworthy. The realization, however, lends itself to the further realization that Maledetto, as one of the major works during a particularly important period in poetry, performance (-art), and music, torques questions central to identity, agency, and aesthetic production as having a social function(s). The work asks us to consider the social function(s) of art under (at this point neoliberal) capitalism, i.e., as situated within a coercive environment, perhaps determined by it. It does so by poking at what some of us mean when we make use of the term "meaning-making," and more specifically, when we use the term "meaning."

Maledetto so far is an under-studied work of praxis-driven art that challenges us to suspend any presumption that "meaning" needs be determined by what is said, let alone that meaning needs be (even) quasi-propositional, that meaning and saying are necessarily bound up with one another. The work is more than just a complication of medium and genre (music? theater? poetry?), but it is that. The performance of the work goes beyond the performative speech act, as the performative and the constative are arguably collapsed (score, especially for two of the speakers, is both a string of constatives regarding "to screw" and "the screw" and a performance, where the performance's lecture--speaker A--is just that, and taken to be so quite often, interestingly, by listeners/participants). Maledetto also arguably collapses or at least complicates the oft-made distinction between pragmatics and semantics, use versus meaning in language. Think: this is a work for "seven virtuoso speakers," where the "speaker," as a normative freely self-conscious entity who communicates via strings of useful propositions and other linguistic constructions, is challenged. Or as Gaburo writes for the work's inception:

LINGUA speaks out for language as my compositional concern and thus reflects the expression: Compositional Linguistics (i.e., language as music, and music as language). In this regard the range of LINGUA extends from nonverbal communication to structural linguistics (e.g., generative grammars). from explorations beyond concr6te poetry and text-setting (e.g., What is constituted by the expression minimal intelligibility?) to contextuality (e.g., the structure of a composition is looking at you), from sound for its own sake (e.g., the acoustical properties of language) to perception (e.g., What is constituted by the expression: observer?)

Speaking--in and through a performance of itself--is shown to be unnecessary for meaning-making, although how else linguistic items and other language enactments mean, I think, remains in question by the end of the work. And the degrees of freedom we have to re-imagine and behave otherwise viz the manufacture of meaning (agency), and (less interestingly) to make theories about making meaning, is left ambiguous at best. In this regard Maledetto is a rethinking of older musical arguments about the meaning and/or social function of pure music--the Schoenberg-Krenek correspondence during the 1920s-30s about what "musical meanings" are appear to be called up from the depths (See, Krenek's New Music and Old Objectivity, eg).

Bored yet? As in: screwed.

In its overall negative articulation as a "successful intervener" in normative ascriptions of agency (hence new ways of making meaning), or at least in its lack of (musical and extra-musical) resolution, Maledetto presences prosody, typography, and synaesthetic event (among other sensuous enactments of live human voice) as meaning-bearing and meaning-making. The saying or speaking moves from predominantly functional/rational to predominantly non-rational, though potentially differently functional. The movement is from sense to sound generally, where the movement is not quite linear but epicyclic, and so "speaking" in any normative way is backgrounded later in this score as something central to a potential future (or even present) aesthetic sound-text language, one that is importantly not static but malleable, always becoming. In this regard Maledetto flies by Wittgenstein and flies over semiotics on its way into, dare I say it, postmodern concerns.

nip. niggle. NEVERMIND.

But to what extent, and in what ways, does the work, as both Burkhardt and I agree it does somehow, intervene in existing social orders viz. meaning, and related, agency? Late capitalism and rationalism (functional analyticity)? Does Maledetto presume "meaning-making" by end to be inescapably ensnared by the residue of "saying" and the ectoplasm of rationality, or does the work detach more completely from the late capitalist mothership, "end" not at the point seven people playing entities are finished with the score, but with you, the audience (community of "speakers"), doing something with the final lines and all else--where a sort of aesthetic logic making use of prosody is, in some ways, still in its infancy? Is there a shadow text (even opus) here, one that's in-progress after the score-as-performed has been...performed? If so, stakes are high for poetry (aesthetic production) and generally for behaving and becoming.

To turn the screws. So he can tell me what I want to know.

A reading of Maledetto as using failure as internal and overall device--the apparent failure to definitively oppose meaning and rationality, on my reading--gives the work its forward propulsion, would mark the work as fully dialectical, in fact a more utopian work. Where, as so often in poetical works (cf Beckett's later plays), a dystopianism-as-enacted negatively articulates utopia: the work hopes to prompt us into thinking of counterfactuals, ways in which this aesthetic logic will not have failed. Into thinking of circumstances needed for this aesthetic language to rather "succeed" as (some sort of) intervention into normative ascriptions/assumptions/ sociopolitical and linguistic conventions. Conversely, if the work completes itself, fully sheds propositional language as a necessary condition for meaning, then we are left with nowhere else to go, nothing else (not much else, anyhow) to say. We have what we have when the two are decoupled (the normative definition from "meaning"). The work fails to some extent in its own logic's success.

2. If Music Means, Then What of Meaning Makes Performing?

Burkhardt's analysis, as a largely "formal" analysis of the score, makes for a nice contrast between older critical conventions and contemporary ones. Not that Maledetto is alone in what ostensibly gets counted as post-modernism--that'd be weird. And not, of course, that Maledetto's value is bound up in how or whether it undermines older paradigms in literary criticism. Yet, a serendipitous couple of emails/links. Hence I want to start my thinking about Burkhardt on Maledetto by thinking about structural and other semantic analyses of text--my blog post's (interesting to me, anyhow) foil and springboard for more Gaburo musings.

scaffold. GO:

| Jakobson, who I haven't really read since grad school, is no doubt incredibly important to any critical poetics, any poetics critical of Jakobson's work itself (and other modernist structural theories), from Lacan to Agamben to Silliman to Bergvall and so on. His work lends itself to a critique that retains some elements of the analysis, even if on instrumental grounds. Which is what I understand the scholar who emailed me is doing in constructing his own interesting critical framework for part of Occultations. |

In any case, Maledetto, Burkhardt immediately points out, also takes as its materials the problems of meaning. But now "meaning" is admitted to be much fuller (or anyway, messier) than a formal model like Jakobson's can fully articulate, i.e., becomes inextricably tied up with the social-political, where Jakobson's "context" can't be the box into which all that the social-political (the radical confrontation with prosody, for example) implies and acts on is put. All 7 entities in Maledetto--"virtuoso speakers"--are arguably performing several failures, which, I'll discuss a little below, enact the potential failures of Maledetto and aesthetic production generally: failures of rationality and also sensuous nonsense as meaning-bearing (or in Adorno's terms, "truth"-bearing), failures of late capitalism, and of an ability to know whether it is possible that any gesture (aesthetic and otherwise) can truly intervene in late capitalism, as I hinted at in an older post. The failure to intervene and the failure for non-normative devices to mean I take to be pointing out the socio-political lacks, now, under late capitalism, that would give us the conditions for these aesthetic alternatives to otherwise flourish. As Burkhardt shows, Maledetto nonetheless performs, through Speaker A (the lecturer on screws) and through the Chorus (Group C), failures of normative notions of meaning: taxonomic failure, the failure of localized sign-systems, of naming-as-understanding, of referentiality. These are insufficient terms for "meaning." But are they also unnecessary? Burkhardt's analysis gets down to brass tacks (pardon the pun), occurs with a level of admirable detail and attention to the musical semantics and politics of the work, does so in ways that inspired me to write on a finer level about this piece.

speaKKers are old skool. or: heteronormativity at its finest

What is interesting about Maledetto in relation to theories of meaning and of agency/subjecthood, and I think Burkhardt's analysis suggests this, is that the work acknowledges the problems of meaning-making within systems of (potentially total) coercion (on the tactical, strategic, and meta-linguistic levels), but doesn't then make the tactical leap to the parodic, the meta-poetic, or the fully found and re-framed seen in much contemporary poetry (and other artistic media). The parodic in contemporary poetries, e.g., has been seen as one way of responding in good faith to the totalizing effects of mass cultural economic processes, hoping to do something like intervene in language while yet taking seriously Watten's (among countless others') skepticism about agency and authorship in a constructed, coercive social environment. Maldetto, both visually as a score and audibly as performed, expresses an inventiveness of forms that can be said to be emancipatory of and resistant to mass cultural tropes while yet using some conventions--borrowing from topical/current discourses in a general economy for speaker lines, borrowing directly from the OED--that allow the work to be starkly deviant from normative communication (and aesthetic object) while yet obviously relevant to current social circumstance. Gaburo's scoring language has nonetheless, in fact, no precedent. Marginal notes are precisely ambiguous (parts of the performance, one might say), relied upon heavily, as are the shape of sections (or movements)--taking on S, C, R, E, and W shapes, as are typographical (and handwritten) differences denoting which speaker(s) is speaking and when. As a whole, Maledetto, as I mentioned in an older post, makes use of the screw as both metaphor and narrative device. From Burkhardt, the work's parts break down thus:

Of the seven speakers, one (speaker A) delivers a comically protracted lecture, one (speaker B) furiously whispers nonsensical words and phrases (“inspired, wagtail, sweetmeat, tib, prancer, thing, bite, aphrodisian”) as if they were vile insults, one (speaker D) alternates between goading and drunken, incoherent ranting, sometimes shouting out disembodied transitional words like “But” and “Furthermore,” and the remaining four (speaker group C) form a “choir” that drones congregationally, murmurs, snickers, cheerleads, argues, and parties. It’s not always clear what they are all talking about, or if they’re talking about anything. But for the bulk of the piece, the main subject of discourse is the screw. (7)

Still Bored? I mentioned I would cum back to this later.

The speaker-message-receiver taxonomic system of Jakobson (and other structuralists and semioticians similarly aligned) is perhaps so complicated by what Maledetto performs, e.g., that it's unsalvagible as theory. This specific failure isn't really my concern here either way, but is telling with regard to what we take an agent to be now, what we take ourselves to be capable of, and as artists. Certainly experimentalists in poetry have done similar to theory for a long time now, in countless ways and for countless reasons. But Maledetto specially suits us to ask what the terms "meaning" and "speaker" desire--speakers, especially of the "virtuoso" sort. Contra formal systems like Jakobson--no less "formal" of course--the "speaker-receiver" relationship, even updated or morphed after Barthes into a more contemporary semiotics, still desires for more, more failure. Recorded voices put through speakers can be virtuosic in ways Maledetto appears to demand. But the opus, notes composer William Brooks (who performed the work many times in the 70s) requires:

that seven voices be perfectly synchronized with respect to even the most transient phonemes, that the speed with which text is delivered be precisely monitored, that different voices begin and end exactly together despite different densities, that individual voices change instantly and convincingly between different characterizations on successive words, that the dynamic level of each voice in a complex texture be precisely regulated. (2)

And recorded voice can do this all day long. So Maledetto desires something more from speakers and meaning-making, or additional, or beyond, which gets us to ask how the work deals with meaning as itself lexical item--how one means and what other speakers think Maledetto means by meaning. William Brooks advances on this question by way of noting that any communicative act demands a kind of self-consciousness, where:

Being self-conscious... a collocutor (aSSSpeaker, perhaps) can stipulate classes of suitable interactions. Being a collocutor, such a collocutor requires that there be at least one other comparable collocutor; this Other, being comparable, can also stipulate. Being an observer, observing the Other, such a collocutor may stipulate that the Other is also an observer: then the Other, being an observer, may analogously stipulate that the collocutor (who is, for the Other, an Other) is an observer. Tempted by such convergence, such a collocutor may then stipulate a code: a language which he ascribes to the Other and which, preserving symmetry, he stipulates the Other to have ascribed to him.(4)

But not so fast. Here again there is something arguably Jakobsonian (or in any case deeply structuralist) about this: here "meanings" as part of a language, are stipulated. Which is to say that the organism--this one, say--is free to ascribe to self and other a code, with some symmetry in some way assured. But by whom? And for "natural" (read: evolving, everyday) languages? Or for aesthetic objects that take meaning making to be a kind of ongoing labor?

More on Brooks in a minute, as his analysis of the musical semantics of Gaburo is invaluable. But for now: Burkhardt complicates any notion we might have of the necessary conditions for meaning-making (in an object or meta language), and relies on Silliman's New Sentence to clarify how Gaburo's score operates as non-closural, how even A contains sets of lines that "need filling in" or that include "blanks" in ways that defy a prima facie coupling of meaning-rationality for this particular voice (critical discourse, cf poetry criticism, can take a cue here... finally?...). Related, in Conduit, Barrett Watten writes (in response to Jakobsonian systems):

Any ‘statement’ is blanked, negated, made into the form of an encompassing void — from the perspective of the reader, it indicates only the limits of the writer’s form, as incoherent and various as that might be. It is not by any means what he is ‘saying.’ Nothing can be compelled from the medium of the speaker except the outline of his form. (Conduit 9-10)

That is, communication simpliciter not only detaches signifier from signified quite often every day, sure, but the possibility for us to make linkages is narrowed every day too: communication is an alienated/ alienating experience, since "speaker," "message," and "receiver" are social constructions, constructed by interrelated systems of coercion, the form of the poetic work, at least for Watten, is necessarily "reduced" to the transmission of the coercive system's form within which that utterance was/is made. Narrowed indeed. So new tactical strategies need be tried. How Gaburo does this is my concern here and especially below.

3. Agent-See

Without a robust notion of agency, the Jakobsonian thesis, or anything like it, easily falls prey to a critique like Watten's, that it assumes a free agent in false consciousness so that "message" can match intention; and that, by doing so, it assumes that "speaker" and "receiver" are unitary beings with self-knowing intentions that issue forth "freely;" and that we are not only free to utter and receive utterances, but are not multiple, potentially fractured, constructed by various systems and politicized contexts, are not always a paradoxical and contradictory multitude, or as Gaburo himself beautifully puts it, "Each human [is] contrapuntal" (1973). In other words, assumptions about freely operating selves would have to be made at the expense of failing to acknowledge sociopolitical realities that even the smallest, most "removed" community of speakers--poets, say--are bound up in.

For Brooks the formal relations between A, B, Group C and D occur (largely, not wholly) as pairs. Where, for instance A marks the end of movements while D marks beginnings, hence an A/D complimentarity. Group C musically compliment A and D, too, however, since A and D are soloistic while C always behaves as chorus (round, fugue, etc). So since there are more than one pair of compliments, there are also binary opposites, also a kind of complimentarity (or dialectical opposites extra-musically). Besides complimentarity there is also suppression (A over C and so forth), and extraction (B emerging from A during duets). It's Brooks' fourth paring relation that Burkhardt and I are here most interested in: what Brooks calls the political evolution. (12-13)

Burkhardt quotes from one of my least favorite (to perform--I always screw it up) parts, showing how through years of research in the writing, Gaburo finds "kangaroo" "bounding" texts from a heteronomous market he can use for A's lecture and in the service of trying to surmount said market that, without A's knowledge, are fully laced with double entendre (from a medieval text on screws):

These pressing instruments are easy to work. They can be moved and put up any place we want, and there is no need in them for a long straight beam of a hard nature, and there is in them no hindrance from stiffness. They are free and press with a strong pressure, and the juices come out altogether, and we have to repeat the pressing again and again until no more juices are left in the pressed substance. [Gaburo p. 6]

Burkhardt points out the obvious double-entendre here, the sexual violence of these lines, especially as Group C echo them with overtly violent, oppressive whispers and chants--thus the feminism of the piece that I wrote about in an older post (a reading of the political thematics of the work). Burkhardt further notes via Silliman that much of Maledetto's lines, even A's apparently absurdly rational dronings, are maximized for torque, e.g., at very beginning where the first spoken lines begin without an operator: "Screw is..." as opposed to "THE screw is..." Other conventions, especially polyvocalism, interruption, and tempo, the auctioneer-like speed (denoted by words per minute) at particular points, turn sense into sound in ways that only by mentally doubling back (as audience) can one re-construct what had just been heard as meaning-bearing. And, perhaps most prevalent, use of unusual pauses and (often) resultant syncopation, make for increased ambiguities. You dear listeners, are active makers--Speakers E-Z and again 1-?...

4. Meaning Penned In

All in all, argues Burkhardt, Gaburo masterfully makes use of both poetic and musical conventions (the fugue, but torqued, or the round, but not fully rounded, eg) such that the work starts out with the familiar premise that rationality = meaning, and ends dialectically with the two not only decoupled, but turned into binary opposites. Meaning versus rationality. It's Group C, the "dark underbelly of rationality" (see, for example, lines quoted in Burkhardt, 3), along with D (a sort of drunken goading of A), who as entities chip away at A's lecture (as does A herself by way of simply going on and on absurdly), such that the aforementioned are experienced as enacting something significant, important, weighty even as emitting sensuous nonsense. These lines feel meaningful, notes Burkhardt. All while the latter, A, ends up neutralized, exposed as oppressively irrational in her rationality. Late capitalism seems to kill itself off in the last part of the lecture, where screw-making and delivering processes are detailed, wherein the screw is continually made obsolete along with its makers by the invention of "new screw types." A nearly realizes this best kept secret failure, then quickly recovers. As I mentioned to my collaborators when we first started working the score, this piece feels like, in many ways, a sensuous, abstracted enactment of Federici's analysis of early modern capitalism in Caliban and the Witch, where initial landgrabs and expropriation of the laboring body are needed to keep an unlivable and inevitably failing system going.

Ultimately, for anyone interested in Gaburo's work, or work by composers during a wildly diverse period of American experimentation in cross-genre and cross-media art--late 60s through the late 70s--Burkhardt's essay is essential. I have very little to disagree with here, save for how Burkhardt interprets the "end" of Maledetto, which, though the disagreement is a matter of degree, the degree to which meaning and rationality as decoupled are now redefined as opposites, the different stresses on how the work shakes out has a lot to do with what we take "agency" to amount to in light of Gaburo's work, and coming into it. Not surprisingly, part of the difference in reading also has to do with how one treats Gaburo's use of lineation in this particular part of scoring. Burkhardt quotes from the last lines of the work, as put by D very slowly (40-19 wpm ritardando, the slowest the score gets), and so thus:

If we:

dipped rather deep.

rather dipped deep.

deep rather dipped.

dipped deep rather.

deep dipped rather.

rather deep dipped. [p. 26]

Burkhardt points out that D in her goading of A is interruptive, combative, and (I'd say further) nearly representative of the poetic, the non-linear, the emotive lines with gaps to be filled in and with the floating connector words is the marginalized voice of anti-rationality, or in any case anti-rational in the sense that A is rational, where the rational here is clearly (on my reading) the language of late capitalism, where words mean what they say, mean in the saying, and to the extent that they are useful as utterances. D is trying out different ways not only to interrupt but to "sound," to make meaning in a new language, which amounts to trying to detach from existing social orders and make way for a new social order, one where contra Hegel, rationality gives way to art, or aesthetic logics of some sort. Burkardt argues that these last lines suggest that here, by end, D

...takes a coherent thought (or half of one) and applies a clear, audible, rational procedure to it, permuting three words until all six possible orderings have been heard. The procedure, clearer than the matrix of words that results, seems to comment on all the prior “rationality,” its glossiness, its arbitrariness; the words themselves perform a balancing act on the edge of meaning, never to attain any particular meaning, but never to escape its aura — these words, unlike most of Speaker D’s (and in a different way, unlike most of Speaker A’s) feel like they mean something. The piece ends with meaning and rationality thus redefined: as opposites. (8)

This is an elegant argument and not one that I wholeheartedly disagree with. But I do think the shape of the text is indicative of a further ambiguity that for me suggests Gaburo's writing into the score the potential of its own failure to intervene, specifically an inability for the liquidated subject (Adorno) to do anything much more than reactively and mimetically riff off A, and that further, the only way for alternative (aesthetic) languages to mean if for there to exist the social-political conditions (room) to support them. Because the piece as scored is not clustered as paragraph, Burkhardt's shorthand (and I think he's written it out this way because there is no great way to keep fidelity to the actual score). But the lines here look more like this:

dipped rather deep.

rather dipped deep.

deep rather dipped.

dipped deep rather.

deep dipped rather.

rather deep dipped.

A subtle enough difference, but that the center of the group is the couplet and that the "stanzas" diminish by one line per I take to be significant. Not just because it adds the regular prosodic pausing of the lineated poem read aloud. Too, I take the "end" here to be deeply ambiguous in relation to the rest of the work. On one reading, these last lines represent an ending in that, as per Burkhardt's observation, all the permutations of "deep," "rather," and "dipped" have been tried, the possibilities have been exhausted. Nowhere else to go, D can do what D is capable of, to perform a critique at the edge of meaning of all the "glossiness" and "arbitrariness"of the rationality that's come before it. This is either a minor success (as witness to history) or a deep failure (the art can only take the form it's given by a coercive environment a la Watten). That is, this holds if the last lines here mark the end of the work, and the work is considered in a kind of isolation of its real-time performance, away from people and conditions that may not be ideal for supporting D's paralogic, but it's at least something.

I do think at this point, and probably quite a bit sooner, that rationality and meaning have been decoupled, i.e., that rationality as necessary condition for meaning (rationality: strings of propositions that follow one another logically, well formed formulas, or otherwise normatively defined functional enactments of language) has been shown to be deeply problematic if not false. But I'm less convinced that a dialectic has been completed, that meaning and now rationality are now opposed. I'd take Burkhard'ts feels like further: if D's lines here feel like they mean, then they are somehow meaning--what they need is some sort of life support. Because "meaning" here is still in question, i.e., we still have very little to go on--D's just now broken away with repetition, lineation, and prosody presenced. What does it take to mean with these terms for which we, especially in the west, have very little interpretational vocabulary? How do we "make" meanings in ways other than normative theories or assumptions have allowed for? How can we make meanings within such a circumscribed, narrow field of mobility, where D, A's frenemy, is "given" so little to permute? Or is this field of mobility as narrow as it appears? Certainly there's little room here, but how little? The small amount of room afforded D before the work closes (or appears to close) heightens the paradoxical line of questioning, and in this regard, my reading and Burkhardt's are quite similar. Only, now decoupled from rationality, "meaning" becomes a floater--becomes sheer possibility within a narrow field of constraint. Were meaning and rationality opposites here by the end, we could say that by definition what means X, where X is defined against the definition of rationality instanced by the score. On that reading, we have very little room indeed--the work ends where it ends on the page, and, arguably, with it, linguistic and social possibility.

On one level, this last part of Maledetto serves, I think, to ask through iterations of its performance, whether the work, and by relation any aesthetic object, can intervene in existing social orders that are so thoroughly coercive (the larger linguistic context in which Maledetto gets performed). So while Maledetto as a whole presences the possibility for meaning to be awash in only the residue of rationality's aura, the fact that these last lines are written out in "stanzas," where the couplet is the midline, introduces an ambiguity: is D "finished"? Is she given so little space within which to essay new social relationships, a new language, having 6 permutations to work with over and again? Or is the line and stanza also given weight as variation such that we can imagine D not yet finished or "done" permuting? The shape of these lines in stanza (a typically "poetic" form) suggests the possibility that D is in mid-stride, that she's got more stanza variations to go, that we've just now driven through the gates of an alternative meaning-making ecosystem, despite having only 6 permutations of word order to work with. What we do to support this fragile ecosystem, or how we treat its emergence, becomes another long (the fifth) long, active silence in the work. Only now instead of A picking up from that silence, audience must somehow do so. Whether it be in the language of A or otherwise is up to us. And this is indicated, I think, by the ambiguity of just how little or how much room D has (we have) to move within a system that is, overall, coercive, a language that's pervasive and that we can't help but in some sense parrot.

So the possibility for that double reading is, I think, another torquing, affords for another filling in moment for the audience, or, more precisely, the reader-worker. Getting back to Brooks' figuring that what, in part, binds the music, poetry, and theater codes of Maledetto together is pairs of pairs, specifically getting back to Brooks' "political evolution" relation, Gaburo arguably closes the work as it begins, with just such a pairing. Or as Brooks writes:

The hiss is a constituent of MUSIC (articulated quietly, contrapuntally, beautifully), and also a constituent of ENGLISH (the first phoneme of the keyword). Both ways, it contributes to a logic: it’s the first of four constituents, the key-phonemes /s, k, r, u/, which punctuate the whole and which all but A articulate; proceeding from unvoiced to voiced by way of plosive and semi-vowel, these four suggest a scenario: in Maledetto, B, C, and D gradually acquire a voice, establishing parity with A only at the end. Yet another relation, then: political evolution. (13)

There's both a not enoughness and a what's nextness to the end that as I read it has a sort of paragone quality to it--the possibility for two equally justifiable readings that are at odds with one another (so, in Brooks' terms, the political relation is paired, too, with a compliment by opposites relation). Hence, while rationality is decoupled from meaning, the dialectic unlike a Hegelian dialectic isn't complete, can't be if meanings are made as well as given. The tug and pull of making and inheriting haunts the work. To what extent is this reading of Maledetto, e.g., compromised by a sort of pernicious mediation, a coercion that obliterates not just agency as so often construed, but even an agency of interactivity, reactionism, or patiency (to name a few more deeply considered ways poets have thought about and written on what agency means absent older, insufficient claims for unitary being, freedom to do and to say, and the like, ways that would allow for setting the conditions for a new resistance)? Well, depends on which fork in the road--which of the pair of readings--one chooses to act on. Where, paradoxically, the question of choice falls back on Maledetto, on we who perform it, leaving us finally with questions not only about interpretation, but whether the work itself--or any work--can break away from the shorn predicament of pernicious normativity, coercion. Where that small but significant question heard lately in poetics forms this works wake: if we have yet to pick up where D ends, to, in other words, "try out new behaviors" as poet Robert Kocik has aptly written, then how could we know what the score or the poem, what we, as becoming subjects are even capable of? To take that question as challenge (as Kocik does) is to try setting the conditions for the flourishing of Maledetto, among myriad other potential and deeply necessary meaning-making ecosystems so far excluded by late capitalist instrumentalisms.

*William Brooks, Competenza Maledetta (1980), loaned, from Arun Chandra

**just found out that poet Holly Melgard is writing on Gaburo's work now, very exciting given how little is written, or at least published!