positions conference at kootenay skool notes…

Wershler-Henry=statusupdate.ca; database a creative act with an author in Europe but not in North America

Ngai=groups obvious; networks harder to see

Stanley=is there a relationship between web 2.0 and the rapture?

discussion over congee about whether Killian was telling truth when he claimed he had appropriated for piece on Clifford Irving or whether he was faking it.

BKS=it explodes at the end

Vivider=the market; “unsquatted houses”

Davidson=hemispheric frame; away from spiritual localism

Poetry as a group of individuals who talk about certain things together in literature; . there is nothing special about this group and literature is no better or worse of a genre or media in which to talk about things with.

Johanson: land claims a multimillion $ industry; Gord Hill: Indigenous Anti-Colonialism; land struggle in courts approved by government as primary form of resistance b/c it legitimizes the state.

BKS story about writing in Scotts. Alliances.

Boykoff=public space is state controlled space; “high density sign grove”; “inadvertent audience”

Burnham=deMOCKracy

Derksen=poetry as a holder for nonconventional knowledge

Farr=limits of the historical avant garde to poetics of consciousness raising; a sort of poetic cop watch?

how does kulture naturalize neo-liberalism

Toscano/Heller: “anarcho something something” absurdity of Toscano and Heller on beach reminding of fencing scene in Savage Dectives.

slightly derisive jokey attention to conceptual art because poetry not really the usual or the “right” genre for talking about the neo-big-L. so once one talks about the neo-big-L then it is putting poetry to a use that is so antithetical to the conventional uses of poetry that one has to constantly ask why one talks about neo-big-L with poetry. or it forces “kind of conceptual” (Fitterman) genre questions.

MFA as emotion work? feminized?; feeling empathy with Delta flight attendants who can’t stop caring after work. to read: Hochschild.

Derksen=earnest instead of zany; can zany be earnest?

Doris and Robertson as visceral sensualists

marxism v. anarchism? not really discussed. Doris/Robertson/Toscano v. Farr/Johanson/Vivider?

Rita Wong poem in Premonitions about English. attention to alliance in the reading. Wade Compton. she read his poem; he read a part of hers.

to get in next week or so to add to syllabus… Nicolas Bourriard (everyone is reading it in LA Stan, not at conference, said); Hal Foster article; Jacques Ranciere. also change section now called “found” to “using public, aka state controlled, speech.”

poets still heavily reference French theory; party like it is 1997.

conference questions:
Here we might ask: How is poetry a political field of action? What can poetry un/do? What do 'limits' mean for poetry? What are the crucial issues in taking a social (ideological) position with in a poetics today? What relationships arise between cultural production and broader social projects?

very happy to be hearing new work that is regularly about conference questions. this was super interesting. nice combination of directive and yet not imposed.

very happy with the schedule (panel or piece at 11; another at 1; then a lunch and a nap usually; then a reading at 7 that often went until 11; it felt as if there was just right amount of time so one could nap and yet not so much that everyone disappeared into decentralization). happy with the length of some of the pieces. several 2 hours long.

very happy with BLT-ish at the Foundation; less happy with the congee; riddle: how do Canadians get drunk with high cost of wine?

sometimes when we said neo-big-L we meant gentrification. or we told stories about where we felt it most, which is in our city streets. although world wide women more adversely impacted by neo-big-L, discussion still very male. why?

sometimes we spend some time finding politics into works that have submerged it and ignore works that have it up front. why?

desperately wanted to discuss more how conference question were dealt with in the new work but unsure of how to do this with any sense of detail.

wondering about what attention to real estate as a shorthand for economic issues allows/ignores. smith raising joke fist in renter solidarity.

wondering about how many images of women as assembly line workers? how many images of men? (Toscano/Heller; Ngai talk)

what was the list in the Sand piece? items that were not covered by Nafta? or items covered? did I miss this information because I came in two seconds late?

did queerness only show up in Bellamy piece?