swoonrocket

2013-01-07T12:33:00.000-08:00

Talk for MLA 2012 panel on "Poet Scholar."

I have an autobiographical relation to the poet scholar category. I wanted to be a poet. I went and got a PhD in English with the idea that even the TA line would be a sort of day job. At the time this being a poet and being a scholar felt not quite related. My first job was as a scholar. My second, and current, job is as a creative writer. Everyone told me for years I had to be one or the other. I continued to muddle on as both. There is nothing unique about this story, so I will present it as anecdotal example. I will in these notes just quickly attempt to enumerate the terrain which I think might explain how we have found ourselves at a panel on the poet scholar at the MLA in 2012. I will draw no conclusions from it.

When I was applying for that first job, I thought I was entering the job market in its decline. Casual or adjunct appointments were at around 30%. This felt catastrophic. The general thinking was that that there was no way it could get worse. Who would do the service?, it was often said by colleagues in the hallways, it would be unsustainable to go lower. But then adjunct labor was teaching 50% of the classes when I got this second job in 2003 as a poet, in what Mark Nowak calls the American neoliberal MFA industry. What I realize now that I couldn’t see then was that despite the massive casualization of academic labor, I was at the same time getting a job in what is looking like it might very well be an MFA bubble economy. When I got my first job in 1995, there were somewhere maybe around sixty-five MFA programs. In 2009 there were around 194. I got these numbers from Seth Abramson. And in his estimate the cohort groups for these programs average out to about 20. So in less than fifteen years, the US has gone from producing around 1300 to close to 4000 MFAs per year. Many of these MFA programs are clustered at tuition dependent universities (although some state universities have begun to see these programs as good ideas because they can educate that casual labor pool they so need to have around). But there are next to no employment prospects for these graduates, which wouldn’t necessarily have to be a problem if not for how so many have funded their degrees through large amounts of student loans. This is why the MFA numbers look unsustainable.

Parallel to what is looking like an unsustainable MFA bubble, is what I might call the “possible creative writing-ization” of the English major. Again, numbers here are hard to find, so I’ll resort to anecdote. When I was an undergraduate way back in the 80s, colleges and universities tended to treat creative writing classes like candy, too many would make you sick and weak. The small liberal arts college that I attended taught two poetry workshops a year: a beginning and an advanced one. You had to apply to take them. 12 students were admitted. The rest, it was felt, did not deserve such a pleasure. Other schools, if they even had a creative writing major, tended to limit the creative writing majors. They had a gateway admissions process and only a certain number were allowed to be majors. Some schools, especially big state universities, still use this model. But in general, as the university system has begun to see students less as children whose candy intake should be regulated and more as consumers whose candy tuition money they want, they tend not to regulate but to provide. Anecdote again: the small liberal arts college where I now teach when I began teaching there used the limited class offerings model to regulate creative writing majors. Each semester there was a beginning and an advanced, waiting lists and demand be damned. At a certain point, the department begins to receive more and more pressure from the administration to enroll whatever would enroll however it would enroll. So the department began to offer more and more undergraduate workshops. Now the department’s unregulated undergraduate creative writing majors tend to double undergraduate English majors.

There are numerous reasons for this: the grades in creative writing classes are obviously higher; the reading is less; the writing has a lower word count; etc. But not all of them are necessarily negative or lazy assumptive. I’d like to think that students might also be looking at the five page seminar paper, the continued tendency to teach mainly the literatures of only two nations, and the strict century coverage model that begins in the early modern period, and think to themselves, well at least the novel, say, has the possibility of being read by someone outside of the classroom.

Beyond anecdote, there is a fairly obvious piece of evidence to support this “possible creative writing-ization” of English departments. Although the AWP started in 1967, it did not feel compelled to hold a conference until 2005. It started small, with 3000 attendees. Last year it had 11,000 attendees and it expects more this year. The MLA at its peak in the mid-1990s maxed out with around 12,000 people attending its conference. Last year it had around 7,000.

I doubt this “possible creative writing-ization” is in anyway a permanent change to English departments. And that is how it should be. However, it definitely has had a major impact on the hiring patterns of English departments and English departments will be changed by this for years to come. And while whatever happens next remains to be seen, I doubt it will look like a retreat to what English departments looked like in what we might now want to begin to call the glory days of the 1990s. The profession is obviously in the middle of a profound metamorphosis of some sort, from the fairly dramatic funding cuts that are privatizing the state university systems to the increasing evidence that the private system might have reached peak tuition a few years ago and might now be massively overpriced in relation to student ability and/or willingness to pay or borrow in a fairly stagnant employment market. And then English departments have their own narratives within these large scale changes. I’m not sure, in short, that the profession could pay its composition and intro class instructors so little if it were not for the current large numbers of MFA graduates. It is also worth remembering that when Bennington fired all its tenured line faculty, under the advice of John Barr—recently retired president of the Poetry Foundation, they justified this by saying that they wanted to hire working artists and writers rather than scholars. But that is another talk for another panel, the one on the role of creative writing programs in the privatization of education or the one on the role of MFA programs in the casualization of the labor of English departments.

That said, I don’t really have a profound conclusion here. Except, as much as it might be the time of the “possible creative writing-ization” of English departments, it might also be the time of the poet-scholar. And what it means to be a poet scholar feels one that is full of these issues. I’ve been a bit grumpy about it all. But one of the potentially productive things that could happen out of this “possible creative-writing-ization” of English departments is that this old standoff between creative writing and scholarship might dissolve. One thing that I’ve noticed where I now teach is that as the number of creative writing majors have grown, more and more students are writing a creative thesis that is basically a form of scholarship. In recent years, in addition to the usual retellings of Jane Austen novels, I’ve read an novelization of a queer subtext of Shakespeare’s Henry the 8th, a feminist reworking of a series of classic male performance art pieces, a detournment of a Hemingway short story with the genders reversed, etc. I am, in short, watching undergraduate students attempt to write what I might call “more interesting to me literary scholarship” and they are reading and thinking and arguing with the informed critiques and discussions of the field. Although I should admit that graduate students are still doing what they tend to do. They are still writing, with a few lovely and notable exceptions and god bless these, the mainly confessional, even when experimental, observations about their lives and their loves and sometimes the weather and the land and the suburban animals.

2012-10-23T12:50:00.001-07:00

"Index" for Under Under
at Konsthall C in Stockholm, Sweden
by David Buuck and Juliana Spahr
images by Mikael Lundberg

wall text:
One thousand, nine hundred and ten. Twelve thousand, seven hundred and ninety three. Five. Five hundred. Three hundred and forty thousand. One hundred thousand. Six eight thousand. Four point seven percent. One point two percent. Three point eight percent. Three thousand one hundred and forty. Thirty one thousand. Fifty nine thousand. Six billion, eight hundred and eleven million. Seven hundred and eleven billion, four hundred and twenty one million. Eight hundred and seventy eight million.

description:
Participants wrote the numbers by jumping up as high as they could. And they wrote them as large as they could. Attention was paid to the jump, not the writing. They did not erase or edit. It was okay if the numbers overlapped. And they didn’t have to go from left to right. They wrote the numbers in whatever medium they desired. Sharpee was fine. Charcoal was fine. Ideally the writing instrument produced black marks. As many people as desired were used. And these people did this either before or at the opening. The point here was not legibility but difficulty. Yet the piece was not just the jumping, it was also the results. What was created was a collection of number-referencing abstract marks.

Underneath the text the following videos looped:

Call Me Maybe Cover - Kunar, Afghanistan - US Army Soldiers

SABATON - In the army now (Afghanistan War)

Images of US Soldiers With Afghan Corpses (Graphic NSFW)

Tribute To The Swedish Soldiers In Afghanistan

U.S. Army Sniper Engages Enemy Forces In Afghanistan

Spectacular Footage of Taliban Attacking US Military Base, Afghanistan.

Swedish soldiers VS Talibans in Afghanistan

US military, CIA out of control in Afghanistan

Swedish forces fighting the Talibans in Afghanistan 2011

US Troops Burning Afghan Taliban Corpses

Swedish Army Elite - The One And Only

Gimme Shelter in Iraq and Afghanistan

2012-04-12T12:38:00.001-07:00

I intend to go to the office next to mine to ask some absurd unanswerable question about the body and growing old and being female but I forget to do this and instead I talk some more about the economics of higher education, the student loan industry, various other sorts of numbers. We have been doing this all year, attempting to understand the way these numbers press in on our bodies, trying to find an impossible ethics in them. I go to get back to work, absurd unanswerable question about the body and growing old and being female unasked and before I leave I am given Jennifer Moxley's Evacuations. I take it and read it immediately. It ends:

In fact, if I were an industrial worker
and not a poet and I read this "experiment" I would
think to myself, that poet has too much money,
she has lost touch with working people who
don't care about poetry. It is a vicious cycle.
Bladders and feet, however, are everyone's concern,
culture, education, and class aside. In the present
they press on and pain us. They make me think:
this has got to stop.

2012-04-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

"3. Abomunists demand the abolition of Oakland." --Bob Kaufman, "Abomunist Election Manifesto."

and

"What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say literature." --Henry Miller

thanks J.M. Fazzino

2012-03-07T23:48:00.042-08:00

What FTP Means to Me

In late December of 2011, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) began pulling people out of the crowd at Oscar Grant Plaza (OGP), the gathering place for Occupy Oakland (OO), for no apparent reason and "arresting" them on charges that could not legally stick. Arrestees have been given "stay-way" orders that prevent them from gathering at OGP. The ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild are challenging the constitutionality of these orders in court. In response, it seems, the Alameda County district attorney has become unhinged enough to write an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle defending the stay-away practice. See here for some good analysis.

There is one particular snatch and grab case available on youtube that is shot from the point of view of the arrestee, @geekeasy. See here.

This happened to a lot of people and continues to happen. In the video, it's particularly interesting that one of the arresting officers tells @geekeasy: "Let go of it, Mr. Katz. Let go of it." ("it" is the camera). It's clear OPD knew his name before they arrested him. Yet it's not clear what "Mr. Katz" did to deserve that pre-knowledge or that arrest.

In response to this practice, on new year's eve 2011, a jail solidarity (noise demo) march was organized by the Occupy Oakland Tactical Committee (ooTAC). If you've seen the Occupy Oakland "sign" it is usually carried by an ooTAC member. See here.

The idea of a noise demo is to march to the local jail and make as much noise as possible so as to let the prisoners know someone knows they're there.

We were in the crowd of about 100 people. We were getting ready to march from OGP to the jail. Part of the preparations concerned unveiling a large black banner, three traffic lanes in width, with the words FUCK THE POLICE thickly stroked in a red non-serif font. See here.

We marched down Broadway behind this large banner to the police station. We stopped in front of the station and stood near the entrance and performed a party. Some people made gestures to the five or six riot cops guarding the doors of the police station from the inside.

One half hour later we moved down seventh street to the jail. On the way an OPD flag was grabbed from it perch. We stopped in front of the jail and again performed the party. We shouted to the prisoners. They flicked the lights on and off. People brought out fireworks and flares and lit them. See picture of rocket.

Someone burned the flag snatched earlier. This party lasted for one half hour after which we made our way back to OGP, but not before walking back up seventh street to again make gestures to the five or six riot cops guarding the doors of the police station from the inside.

At the plaza we had a real party with dancing. I think michael jackson songs were played. Some people kissed anarchists. The next day, near year's day, there was a march from OGP to the fruitvale BART station where Oscar Grant was shot in the back by BART police while he was handcuffed and face planted on the platform early new year's day 2009. We marched behind a family who brought a mobile sound system and played NWA's Fuck the Police over and over. See here.

I make a note regarding the ooTAC that they are largely people of color from the east bay about the same age as Oscar Grant. They rallied after the "verdict" of the BART officer who shot Oscar Grant in the back while he was handcuffed and face planted on the platform early new year's day 2009. They came to know each other in real life (IRL). I don't know members of the ooTAC in real life. They probably think I'm a cop. After all, I do play one on tv.

After the relative lack of police presence at the noise demo, the next FTP marches were met with a serious police response: large white vans full of cops in riot gear, lines of cops in riot gear, motorcycle cops, batons, "non-lethal" rounds. During FTP 1 on January 7, for example, the cops kettled and attacked the marchers, beating them and making numerous arrests.

FTP 1 Jan 7, 2012 Downtown Oakland, CA
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/19634501

metadata:
1) 00:03:20 The entire precinct is outside arming up, putting helmets on. Protesters coming down. '... from Oakland to Greece, fuck the police...'

2) 00:21:00 Discussion with someone snatched from Oscar Grant Plaza. The arrestee, Tiffany Tran, was charged with lynching.

3) 00:40:00 Standoff .

4) 00:44:00 Riot cops attack.

5) 00:54:45 Discussion with food committee member Leila with swollen knuckles: "They took my cake, they took my bike, they took my trailer."

To date, there have been 10 FTP marches. I think the new year's eve noise demo can be called FTP 0. I assume there will be more. I get updates about FTP marches from the Twitter Social Media Site. I follow @occupythemob and @LadyGoftheTAC.

Occupy4Prisoners Benefit March 1, 2012 Grand Lake Theatre Oakland, CA
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/20818490/highlight/245880

metadata:
1) 00:22:45 Blank Panther Elaine Brown gives a brief lecture on US Capitalism 101 and the prison industrial complex.

2) 00:28:45 Elaine Brown's closing thoughts: "[I am happy to] urge you to organize yourselves and arm yourselves for the inevitable government onslaught and know that we are still dreaming of that day when power will come to the people and we will all truly be free at last. Power to the people."

So, given that brief FTP background, I want to make a point about a recent blog article concerning one cluster of contemporary american poetry, a thoughtful exchange between Brandon Brown and Thom Donovan. They fawn over each others' new books; hey, I'll fawn too, you should read them: The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus and The Hole. Get them. They're good poetry. They talk some about the lyric and its (new) possibilities against a backdrop of anti-lyrical sentiment starting in the late 70s or so with Language Poetry and ending with the Telling it Slant book of essays in the 90s. (disclosure, I think I must be under attack since I have an essay about gender in Telling it Slant). It's a reasonable piece written by two poets who I like personally and whose work I admire. See here.

I only have one problem with the piece. I found myself wishing they had used another title:

"Enframing the Brink: Fuck the Police and Fuck the Avant-Garde Too."

1. "Enframing the Brink"... not sure what that means. Fine. Whatever. It's not the part of the title I have a problem with.

2) "Fuck the Police" ... I know what that means. But I'm not sure the authors do. Here's why I think that. If the authors knew that police feeling, the one you get, for example, from facing a line of riot cops, they probably wouldn't trivialize it by transferring it to the realm of poetics and using it as a hammer against some perceived elitist, vanguardist or old-fartist tendency in one cluster of contemporary american poetry. Or maybe I just mean I wouldn't. Why?

a) It gives you a feeling inside

"Recent advances in understanding what psychologists call 'embodied cognition' indicate a surprisingly direct link between mind and body. It turns out that people draw on their bodily experiences in constructing their social reality." duh.

Go to oakland and participate in an FTP march and see how it makes you feel inside. I'd recommend against bringing the kids, but do pack a bandana, protective eye-wear, and a bike helmet. Bring also some water as you'll probably be walking a few miles. Enjoy the streets. They're your streets. Watch out when the cops try to join the march. Walk, don't run.

Now try to use the phrase Fuck the Police as a metaphor to make a literary point in a blog post. Wait, did I just do that?

b) I snark tweeted
Let me tell you the timeline of my encounter with Thom and Brandon's blog piece. I first read it after seeing a link on facebook. I thought oh, fine, whatever. Thom and Brandon like each other and that's nice. I had a few discussions with folks in real life who were a little tweeked by the piece, but I really didn't feel compelled to have an emotional reaction or respond in any way.

A day or so later I was reading the Twitter Social Media Site and had just finished wondering about a story about another snatch and grab episode and OPD's press release regarding same. You should probably read the Press Release (PR).

Thanks OPD, my new favorite phrase is "calling for a riot." Seems like OPD has not forgotten about Althusser. Operators are standing by. Call 1-800-RIOT-NOW.

(btw, if you're flush, like David Buuck, you can donate to the bail fund here.)

After reading that press release, a link to Brandon and Thom's piece showed up in my Twitter Social Media Site. I experienced a feeling inside I had not had from reading it when linked via facebook. I snark tweeted. Odd. Embodied cognition? Twitter is generally where I get information about Occupy Oakland and FTP and other anon news. Facebook is much more literary in terms of contact ratios. So sorry for the snark tweet. This is what I meant to say.

I feel a little odd, like I'm claiming some ownership over the term FTP when I have very little involvement with the actual actions or the actors. I really don't want to scold. What I want is Brandon there at OO and the others too. There used to be a lot of poets showing up and now they're not there so much. I love you poets. I miss you!

3) "Fuck the Avant-Garde Too" ... that is fine also. I don't theorize about vanguardism, so again I leave that to the realm of whatever. As a way out of here, let me pull a transformation from the literary realm to the realm of the anarchist discussion board.

Charles W via King Tender
‎"Direct Action Brigade of Wild and Eternal Childhood"

Chile: Claims Of Responsibility For Santander Bank & Banco Estado Attacks
http://cuntrastamu.com/2012/02/28/chile-claims-of-responsibility-for-santander-bank-banco-estado-attacks/

Yesterday, February 27, 2012

Tony Dohr, Sara Wintz and 2 others like this.

Chuck M
I think actions of this sort are very destructive. Sure, they might evoke a sensibility, but they are inherently vanguardist and elitest.
February 28 at 1:45pm • Like

Charles W
I don't know much about the action; or anything about the people who did it, or their relationship to and place within the broader movement. But I think their name is pretty funny.
February 28 at 2:27pm • Like • 3

José P
@Chuck, thats what parents say to their kids. Better yet, what is said about OO...
What else do you propose people do in the face of this violent/murderous system? What shall we tell the people of Chile about how they should fight back?
February 28 at 7:28pm • Like

Chuck M
‎"Chuck, that's what parents say to their kids"? Huh? Did your parents call you elitist and vanguardist? Really? Well, ok, then. . . I'm not sure if the people of Chile care what I have to say, but you do and so does Charles and maybe a few others. And, yes, it IS elitist and vanguardist when a small, secret, unaccountable group of militants set fire to a bank in the name of the suffering masses. No thanks! Who needs another revolutionary elite, acting in the name of the people? I certainly don't and I suspect that most Chileans don't either. I want a MASS revolutionary movement, not one organized around elites (Bakuninist, Guevarist, Maoist, or otherwise)
February 28 at 7:44pm • Like

José P
lol.
February 28 at 7:45pm • Like

Chuck M
for the sake of comparison, right now there is a very radical, mass student movement in Chile that can shut down Santiago with huge marches, has an impact on public debates throughout the country, and has a very important anarchist influence. It is a mass movement-in the streets, on the campuses, and engaged in discussions with millions of ordinary Chileans. This is the sort of thing I support, not a small, secretive group focused on extending its members childhood.
February 28 at 7:56pm • Like

José P
Chuck,
Have you ever been part of any "mass revolutionary movement" in the Global South? Do you know that some actions are done in secret because of the nature of the action? They have state power last time I checked. What does YOUR experience tell you about how revolutionary actions take place? Not what you read, not what you wrote, what your experience there tells you. So, they burnt a fucking bank, what will you say when the 3 billion people on this planet--who live on less than $2.50 a day--seek to burn Wall Street and its junkie capitalist economy?
Yankee Go Home, J.
February 28 at 8:02pm • Like

Chuck M
Am I the Yankee you're telling to go home, Jose? Is that directed at me?
February 28 at 8:36pm • Like

Chuck M
I'm not sure where your indignation comes from Jose, but, yeah, I support mass, popular movements, not elitest, vanguardist groups. I actually want to see a movement of three billion people and, yeah, juvenile vandalism has nothing to do with it
February 28 at 8:42pm • Like

Chuck M
Jose, i'm guessing that you're probably not familiar with it, but there are big debates within the Chilean anarchist movement about the role of vanguardism, terror, and all of the related issues. Most but not all Chilean anarchists share my position (which is not controversial there)
February 28 at 8:47pm • Like

King Tender
tomorrrow morning, i am so calling sasha elitist and vangardist.
February 28 at 11:01pm • Like • 1

King Tender
then i'm going to use it on charles.
February 28 at 11:01pm • Like • 1

Charles W
Hey, both Sasha and I only have pure revolutionary motives. We are so "of the people" that we don't even need the people.
February 28 at 11:03pm • Like • 1

King Tender
yeah, yeah dream on haoles.
February 28 at 11:13pm • Like

Charles W
Watch your step or we'll denounce you in our next construction-paper communique.
February 28 at 11:23pm • Like • 1

-----------

@bluoma

2011-12-20T22:26:00.000-08:00

I am filing the letters J, K, and L. Then I moved M.

Leaving the Antocha Station, Ben Lerner. Self-mocking literary autobiography. American poet in Spain on a fellowship to write a long poem about the Spanish civil war spends most of it stoned and thinking about women. I confess I could not stop reading it. Adding it to list of prose books about being/becoming a poet that includes Bolano's Savage Detectives Moxley's The Middle Room, DiPrima's Memoirs of a Beatnik.

Life of Crime: Documents in the San Francisco Poetry Wars Containing the Complex Life of Crime Scurrilous Newsletter of the Black Bart Poetry Society edited by Steve LaVoie and Pat Nolan that Scandalized the Literary World in the 1980s. Serious archival autobiography with no self-mocking. Still somewhat fascinating because suddenly I understood reasons why people do not talk that I had not understood before. Deep minutia about bay area poetics. There is a photograph of a youthful Lyn Hejinian and Carla Harryman, arms around each other.

An Old Junker: a Senior Represents, Howard Junker. Blog as autobiography. Opens with a story about a fight with Stephen Elliot and then Elliot throwing a beer on Junker. Has Junker-esque figure throwing gang signs on the cover and then Junker batting in a pumpkin costume on the back cover.

2011-09-29T20:51:00.001-07:00

"Today I read poems, I write poems, and at times, yes, sometimes for hours on end, I forget about women." Ted Kooser, "A Poet's Job Description" in The Poetry Home Repair Model: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets.

2011-09-29T20:47:00.000-07:00

A man waves at himself in the mirror while tying his tie. "The Necktie." Ted Kooser. Delights & Shadows.

2011-09-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

"commodity riots." Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically.

2011-09-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

The Poets Laureate Anthology in association with the Library of Congress, edited by Elizabeth Hun Schmidt includes James Dickey's poem "Adultery" and Louis Untermeyer's "Infidelity." And a poem by Louis Gluck that goes "I hate them [mock oranges] as I hate sex" and a number of poems by Donald Hall where the narrator seems to be enjoying sex. And a poem about Bush's war by Bob Hass.

2011-09-13T13:59:00.001-07:00

National Endowment for the Arts Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, ed by Andrew Carroll begins with an "I remember..." poem.

2011-09-02T16:50:00.000-07:00

Proof that I am right to be so obsessed with Ida Börjel.

2011-08-07T22:19:00.001-07:00

Among the things I've been reading lately, this week loving Catherine Meng's Pure War: I'm Not Writing This is a Grocery List. At least I think that is the title. There is a refrain of "available balance as of today."

P.S. The one good thing about twitter: Catherine Meng chapbook.

2011-07-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

Spending next week on these four things:
Rosmarie Waldrop, "Alarms & Excursions"
Bertolt Brecht, "Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties"
Theodor Adorno, "Commitment"
Alan Badiou, "Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art"

All from Brecht:

The writer thinks: I have spoken and those who wish to hear will hear me. In reality he has spoken and those who are able to pay hear him.

In our times anyone who says population in place of people or race, and privately owned land in place of soil, is by that simple act withdrawing his support from a great many lies. He is taking away from these words their rotten, mystical implications. The word people (Volk) implies a certain unity and certain common interests; it should therefor be used only when we are speaking of a number of peoples, for then alone is anything like community of interest conceivable. The population of a given territory may have a good many different and even opposed interests—and this is a truth that is being suppressed. In like manner, whoever speaks of soil and describes vividly the effect of plowed fields upon nose and eyes, stressing the smell and the color of earth, is supporting the rulers’ lies. For the fertility of the soil is not the question, nor men’s love for the soil, nor their industry in working it; what is of prime importance is the price of grain and the price of labor. Those who extract profits from the soil are not the same people who extract grain from it, and the earthy smell of a turned furrow is unknown on the produce exchanges. The latter have another smell entirely. Privately owned land is the right expressing;it affords less opportunity for deception.

Anyone know story of "an Egyptian poet"?

2011-07-10T20:28:00.000-07:00

DB gave me "All the Rage" by Bob Ostertag to read.

"I want All the Rage to be a piece that speaks to a general, human anger anyone can feel. But first and foremost I want it to be a piece for queers. I wrote it for our anger, for who we are and how we feel with violence coming at us from every side, with the intimate parts of our lives discussed every day in the media by arrogant bigots who have not the slightest clue what they are talking about, with so many of us sick and dying. I wanted All the Rage to end with Hank alone playing his viola, playing the most passionate music I could write. It is a sort of present for Hank, and for Kevin." p. 202

2011-07-10T18:34:00.000-07:00

This week, loving Donato Mancini's Buffet World.

Last week, loving Chris Nealon's The Matter of Capital: "And I hope to have at least suggested to my friends on the academic and poetic left that it is not only the poetries of witness and documentation, or movement poetries, that are worrying over the destiny that capitalism is forcing us toward." p. 35

Reminder that Auden has a Caliban poem also: "Caliban to the Audience."

Also the phrase, about Ashbery's work: "network of topoi." "...that reach across the books of fifteen years and make it possible to see, even in small gestures, whole thematics being touched on (I like to think, tugged on, as in pulled threads of a tapestry)." p. 74

Kept thinking about how I read Moxley's work as having similar "network of topoi" that makes me somewhat want to argue with Nealon's reading of "Our Defiant Motives" as part of the problem where "critique is seen as guilty, as an injuring act, one that hurts others more vulnerable than the critic." p. 9

So went back then to the Moxley of Often Capital. The "afterword" here using a similar metaphor for network of topoi: "Section one is made up of poems which, by virtue of their economical scattering of words, might be compared to connect-the-dot drawings." p.58 And also the Moxley of "Cell #103," which is, I admit, more about the prison industrial complex when it impinges on family than it is about capital but is not a poem that sees critique in poetry as a problem, and is still years later a poem that amazes me, provokes me to emotion. And the two that follow it, "The Right to Counsel" and "The Right to Remain Silent."

I also think this by Nealon is so crucial: "In psychological terms, it is hard to imagine a more durable twentieth-century victory of the right than the persistence of this structure of feeling, which dates at least to the 1930s, and the international left's horrified disavowal of Stalinism." p. 10

So Nealon again, a few pages later, and this feels more telling: "Ashbery, like Moxley, is keenly aware of what is, precisely, he's looking away from--in his case, something like the consolidation of capitalist spectacle in 1970s New York." p. 10

Anyway, kept wanting to think about both Moxley and Kevin Davies together, as both using peripheral vision to look at this consolidation of capitalist spectacle. Not looking away from. But the forms being so different, that their work feels on the surface as if they have nothing to do with each other.

And then kept thinking that I couldn't give up Moxley. Like I had to have her there. Otherwise, too few, too little.

2011-07-08T11:03:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure this is worth mentioning, but the quote by me that is called a “negative review” by Vanessa Place is out of context. The words are all mine but they are part of a discussion with Perloff about her reading of Place’s book, a reading that I disagreed with. The words are not a review, negative or otherwise, of Place’s book. And I do not think that Place’s book implies an easy yes answer to any of those questions.

I would probably say something similar also about Fama’s quote in its original context. The quote from Fama that Place quotes is about the content of the book. This content, and I thought this was one of Place’s points, is horrifying.

2011-06-27T21:52:00.001-07:00

This week, loving Dana Ward, The Squeakquel, parts 1 & 2.

"I should mention," I added with a stiff upper lip, "that my poem begins with a quotation from Franco 'Bifo' Berardi--'The Social content of capitalist production contradicts its own semiotic framework. It produces a system of misunderstandings, contradictory injunctions and perverse juxtapositions. Therefore, it's a great joy to have intercourse with people of excellent taste'."

and also:

The table grew tired of feeling my eyes boring into its surface with mute incomprehension, & so, as if to satisfy my mystical impatience leapt up & started dancing there, not possessed, come true. When it danced it was like a Swiss army knife dancing with each step revealing more lacerating plumage that cut through the tender & tactile air above my head (which had something like the dampness of a sapling), & when it was done with its volleys & cuts a dewy light-bulb had been carved & stationed in the orbit of my skull.

Those are both from part 1. It is not paginated.

Also, Claire Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics."
Also, John d'Agata, About a Mountain.
Also Leslie Scalapino, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold.

2011-06-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

Also, wrote this for elective affinities. And argued with Joshua Clover and Chris Nealon at Evening Will Come.

2011-06-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

Reading through the Petroleuse Press pamphlets. I am collecting the moments where women’s role in various struggle is mentioned. I am working on a spreadsheet.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma Jones, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community:

When women are deprived of wide experience of organizing and planning collectively industrial and other mass struggles, they are denied a basic source of education, the experience of social revolt. And this experience is primarily the experience of learning your own capacities, that is, your power, and the capacities, the power, of your class. Thus the isolation from which women have suffered has confirmed to society and to themselves the myth of female incapacity. p. 12

Claire Fontaine, Human Strike Within the Field of the Libidinal Economy:

In her extensive research around the strike in the nineteenth century, Michelle Perrot talks about the birth of a sort of “sentimental strike” in the year 1890. May 4th of that year, in the newspaper from Lille entitled Le Cri du Travailleur (the worker’s scream) we can read that “the strikers didn’t give any reason for their interruption of the work…just that they wanted to do the same thing than the others.” In this type of movement, young people and women start to play a very important role, Perrot says. In a small village called Vienne militant women encouraged their female comrades, “Let’s not bear this miserable condition any longer. Let’s upraise, let’s claim our rights, let’s fight for a more honourable place. Let’s dare to say to our masters: we are just like you, made our of flesh and bones, we should live happy and free through our work.”

Amandine Vernet.

**

a new obsession, as I do this, the moments where love, make love, love-force, sexuality, etc. shows up…

Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma Jones, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community:

To make love and to refuse night work to make love, is in the interest of the class. p. 21

Either the vagina is primarily the passage to the reproduction of labor power sold as a commodity, the capitalist function of the uterus, or it is part of our natural powers, our social equipment. Sexuality after all is the most social of expressions, the deepest human connection. It is in that sense the dissolution of autonomy. The working class organizes as a class to transcend itself as a class; within that class we organize autonomously to create the basis to transcend autonomy. p. 26

Claire Fontaine, Human Strike Within the Field of the Libidinal Economy:

Lisa Cigarini and Luisa Muraro specified in 1992 in a text called Politics and political practice, “We don’t want to separate politics from culture, love and work and we can’t find any criterion for doing so. A politics of this kind, a separated one, we wouldn’t like it and we wouldn’t know what to do with it.” p. 5

The struggle-force, like the love-force, must be protected and regenerated. It’s a resource that doesn’t renovate itself automatically and needs collective conditions for its creation.

and then quoting Federici’s Wages Against Housework: Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife. p. 8 (in Fontaine)

2011-05-27T22:33:00.000-07:00

Last few days unable to stop reading Yvonne Rainer's Feelings are Facts: a Life. SY had already discussed her inability to stop reading it with me a few years ago. Then DB handed it to me to read. I felt as if he was assigning me work, I was to return it to the library, but I took it. Then began the last few days in which I do things like drop child off at babysitter early so I can read more. And wake up at 2 am and say to self, I can go back to sleep or I can get up and read Feelings are Facts and decide to get up and read. Unable to describe to others why I can't stop reading it. Something to do with the stuff about the body in the book? And something to do with her relentless examination of the back and forth between ambition and abjection? It all culminates in the list "Shameful Conditions and Occurences" (on p. 436-7). SY had already talked to me about this list before and she mentioned it again the other night. It begins "To live alone. / To arrive at a social gathering alone. / To go outside in clothing not suited to the weather." ... Then there is this "The dispirited humor of the above inventory probably originated in the dissolution of a relationship with 'my last man' around 1980 and the beginning of ten years of celibacy." p. 437 At the end, I am disappointed. By the turn to poetry. By the poetry.

Legs, along with breasts, hair, and buttocks, are parts of the female anatomy that continue to be fetishized by mass culture despite years of feminist resistance and struggle. For me, aging and illness have been sure-fire catalysts, enabling me to jettison whatever internalizing process gave me grief in my younger days around my physical attributes. Now with one breast gone and the other shrunk, my hair shorn to one-inch spikiness, and legs sheathed in trousers, I can walk the streets in dignity. Being addressed as "Sir" is a minor inconvenience. But it was not only aging and breast cancer that hastened such change in consciousness and appearance. Beginning in the early 1980s my association with lesbian friends and culture led inexorably to a weaning from the vanities and bodily obsessions I had absorbed from the worlds of dance and heterosexual social imperatives. p. 162

2011-05-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

I wrote this with David Buuck and then Tarpaulin Sky Press published it. This is the small plot of land.

2011-05-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

It was the women who usually initiated and led the food revolts. Six of the thiry-one food riots in the 17th century France studied by Ives-Marie Berce were made up exclusively of women. In the others, the female presence was so conspicuous that Berce calls them "women's riots." p. 80

The witch-hunt was also the first persecution in Europe that made use of a multi-media propaganda to generate a mass psychosis among the population. Alerting the public to the dangers posed by the witches, through pamphlets publicizing the most famous trials and the details of their atrocious deeds, was one of the first tasks of the print press (Mandrou 1968: 136). Artists were recruited to the task, among them the German Hans Baldung, to whom we owe the most damning portraits of witches. But it was the jurists, the magistrates, and the demonologists, oten embodied by the same person, who most contributed to the persecution. p. 168

During these revolts, it was often women who initiated and led the action. Exemplary were the revolt that occurred at Montpellier in 1645, which was started by women who were seeking to protect their children from starvation, and the revolt at Cordoba in 1652 that likewise was initiated by women. It was women, moreover, who (after the revolts were crushed, with many men imprisoned or slaughtered) remained to carry on the resistance, although in a more subterranean manner. p. 174

also, the "petroleuse"

2011-05-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

Two corrections.

Math error here. It should read “So in less than fifteen years, the US has gone from producing around 1300 to close to 4000 MFAs per year.” Thanks Steve Fama.

In the introduction to Looking Up Harryette Mullen, I neglect to mention the current women of Oulipo: Michelle Grangaud (since 1995), Anne Garreta (2000), Valerie Baudouin (2003), and Michele Audin (2009). And Ian Monk said black lesbian dwarf, not just black lesbian. Thanks Harry Mathews.

So sorry.

2011-03-03T20:37:00.001-08:00

It is possible to name everything, and to destroy the world. Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity as quoted by Michael Clune in American Literature and the Free Market.