The Future of Working

Yesterday I read Juliana Spahr's thoughtful blog post/talk (and loving challenge to each of us), "The Future of Writing," on the increased privatization of poetry landscapes, many she has helped build and nurture, landscapes that are made up of readings of various stripes, conferences, presses, collaborations, ephemera, political engagements, friendships, books, blogs, coteries, various and varying commodity forms and institutional systems of patronage--an increasingly virtual landscape made up of what Spahr aptly calls "psychosocialsexual poetry scenes." Not that I necessarily experience poetry communities this way, but the potential for things to feel or become increasingly privatized, notes Spahr, is out there. And for Spahr, who has done a lot more poetic traveling than I, does feel an increasing fragmentation and dispersal...READ THE REST HERE.

Catching Trains 2: After Blindness

That part of us
That has no name

Is who we are.

*

After the dogs
Take over.

After the dogs
Have taken shelter
Inside our skin.
Inside our skin, they eat

A vaulted darkness.
The roof is smooth, the
Marrow inside bones
A stucco arch.


The dogs they say
Can smell the after

--Math of crisis.

*

Sacks hang light
What lanterns
That we are

And are read from.

The grammar of death
Makes our names

Turn pink
In snowdrifts  [I didn't do nothing. I watched hir hang from the stars. I watched them hoist hir up. I sat on the steps of the old railyard where in the time of other wars

a Wobblie lay draped like a rag. A book says he had his throat slit there, and that the cause was. Infectious

For us.]

*

(No huddled
Forms us.)

*

Xe is powerlines someone said. Xe is the undertow of the Detroit. After this time of dogs I will walk to the river for you. But not nothing. A necessary condition of doing nothing

is the realization of utopia.

*

Who would have known
The rain would make us

Weep, wander into dead
Streets, into dead
Houses, into washed

Hands.

The pulse they say
Has no heat. "Come in. Come in!  This is your home now! Come in. Come. I can hear the dogs. They're getting closer. I can hear them in the absence of cars. In the mono-rail's function as a wrecking ball. I can hear them in cyclone fences. I can hear them on the news. In the groundwater. Come."

Notes from Wisconsin's Streets @ Montevidayo

A really uplifting dispatch from Wisconsin by Brenda Cardenas. After you go to the AFL-CIO or the Working Families Party and hook into the nationwide rallies and/or petitions, check out the rest of this piece. From Cardenas (at Montevidayo):

"In the past several weeks, I’ve made about six trips to the Madison Capitol to protest Walker’s “budget dis-repair bill” and biennial budget. On the first trip, I found myself among 10 or 15,000 others. By day three, the crowd had swelled to 30,000 who were flooding the elevators, hallways, and stairwells to the third floor, trying to out shout any possible Senate vote when, in a surreal moment, thousands of “Shhhhh’s” flew across the rotunda like a flock of swallows. Then the news that the 14 Democrats had fled the state to prohibit the corrupt vote. The roar that followed erupted louder than any I’ve ever heard at any concert or sporting event, even those filling stadiums, perhaps because it was a desperate roar, one born of ransacked hopes and hearts." 

Catching Trains

It is horrendous, this world's condition of dying. Loss of life is the most arduous vista of pain. Let us honor Akilah's life and legacy, and honor her advance toward death as "a field of investigation" by writing a poem....While on your back fold your fingers with fingertips pressing into your chest, this way you conduct the flow of energy back inside you. Occasionally PRESS your fingertips deeper into your chest to better sense your recycled circuitry.... Let the poems and music become an entirely new PLACE you go to. When the CD ends light a candle. WRITE THESE PARTICULAR NOTES BY CANDLELIGHT ONLY!... Notes about death, notes about living with death, notes about the topography of grief, of darkness, isolation, forgiveness, and what it means to give and receive mercy. For the next week keep your notes on you at all times. Walk everywhere with them and BE READY to add to them, or to begin PULLING them and kneading them into a poem, a poem you write for the living who are dying everyday. And STOP sleeping so much! We sleep TOO MUCH!  --- CAConrad, excerpted from Akilah's Legacy, (Soma)tic # 55


This body is constructing a plexiglass box, 8 by 5, that it can get into via a hatch n lock system above, needs knock to be let out of. I've been told there is a magician who is named Chris Angel and that he is a "Mind Freak." A  student said to me that this Chris Angel places himself in suchlike contraptions. And people stare in awe at how he is able to fit into these spaces, how he can endure the cramped extremes of his own doing for so long. Ok, I said, but I was taking the construction of this box--sitting in the middle of my office/bedroom in lying sheets--as a place of banality, making visible the sort of enclosures we're married to most of the time. A place from which to write and a place to stare out of. Suspicion of blind-spots to the cube I inhabit. I will move at the end of the month into a house the bank has owned for two generations. Some enclosures are larger, where  still we perform invisible, intimate, virtuosic, acts of production--like organelles, say, for a nervous system guarded by board members. What's magical about living in a box? Maybe a lot, if the question is what COULD be magical about living in a box? 


I am from the midwest. 


The Amtrak station has not been 
what it names for a long time 
now. It's a clenched limb, monumental cut in the horizon for the sky that breathes. [A gag system also, that sings. The throat of grief. And me pissing in a bucket projected silently on a screen behind the live me pissing in a bucket. I say to E that public incontinence is as rare as public grieving. It's not a matter of who will strain for you, but who will strain with you. Of a once-was. In an is-shape. Post-industrial tape choking off air as it wraps the gullet is also love. "Why?" "The sound is tremendous. Shared and tormented the wind and the skin cohere, so we collect and backlight  the voices 


resolve. This restoration of our electrical current. We will each have mended spines at least once."] A deco foot trapped in a boot of fences. 


One time playing postwar there an Israeli named Zvi fell thru the rotted floorboard to the mezzanine. He didn't die. But it was dark inside, and that fantastic echo, and magic really could steal your fears. 

Thank you Robin Tremblay-McGaw!

It certainly would have been great, during my visit to the Bay, to catch up with poet-essayist-fine coffee brewer Robin Tremblay-McGaw. But our paths didn't cross. Blame capitalism. More specifically, Right to Work (not write to work) laws like those being forced down the gullets of working people in the midwest right now. Work getting in the way. No matter how much one enjoys one's job (a rarity, but I suspect we both do), it still sucks that our lives become so truncated and often desperate... Anyway...Then, oh, yesterday I believe, I wake up to see Robin's written a mini-exegesis on Occultations, quoted from it, and overall had some deeply giving and insightful things to say (again, the question of writing publicly thru doubt, and in common, comes up--writing under constant, common yet also commonly illusory pressures--the forms that make our bodies legible as such, and conversely, and that shape, then, the form our conversations take, and conversely...).

I'm touched by Robin's gesture--a public, extimate "missing" of a friend. And yet I'm not surprised. Robin is in a constant state, it seems to me (at least within the circumstances of our friendship, teaching at Bard College L&T together and us responding to one another via blog, email, etc.) of giving her energies over to others in ways that call up for me the term "care." She's looked after me quite a bit at Bard (I'm comparatively a mess, of course), me hearing the constant and important friendly refrain: "how many coffees HAVE you had today?" She's got a calming presence, one that draws folks together. And then puncturing them with her exciting poetry and prose during readings. Carrot and stick, eh?! This calm giving comes thru in her really wonderful close readings and honest attention to peers' work, or to readings by folks who blow thru town and that she's managed to catch. At SPT. At 21 Grand. Wherever. XPoetics being one of the blogs I go to for close, careful readings that also revel in their own subjectivity, the results often startling, encouraging us, for instance, to go back to familiar texts and re-create them, let them dance with McGaw's wreading. Which, by the way, she outlines rather beautifully over at Bard L&T's new blog, a fantastic post about cross-wiring of reading-writing, the altered state one enters when writing thru X rather than simply and only talking about X, etc, hooking these suggestive ideas up to non-normative notions of community. Anyway, the blog does its thing, like Robin, without pomp, without banging around. I hope very much to see her next time we're in the same town. Meanwhile, I thank her for the shout-out!

Another Box Link for Your Sock Drawer

Distraction Zone Staging for Hospitals and Clinics ("Room" transliterated for Occultations, now part of the performance pieces for Hospitalogy--the two "books" were at one point to exist together as one). This work is part of a multi-media performance (audio composition with live voice and video projection) that  was initially commissioned for The Electroacoustic Music Festival, Olympia WA 2011. The audio here is still unfinished (see note below).  This is the 2nd in a series of electroacoustic pieces that translates extant text for performance, both so far translating parts of the section "modular arterial cacophony," which is to say that they are really one piece in two movements, each designed for a different site (the whispered text carries over and is finished in this piece). Said found text was published as watermarked pages in Occultations a few months ago, with new print-run/edition out soon. The other "movement" is available here as link under "Selected Sound and Video Poetry Online" and is called "Wave." Eff Why I.

Note: really the only way for the piece to be as grating and grungey as it would sound, say, with huge theater speakers, would be to listen via headphones. Or so I've come to experience it anyhow.

Details/Specs: 4-Channel Composition using statistical recursion software and decay modulation using manual reverbing (one recording is played back into a microphone, then again, and so forth, four times). All manipulated sounds aside from the voiced text source from recording the inside of the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) Machine during test (of brain and cervical spine). Recording from 2006. Ambient noise (what may sound like static) comes from the ambient sounds of the room--tech voices, footsteps, body moving/adjusting near the machine, etc. This work is still in draft form: each layer still needs be filtered more so that the original recording (necessarily low quality) can be maximized for high quality resolution speakers.

Video components include a "silent shadow" of the live actions: a live reading during slow compression of the neck by use of ducked tape that is wound round the throat and cervical spine as subject lies on folding table. The live voice's capacity for projection is thus suppressed until it is no longer audible over the recorded layers. Video projects same, but inside the room I did not leave for 2 months, save to go to work, and once to a reading. I was thinking about neoliberal enclosure enclosures: the enclosures that we build within neoliberal enclosures, recapitulation, miniature zones of constriction that pass as entertainment and domicile. Or something.

***

In other news, I got to hear a helluva concert this evening, despite my sadness of not being able to head to NY this week--still feeling poorly, so glad I made the "right" choice, but still. The concert was darn good distraction from that disappointment tho. I read some work with E, participatory, fun to have use of the experimental theater and be with lovely (and deeply exciting!) composers. We, poetic interlopers! Stephane Brun has gone to our ensemble's rehearsals while in town, has been so kind and helpful in critique--such a lovely person. Check out his work in performing arts (out of Chicago, Urbana, where for years now some of the more exciting cybernetic composition and other performing arts collaborating has been going on--a quick google of his work aught to be well worth it). I'll write a "review" (debrief/overview) of the evening's guest composers' work in another post. But for now just to say the evening was great and that the ensemble I work with, their stuff I thoroughly enjoyed (was nice this week to be more on the periphery, more audience to the art-making). I liked how poetry met musical composition tonight, rarer from the "music side" of things than one would imagine (these folks from Urbana, like those out of Madison and elsewhere, many involved in The School for Designing Society and The Nonsense Company respectively, these folks are rather special in that their interests are wide-open, their aesthetic production isn't interested in categories or commodity, and their enthusiasm for collaboration is infectious). New work from Arun Chandra was fantastic, first time I've heard this new piece he's been working on. But of all the work put forth by our ensemble (again, more on the other composers' work later), I have to say that the highlight for me was a "Cagean" work by Ben Michaelis and Molly McDermott, Ben an Evergreen alum and Molly a current student. They performed a work for kitchen utensils, metallic beads, calculator, keys, water, and voice--that had me (oddly) fist-pumping. The score itself is pretty gorgeous, so I'm hoping to borrow it to scan it in here at a later date. It was/is, perhaps, the most astonishingly fresh piece of the evening. And of course I had to read poetry right after them!

Quite tired, long day, but glad I was dragged out for a bit to hear new work tonight. But now... now I can't sleep. 4:08am. G'night.

NONSITE || "Common/Ground" Town Hall Discussion

The Nonsite Collective invites you to participate in a Town Hall discussion at SF Camerawork on Thursday, March 3, from 6-8pm. We will explore the implications of San Francisco's Sit/Lie ordinance, Prop L, and plan a city-wide day of action in March in which we will incorporate our cameras and our words towards reversing Prop L. 

Common/Ground is part of Nonsite's ongoing residency COMMON/USE, throughout the duration of SF Camerawork's show, As Yet Untitled, (running January - April, 2011). 

Thursday, March 3, 6-8 pm, in the SF Camerawork gallery
657 Mission St, 2nd floor, San Francisco
www.sfcamerawork.org Nonsite's Common/Use events:
http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/993

The Space of Doubt @ Mrs. Maybe

My sincere thanks to very fine poet Lauren Levin--who I found out my first time in the Bay went to school with E!!--for her kind and thoughtful blog post on the SPT reading I was part of last week. Levin interestingly identifies connections by way of doubt and its public spaces, to assert doubt performatively. I'm quite taken by those connections/questions and their counter-assertions, as they seem to clear up some of my fuzzy thinking (while also complicating it quite a bit) regarding the emergent "themes" of the evening (a few posts below). Any case, check it out.  And do check out the forth. Mrs. Maybe (Levin's mag), which will feature Lara Durback's work, among that by many others.

What is Electroacoustic Music? It's Not the CD of Rain Falling You Use to Fall Asleep...

If in or around the Olympia area, please join us for this special engagement, curated by Michaud Savage and Ben Kamen. I can't say that the work I'll be performing will be mind-blowing (eh, finishing it momentarily), but small works by others from our Performance Research Ensemble are really shaping up and quite excellent. And, of course, the other composers who will perform new compositions tomorrow eve are, well, always rather mind-blowing. I've had the rare pleasure of hearing Truax's riverrun in one of the few area theaters equipped to play full surround 8-channel compositions, and I can remember that experience like it was tomorrow...

The announcement:

May I have your attention please!

"Electroacoustic" is a broad term referring to music resulting from the manipulation of recorded or generated sound, emanating from loudspeakers, without an obvious human performer. Electroacoustic music is rooted in the mid-20th century, particularly in the work of two groups of composers, Musique concrète in Paris and elektronische Musik in Cologne .

Wednesday, March 2nd, Students for Contemporary and New Music present a collection of performances from Ben Kamen, The Performance Research Ensemble, Jenny Magnus, Arun Chandra, and Barry Truax. This evening of electronic, acoustic, and electroacoustic performances begins at 7 in COM 110, presented to you by Students for Contemporary and New Music.

Barry Truax is a Professor in both the School of Communication and (formerly) the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University where he teaches courses in acoustic communication and electroacoustic composition, specializing in soundscape composition. He has worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and has published a book Acoustic Communication dealing with all aspects of sound and technology. As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system which he has used for tape solo works and those which combine tape with live performers or computer graphics. A selection of these pieces may be heard on the recording Sequence of Earlier Heaven, and the Compact Discs Digital Soundscapes, Pacific Rim, Song of Songs, Inside, Islands, and Twin Souls, all on the Cambridge Street Records label, as well as the double CD of the opera Powers of Two and the latest CD, Spirit Journies. In 1991 his work, Riverrun, was awarded the Magisterium at the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, France, a category open only to electroacoustic composers of 20 or more years experience. He is also the recipient of one of the 1999 Awards for Teaching Excellence at Simon Fraser University . Barry is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre and a founding member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community and the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.

Jenny Magnus is a Chicago-based performer, writer, director, producer and teacher. Founding member of the Maestro Subgum and the Whole, Magnus' voice is front and center on just released, Songs From Shows. Magnus has contributed to cultural life in Chicago for 25 years as a founding member of The Curious Theatre Branch. Magnus produces her original work, produces and contributes to the annual Rhino Theater Festival, and tours her work internationally. She has performed recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art , teaches performance and writing at Columbia College Chicago, the School of the Art Institute, and many other schools.

The Performance Research Ensemble is a loose amalgamation of students, faculty, and community members. Our collective work began in Fall 2010 with several performances of Kenneth Gaburo's Maledetto, and has continued this season with compositions based on David Wolach's Occultations. Group members for tonight's performance are: Arun Chandra, Terra Glick, Molly McDermott, Ben Michaelis, Clayton Norman, Willy Smart, Elizabeth Williamson and David Wolach.


Arun Chandra and Ben Kamen are both music faculty at Evergreen.

There is no charge to attend the event.

Best,
Michaud Savage

Poetry in THE NEWSPAPER!

Despite the hostile corporate takeovers that have led to layoffs, mergers, and bad news -- the plague that has swept thru just about every locality in this country--there is something still alive in the newspaper trade (and it ain't my laid-off grandpa). It is what comes from the hard work of editors such as B.T. Shaw, who, rather miraculously, is the POETRY editor of the Oregon daily The Oregonian. And a talented poet I might add. I sent her some poems awhile back, after both of us read with Rachel Zolf for the Tangent Series, and this weekend she featured a poem from Hospitalogy. I've grown to understand how hard-working B.T. is in holding down the fort and providing a space for new poetry in a daily paper. My thanks to B.T. and the rest of the poetry staff for printing the piece and also providing it online--do look at past contributors' work, diverse work from poets in the Northwest and beyond.

Video of Hedreen Gallery Reading & Talk

Wow, my deepest thanks to Summer Robinson, curator, poet, and owner of the landmark Pilot Books in Seattle, for shooting this video of the reading and talk I gave for Seattle University's Free Lunch Series (curated by Will Owen). The poems: one each from Occultations and Hospitalogy, both in conversation with two writers I admire greatly: Robert Kocik (his work on commoning) and Laura Elrick (her video poem Stalk). The reading and talk was for the anniversary of the Seattle General Strike. The video is beautiful and makes my work palatable! If you perchance are blowing thru Seattle, go to Pilot Books. You'll be amazed, drooling, and leave with weird little poetry books.

Also:

Here's another link to the Seattle University Hedreen Gallery reading & talk I gave as part of Hedreen's Free Lunch Series, audio upload and hosting courtesy of Greg Bem, a poet whose work I really admire, now in Seattle, and prior, a member of The New Philadelphia Poets. Many thanks to Will Owen & Co. for the curation, to The Hedreen curators Whitney Ford and Jessica Powers, to Summer Robinson of Pilot Books who taped the event, and to those who turned out and participated. 

The discussion was really productive for me. In fact, it helped solidify my conviction, given the interest and suggestions, to send out a call for ideas soon about forming a coalition of laboring poets/poetry curators and others, committed to labor organizing in some way--whether thru organizing the workplace, or less intensely, attending a labor institute workshop or participating in the many other labor-oriented micro-communities in poetry & poetics. Not sure yet, but that's what the call would be for--to see what interest there might be and to hear ideas from folks.

Regardless, it was a generative discussion among friends new and old. Next week Robert Mittenthal and Nico Vassilakis, two incredible people/poets, will be reading and hosting a discussion. I'm hearing they'll be running thru a work in 4 acts. Susan Schulz will also be in town for a reading and talk. If I weren't headed to SF I'd certainly go. So look out for these and future Free Lunch events.

I should add this was my first reading/talk since my mom's death in October. And so it meant a lot to me to have folks in the room--my friends--who really embraced the afternoon, welcoming me with such warmth as we arrived.

Rally for the Working Class: if in or around Seattle/Olympia...

Come to the Saturday rally in solidarity with the state workers of Wisconsin! 

Come join unions and coalition partners this Saturday (Feb. 26th) at noon at Tivoli Fountain at the Capitol in Olympia.  Look for your UFE colleagues at the north side of the fountain and WEAR RED to show solidarity with our union brothers and sisters in Wisconsin!

Laura Goldstein on the amazing Gaze by Marthe Reed over at Black Radish Blog. Please visit, read, and read.

Challenging Categories & Movement of Mind, But Grief: Akilah Oliver

The exploration of grief--as choking, as being rendered silent by death, "the body as holder of a terrorizing silence" as a sort of default space. "What happens when there is no public space for grief?" she asks in a book that's influenced so many of us, A Toast in the House of Friends. I've come back to it recently, in my own paradoxical and contradictory grieving gestures this year. And again at PennSound, these sound files, including the Segue recordings I quote from above, registering this conversation just now in relation to her friends and family, who I am at moment thinking about. Hear  here.

Michael Cross @ The Disinhibitor

Thank you, Michael, for the kind remarks -- the recollections of moments during last weekend's reading for SPT. Agreed that it was awesome. It certainly was refueling for me. A reminder to check out the broadsides at SPT. Each made by a guest artist, the proceeds (so inexpensive given the labor that goes into making them) going towards SPT programming.

Akilah Oliver

Very sad to hear that Akilah Oliver, an amazing poet, not to mention everything else she has been for so many friends, has died. Rachel Levitsky has posted some remarks and links to Oliver's work on Coffee House Press's site. Here.

Postscript: Movement, Somatics, Writing--

[POSTSCRIPT regarding links narrating the symposium: another intense entry from Bhanu Kapil is here. I'm drawn to her question, or the problem, of "knowledge-based" somatic practices. Power & power. & assertion. & place. 29 degrees & 1 ft of snow on the ground... off to class, a term I use & dislike intensely. On the "transgressive" body & somatic practices/bodywork. & Writing. In some ways redundant these terms we use. In other ways immeshed in conflict, contorting the presence of human touch. To archive like that. Why do we do it? To testify trans-port has colonial roots, perhaps... Re Rob's gorgeous proposition: My organelles, I can feel them, the breath truncated when transported by another's intimate gesture of "here" - mitochondrial DNA deletion. My body is on the outside of my body. Always living on borrowed social time. Is this becoming in constant meditation? A kind of knowledge? To have written this, also redundant, deadened too. In both senses...]

Somatics, Movement, and Writing Symposium...

The only downside to being in SF this weekend was missing the Somatics, Movement, and Writing Symposium in MI, put together, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) by Petra Kuppers and the organizing team listed below -- who helped the workshop participants and performance folks during the weekend. I would imagine several others were involved in organizing various parts of the weekend. This poesis, given a multiple media/performance background, an interest in the politics and poetics of the corporeal, and engagement in post-abelism, that is really close to my heart (for lack of a better way to say it at moment).

Given how far away I am, I would have had a difficult time getting out there even if. Because I've been hoping for the time/money to fly to MI anyhow: simply, I miss my dad a lot and would really like to see him.

I'm just thrilled the symposium happened. I remember Petra announcing it during my last visit to the Bay, during our Nonsite commons discussion. And I wait enthusiastically for the post-symposium reflections to start flowing. A couple have already emerged on the web. Some wonderful photos taken by Thom are up at Wild Horses of Fire. Many are of Brenda Iijima's dance/movement workshop/performance, the same event Bhanu Kapil dreams from, and writes about, over on her blog. The combo of photos and dream journal piece by Kapil give me a small sense of how f-ing amazing Brenda's piece was/is. Darn.

So, if you have some reflections on the weekend that you don't plan on putting anyplace like your blog or in a journal, just comments, notes, or what-have-you, I'd love to hear them. Live vicariously thru you. So feel free to post here or email backchannel. Here's to hoping the symposium occurs next year!

Conference Team:

Amy Sara Carroll, Assistant Professor of English and American Culture (Latina/o Studies), UM

Clare Croft, Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, Assistant Professor of Dance, UM

Thom Donovan, poet and essayist, co-editor of ON: Contemporary Practice and the weblog Wild Horses Of Fire

Kate Elswit, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow (Drama/Dance), Stanford University

Bhanu Kapil, Assistant Professor, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University (Cross-Genre Narrative and Poetics)

Jina Kim, PhD student, English/Women?s Studies, UM (Visual Culture)

Petra Kuppers, Associate Professor of English, UM (Performance Studies)

Eleni Stecopoulos, poet, writer, educator, curator of the Poetics of Healing project at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University

SPT Audio File, from Occultations

For anyone interested, here's the audio composition I composed for SPT; it was one of two I performed during the evening, layered by live reading. It's a google-docs downloadable file, compatible with i-tunes (it is an i-tunes file).  An old file name accompanies it, so to hear "modular arterial cacophony walling 1" click "download" on the file named "BelladonnaLiveReadingNew." One of the channels--whispered leaked CIA documents outlining torture of detainees--was played for the release of the book, back when I first began composing this sound piece, the reading sponsored then by The Belladonna Series in New York. Thus the old file name. Specs on this piece (4:50), now finished, beyond that channel, are:

Channel 1: whispered leaked Bybee Memorandum, 2008 (courtesy of WikiLeaks)

Channel 2: Sine-Function re-composition of Brun's I Told You So (a work based on this piece that I re-composed using different software)

Channel 3: Sine-Function computer composition, "Wave," David Wolach 2010-11.

Channel 4: Recorded excerpts, "modular arterial cacophony," from Occultations

Ideal way to listen is volume on max, with earphones, reading parts of the book's section of the same title. The live reading includes taking up the walling stress position (examples found in Appendix M, CIA Interrogations Manual) for the duration. Enjoy.

Porous the Borders in the Bay: SPT, Nonsite, Motels

Deep gratitude to the kind, talented and gracious Samantha Giles, and to the rest of the SPT folks for setting up a crazy-energizing (for me) reading with Laura Elrick and Lara Durback on Friday night. Michael Cross needs mention too, facilitating two in an ongoing series of beautiful broadsides, the latest one of Laura Elrick's work, letterpressed by Rich Owens. Wow, it was great to hear Laura's work in-progress. She performed a steady stream of prosodic, intense and at times intensely funny poems-of-a-cycle, each feeling like the hurried or rushed "voice in the head" part way between "pre-linguistic" para-logic (internalized impressions of things, people, systems) driven as much by sound and word-play as anything else AND the more formally subtle performative speech-act. Thus I take the work to be enacting that interest, stated in her SPT bio, of lately exploring the relationships between social time and utterance. That "inner speech" Keith Waldrop writes in relation to Stein's pre-occupations (Intro to Useful Knowledge, New Directions) is here as much coerced or inscribed by false consciousness, hence traced from imprinting political systems as it is echoes of other associative conversations one has in the head, imbued with present-tense experience, the output forming trace or shadow of that live-wiring filtered and perhaps interrupted by monetized time, a poetic speaking of what will have just passed, its affect that of opening up possibilities, to paraphrase Taylor Brady in relation to Michael Cross's work, disclosing prosodic parameters for what has not yet been foreclosed. 

Lara's work was also amazingly refreshing: deeply performative and procedural, Durback following up on her WONDERFUL Zine Chapbook, played a recording of her poetic, truncated, funny and also horrifying experiences with a personal history with clothing, the politics and economics of what and how we wear, and this was underlayed by livve short thought-bursts, one after the other, each testifying to one of those thought-but-not-said-publicly moments--read by Durback from a stack of blue post-its, each of which she stuck to all manner of surfaces in the room, after and as she read from them. So the ephemeral, the honest, the political, and the found, all intermingle here in a way that's arrestingly direct and narrative. Sort of a no bullshit get off our asses and do kind of beauty to the performative work that I loved, and that complimented Elrick's work so conspicuously.

This work and mine--a sort of love letter to The Book of Frank and a sort of note to CA Conrad of thanks for existing (my notes towards my essay-review on Frank) can be found in David Brazil & Sara Larsen's latest issue Try Magazine. So many thanks to David for putting the issue together, which also features some awesome work from Cedar Sigo, David Buuck & Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young (on Weiner's The Fast !!!!), Jason Morris, Dana Ward, and several others. And my apologies to David for falling ill the night Elizabeth Williamson and I were to have dinner with him.

Was also great to see old friends and meet new folks. Great, for instance, to see fellow Black Radish Books author Carrie Hunter, whose fantastic procedural-lyrical The Incompossible is coming out soon through the press. Was so good to see Tanya Hollis, who carted E and I around all night in the rain!

***

The next afternoon Laura, Lara and I met up with other Nonsite Collective participants for a discussion about Nonsite's collaboration and residency with SF Camerawork, "Common/Use." (See Nonsite Collective dot org or the archives here for a description of the 4-month residency bringing writers and photographers together to explore and intervene in the privatization of our public spaces and commons-forming practices.) This was, I think,  a really generative discussion that first caught the three of us up to speed on what the collaboration has been doing as of late and what it's planning (a documentary/investigative poetry-photography walk being planned by Ariel Goldberg and an exploration-intervention of the Sit/Lie Ordinance recently passed in SF led by Tonya Hollis and others -- both sound incredibly necessary and mutually complimentary). From getting caught up to speed we all discussed the productive challenges the residency has posed: how Nonsite, a self-organizing pedagogical collective, tran-slocal and non-hierarchical, imminently collapsible and in many was a come-as-you-are nonsite in itself, how can we now produce work that interfaces more directly with activist communities, the public, and do so in relation to deadlines, to the hyper-visual problematics of the photographic artistic? That doesn't problematically frame or archive, i.e., use or appropriate, living communities who are involved in reclaiming public space? The productive problems of forming a commons curriculum and "installation" in the gallery -- that tension between atopia and installation, commoning and commodity, aesthetics and the archival/curatorial -- was discussed, with core questions such as how we as collectively "starburst" (to quote Laura Elrick) can be most salubrious, and most helpful towards particular communities organized to maximize the visibility of their production--activists, unionists on the picket line, for example--ended up taking on a central conversational role.

All of this occurred within the gallery itself, and as folks came and went, arrived to see our work and to see some of the other fantastic collaborations, such as Dodie Bellamy's, on display as part of the larger Camerawork show "As Yet Untitled," it was clear that our meeting doubled as itself an installation. And has in the past in more active/self-reflective ways, with Jen Benka and others sitting down with the public at the common table and asking visitors to write down their thoughts in relation to specific questions, as well towards developing "common terms" lined along one wall as headers ("private," "use," "boundary" e.g.) - the participants then sticking their notecard responses to the wall under the corresponding header.

My sincere thanks toTanya again, to David Buuck, Taylor Brady, Rob Halpern, and several others who invited us to participate in this meeting/discussion. I came away feeling overwhelmed by how much the Collective has managed to do, how many productive experiments have been, or will be, tried. One question that came up was where Nonsite was as a collective now, more generally, now with so many new participants, with such activity lately, etc. A great question that I don't have any particular answer for other than the above and the below re-post of a note I wrote about Nonsite last year. Due to the localism of any on-site art installation, which this is to some degree, I did come away with some concern about the worries folks had about having to "produce" "visible results," whether, for example, that felt sense of pressure would temporarily unhinge the very careful considerations that I witnessed right then and there, and have been a part of the last couple years--the carefully considered commitment to trans-local, cross-disciplinary radical pedagogy, for lack of a better set of terms, where we have always produced a great deal, but have done so as radical, non-recapitulating compliment to established forms of art and protest (aesthetics), forms/movements/groups that are already afoot and in need of our help and that we are thus already involved in. That is, Nonsite, for me, among several other things, has been a no-place of imminent critique, or a place of counter-boundary and interrogation of already established discourses that we, as individuals, are already a part of (to support established forms, under convivial conditions, means to critique them too). The work I've been a part of so far has been a deeply-thought set of reflections, or have felt anyway like reflective and aesthetically-driven curricular explorations unearthing further possibilities, such that I slow down, interrogate my own preconceived notions, activities, and commitments, temporarily suspending all of those discursively, in order to deepen some of those notions, activities, and commitments, and to torque or even let go of others. I feel like that is still very alive here, and that the residency applies pressure to us in this regard in ways that are, again, generative. So I also think we need not worry whether we produce too little--as Chris Daniels mentioned there, he's been so radically changed and astonished by the production that Nonsite has generated and is laden with use-value for him, that change in him being maybe not easily visible, but extant.

Speaking of whom, before I re-post my thoughts regarding Nonsite (how I've worked with and come to participate in Nonsite), I must say that one of the highlights of my visit was spending the afternoon with Chris, talking over a bite about his work on a new chapbook press, one that is currently working on some more beautiful poems by David Brazil and others. Really great to see him--as always. And as always I left the Bay wanting somehow to teleport back and forth, wishing the DOD would just sell that technology to a corporate giant already.... From the blog last year:

In the past several years--since suddenly falling ill--I've been a buried bone. Collectivity and gathering had been (what?) intuitive for me, collaboration and organizing isomorphic to "this body" and/or "David's identity," my life in New York absolutelypopulated, from working as labor organizer to navigating thru the narrow arteries of traverse that New York City alone poses as challenge to any commuter.  

This was initially difficult, this drastic shift in my adaptability to physical environments shaped by a dominant cultural formation. Not long after the first of several bodily changes occurred, it became clear that too often, even in disability rights circles, our failure to "keep up" with our shaped environments was/is thought of as a shift in bodily capability that needs be dealt with, such that despite activism demanding greater access services/rights, the underlying discourse negatively articulates itself viz. "what the body can do," putting the onus of adaptability too much on those for whom access is denied by not fully acknowledging the underlying inequities effecting all of us, regardless of level of mobility: of the disappearing commons, the fact of who gets to have a say in urban planning, in how we gather, and why private interests get to decide what counts as a "habitable" environment (let alone a beneficial one), etc.  

My initial timidity (or disorientation?) combined with the limits public and private spaces puts on us led me to what ostensibly counted as a house-bound life.  House-bound at least in contrast to an earlier bodily existence. I've since learned to get around differently. But especially a few years ago, the house-bound life, of course, meant rather severe changes in the way I socialized, especially given the far-flung nature of many of my friendships. This narrative plays out ten times a minute in this country alone as politicos play roulette with what counts as "health" and what counts as "care." 

It's Thom Donovan's recent Harriet post on Nonsite Collective that has gotten me thinking here about "disability" and somatic practices again, wherein Thom describes the trajectory of Nonsite thru collecting comments from those active in it (a call to which I came late, hence feel badly for having failed to contribute something as I'd promised). I'm thinking specifically of Amber DiPietra's comments, as well as her amazing initial contributions to the Aesthetics of Somatic Practices curriculum, and all the work that came before and after it: Thom's talk on a poetics of disability, the Collective's work on a poetics of patiency, and Robert Kocik's hooking those discussions up to systemic problems of the disappearing commons, omitted social services (omitted by capitalism), and ultimately translating nonsites (systems of metaphors or narratives serving to apprehend or map occulted phenomena, such as lacks or holes or omissions) into sites--habitable spaces/structures that nourish, thatovercome, that fill extant voids.  DiPietra recalls, that early on, after moving to SF and getting involved with Nonsite:

I also felt my disability being erased because I found that I was trying to emulate an avant-garde poetics (which had not existed so much on the coast I came from) and in that poetics, there was less room for the “I”, for a body’s history, for emotion around that history. 

And that as she injected those feelings into Nonsite discussions (at first as blog entry), there was not only room for them, but action and lively discussion, a self-organizing pedagogy for which she was as responsible in sustaining as anyone else:

Then, one day I took a chance and wrote a blog post about this ambivalence I was feeling on the Nonsite Collective’s blog. I felt as though I were doing something risky and perhaps, not very refined. These were scary folks. They weren’t from the South (the opposite ended up being true), they were more intellectual than I and thus, had gone past the need to talk about the body (that wasn’t the case) ...But in fact, my blog post was met with an amazing response—and Nonsite events on disability began to unfold...

Though I am a participant of Nonisite Collective from afar, and though I feel I owe a huge amount of my thinking/feeling the world to friends active in Nonsite, I re-post Amber's comments not simply as a way to cheer us on, or to redouble Thom's already excellent write-up. It's rather to mention that though I am a Nonsite participant, my small contributions have been wholly online or in my own classrooms--I've never been to a general meeting or had an in-person Nonsite discussion (outside of many, wonderfully generative informal discussions with Thom and Rob, Eleni and others, far too late at night). My trip to SF in July will be my first, my reading and talk for Nonsite my first, and so my participation has been on the very outskirts of the Collective, or would be, were the collective not actually living up to what its baseline aims are at moment, that self-organizing pedagogy/set of investigations. So, this re-post is to extend Thom's collection of remarks by mentioning that it was this particular set of conversations--those around somatic practices/disability rights/poetics thereof--that saved me from myself, got me first plugged in to Nonsite discussions, that got me involved, and that ultimately got me re-thinking/feeling what the body can do. 

It was at the time of my move to the West Coast from NY that I began teaching as visiting professor in Bard College's Language & Thinking Program each summer, which got me in touch, and facilitated friendships with, Thom Donovan, Eleni Stecopolous, and Rob Halpern, all of whom were active in Nonsite Collective, a collective with which I'd developed a keen interest a year or so before while doing some writing on Robert Kocik's Overcoming Fitness. I was at that time working on two manuscripts, one a book of poems written in hospitals and hotels and written forhospitals and hotels (Hospitalogy, which is ongoing), and the other ended up asOccultations, which had its Belladonna Series/Thom Donvan-curated release party as my first full-length poetry book in New York back in mid-April, and which is at the printers now for its official print run.  This work is deeply informed by Amber's work, and by follow-up work from those Thom mentions in his post.  My performative work before falling ill was very body-centric, very much interested in gendering and owning, and yet that work seems quite distant to me now as I recall how generative (how really intensely moving) those Nonsite discussions were. My (then) eavesdropping on the conversations that were playing out helped me re-feel a poetics, and I describe this at the end of Occutations as a sort of essay/set of notes (which I'll post in part in another blog entry as continuation/response to what I see as connection between Amber's Nonsite entry on somatic practices and some of the newer posts on commoning - can this body-as-shorn predicament be, consensually at least, a commons?). 

Since late 2007 (or early 08) I've incorporated Nonsite's resources into my classroom fairly consistently. It doesn't hurt that there are to be had on the website several documents and other resources related to key questions in contemporary poetry and poetics-as-connected to social justice. More than that, though, the very self-organizing pedagogy that Thom and Amber talk about over at Harriet, it's deeply realized, continues to help model for me different ways to "gather differently," as Thom puts it, to: 

explore different platforms and social milieus in which poets can collaborate, converse, and connate. 

Thom adds: 

If this returns us to many projects deferred and abandoned by radical social movements ongoing since the 30s, that is because the desire has not gone away to embody a form of assembly that reflects radical content.

As I wrote recently in an essay for Jacket Magazine, I don't think it does return us, precisely, to the radical social movements that have helped inform Nonsite Collective'scollective practices, from Situationsist cross-disciplinary political interventionism to Freirean anti-banking pedagogy, but in the classroom, as elsewhere, the desire to assemble differently is certainly there, manifesting as response to managerial trends in education, increased corporatization hostile to any experimentation that doesn't garner dollar producing attention. Nonsite's work, incorporated back into the institution (which is essentially what I am doing when I teach, not to mention the many other participants who move rather freely between the classroom and Nonsite's events) helps highlight how radically restrictive a lot of institutional pedagogical practices are, how, for example, even at a place such as Evergreen (where I teach), a school known for its radical co-learning (even popular educational) models, we need push ourselves to go further in cross-disciplinary research; we can, and should, push ourselves outside of the morbid professionalization inherent in how schools, say, get funded. We should (and at Evergreen I can) do so while still bringing to our re-narrations, our explorations outside of given domains, our different assemblages, a rigor and intentionality necessary to know what we are asking and how to listen for it.  Thom asks:

Is gathering a form of poesis—a form of active making?

Not necessarily, is my provisional answer--there is a premium in this culture on spectatorship. There is no sense, tho, in which one can participate in Nonsite Collective and be a spectator. The organizational pedagogy necessitates gathering as a commoning, which is an active making, and so every curricular discussion that spiders out in my classroom (our classroom) is an emergent instantiation of a constantly becoming (a radically dialectical) Nonsite Collective, its making and remaking, fashioning and refashioning. From CA Conrad coming to our classroom and building with us a new (soma)tic to 25 of us wrestling with what else Kocik's commons site for "sorely missed" social services might include (architecturally, structurally, and then again, poetically), there is something substantial, not simply semantic, about the claim that Nonsite has no central locus of activity. As long as this work recursively flows back into the refashioning of the Collective's draft proposal and its attendant makers, which is to say, into further avenues of collaboration, in echo of Halpern's "no work in isolation!" 

So I'm extremely happy to see that Thom's put together a series of reflections on Nonsite Collective, where it's been and where it might be going (or can go). From both the classroom to (contiguously) the development of a poetics, Nonsite Collective has en-abled me in ways I can't fully apprehend, despite being able to state that what I appreciate most, perhaps, is precisely that which Amber speaks of--this desire to actively move from site to nonsite back into site, i.e., to make use of without using. Metaphor here is not terminal, but rather takes physical form when possible, thus Thom's mention of re-imagining poetry as not for itself, but "for us," I take to be a claim about the poem itself as part of a commons, a crucial site of activation for us who assemble, forming (and taking responsibility as) an aesthetic ecosystem--where aesthetic embodies the political-social-ethical practices of constructing/narrating some future(s) contra catastrophe.