swoonrocket

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.

2011-02-09T16:53:00.000-08:00

This is a revision of a talk that I wrote for “The Future of Writing,” a conference organized by Christine Wertheim. It will eventually appear in Viz Inter-Arts.

****

This is primarily about the round about around writing by which I mean it is not about writing or literature itself but the way writing circulates after it has been written. The thesis here is that the future of the round about around writing will be, just like the present, privatized.

My use of the word “privatization” here is intended as an annoyant or an irritant. I am meaning not only individually controlled but also something about the privatization of attention. I am meaning self-involved without the necessary reconnecting. As I wrote this talk, I kept stealing sentences from some related work I have been doing on the 1990s. But as I brought these sentences into this talk, I kept replacing the word “community” with “privatization.” So that is the slide I am talking about. I used to argue against the relentless charges of elitism that are so regularly lobbed at any small group defined by certain ways of thinking together, that the psychosocialsexual poetry scene I consider myself a part of was closed but permeable. By which I meant that it was partial to a certain way of thinking but anyone was welcome to show up and think that way. I’m now wondering how true this “permeable” part is. And this talk is about how I have found it increasingly confusing to figure out what is a private-ing gesture and what is a community-ing gesture in the psychosocialsexual poetry scenes in which I participate.

At the same time, I want to make clear that I do not hold exempt from this privatization any of the various things I’ve participated in or attempted to call into being. This isn’t a righteous talk where I argue that the answer to privatization is a lottery or that if everyone would just contribute a percentage of their income, all would be open and inclusive. I’m interested in this topic precisely because it has been so hard for me to figure it all out. And when I talk about my psychosocialsexual scenes, I am talking mainly about what I have otherwise called the “experimental/postmodern/avant-garde/innovative poetry puddle.” I am talking about writers of contemporary poetry that is informed by modernism, the beats, what Anne Waldman shorthands as the outriders. But I am not, for instance, talking about the slam or spoken word poetry puddle nor am I talking about the more lyric and confessionally quiet poetry puddle, scenes in which a related set of issues inflect very differently.

There are many stories one can tell about privatization. It is the time of neoliberalism after all. And many of these stories are dramatic, such as the privatization of water in Bolivia. And the story I am going to attempt to tell around the arts is in no way equivalent. The arts, unlike water, have had a long and complicated relationship with privatization from the beginning. The genre does, after all, have a courtly tradition.

But the story I want to tell here begins with what I am going to frame as a somewhat better time, as the once upon a time of the last half of the twentieth century when poets began to group themselves into various aesthetic affiliations, or “schools” in opposition to the nationalist idea of a universalist American literature. As they did this, they created community based patronage systems such as publishing houses, journals, anthologies, and reading series that supported themselves and others in the group. Many of these “schools” were formed in dialogue with the hothouse of minority cultural activist movements as many of these movements saw poetry as one genre among many that could be used for cultural representation, uplift, and preservation of the culturally disenfranchised. The creation of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in 1965 by Baraka is often seen as a foundational moment here. But that is just one among many. Bamboo Ridge, the workshop and the press that publishes mainly literature written by Asian Americans in Hawai‘i and has preserved and cultivated a literature in Pidgin, was founded in 1978. Arte Público, with its claim to “providing a national forum for Hispanic literature,” was founded in 1979. Many US cultural movements in the 70s often see poetry as a part of their activism as an ideal genre for an identity group to articulate and support its unique cultural practices. The Hawaiian Renaissance, the Native American movement, the Chicano/a movement, the various activisms around feminist and queer issues--all consider poetry as one possible genre in which to propose, examine, and cultivate cultural change.

Much of the literature that gets written out of and with this decentralization with activist ties provocatively represents collectivity. A foundational moment here is the poem “I am Joaquin” by Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzáles. It was written, as Rafael Pérez-Torres notes, as “an organizing tool” and published as a broadside. “I am Joaquin” uses the singular and heroic identity of “Joaquin” for Whitman influenced multitudes. Joaquin is many things. He rides with Don Benito Juarez; he is “the black-shawled / Faithful women”; he is “Aztec prince and Christian Christ.” It is a poem that echoes and one ups in homage Langston Hughes’s “Negro,” a poem that begins “I am a Negro” and then goes through a series of different qualifying identities such as slave, worker, singer, victim; it is a poem that perhaps also draws from Carl Sandberg’s poem that begins “I am the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.” All these poems present a collective, permeable identity with activist desires.

“I am Joaquin” is just one example among many possible examples. Whether one buys Auden’s line that poetry makes nothing happen or buys Mayakovsky’s that one must smash to smithereens the myth of an apolitical art, it is worth noting that there is a moment where literary cultures in the US decentralize and as they do they refuse the more universalist content of American literary nationalism and align themselves with various specific forms of resistant activism. Kaplan Page Harris, for instance, in “Causes, Movements, Poets,” discusses another example of this: the “benefit” readings that are advertised in the 70s in the bay area journal Poetry Flash. Harris’s list has around twenty-two benefit readings that he has noted between 1973-1980 in the bay area alone. It is a telling list. There were readings for farm workers, for women, for the People’s Community School, for the Greek resistance, for stricter regulation of Nuclear power plants, for the prisoners of San Quentin, etc. However, as Harris notes, the benefit reading more or less fades away from the listings in the 80s. And I have to admit that the only benefits that I’ve attended lately are for the various journals or reading series that define my psychosocialsexual poetry scene.

Harris does not take as his subject the reasons why the large political benefit reading disappears. And I think one could endlessly hypothesize about why poetry once had a valence and connection to a certain sort of activism at one time that it no longer has. But many of these reasons, I want to argue would also be stories of privatization. The privatization that I am talking about is multivalent. It can be seen in the decline in national arts funding in the 1980s. It can be seen in the resulting decline in those community centered arts institutes with ties to cultural activist organizations and the sorts of literatures that they supported. It can be seen in the decline in the benefit reading as these organizations disappear and those that remain are forced to concentrate their fundraising on just staying around. It can be seen in the retreat of artists into higher education. It can be seen in the rise of graduate degrees in the arts.

I work in what Mark Nowak calls the neoliberal American MFA industry. And I also, like almost everyone in my psychosocialsexual poetry scene, have a graduate degree. So this story of privatization as also a story about myself. But at the same time, I want to make it clear that I do not think that graduate degrees in the arts are destroying literature; I do not think those who enroll in these programs are misguided; and I do not think that people should refuse to teach in them. (Even while, like Nowak, I’m concerned about the casualization of labor in higher education and I’m also not convinced that in general the programs do that great of a job of fulfilling their intellectual missions.) And just a note, when I say “graduate degrees in the arts,” I mean not just the MFA but the PhD and the MA in creative writing and the PhD in poetics. Although of all these degrees, the MFA has a somewhat distinctive role in this privatization story because of its huge growth in the last 15 or so years. The numbers on MFA growth are hard to get firm. But, after numerous complicated emails with Seth Abramson, it seems likely that in 1995 in the US there were somewhere between sixty-five to eighty MFA programs. In 2009 there are around 194. Abramson’s estimate is that the cohort groups for these programs average out to about 20. So in less than fifteen years, the US has gone from producing around 300 to close to 4000 MFAs per year.

The impact of this expanding relationship between higher education and creative writing has been much debated. But Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, stands out as the distinctive study of how higher education has shaped American literature. McGurl’s study—with deliberation I am assuming—does not distinguish much between the MFA and other ways creative writing enters into the university system. And McGurl does not spend much time on the heyday of cultural activist movement literature that I have just described. But he does discuss it when it enters the academy and what he describes are literatures of institutional individualisms. McGurl in his discussion of Chicano/a literature, for instance, ends up suggesting that it might be created for “the increasingly paramount value of cultural diversity in U.S. educational institutions” and yet another example of something that is more “a new way of accumulating symbolic capital in the fervently globalizing U.S. academy, pointing scholars toward valuable bodies of expertise they might claim as their own and offering a rationale for the inclusion of certain creative writers in an emergent canon of world literature.”

McGurl’s study is pointedly limited to fiction but I actually think genre is not all that determining of an issue here (despite the different economies between them). McGurl’s observation is not that off the mark when it comes to poetry. I keep thinking here of how the “I am…” poem mutates from the inclusive and activist drive of “I am Joaquin” in the early days to something like Marilyn Chin’s “How I Got that Name” which begins “I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin” and is all about Chin, not all about “the people” or a specific group of people within “the people.” This observation of institutional individualism has been made as dismissive accusation many times before. Often to dismiss the possibility of there ever having been a moment of a culturally activist and aligned art. But my desire here is to suggest that it would be insistently ahistorical to read a poem as “I am Joaquin” as merely individualist and at the same time, to read a poem such as Marilyn Chin’s as an organizing tool would be just as ahistorical. The “I am…” differences here are yet another example of a closeness between poetry and cultural activism that was so present in the 70s that is no longer so by the end of the century. The “I am…” poem has become, in short, privatized.

This one little example of the “I am…” poem is, of course, reductive. But sometimes reductive is the only way I can make sense of things. The other day though I was sitting in a car talking with my friend in attempt to figure out all this privatization and we kept getting caught in complication. I had given her a ride home from our jobs in that neoliberal MFA industry. It was a hot fall day and we were both sweating in the heat of the idling car as we were trying to describe this Cthulhu of privatization, this many tentacled but impossible to describe beast that haunts H P Lovecraft’s work. We were just talking. And a lot of what we were saying was more emotion and less sense. We were the parable of the blind man describing an elephant, or say a Cthulhu. We talked rapidly and nervously, our tentacles swaying with excitement.

We began talking about what feels to us as if it is a sort of talisman of explanation, how Harris, in a different article; this one called “The Small Press Traffic School of Dissimulation,” notices that in the October 1978 issue of Poetry Flash there was an announcement about a study group for “Marxism and the Theory of Writing.” Harris’s article is about the connections among what are now often seen as very disparate camps of Bay Area literary aesthetic schools, a number of which were at the “Marxism and the Theory of Writing” study group which was attended by people who we might now group into things like New Narrative and language and feminist writers. We are interested in this small fact because we have been joking that one doesn’t know about the reading group or the house reading or the house workshop that so defines the commons of our psychosocialsexual poetry scenes unless someone who is in the know wants to kiss you or kiss a friend of yours. Although Poetry Flash still exists, we can’t imagine announcing a reading group in it. The role Poetry Flash once had of a centralized but community run info rag is but a vague memory in the age of the internet. To get that same list, how many websites must one now click through?

So there we were sweating and talking and in our agitation we can only see how everything is becoming like us, like a Cthulhu, and how a certain privatization is coming to dominate the very forms of permeableness that had brought both of us to poetry in the beginning. We began to make a list of what we thought was permeable but now feels more privatized that we counted out on our tentacles. Much of what gets celebrated as independent or as DIY or as gift economy is on this list. Our list included the house reading and how when one isn’t in the coterie the reading at the bar or at the arts center feels permeable but the privatized space of the house does not, about Facebook and the privatization of the reading announcement, the increasingly privatized move from poetry announcements in Poetry Flash to the subscription based listserv list to the individual blog with the comment box to the individual blog with the shut down comment box to something like Facebook, a hyper regulated and restrictive social network space.

We then began another list of what we thought of as heroic labors, those moments where poets give their time, energies, and resources to keep non-institutional presses and their online equivalents alive. And there are, we noticed, places where poets who are differently affiliated come together not to erase difference—because we do not want third way or elliptical or hybrid—but in discussion of alliance. There are things like big internet projects such as Poets Against the War and Poets for the Living Waters and Delirious Hem and Pussipo. There is Nowak’s claim recently on his blog that much of his work with bringing poetry to union members was because he wanted to push beyond what felt (to him) like “overly constricted, delimited spaces and audiences for the reception of Poetry.” There are interesting conferences. The list goes on.

And yet still, my friend brayed and bellowed as she writhed about in her seat, some of these work towards the greatest diversity and reach possible by using internet technologies and yet still end up reflecting a kind of privatization as hundreds of diverse individuals click through without collective struggles because of the inherent limitations of more virtual modes of community-building. Sometimes these models become fetishized, arguing for revolutionary sociality, saying the words gift economy over and over, claiming that working for free is in and of itself progressive, or that having some quantitative evidence of diversity is the same as building a political constituency. Still, she bellows, on the whole, in the current context, these are ALL heroic and difficult labors, increasingly essential to the struggle against the institutional and economic pressures of privilege. The part I can’t figure out, she next brays, is how to not discount the individual heroism and yet acknowledge that it is at risk in a time of a privatization of sociality.

This privatization of sociality we somewhat locate in the impact of that way that suddenly we all have a graduate degree in the arts. We are well aware how graduate degrees in the arts are, as all college degrees are, provisionally permeable pay to play (whether one pays with cash, loans, or labor) communities that are constituted through a series of limitations such as applications that the community who enters into it does not control and does not have the right to contest. It is also a super short term community, usually of two to three years, sometimes of five. Graduate programs, as a result of these conditions, can at moments have a certain interestingly diverse student body. And unlike community poetry events, which seem to be more designed for an already convinced group, they can at moments provide an entry point to those who do not live in urban areas or do not have access to arts knowledge for other reasons. And they can create a community of writers that is not based on friendship, but on shared interest or intellectual devotion. And we also notice how if at one time it felt really obvious to us that the psychosocialsexual readings of our scenes were the ones that mattered, we have a harder and harder time telling the difference between a psychosocialsexual reading and an MFA reading because they tend to schedule the same sorts of readers except because we work at a fairly identitarian diverse college, the readings at our college are attended by more categorically diverse people who do not yet have an MFA and the psychosocialsexual readings are attended by mainly white people with an MFA or a PhD like ourselves.

At that point we began to wonder then about how it is that ethnic/racial diversity has become something institutional, but not something psychosocialsexual. We wonder again about the privatization around identity, about the MFA space resembling a commons in that many different people enter into it with admission being determined by factors other than friendship and yet not at all acting like a commons in its ramifications. It seems to us that many different people enter into the MFA, spend two to three years together, and then scatter back to their psychosocialsexual scenes.

As we talk, each time we use the word “commons” we cringe and say “ooops I mean Cthulhu.” It is not until later at home that night when reading Jodi Dean’s blog that I realize the reason we are cringing each time we say “commons” is because we should have been saying “common” not “commons.” Or as Dean explains this difference, using Cesare Casarino, the commons is a shared limited space; the common is the self-reproducing excess that is capitalism.

There is no better example of this from my psychosocialsexual poetry scenes than the impact that the MFA has had on the literary magazine. For so long the literary magazine has been one of the most unimpeachable and unquestionable signs of the gift economy of the literary coterie. It was edited by someone who put in long hours without pay for the love of writing and it was distributed and contested and often financed by a psychosocialsexual scene’s concerns. At a certain point the AWP puts together a series of recommended program guidelines. One of them is that MFAs have a literary magazine. And in years since we’ve seen the “commoning” of the literary magazine. We have noticed endless numbers of them all glossy and institutionally supported but without a community of readers beyond their editors. At the same time, that decrease in national and state arts funding makes running the little magazine difficult to do. So the little magazine lost both community need and arts funding at the same time due to its incorporation into the privatized MFA system.

As we brayed, our writhing feelers quivering, I kept thinking here of how conditioned I am to not think of poetry as in affiliation, how I tend not to notice these moments of privatized sociality. When I say to myself, oh the all white and degreed up psychosocialsexual reading series or little magazine or whatever is, feel, well, a little limited, I then say to myself, well, why don’t you just not show up to that one and start your own; edit your own a journal; start your own free skool; kiss everyone so they know about your reading group. But that is part of what I am now seeing as part of the problem. I have a tendency to privatize and call it gifting.

What we were noticing that afternoon in the car, although we were not saying it at the time, is the breakdown of that old divide between a good community poetry and a bad academic poetry. Basically, the divide isn’t holding up any more. And neither is the divide that suggests that the academy is privatized while the community is public. But neither is the reverse. That the university is public and the community is privatized. Everything seems to be constantly hitting up against this issue of what is open and what is private all the time and then the privatization seems to be winning more often than not. And the issue that feels pertinent to us at that moment is how we will get ourselves out of that hot, enclosed private car, how we will keep both these things accessible, open and yet undiluted and rigorous.

At a certain point, I turned off the idling motor, and we began to talk of Judith Butler’s recent work which is about how we define our selves and others into and out of the category of human. And in this book she points again and again to how we need more complicated modes of recognizability. Among the things to be recognized are claims of language and social belonging. And it feels that it is perhaps limited modes of recognizability are responsible for that disappearing benefit reading. There is some strange way that this commoning I have been attempting to describe on my own body promises me greater access to everything, but in actuality leaves me unable to think in a hot, stuffy, psychosocialsexual car. That once meaningful benefit reading doesn’t come out of nowhere. People don’t get together and make something happen unless they’ve hung out and argued and loved together at a bar or an arts center with the fervent faith of the converted. That is why I think this Cthulhu of privatized sociality puts so much at risk. Here my mind begins to wander and I think, one tentacle entwined with another, about needing both the intimacy of the psychosocialsexual scenes and the intimacy of the larger, public alliance that I am shorthanding here as the benefit reading (even as I so feel that the benefit reading is clearly not the answer). While I am lost in thought, I shake my squid head with its writhing feelers and my friend gathers up her exploding bladder, the slushy nastiness of a cloven sunfish, and with a sound I cannot put on paper, she leaves the car and I begin to drive home, tentacles to the wheel, and I, as I drive off, continue paraphrasing Lovecraft… Who knows the end? What has risen may sink and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.

2011-01-29T22:09:00.001-08:00

Latest obsession... Alan Halsey's The Text of Shelley's Death. I went to buy the Robin Hood book but it was out of stock at SPD. So I got this instead. The index, in particular, is lovely.

2011-01-21T20:14:00.000-08:00

Dear all,

This is a Durutti Free Skool update.

Short version: it's still on!

Slightly longer version: it is still on!

We're planning to host a metaskool, or aggregate skool, named Durutti Free Skool, this summer. We think it will be first week of August but we aren't sure; we're trying not to conflict with some other events.

It's an "aggregate" skool because it is for anyone who has already helped run, or participated in, a Poetry Free Skool this year. Sort of. To recount, we are inviting people to host a Free Skool in their region, of any size larger than two (it should qualify as a conspiracy), which is concerned with Marxist and anarchist poetics. We have recommended two texts (listed below) but that's not a rule, just a proposal. Our commitment is to an interest in thinking about poetry and being a poet and the questions of poetry and social existence from an anarchist and/or Marxist perspective.

We keep saying: we are not trying to get anyone to do this. If you want to have a free skool about gluten, do that. Or do something else entirely. All we are saying is, if you want to do this, we want to do it with you, and help facilitate, and help in whatever ways we are able, and help host a big meetup of everyone who has done similar things.

"Free," this year, for the Bay Area summer jam, will mean twenty bucks. That's it. That's American dollari, northern comrades. Once you have made your plans for your own free skool, and passed this message on as needed, we'll poll everybody we have on the list in, oh, April or May or something, and ask everyone who wants to take part to send in the 20 bucks, which will let us know how many people to plan for. If it turns out we have to spend more to get a space, we'll pass the hat or something, come summertime.

In the meantime, keep us posted as to what you are planning. Some people have posted their skools as events on the facebook page, including curricula: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=155285014499575

You can do that too, or just drop us a message at duruttifreeskool@gmail.com. We don't check this address all the time, but we'll get it eventually.

We are very excited! More soon, heartz from dfs11

The books we are proposing:

Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt, by Richard Kempton

Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, by Raul Zibechi (tr. Raymor Ryan)

2011-01-10T09:14:00.000-08:00

"Yes" again. Edwin Torres, Yes Thing No Thing.

2011-01-09T21:55:00.000-08:00

"I'd like to say now that I love poets." Dorothy Lasky, Poetry is Not a Project

2011-01-09T21:33:00.000-08:00

I go "yes" while rereading Jena Osman's The Network.

2011-01-08T16:42:00.000-08:00

Made it all the way through John Barr's Grace, second time.

Retreated, mid-Grace, to Judith Larner Lowry's Notes on Natural Design: Ideas for the California Backyard Restoration Gardener and Dan Heims' and Grahame Ware's Heucheras and Heucherellas: Coral Bells and Foamy Bells.

Then after Grace, and loving it all the more because, Andrea Brady's Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination. Relief in "the history of incendiary devices." Somewhat mesmerized by this book. Have gone back to it several times in last few weeks.

2010-12-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

This afternoon loving Caroline Bergvall's Meddle English. Especially loving the sections called "Cropper."

2010-12-03T16:55:00.000-08:00

One liners from Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman:

Stripped of any internationalist and political quality, feminism becomes about as radical as a diamante phone cover. p. 30

and

What if every fuck was a kind of communism, egalitarian, joyful and for the good of all? This would precisely not be communalism, a kind of withdrawn fellowship, but a reestablishment of the link between sex and politics. p. 58

and

The political imagination of contemporary feminism is at a standstill. p. 69

The book is super short. I am obsessed with this. I say this like 5x while talking to Stephanie about it. I am convinced shortness will save the scholarly book.

It is basically a diatribe against vibrator feminism. Although it spends a lot of time on chocolate.

It is very funny at moments. "They, the breasts, and not their 'owner', are the center of attention, and are referred to, with alarming regularity, as completely autonomous objects, much as one would refer to suitcases or doughnuts. Constantly fiddled with, adjusted, exposed, covered-up or discussed, contemporary breasts resemble nothing so much as bourgeois pets: idiotic, toothless, yapping dogs with ribbons in their hair and personalized carrying pouches." p. 25 Would be less funny if I hadn't been talking about donuts all the time lately.

And I kept thinking what is it doing and then it did something, mainly with pornography (in the contemporary it is all about work--Annabel Chong--but it has a history of being about pleasure). And then ending with that pregnancy pact between Massachusetts girls. (I am obsessed with this story; so glad someone still keeping it alive. Will someone please write the book on these girls?)

2010-11-28T16:20:00.000-08:00

More on MFA, "MFA v. NYC" at Slate and N+1. Somewhat fascinating, because it is attempt to get somewhat at the round about around literature and how it circulates, and yet keep feeling grumpy about so much of this recent writing.

This on poets: "The model for the MFA fiction writer is her program counterpart, the poet. Poets have long been professionally bound to academia; decades before the blanketing of the country with MFA programs requiring professors, the poets took to the grad schools, earning Ph.D.s in English and other literary disciplines to finance their real vocation. Thus came of age the concept of the poet-teacher. The poet earns money as a teacher; and, at a higher level of professional accomplishment, from grants and prizes; and, at an even higher level, from appearance fees at other colleges. She does not, as a rule, earn money by publishing books of poems—it has become almost inconceivable that anyone outside a university library will read them. The consequences of this economic arrangement for the quality of American poetry have been often bemoaned (poems are insular, arcane, gratuitously allusive, etc.), if poorly understood. Of more interest here is the economic arrangement proper, and the ways in which it has become that of a large number of fiction writers as well."

Somewhat thinking that what is crucial is that the poet does not earn money on the poetry. And this means that some poets earn money as a teacher. And many do not. And yet both publish more or less similarly. And so poetry circulates in a field that is somewhat feudal (has a hidden feudal aspect?), even if on the surface it attempts to act as if it is the same as capitalist publishing ventures (it has barcodes and spines and sometimes ads are taken out and it is priced at least $15, etc.). This feudal field is often called "community." And it may or may not be that at moments.

Then how this feudal field (or perhaps hidden feudal aspect) or often called community intersects with the more obvious feudalism of the akademy is where it gets really confusing. Both to people in and out of it. This is where I keep wanting to spend hours figuring it out and yet can't yet figure out what needs to be noticed.

2010-11-26T16:45:00.000-08:00

Wanting to do some sort of graph where I chart out who shows up in various books I've read lately. James Sherry, for instance, a minor figure in both Eileen Myles Inferno and also Michael Gottlieb's Memoir and Essay but not in Patti Smith's Just Kids. Richard Hell is in Inferno and in Just Kids and might be in Memoir and Essay (remember at least one reference to punk) and is probably in Kane. Patti Smith is in Inferno but Eileen Myles not in Just Kids. Etc.

All books taking place in same mile radius. Also earlier, same mile covered in Daniel Kane's All Poets Welcome. All describing entirely different literary histories as if they never overlapped. There must be someone in all of them? If not Hell, maybe Ginsberg? Not sure. Would take more work than I can do at this moment.

The Smith and the Gottlieb almost mirror images of the other. The Mapplethorpe of the Gottlieb is Alan Davies (and Gottlieb's love of Davies is the sweet part of this book). The Alan Davies of the Smith is Robert Mapplethorpe.

The Smith is a rosy say nothing bad about anyone sort of book. This is as harsh a thing said in the book, on Allen Lanier: "These extended periods on my own afforded me the time and freedom to puruse my artistic growth, but as time passed, it was revealed that the trust I believed we shared was repeatedly violated, endangering us both and compromising his health. This gentle, intelligent, and seemingly modest man had a lifestyle on the road that was inconsistent with what I believed was our quiet bond." (246).

The Gottlieb almost the reverse. As in why say something good without saying every bad thought one has thought right before it: "Michael Gizzi came up to me after a reading up in Great Barrington a few years and said, 'Man, that was great. But you read so, so slow." I looked at him and thought to myself--this third generation-removed bebop wannabe scat poet who's been trying vainly to channel Kerouac's voice since he was fifteen, who reads so fast that every poem sounds like one long sentence strung together, has the gall to criticize me? And, on top of it, the long poem I've just finished reading is in fact dedicated to him, of all people. But then I realized, of course, that he had a point. Michael Gizzi was right." (p. 56)

And then ugh, gender. Kane keeps apologizing for the sexism of his subjects. And forgiving it as performance, as just the way it was. But the Myles book suggests a parallel feminist scene happening at the exact same time that doesn't seem to show up anywhere else. In the Gottlieb very few women even get names; they are called by their relationship status, "wife," "girlfriend," etc. Hannah Weiner appears only as someone who was jealous of some girlfriend he had once, a dancer.

2010-11-24T13:50:00.001-08:00

I give friend leaving the house and carrying book of Jess images to look at while he gets ketamine iv, Robert Walser's Answer to an Inquiry. Thinking Walser might be perfect in same way. Have got the book back but not yet the book review. "Remember what I told you once before, namely, that it is possible to perform fearsomeness, beauty, mourning, or love, or whatever else you want merely by opening or closing one eye in one way or another."

2010-11-16T11:28:00.000-08:00

"whenever a people's energies are roused by compelling historical forces and quickened by the quest for new avenues of spiritual liberation and salvation its literature acquires epic dimensions. For indeed in times of social and spiritual upheaval some literature serves as a safety-valve and cries out with outrage and indignation against social ills and injustice. At such times literary expression responds to historical, psychological and social problems and bears an extremely close connection with life in general." Eliud Martinez, "I am Joaquin as Poem and Film: Two Modes of Chicano Expression."

2010-10-30T02:36:00.000-07:00

“People read in bed for a reason. Nobody needs to be so damn awake. Sleep and Poetry. It’s what Keats meant.” Eileen Myles, Inferno, p. 198

Last week, loving Sharnish Parsipur’s Women Without Men. The women all come to a garden. One turns into a lotus flower and ascends.

This week loving Eileen Myles’s Inferno.

They have the same plot. Female spaces are created. Although Myles has the same plot as the Daniel Kane All Poets Welcome of a few weeks ago: poetry spaces are created. Although the Kane book keeps apologizing as it charts all the sexism of the scene.

Half way through Inferno, Bill steals my copy and removes all my dog ears. We are going to LA for the weekend. He has nothing to read. I say, as we walk out the door, take this; I am loving it. I have something I have to read for class. What is it? The Daniel Kane? In the Myles book, I have dog ears as notes. For some reason he cannot stand them and quickly removes them all. I had Schuyler poems to reread marked. I had other things to look up. I can’t find them now. This is feeling like a loss. I am in the airport, I take the book on next plane trip, attempting to find them. Looking for the evidence of the bent pages.

Inferno is messy and it makes me so happy when reading it. So many times in the last few weeks I have mentioned it when I am talking about the emotional minefields of psychosocialsexual poetry scenes with others. The moment when Eileen Myles says… Or the way she describes… I say both her names when I do this. As if they had some obvious rhythmic pattern.

She makes the blunder heroic. I feel as if all the stupid things I’ve done and said can be made into heroic narratives also, if I just imitate.

I get MFA’d out. I confess. I don’t hate the MFA. I see it mainly as under-realized, under-theorized. But still I get MFA’d out. By saying that I don’t mean that I get tired of the individuals in an MFA. Tired of myself maybe. But the others in it remain thinking humans and I like them in the same amounts I like all thinking humans. Maybe a little more. They at least have all been willing to think about poetry for two years. And that seems important. It is all the things round about the MFA that make me MFA’d out. The stuff that comes out of it. The endless wrestlings. The claimings. Something about the easy dismissal of the MFA. How it doesn’t take itself seriously and as a result, all that has come out of the MFA goes down a path that ends up at snarky. And snarky is that one jolt of superiority and then the crash. It is like bad candy. And in that, Inferno feels as if it reminds me what both wears me down about what is sometimes called community arts formations and what is worth being worn down for. Eileen Myles took speed and danced around funny at a party a whole lot once. Thank you Eileen Myles for funny dance on speed.

“It was a thing--an earnest and important thing to sit in the workshops at the church, or to go to the homes of the people who filled it with light--to be their friend.” p. 289

2010-10-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

Today, I am so loving rereading Hirmoi Ito's Killing Kanoko for CWS.

Handout for if discussion fails, these two paragraphs from Judith Halberstam’s “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies”

Lee Edelman’s book, No Future, makes perhaps the most powerful and controversial recent contribution to anti-social queer theory (Edelman, 2005). Edelman’s polemic describes the rejection of futurity as the meaning of queer critique and links queer theory to the death drive in order to propose a relentless form of negativity in place of the forward looking, reproductive and heteronormative politics of hope that animates all too many political projects. The queer subject, he argues, has been bound epistemologically, to negativity, to nonsense, to anti-production, to unintelligibility and, instead of fighting this characterization by dragging queerness into recognition, he proposes that we embrace the negativity that we anyway structurally represent. Edelman’s polemic about futurity ascribes to queerness the function of the limit; while the heteronormative political imagination propels itself forward in time and space through the indisputably positive image of the child, and while it projects itself back on the past through the dignified image of the parent, the queer subject stands between heterosexual optimism and its realization. At this political moment, Edelman’s book constitutes a compelling argument against a US imperialist project of hope, and one of the most powerful statements of queer studies’ contribution to an anti-imperialist, queer counter-hegemonic imaginary and yet, I want to engage critically with Edelman’s project here in order to argue for a more explicitly political framing of the anti-social project.

While Edelman frames his polemic against futurity with epigraphs by Jacques Lacan and Virginia Woolf, he omits the more obvious reference that his title conjures up and that echoes through recent queer anti-social aesthetic production, namely “God Save the Queen” as sung by The Sex Pistols. While The Sex Pistols used the refrain “no future” to reject a formulaic union of nation, monarchy and fantasy, Edelman tends to cast material political concerns as crude and pedestrian, as already a part of the conjuring of futurity that his project must foreclose. Indeed, Edelman turns to the unnervingly tidy and precise theoretical contractions of futurity in Lacan because, like Lacan and Woolf, and unlike the punks, he strives to exert a kind of obsessive control over the reception of his own discourse. Twisting and turning back on itself, reveling in the power of inversion, Edelman’s syntax itself closes down the anarchy of signification. In footnotes and in chiasmic formulations alike he shuts down critique and withholds the future and fantasies of it from the reader. One footnote predicts critiques of his work based upon its “elitism,” “pretension,” whiteness and style and the footnote projects other objections on the grounds of “apolitical formalism” (Edelman, 2005). He professes himself unsympathetic to all such responses and having foreclosed the future, continues on his way in a self-enclosed world of cleverness and chiasmus. Edelman’s polemic opens the door to a ferocious articulation of negativity (“fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop” [29]) but, ultimately, he does not fuck the law, big or little L, he succumbs to the law of grammar, the law of logic, the law of abstraction, the law of apolitical formalism, the law of genres.

I think the manarchist manny, the mannyarchist?, still has my copy of No Future.

2010-10-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

Went back to the original on the Lorenzo Thomas. "Alea's Children: the Avant-Garde on the Lower East Side, 1960-1970." in African American Review, 27:4, 1993, 573-578...

"The most remarkable thing about the Lower East Side scene was that, while race remained a powerful engine of social upheaval, the artists seemed able to work together almost in spite of it." p. 575

And...

"The relative lack of racial animosity--at least among the artists--was a notable feature of life on the Lower East Side. The fact that this atmosphere changed in the middle of the decade has, perhaps, more to do with the realities of the nation at the time than with any failure of heart among the practitioners of the avant-garde." p. 578

Also, this article from a whole section on Umbra.

Calvin Hernton in "Umbra: A Personal Recounting": "I love everything about Umbra. I love the outlandish parties we gave to raise funds to publish Umbra magazine and to keep ourselves going." p. 579

2010-10-09T16:14:00.000-07:00

But how does this dispersal or inhibitory machine work? And how, if it does work, does it work in everyday life? Here are some examples. First of all, there are the "tactics" invented and used by the movement to defend and attack: pulga, sikititi, taraxchi, and wayronko are among the most prevalent. To summarize: the pulga [flea] is a tactic utilized to block roads and streets at night, quickly, and to withdraw instantly--similar to a flea bite--and occurs simultaneously at thousands of different locations. The wayronko [ground beetle] tactic consisted of "lightning marches and blockades to distract the forces of repression," without a route or prior plan, like the flight of the beetle, which seems to lack any predictable direction. In the sikititi [red ant] tactic, the communities march "in line." Finally, the taraxchi [plumed bird] tactic is a massive mobilization intended to shut down the cities. p. 50-51. Raul Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces.

2010-10-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

"the avant-garde is less about change in the arts than it is about genuine experimentation in social relations" Lorenzo Thomas as qtd in Daniel Kane's All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s

2010-09-27T15:19:00.001-07:00

In the Jonathan Franzen v. Tao Lin, my pick is Eileen Myles' Inferno.

2010-09-21T15:29:00.000-07:00

I wrote this with Joshua Clover.

2010-09-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

Durutti Free Skool For Poets: Summer 2011.

This summer, we participated in a short seminar that was more or less a meet and chat about Marxism, anarchism, and poetry. It was called the 95 cent skool. We put out the call and we reserved the space but that was about it. It was a week of collective talking and shared intellectual responsibility.

We spent a lot of the week talking about political economy, our suppositions and uncertainties, our feelings sympathetic and skeptical and passionate. But not much time talking about what we might do with these things. We did not become a terrorist cell or even an action group, despite the fears of so many bloggers. We were a giant group hug, but not yet a Durruti column.

This is a joke; and yet sort of not. We did not show up to declare a poetic program, but to think about social action from the perspective of poets. In the weeks after the 95 cent skool, we pursued pursuit: how to continue this conversation. We want to talk next about what actions “we,” whomever we are, might take in response to some of the things we noticed. And after doing a week of concentrated talk with a small group, we were thinking it might also make sense to talk with a larger group. Are you interested in talking toward action?

Here is our idea…

You start your own skool finishing up before the end of June. Call it whatever you want. Announce it wherever you want. Enroll whomever you want, as big or as small as you want. Read what you want. Just, for our purposes, make it somewhat related to Marxism and anarchism. (Feel free to also start schools unrelated to Marxism and anarchism; but for the Durutti Free Skool of Summer 2011 purposes do some thinking about Marxism and anarchism as poets.)

That said… two books we might suggest as curriculum:

Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt, by Richard Kempton
Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, by Raul Zibechi (tr. Raymor Ryan)

Both of these discuss specific moments of decentralized direct action, with extensive detailed information; this sort of detailed discussion was what we felt was missing at the week long 95 cent skool and we want to talk more about this sort of thing in the future. One is global South/social and one is global North/cultural. (We are thinking that there is much to learn from thinking about both of these at the same time.) And they are both fairly short and interesting to read.

Then, we want to invite you and everyone in your skool to meet up for a weekend in Berkeley, end of July or beginning of August. We haven’t planned this yet. Right now we think it might be nice to do some group-talk about what we all might do. And we want to have some drinks at the bar and we want to do some dancing after we have some drinks at the bar and feel as if the world is a little less alienating because there are poets to talk with about Marxism and anarchism.

If interested, and if you give in to facebook, then visit (and/or join) the Durutti Free Skool page and post your intentions for a free skool. If no facebook, then send an email to duruttifreeskool[at]gmail.com declaring your intentions and we will post it. The facebook page is publicly viewable.

2010-08-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

I'm following Kaplan Harris this week: Judith Halberstam's "The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies" and also his "Causes, Movements, Poets." Last week I was following Brian Teare: Judith Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies.” And Stephanie Young: Ronaldo Wilson, Poems of the Black Object.

2010-08-17T17:18:00.000-07:00

English 204
craft of poetry: TWO PLUS ONE

I am thinking of this course as a two content areas plus one form. We will be reading for range in this class. And my goal is to convey an expansive sense of what is possible in contemporary poetry. For the first third of the semester we will read a large number of writers who are wrestling with the representational issues that accompany writing about the current on going wars in which the US currently participates. The list here is likely to include but will not in any way be limited to Amiri Baraka, Judith Butler, Alice Notley, Judith Goldman, Brenda Hillman, etc. For the second third we will read a large number of writers who are doing things to the body in their work so as to disengage with the tendency of lyric to naturalize heterosexuality and/or figure women as desired and men as desiring. The list here is likely to include but will not in any way be limited to Kathy Acker, Dodie Bellamy, Tisa Bryant, Hiromi Ito, Nourbese Philips, Vanessa Place, and William Pope L. For the last third, we will look at the form of the “tour.” The list here is likely to include but will not in any way be limited to David Buuck, Gaye Chan, CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock, Deep Oakland, Jena Osman, various Situationist tracts, Spurse, Claudia Rankine, and Kaia Sand. For each area of concern, you will turn in critical and creative enactments/assignments/annotations. There will be a lot of reading for this class. All of it will be good and much of it might even change your (writing) life.

August 25
introduction

September 1
Joan Retallack, “Rethinking Poetics Log”
Paul Chan, Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, The Law, and Poetry (2006)

first module: the MILITARY
argument: In the last five years an unusually large amount of poets have written on the same topic: US military expansionism. We will begin this class by looking at a number of these works and cataloguing the various formal techniques that these writers use.

read one of the following…
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence or Frames of War

plus a selection from these…
Alice Notley, Alma or the Dead Women [MBS]
Amiri Baraka, Somebody Blew up America [SPD]
Barrett Watten, Bad History [SPD]
Brenda Hillman, Pieces of Air in the Epic [MBS]
Carole Mirakove, Occupied [SPD]
Dan Bouchard, Some Mountains Removed [SPD]
David Buuck, Shunt [SPD]
Eliot Weinberg, “What I Heard about Iraq” [OR]
Heriberto Yepez, Wars. Threesomes. Drafts and Mothers. [SPD]
Judith Goldman, Deathstar/Rico-chet [SPD]
Jules Boykoff, Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge [SPD]
Jena Osman, An Essay in Astericks [SPD]
K. Silem Mohammad, Deer Head Nation [SPD]
Kim Rosenfeld, Trama [SPD]
Kristin Prevallet, Shadow Evidence Intelligence [SPD]
Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs [SPD]
Meg Hamill, Death Notices [SPD]
Drew Gardener, Petroleum Hat [SPD]
Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard [MBS]

September 8
Bring copies for the entire class. Questions about a work (or works) you read. This question should be at least a full paragraph in length. It might even be a page. Questions though should be “meaty,” should be designed to provoke discussion. They might also be somewhat “craft” based. A sort of example of what I am talking about could be seen in these questions about Drew Gardner’s “Chicks Dig War” at this website: http://www.marscafe.com/write-now. Bonus points if your question mentions some of the ideas in Butler.

September 15
Bring in some creative work that somehow engages with some of the issues we discussed. Bring copies for the entire class. Should be a somewhat serious piece of work that could be published on its own. I am hesitant to put a page number on something like this but it should be more than something that you dashed off at midnight the night before but less than a book length project. Somewhere between two and thirty pages.

September 22
Bring copies for the entire class (but we may or may not discuss in class; I’m not sure yet). Bring in an annotated bibliography of the 4-6 books you read for this module. Try to make this bibliography investigatory. So instead of any 4-6 books, focus your bibliography around a technique, a device, an issue. Example: A bibliography about sarcasm that discusses Gardner, Mohammad, Mikhail, and Buuck and also discusses how or why they are using it. I’ve made these annotated bibliographies due at the end rather than the beginning of the module so you can adjust your reading based on the presentations from the first week. I’d prefer it if you concentrate on books on the class list, but if you really want to add some other books then check in with me and we can discuss.

second module: DEMATERIALIZED BODIES AND STRATEGIC SEXUALITIES IN REACTION TO THE INDIVIDUALIST TENDENCY OF POETRY

argument: Poetry has an intense and long tradition of an inward turn. This module looks at some recent works that attempt to take this inward turn (often we call this inward turn “lyric” or “love poetry”) and turn it outside in or inside out. The not so hidden agenda behind this list is feminism, provocative feminisms in particular. And the list could also be seen as a series of examples of some recent dis-engagements with the long tradition of lyric that has naturalized heterosexuality and/or has figured women as muse and objects of desire and men as desiring agents.

read…
Judith Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies”

plus a selection from these…
Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School [MBS]
Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker [MBS]
Asa Berg, Remainland [SPD]
Tisa Bryant, Unexplained Presence [SPD]
Margaret Christakos, Excessive Love Prosthesis [SPD]
Samuel Delany, Times Square Red Times Square Blue [SPD]
Renee Gladman, Toaf [SPD]
ed. Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poets [SPD]
Kenneth Goldsmith, Fidget [SPD]
Hiromi Ito, Killing Kanoko [SPD]
Jennifer Martenson, Unsound [SPD]
Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day [MBS]
Nathanaël (Nathalie Stephens), Absence where as: Claude Cahun and the unopened book [SPD]
Alice Notley, Descent of Alette [MBS]
Nourbese Philip, Zong! [MBS]
Vanessa Place, Statement of Fact, [order]
William Pope L. The Friendliest Black Artist in America [MBS]
Claudia Rankin, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely [MBS]
Trish Saleh, Wanting in Arabic [SPD]
Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution [MBS]
Catherine Wagner, My New Job [SPD]
Hannah Weiner, Open House [SPD]
Ronaldo Wilson, Poems of the Black Object [SPD]
Heriberto Yepez, Wars. Threesomes. Drafts and Mothers. [SPD]

September 29
Bring copies for the entire class. What parts of bodies? Take a book or two and index all the body parts in it. Then write something up about what sort of body the book creates. If it makes more sense, you could do this around which sexualities or how sexuality gets represented. Basically, I want some indexing and then I want some analysis of what you find.

October 6
Again, bring some creative work. Again, bring copies for the entire class. Again, should be something engaged, risky, provocative, interesting. Again, three to thirty pages.

October 13
Bring copies for the entire class (but we may or may not discuss in class; I’m not sure yet) of an annotated bibliography of the 4-6 books you read for this module.

third module: the TOUR
argument: Not much of an argument here. Just that there has been in recent years a lot of interest in the tour as a way of talking about the complexities of urban space. Last year I taught a workshop at the U of Alabama that I called “Together: We Can Write a Book about Tuscaloosa.” And so after we have read and discussed some of the works below, I want to do a version of that workshop except one that I might now call “Together: We Can Write a Book about Oakland.”

read…
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (might make sense to concentrate on “Maps.”)

plus a selection from these…
Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior [can get anywhere]
Bureau of Public Secrets--see especially key works like Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive” or Chtcheglov’s “Formulary for a New Urbanism”
David Buuck, Buried Treasure Island
Allison Cobb, Green-Wood [SPD]
CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock, The City: Real and Imagined [SPD]
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch, Ten Walks/Two Talks [SPD]
Deep Oakland
CS Giscombe: Giscome Road [MBS]
Historic Waikiki
Fiamma Montezemolo, Rene Peralta, and Heriberto Yepez, Here Is Tijuana! [MBS]
Jena Osman, “Public Figures”
Kristin Palm, The Straits [SPD]
Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and 7 Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture [in reprint; should be out by October]
Kaia Sand, Remember to Wave [SPD]
Jane Sprague, Port of Los Angeles [SPD]
Spurse, “Investigations in place: Some thoughts on Psychogeographic mapping strategies in an examination of the working coasts of Maine”

October 20
Bring copies for the entire class. Choose a book or two and somehow make a map of the tour and at the same time somehow demonstrate what is represented in the tour and what is not represented that could be. Bonus points for making it clear you’ve read the Moretti.

October 27, November 3, November 10
"Together"

November 17
Bring copies for the entire class (but we may or may not discuss in class; I’m not sure yet) of an annotated bibliography of the 4-6 books you read for this module.

December 1
Again, bring some creative work. Again, bring copies for the entire class. Again, should be something engaged, risky, provocative, interesting. Again, three to thirty pages.

2010-07-27T13:03:00.000-07:00

This week in front brain: Paul Avrich The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the US, Joel Kovel Enemy of Nature, and Jason Read Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present.

2010-07-15T15:19:00.000-07:00

Notes from workshop for La Fronteras in Tijuana.

Context: It was hard to do. The border is three fences deep. It works really well at keeping things disconnected. I feel a deep disorganization of my brain from it. I am always anyway a first world white girl of confusion and angst. This got worse.

Heriberto and others worked with me in the back and forth of Spanish and English. They were super human.

I began with a quote from Jeff Derksen, or something I wrote down and attributed to Jeff Derksen at that recent Vancouver conference, which was this:

Poetry as a place for atypical thinking.

Then we talked and translated for a long time Drew Gardner’s “Chicks Dig War” and the idea of “useful.”

As we talked about “Chicks Dig War,” we talked about a series of questions that I had written down from the recent Rethinking Poetics conference. They are not exceptional questions and probably don’t even benefit from being attributed to those who I attribute them to. But I leave their names beside them anyway. Still they are just notes. And they are large questions that I think are obvious ones.

The questions/issues were:

from Monica de la Torre: does it produce knowledge?

from Joan Retallack: does it generate the courage?
Here Joan talked about video that Paul Chan did with Lyn Stewart. Stewart talking about reading poems to the jury because they generate courage.

from someone (my notes dropped the name): where does reciprocal alterity show up in the poem?

from Mark Nowak: what is the role of the artist in the time of accumulation by dispossession?; how do we tell stories not heard in poetry and take back that which has been taken away by capitalism?

from Rachel Zolf: how do we problematizing the relation between the subject and testimony?; is polyvocality the answer?

This discussion went on for two days. Other things got added to it. Among these things added was a quote from CA Conrad that I find so useful:

I cannot stress enough how much this mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in ever increasing brutality, has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry. If I am an extension of this world then I am an extension of garbage, shit, pesticides, bombed and smoldering cities, microchips, cyber, astral and biological pollution, BUT ALSO the beauty of a patch of unspoiled sand, all that croaks from the mud, talons on the cliff that take rock and silt so seriously flying over the spectacle for a closer examination is nothing short of necessary. The most idle looking pebble will suddenly match any hunger, any rage. Suddenly, and will be realized at no other speed than suddenly.
--CA Conrad

And some questions about the “but also” and “find my body.” And some discussion about the atrophy of formal conventions around various sorts of poems.

And some discussion about Nourbese Philip’s Zong!, Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary, and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day.

Then some questions like what sorts of ghosts might we need? What sorts of unconscious narratives? What is the “but also” that we might add?

This is along story to end in failure.

The last day is a 5 hour workshop. The back and forth English-Spanish talking we’ve been doing feels impossible for 5 hours.

I retreat into writing. So five prompts. Each is to begin with “what would happen if Tijuana…” As in “what would happen if Tijuana moved south?”; “what would happen if Tijuana was moved to the bay area?” Anxiety about Tijuana had been something we discussed the previous day as worthy of our attention. Issues here felt very wrenching. How to talk about narcoculture when you might get killed doing it? And yet what does it mean that narcoculture barely registers in Mexican literature right now? Issues in which I felt very much over my head.

My prompts were…

Write something that brings on the emotion.
Write something that brings on the courage.
Write the reciprocity.
Write the accumulation by dispossession.
Write the but also, the unconscious, the ghost spirit, the body.

Then the idea was to break into two groups and together make an essay that brings on the reciprocity and other issues that have come up in the last two days of discussion. There were some rules, like leave the text in chunks. And include everyone at least once but don’t include all the writing. Etcetera.

I desired a discussion of things like how do we use emotion? What sorts of emotions are represented? And what sort induced?

What happened is what always happens whenever I do this assignment: we turn democratic. The discussion is too hard. We resort to an editorial politics of inclusion. And we do this despite the questions being so front loaded. Like you can’t front load the questions so much that the democratic pedagogies disappear.

I’m torn every time I attempt this sort of collaborative group writing production space about the failure. My general take is that the failure is useful. And sometimes I think oh what I will do is we will write the essay together and then we will not read it and then I will ask people to write their own essay that begins as an answer to some of the failure, that takes as it purpose some of the hard discussion that was hard to have. But every time I want to hear the writing. I can’t stop self.

As the experiment failed, I took some notes on some ways to attempt to make it fail less next time. The notes now make little sense to me. I seem to think in that moment that maybe if I directed the groups more, it would fail less. But my notes all seem to suggest that the answer lies in form. So I write down “what if each group gets a different ‘guide’ like rhythm or metaphor?” and also “what if one time I do this and everyone has to think about ‘heartfelt metaphor’ and the sort of work it might do and write a piece of heartfelt metaphor?” and then “what if we had to ask 5 questions of the self/piece at the end about this failure? and then not read the collective piece but go back to one’s writing and rewrite?”

I am now attempting a different version of this again this coming week. I have assembled all the poems that Stewart quotes from in the Chan film. I am adding in a piece from Vanessa Place’s Statement of Fact. I am thinking I might experiment with being more directive and seeing what happens.

Anecdote to be continued.

2010-07-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

Last week, unable to sleep in Tijuana, so loving Monica de la Torre's Public Domain which I found in on table in a windowless room. It was next to Lyn Hejinian's Slowly. Feeling slightly embarrassed this book out for two years and I hadn't read it yet, didn't even know it was out.

This week, unable to sleep.

One night spent with S/N: New World Poetries.

Made note to try and find work by Nesto Perlongher, Wilson Bueno. A few others.

Jose Kozer's essay opens with a Robert Lowell quote from Notebook. He argues two "basic lines," one thin and the other thick. The raw and the cooked?

Heriberto Yepez: "Let's define ourselves as philatelists. Writing and art are philatelia: both love of sense and non-sense, both a social and a non-social phenomenon." p. 102

Another night not sleeping with Mark McMorris Entrepot. I kept thinking oh, it is as if I could find Michael Palmer's work all over again but as if it was written from someone educated in the Caribbean. But really, that is not it. It is almost as if Mark has has bludgeoned Palmer with homage. A sort of this is what you might be able to do, like it might be an argument. Or it is hard not to read it as an argument. Because it was 2:30 in the morning the book was perfectly reminding me how I was sad because I had not seen Mark for the last three years. It is a great book I think.

2010-06-19T15:51:00.000-07:00

Those in need of a handbook on how to shame, this just out.

Genocide in the Neighborhood (ChainLinks)
Brian Whitener, Editor
ISBN: 9781930068476

Translated from the Spanish by Brian Whitener, Daniel Borzutzky, and Fernando Fuentes.

GENOCIDE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD (an English translation of Genocida en el Barrio: Mesa de Escrache Popular by Colectivo Situaciones) documents the autonomist practice of the "escrache," a system of public shaming that emerged in the late 1990s to vindicate the lives of those disappeared under the Argentinean dictatorship and to protest the amnesty granted to perpetrators of the killing. The book is an example of militant research, an investigative method that Colectivo Situaciones has pioneered. Through a series of hypotheses and two sets of interviews, GENOCIDE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD documents the theories, debates, successes, and failures of the escraches, investigates the nature of rebellion, discusses the value of historical and cultural memory to resistance, and suggests decentralized ways to agitate for justice. Think of it as a much needed model of political resistance.

Whitener's introduction here.

2010-06-14T10:04:00.000-07:00

Notes for talk for Rethinking Poetics.

Panel description...

Given that higher education in the US is more or less a pay to play system (whether one pays with cash or with labor), one extensively supported by a governmental credit baiting student loan system, given its somewhat feudal hiring and retention practices and the difficulties of getting more than two aligned colleagues in one location, given that the possibility of teaching of creative writing is frequently denied or belittled by the very people who are hired to teach it, and yet despite all this, given that the higher education system unfortunately and ironically remains both one of the more
progressive and richest institutions in the US, is there anything that we, whatever "we" are, can do with or within this higher education system all together? The larger question might be: should there, could there, be an inter/national Poetics Program? If there was, what would it do? How would it do it? But perhaps the easier way to get at these questions is to rethink the conventions around those ways that poetry and poetics enters the academy: the reading series, the talk series, the conference, the seminar restricted to those who are paying to attend the university, the writers center/house, the summer program, the workshop, etc.

***

I want to convince that my old/new school allegiance is damaging the intellectual life around literature, a life that once upon a time, back in the day, in the good old days, when I was young had moments that while not entirely open and not without access questions, was somewhat oddly permeable. Hello those who have ended up in poetry for no good reason other than the thinking. Hello say myself and many of you. And hello those who have not pursued it as a credential. Hello say David Brazil, Rodrigo Toscano.

Now in the dystopia that we call the present, poets have entered the academy to an unusual degree. To say who is in or out is almost an impossible question. And in recent years I’ve watched many who were honorable avoiders, stop avoiding. Even Rod Smith has an MFA. Even Tisa Bryant. Even Kevin Davies has an MA.

This is not an accusation. I’m not interested in the poets are sell outs sort of argument. We all are part of systems we might co-create otherwise. And I know poets have always been in the academy—hello myself and most of you. But rather in the US right now there has been a huge growth of classes that teach creative writing and poetics at all levels—we’re enrolled in them and we’re teaching them—and with that has come an accompanying expansion of professionalization, such as the publishing of more books of poetry, and the production of more magazines, more reading series, etc. (These last two interesting because the AWP recommends that an MFA program have both so you can imagine how many this has created in the last 15 years)

I am interested in a paranoid sort of way about what this sort of impact this professionalization might have on community supported arts, which is what the sort of poetry that I am socially embedded within--I am talking about the specific cultural formation that we sometimes shorthand as the experimental poet or the outrider poet or the innovative poet--was once upon a time, back in the day, in the good old days, when I was young.

There are several things that colleges and universities are that I think we need to better recognize if we want to keep literary communities as communities (and by communities here I mean engaged; I mean exchanges of ideas in full contention and complication, full of friends and frenemies, and enemies).

One is that degree programs are short term communities (even if they have long term impacts—as any analysis of the limited places that those in this room went to school would show) that are created by a willingness to enter into a degree and the desire to pay for it. They are two to four to six to ten years (depends on the degree here). Often people enter these institutions and perform amazing feats of community for the time they are involved in them only to completely abandon these communities when they leave. So to let degree programs take over those loving institutions of community support that have for so long preserved literatures—such as the literary magazine and the reading series and the small press—is risky. It seems, for instance, that the growth of creative writing in universities and colleges has not lead to a parallel long term growth in the interest in literature. Almost weirdly the reverse. Although there is no evidence yet of a correlation and this is more an idle observation on my part—it seems peculiar to me that as more US citizens study creative writing in the academy that US citizens, as that NEA study showed, buy and read fewer books of literature every year.

The other thing worth reckoning with is that higher education is a huge pay to play system that has to maintain a façade so as to get people to spend large amounts of money for a paper certificate. They do this fairly well. They get many people to pay large amounts of money and labor for their certificate. They have entire departments, thus, devoted to cultivating their brand recognition. And I want to convince those who think to self but we support our graduate students, we give our students teaching assistantship lines that this is still a pay to play system. It is crucial to not discount labor as payment. Those students that are being paid $5,000 to teach a class are giving over about an additional $10,000 in labor per class, or paying about $20,000 a year still for their degree. Although I admittedly used really arbitrary math to get that number.

Again, this is less a value judgement and more an observation. Universities and colleges function in certain ways as a result of having to raise tuition money and/or labor. They have huge cash/labor incentives to keep their programs less than permeable, to perpetuate the exclusive and special uniqueness of their program. And they spend a lot of time on that. The exclusivity contract that a faculty member cannot teach at another college or university (a rule that is interestingly being eroded by the casualization of labor, but that is another long story) is but one sign here. Others are all that branding work that faculty and students do around editing the magazine, publishing books, setting up the reading and talk series for their program, etc. That one is told that the reading series should be on campus and then one holds it in the small room on the sixteenth floor that would be hard for anyone not initiated to find or that one’s seminar must meet on campus and that anyone who wants to sit in should pay an “audit” fee and then add to that that the campus does not readily supply parking to those who are not students or might have a giant gate around it, as the one that employs me does, or that requires an identification card for entering any of its buildings are but other signs. This list could go on and on.

So to move a significant pile of the intellectual recourses that were once located in the community has changed the social formation around this experimentalish poetry in many ways. I think it has somewhat challenged the way it was once upon a time, back in the day, in the good old days, when I was young model of the poet as lovingly cultivating things like the magazine, the press, the reading series. It is not that the loving poets have stopped their loving. They love as madly as ever. But some days when I look at the social formation around the Bay Area outside of the academy, all I see is a claim to a loving social as the difference. Everything else looks the same. The reading series is the reading series. Perhaps the chairs don’t match at the community reading series, but otherwise the community and university reading series happen with two readers behind a podium in a somewhat darkened room. The readers read, often in the same week. The same audience shows up. The reading group of the loving community is reading the same books that are read in the seminar down the street. The only difference is the claim to be better at loving, better at the after party.

Again, I do not want to rant about any of this. One way that the higher education system maintains its integrity brand is that it provides some limited protections around free speech thus letting those most involved in perpetuating it to complain freely about it and it calls this freedom or utopia. I don’t want to be part of that utopia any more than I have to be. But I also don’t want to leave the community to have only madly loving as its last remaining claim of distinction. I want it to have thinking loving also.

So here we are. It doesn’t have all, but higher education right now does have a significant pile of the intellectual resources of poetry. And it has a significant pile of other people’s money. We can give up. Or we can attempt some permeability. Insist that we need to maintain some of the uniqueness of the community support for the community supported arts that we feed off of.

Here is one small and tepid thought experiment out of this situation. And it is just one around permeability not one around cultivating the distinct relatedness of community supported arts. How about that national poetics program?

Say certain employees of higher education invent the Shadow Poetics Program. It is open admission. There is no application fee. It doesn’t give degrees. What it does is list the courses that affiliated faculty are teaching at their pay to play institutions and any Shadow Poetics Program student is invited to enroll in these classes. By becoming a faculty member of the Shadow Poetics Program one would agree to let Shadow students to take one’s courses for free, without paying the audit fees and maybe even in violation of the pay to play institution’s course caps, the same course caps one might have fought hard to keep as a labor issue. One agrees to offer Shadow Poetics Program students the same services one offers one’s pay to play students—grades, feedback on papers, office hour discussions, even that slightly inappropriate flirting.

On the obvious problem of uncompensated labor here. My first reaction was that faculty just need to take the hit. Academic labor is so feudal it is hard to figure out the limits of the job. It is for many a sinecure. Further complicating is that there are no national standards on number of students and contact hours and rate of pay and all that other sort of stuff. Even within departments faculty members sometimes make hugely disparate amounts of money. But then when I thought some more about what the Shadow Poetics Program might look like locally, I realized that over 2/3 of the people that would be obvious faculty candidates were adjunct labor. So my next thought was what if the Shadow Poetics Program had a faculty pay equalization plan. So here is my first take on what that might look like. Each year, all the faculty who agree to be part of the Shadow Poetics Program submit their salary. Then the Shadow Poetics Program estimates for each faculty member a per student payment by taking last year’s course enrollments and dividing them by each individual faculty members salary. This is then averaged and this number becomes the rate that faculty are to be paid per Shadow Poetics Program student they take on.

At that point, one of two things could happen.

One is that the Shadow Poetics Program students “pay.” They pay with some sort of bartered labor. Perhaps they pay in jam if they are makers of jams. Perhaps they pay with computer programming if they are computer programmers. Perhaps they pay with proofreading if they are proofreaders. Perhaps with community organizing, all sorts. Perhaps with little magazine production. I think it is important that they not pay this rate with legal tender mainly because I think this would be illegal and would cause the Shadow Poetics Program to be shut down fairly quickly.

The other possibility is that faculty either pay or are paid this rate to and by each other, depending on their relationship to this average.

In the earlier version of this paper, the one without that last paragraph on compensation, I ended it by saying that my thought experiment here feels both modest and also impossible. Modest in that it leaves a lot of things intact that I don’t like. It leaves unchallenged all those questions of what happens in seminars. It perpetuates rather than contests the professionalization around community supported arts that worries me. And then impossible just because it is hard to imagine it happening. But one reason I kept not wanting to deal with the paying for labor issue was that I felt that the moment I entered into the hugely differential pay rates of faculty in the academy, the economics of the situation made the idea of the Shadow Poetics Program immodest and impossible.

I don’t really have an ending here. I am more myself trying to figure these things out. Trying to figure out even what parts of my vision are from within and not without the academy.

2010-06-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

notes for talk at the panel "Why Is Gertrude Stein So Important?" at the ALA.

We get from avant garde modernism, by which I mean we get from Stein, the contemporary literature that we deserve. That in short is why Stein matters.

But what is Stein? I want to tell several stories about the Stein that we deserve.

One is the Stein that appears in the publication context of her time. And as example here I want to talk some about the 150 or so pages of Stein were published in the various issues of the journal Transition. Transition was edited mainly by Eugene Jolas while he lived in Paris and it came out monthly from 1927 until 1932 (after 1932 it came out less regularly, first from the Hague and then from New York, until 1938). So it interestingly, although not uniquely, charts the development of avant garde modernism before World War II. When Jolas reprints Tender Buttons in his journal Transition, he doesn’t just put it in the journal on its own. He puts it in a larger context, in a section titled “America,” which includes not only work by other American avant gardists such as A. Lincoln Gillespie but also work from a diverse range of genres and cultures such as fairy tales of the Aztec and Inca periods, a Mexican statue, a Columbian figure, and a Peruvian bowl.

The Stein that appears in Transition is one that is in dialogue with the wide variety of arts that are new to Europe as a result of imperialism. The editorials and reviews and essays of Transition make an argument that avant garde modernism’s forms are reflective of a Europe changed by imperialism, a Europe suddenly very much aware of how different cultures and their arts and their languages are entering and shaping European centers, over and over. Jolas does not really use the words “imperialism” or “colonialism,” he does again and again relate the avant garde to economic and political changes. Again and again he argues that this writing, a writing that at moments he calls a declaration of linguistic independence and at other moments the revolution of the word, was indebted to the disruption of the center.

But also, I’m interested in how some of the things that get said in accusation or dismissal about this moment, which with the arts other than writing gets called primitivism, are actually nuanced and complicated in the pages of Transition. Jolas not only juxtaposes work that is geographically and generically diverse, but also influence is often presented as a two or more way street. His juxtapositions of various arts point to disparate connections between the art of empire and the art of the colonies. There is little in Transition that suggests authenticity or any singularity of origin. The elsewhere becomes heterodox as the journal as a whole includes not just Aztec sculptures from the past but also contemporary paintings by Hopi artist Polelonema; not just Cuban sound poems but also poems from colonial Guadeloupe poet St John Perse. Modernism, the pages of Transition suggest, is contingent and full of uncertain rhythms and unexpected connections. And while Jolas’s juxtapositions do not manage to sidestep the provisional and asymmetrical ways that forms from the colonies enter into empire, they do manage to avoid primitivist assumptions of the colonies as pure and collective.

I am not saying anything new here.

Another story. The story that I was taught about avant garde modernism in school was that around 1913 Stein published Tender Buttons (or around 1908 Italian poet Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed the beginnings of futurism or around 1910 Roger Fry organized his exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” or . . . ) thus beginning an aesthetic revolution that breaks the constraints and conventions of nineteenth century national European literary traditions. I was taught that this was primarily an overturning of one western literary practice with another western literary practice. I was taught in other words that the conventions of nineteenth century literature began to be seen as restrictive by a certain small group of writers and they thus reacted by indulging in a sort of formal convulsion that used “new” or “strange” forms of writing to break from these restrictions. Basically, I was taught that the west made up avant garde modernism all on its own.

I should have known better; it was the late 80s and early 90s after all and postcolonial theory was unavoidable. But I didn’t and so I carried this story with me to a job teaching literature at a state university in the middle of the Pacific. Because I was a new teacher I had to teach a lot of introduction to literature courses. In one course, an introduction to poetry and drama, I assigned Antigone, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, his sonnets, Stein’s Tender Buttons, and Hawaiian playwright Alani Apio’s Kāmau. The works that I chose were somewhat accidental, a combination of meeting the requirements (a Greek and a Shakespeare), works I had taught before (Tender Buttons), and one that I wanted to think more about (Kāmau). I was not intending to make a point about avant garde modernism.

Yet in this island of competing and complicated identity claims in the middle of the Pacific, students forced me to read Stein in new and exciting ways. One argued that Tender Buttons illustrated the Hawaiian concept of hakalau, of looking astray. Another argued that it was written in a form of Pidgin, a European pidgin. Out of this I realized something that Peter Quartermain argues, that Stein’s multilingual childhood and her adult life in voluntary exile had more to do with her writing than I had previously realized. But I also realized that the forms of avant garde modernism that I had been seeing as “new” or “strange”—the polyvocality, the disjunction, the repetition, the unconventional syntax, the lack of a narrative arc—are actually, as my students kept patiently pointing out to me, the exact same techniques used in oral literary traditions. It was through this moment that I learned to listen to claims such as Fanon’s that “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.” The Tender Buttons that is in Transition is the same Tender Buttons that those students in Hawai’i were reading.

But I really don’t need all this round about-ness, all this talking about how others pointed out something obvious to me about Stein because I could also just as easily quote Stein. When Stein writes in “What Is English Literature?,” “As the time went on to the end of the nineteenth century and Victoria was over and the Boer war it began to be a little different in England. The daily island life was less daily and the owning everything outside was less owning, and, this should be remembered, there were a great many writing but the writing was not so good.” She says something similar in her round about way about how those nineteenth century national literary traditions were feeling a little less than useful in a changing world.

Stein is writing in a time when cultures and their languages and their literatures are uncomfortably hitting up against one another. While avant garde modernism was certainly a reaction to nineteenth century national literary conventions, it was a resistance that most likely felt crucial to its writers not because nineteenth century national literary conventions suddenly felt merely boring or so-nineteenth-century at the beginnings of the twentieth century but because imperialism had dramatically changed so many things. When Stein was in Paris writing in Tender Buttons “act as if there is no use in a centre,” 600,000 troops and 200,000 workers were brought into France from the colonies. European immigration to urban areas such as Paris was also very high at the time.

Still… it is not that Stein is writing an imitative oral poetry in a time of high literacy, but she is drawing from something closer to what Kamau Brathwaite calls (speaking about contemporary poetries) “the notion of oral literature,” something approximate but not directly imitative, something oral and yet literate. And just as critics such as Brent Hayes Edwards, Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten and others have complicated the idea that the primary influence for western black traditions is orality, it also makes sense to complicate the other side of this argument: that Euro-American avant garde modernism draws primarily, even if in resistance, from the literate European American tradition.

If we accept Edward Said’s and other’s claims that European nineteenth century national literatures are tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie and thus also tied to the rise of colonialism, then avant garde modernism’s move away from European national literary traditions could cautiously be read as reformatory. Much about this work severs the one on one relationship between national literatures and national languages. This story of cultural exchange that comes out of Stein’s work is built more around uneven attempts at universalisms (are there any other sort?) than contained multiculturalisms or respectful diversities. I have struggled as I wrote this with finding the proper term for this unequal exchange that it is not hybridity nor syncretism nor fusion. But that also does not damn with charges of appropriation. There is undeniably no mutuality here but instead there is some sort of creeping, undercover international formal migration. At moments then, how imperialism shows up in modernism looks naïve: Eliot talking about the primitive and his drum. But it is not only naïve.

Yet at the same time, do I need to remind this?, avant garde modernism is very much a colonial literary tradition. It is not an anti-colonial one. As is obvious, again and again even as avant garde modernism critiques those 19th century colonial literary traditions and at the same time it colludes with the politics of colonialism that figure the colonies as primitive and the empire as civilized. And yet I still think that to really begin to understand literature’s possibilities as not only representing but also being attentive to the contemporary moment, a moment of globalization, requires not only acknowledging avant garde modernism’s culturally inflected formalism but seeing it as a complicated thing, one that is neither all critique nor all collusion. It would be absurd to suggest that avant garde modernism is innocent--that it is as we say at the turn of this century, “multicultural”--but it also might be missing something to avoid discussion of how it might have felt to certain turn of the century intellectuals impossible to not use the forms of oral traditions, or how it might have felt as if doing this was something that required a certain blindness or a certain allegiance to nineteenth century national literatures.

As oral traditions are social, networked traditions, avant garde modernism at its best attempts a version of a social, networked writing. It is at moments attuned to finding different connections amid the frequencies of language, amid the noisy way that words and literary forms are public business. The usually stable configurations between languages and national identity are frequently questioned. The linguistically atypical works in English of Stein force readers of English to no longer be comfortable in their English language skin. They point to how no language is a native language, how every language is formed out of other languages. Avant garde modernist works also often attentively expand the aesthetic into the social without neglecting relations, entanglements, implications. They often point out that when it comes to the improvisations of literature, connection never really obeys the rules. It is not linear. It is webby and tentacled and intrusive and disordered.

But back to that contemporary literature that we deserve. I am again stating something obvious, that like it or not it is modernism that has shaped the contemporary whether in reaction or in imitation. So it matters how we read it. Those who tend to see a formalist avant garde modernism tend to read the poetries of the last half of the twentieth century as formalist. Those who see a western avant garde modernism tend to assume that the west created its experimentalism in isolation. But a different avant garde modernism, one about that webby dialogue between cultures, points to a webby, tentacled late twentieth century poetry. And this is the contemporary poetry that we deserve.

2010-06-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

Cleaning off my desk...

Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard. This book is super amazing. (Some work here should be in the imagined international gurlesque anthology.)

Sun Yung Shin, Skirt Full of Black.

Kate Pringle, Right New Biology. Capitals! "AMERIKA" AND "AMERIKAND."

Stephen Collis, On the Material. Loving "4x4."

2010-06-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Theory. Syoung assigned me to read it because I was complaining so much while writing this piece we are now calling "Against Numbers." Actually she just assigned me to read some in feminist criticism so I would feel less anxious. Like it would clear my brain. And I read this one. And it helped. Helped me be less anxious. And then begin to work. Really liking in particular the conversational casualness of it. Reads as urgency.

2010-06-01T09:14:00.001-07:00

Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, bulresque poetics. ed. Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg.

Loving the Greenberg intro.

Then read straight through the book, reading for this from Glenum intro: "It is, in fact, very difficult for female poets to speak of their embodied experience without being misread as positioning themselves as erotic objects." (p. 21)

Struck by several things.

One is how much of the work I liked. Thinking about things several days later. Brenda Coultas, "Dream Life in a Case of Transvestism." Dorothea Lasky, "Boobs are Real." Nada Gordon, "fleshcape."

There is a gurlesque poem. That is one thing I got. (The anthology is thus not really a social formation anthology, as most are, but one edited by formal concerns.) Like often now someone will bring in a poem to workshop and say, I've done a flarf. I have fantasy they might now bring in a poem and say I've done a gurlesque. This tight focus made the anthology interesting to read. Different versions of the same form.

Gurlesque as mainly straight. And the poem often about this relationship that women have with the tradition of women as erotic muse object.

Gurlesque written from the point of view of the female poet-self and mainly about the poet-self.

Often about the poetry factory (I steal that term from syoung's recent piece that she read at Brazil/Larsen). Obvious example here Chelsey Minnis. But there it shows up in several other poems. And here a lot of it is the social formation around "experimental" poetry that shows up. I wanted to make a list, but off top of my head the names that I remember are Kevin Killian, Stephanie Young, Edward Dorn, John Godfrey, Bill Berkson, Leslie Scalapino. Not sure what to do with that. Is it a writing into that community or a critique? Often confused here about how the poetry factory functions in these poems.

Mainly about the female body. The image of which is then contorted in various ways by the poet-self in the poem. This female body is healthy and fairly young and abled. If it is mutilated, it is mutilated by the self, not by external things like war or surgery or toxins or... (Wanting someone to do an index on what body parts show up and how often.)

Very little outside of this embodied experience that is attempting to not be erotic objects shows up. Seems to be modeled on second wave feminism and its relentless attention to the personal. Somewhat wishing the anthology had pursued the somewhat difficult possibility of the international.

2010-06-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

On BART on way to ALA conference read The Emma Bee Bernstein, Susan Bee, Marjorie Perloff Belladonna Elders book. On way back, Joan Retallack intro to the U of California Gertrude Stein: Selections.

2010-05-09T21:59:00.000-07:00

Recently... James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value.

2010-05-09T21:51:00.000-07:00

Today, loving both...

Jaime Luis Huenun, Port Trakl. It is thin book. More a poem than a book. Way Romantic. Interested in its globals.

Nathanael (Nathalie Stephens), Absence Where As: Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book. Somewhat "about" a photograph of Cahun. In this like Letters to Jane. That Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin film. Cahun more or less absent here. "She, when referring to Cahun, or to myself, might just as easily be he, splitting (apart) the binary with annulling reversal. For when the two correspond, here, disappear, when their I's touch, I like to think that one and the same turn into some other, nameless, name. I keep to her for the sake of constancy. Julian T. Brolaski is a correspondent inegalable in these and other maters pertaining to the self." p. 27

2010-05-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

Among the many things I have been loving in the last few weeks--longer list later; once i clean up my desk--David Brazil's Spy Wednesday.

2010-04-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

This plane trip loving Joshua Clover's 1989: bob dylan didn't have this to sing about. Keep laughing about the Luc Sante blurb-pun "time spansule." Thinking about how 1989 might be the last year I was really awake to popular music. But anything more contemporary I would be lost. I blame graduate skool for death of my listening. I am really studying the structure of the book. 4 chapter examples. And then a swirling summation. Especially after talking a lot in therapy with begrudging respect last summer about Clover's composition method. It is, I should add, just the right length. 140 pages.

And reminded of this from Adorno: "A song-hit must have at least one feature by which it can be distinguished from any other, and yet possess the complete conventionality and triviality of all others." Which I keep echoing when I talk to people about getting a writing sample together for PhD skool.

2010-04-10T18:57:00.000-07:00

And also loving The Nature Poetry of Matvei Yankelevich. It is all ecosystem wrong. All rhythmic right.

2010-04-10T18:23:00.001-07:00

Loving this week: Look Back, Look Ahead: the seclected Poems of Srecko Kosovel. "O, save me, I am a poet / O, save me, I am a banker!" p. 161 But fun reading it through. Modernism comes on like a freight train and gone are the poems to "the simple words / of our Karst people." p. 39 Might also have the best blurb ever written. It is by Tomaz Salamun.

2010-03-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

Ammiel Alcalay, Scrapmetal. Mixture of description of various forms of "work" (early in life work). And then series of quotations and examples about artists (usually from the mid-century) and their complicities and resistances to the military industrial complex and imperialism.

J. M. Coetzee, Summertime. At moments very moving.

2010-03-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

Notes for response paper for Reimagining the Poet Critic at UCSC last weekend...

Panel was Panel 2: Poetics and Reading Methodologies: with papers by Amanda Lim, Alta Ifland, Surya Parekh.

Surya Parekh ends by, as he phrases it, “returning to our own prejudices as a shared collectivity” and asking “what are our own enabling constraints, what kinds of justifiable valorizations do we need to perform?”

It is a good question.

Surya in his paper, which I read as a wonderful sort of love letter to Fred Moten’s brain, begins by wondering why “some of the most compelling, trenchant, and powerful contemporary examples of poet-critics, namely those which might be grouped under such overlapping rubics as Afro-diaspora or African-American postmodernism do not figure in our discussions of the poet-critic here?”

Another good question. (Although as an aside, I’m not sure where the “here” is. But I feel like I can think of so many heres where his observation holds true.)

Also attentive to the prejudices of a shared collectivity, Alta Ifland argues “the idea that poetry is either ‘experimental’ or ‘experiental’ deserves some scrutiny.”

And in her paper, Amanda Lim--another love letter but this one to Lisa Robertson’s, Nathalie Stephens’, and Anne Carson’s brains—wonders why these works, despite their attentiveness to feminist concerns have “frequently been perceived as elitist, anti-feminist, and/or marginal.”

All these papers are saying, Why these various sorts of myopias? Why the avoidance of obvious complications? Of alliances?

I want, thus, to think with these papers about the sorts of stories we tell about contemporary poetry and how they might be stories of prejudice rather than shared collectivity, how they might be blinding us to some justifiable valorizations.

The story I am about to tell should be seen as a cartoon. And also, I’m not sure it is entirely true. So I’m interested in trying it out and seeing what parts of it might be true. As this is an idea that is very much in progress, I am open to any rethinkings.

My story goes like this…

The experimental and experiential divide, as Alta points out with her well placed bewilderment, makes little sense outside of the US. But anyone who has attended literature school in the US probably recognizes this divide.

I was taught, taught it bears noticing by a number of poet-critics, a story of how reigning nineteenth century national literary traditions got challenged around 1913 when Stein published Tender Buttons (or around 1908 Italian poet Marinetti proclaimed the beginnings of futurism or around 1910 Roger Fry organized his exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” or . . . ). And from this there developed two parallel traditions. One national (and narrowly nationalist), one international (yet mainly Euro-American). One conventional, one experimental. One standard English, one syntactically other English. One cooked, one raw, as Robert Lowell called it in acceptance speech for the National Book Award in 1960. There were, it was said, two sides. And these two sides continued to exist, running side by side, into the contemporary. I myself have taught this story without thinking much about its truth. For years when I taught twentieth century literature, I would draw a horizontal line and put one tradition on one side facing off against the other.

I am not so sure that this two parallel traditions model makes that much sense when describing early twentieth century literature, but it for sure makes no sense when describing the “contemporary,” or the second half of twentieth and early twenty first century literatures in English. And yet it continues to exist. And I think one reason it continues to be so often repeated as if it were true despite so much evidence to the contrary has to do with the poet-critic.

By the late twentieth century, the relationship between literature and the nation is entirely different than it is at the turn of the twentieth century. In numerous ways. By the end of the twentieth century the high arts, and literature in particular, is of very little interest. The cultural industry that has the most explicit ties to US imperialism is Hollywood. A direct sign of this can be seen in how the US government dramatically cuts its “arts” funding at the end of the twentieth century and at the same time puts into place a series of tax breaks for the film industry.

Left to its own devices and with little interest from the US government, a significant part of US literature in the last half of the twentieth century becomes a community art and as it becomes a community art, it becomes an art form that is very much used for cultural representation, uplift, preservation, and conversation. (Please note that I am not disavowing the presence of a nationalist US literature; it is out there; I’m just not going to talk about it in this paper. OK?)

It is in the genre of poetry that it is easiest to see the connections between literature and community that develop in the late 1960s. Poetry, abandoned not only by the US government but also by multinational publishing conglomerates, continues to exist because various community movements preserve and cultivate it by creating support networks for it such as publishing houses, journals, anthologies, reading series, etc.

A few examples from the multitudes of examples possible: I am thinking here of the literatures that rise to prominence in the late 60s through the 70s, many of which have ties primarily to identity movements but not exclusively. The creation of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in 1965 by Baraka is often seen as a foundational moment here. But that is just one among many. Bamboo Ridge, the workshop and the press that publish mainly literature written by Asian Americans in Hawai‘i and is responsible for the existence of a literature in Pidgin (HCE) was founded in 1978. Arte Público, with its claim to “providing a national forum for Hispanic literature,” was founded in 1979. But it is not just the founding of small arts institutions I am talking about. Larger cultural movements in the 70s often see poetry as being a part of their activism. I am thinking here of the Hawaiian Renaissance, the Native American movement, the Chicano movement, the various activisms around feminist and queer issues--all of which consider poetry as one possible genre in which to propose, examine, and cultivate cultural change. I would also want to include various formal politicized movements such as language poetry as a parallel to these movements. And outside of the US, I would include a whole range of anti-colonial poetries written in all sorts of Englishes, many of which are part of resistance and sovereignty movements.

This vibrancy should challenge that old stand off between the conventional and the experimental. Or at least complicate the way the internationalism of the experimental side of things is mainly Euro-American so that the international becomes something more than literature written in the tradition of Euro-American modernism and includes the poetries written in other Englishes that come out of various resistance and cultural preservation movements and their language practices. For most of the writers who do this sort of where they use poetry as a genre for activist discussion also see the writing of what we call “criticism” as part of their work. Surya concentrates in his paper on how poet critics of the Afro-diaspora--not only Moten but also Cesaire, Brathwaite, Glissant--do not show up that much in considerations of the poet-critic. My first thought of who gets left out was to the large tradition of poet-critics in the Pacific such as Haunani-Kay Trask and Epeli Hauofa and Rodney Morales and Dennis Kawaharada. And then I went, oh wait Kathy Acker. And then oh wait Cardenal, Dalton, Vallejo. And then oh wait even someone, although it kills me to have to say it, such as Mao.

But instead, the reverse happens and this stand off between the conventional and the experimental seems to keep being more and more entrenched. My guess here is that this has something to do with how the poet-critic is currently defined. A number of poets enter the academy in the 80s and 90s. Some through the growth of MFA programs and some through the growth of PhD programs in English. These poet-critics tell the story of the experimental and conventional divide as the only two games in town over and over. It is as if they realize that if they keep saying it, maybe they will not have to deal with the much more complicated way that literature intersects with cultural movements. Some examples here, poet-critic Dana Gioia, bemoaning what he calls the death of poetry in 1992’s Can Poetry Matter? reestablishes the division as he blames poetry’s death on modernism, on the raw. On the other side of the tracks, are poet-critics such as Ron Silliman, who uses the terms post-avant and School of Quietude, and Cole Swenson, who suggests the terms transcendent and immanent in her recent introduction to the Norton Hybrid anthology. And the moments where this divide between the conventional and the experimental gets challenged have been less than provocative. I am thinking here of what is sometimes called “third way” sorts of thinking that suggest a reconciliation between these two dominant modes such as poet-critic Stephen Burt’s attempt to establish the term “elliptical,” the journal Fence, which announced itself in its first issue that it was proudly sitting on the fence between these two sides, to the recently published Norton anthology called Hybrid. I would even include the anthology Women Poets in the 21st Century, which poet-critic I co-edited with poet-critic Claudia Rankine as part of the problem. All of these “third way” models end up reifying the two poetries divide and continue to marginalize the large amount of literature that is aligned with various cultural and identity movements.

My desire in telling this story is to denaturalize this divide, to insist with Surya, Alta, and Amanda that we’re missing a lot of provocative thinking. If I had more time, I’d puzzle for a few moments over how weird it is that so many poet-critics devoted to the experimental (i.e. to the tradition of modernism) manage to keep thinking that poets not in Anglo-European traditions are still primarily about identity and overlook the totally dynamic ways that experimental, modernist formalism is used by so many anti-colonial poets. In other words, if all you are interested in is some idea of vanguard formal aestheticism, then you might at this point be more likely to find it in those Afro-disaporic traditions.

I’m blaming this story somewhat on the way we’ve institutionalized the poet-critic as someone who is within the institution. Because when we talk about the poet-critic we mean poets who write literary criticism. Which tends to also be poets who have US academic jobs or who have trained in the US academy and are looking for jobs.

So one beginning task for any reimagining of the term poet-critic would be to look at how many poets are using the illusion of the neutrality of criticism to actually prop of their own position, their own work, to skew the granting and the prize giving system. And begin thinking with that. It might not be a bad thing that the poet-critic is so often a fan with alliances to certain social and friendship formations. But it might lead to a certain narrowness. And while it might not be willful, it is hard for me not to be somewhat paranoid about how to valorize the poet-critic as it is currently defined is to valorize the two camps model and to overlook the literatures that are aligned with various cultural and activist movements.

I have been assuming we are all insiders and wondering how we poet critics might imagine ourselves.

But I want to briefly go more outsider and ask: what does this rise of the poet critic mean for doctoral programs?

I am asking that because I suspect, although the conference description does not state it, that one reason that this conference exists, one reason that the poet critic needs to be reimagined, is that there remains so much institutional anxiety about this tradition leaking all over the dissertation. Or I am remembering this being a big anxiety at SUNY Buffalo when the Poetics Program formed itself. There was some concern that the SUNY Buffalo dissertation “brand” would be diluted.

Two quick thoughts here…

One of which is the sky is falling sort of thought. Which is that the entire system is collapsing and the only optimistic thought that one could have about this is that it might be a chance to rethinking the ossified genre traditions of the academy and what sorts of thinking they permit. One thing that poetics, the byproduct of poet critics, is attentive to at its best has been atypical and provisional association. But this seems to me to be yet another reason why I think it is crucial to include all those activist poet-critics in any idea of the poet critic here. What if the dissertation genre wasn’t written just for degree fulfillment but had to become a book that engaged with a community readership even as it kept its rigor? What if we began to think of an engaged rigor as part of what the dissertation might do?

One final note… I keep thinking of Surya's “shared collectivity” which I love because it is a double double and we need the absurd intensification of double double sorts of thinking. Poet critic, then as a beginning. Also the yes and of Moten. The critical creative...

2010-03-01T17:15:00.000-08:00

Then, for discussion with student, rereading parts of Mark McGurl's The Program Era. Super loving the expanse here. It really is a huge, masterful book. And I am thinking it is mainly right. It is also somewhat nutty and this is part of its greatness. I can make no sense of the various charts. Which makes me really love them and I get all happy when I get to them.

Yet still feeling slightly cranky at moments. Wondering how it fits or doesn't to poetry. I find myself listing all the poets that I know that never went to higher education, have not yet taught. It isn't a small list really. But not sure what that list means. Because they could still be under the influence.

Or maybe I am wondering what it means if it is mainly true that US literature is program literature. Because I think it means something probably not so great for US literature. (Even as this book is premised on how this Program Era might not be such a bad thing. How this literature might be interesting. Or more.)

Although it seems slightly absurd to request more encyclopedic knowledge from an already encyclopedic book, wondering this...

Once US literature becomes something shaped through and through by the academy, it becomes isolated from cultural and resistance movements. I think I can say this. It might be possible to think otherwise (to think that the academy could train in the leftist novel of resistance; thinking here of how Hawaiian Studies at UHM kept wanting to teach creative writing as part of their program and how the English Department kept getting upset), but this book does not argue this. McGurl tends to look at various writers sometimes associated with cultural resistance/preservation movements (I've removed the "and" there deliberately) in isolation so as to show how they are more a product of the academy than of the cultural resistance/preservation movement. So Cisneros=Iowa. Momaday=Stanford. Etc. Thus somewhat disqualifying the way that these writers are often read as part of a larger and long tradition of cultural preservation or uplift or... (instead they = "self-commodificaton"). But I'm wondering if one sits down and instead of pulling out various individual writers associated with various cultural preservation literatures and looks instead at some of these sub-categories of literature as a whole and how many have ties to the academy (so instead of looking at someone like Momaday in isolation looks at the field of Native American literature say) if the academy becomes as determining as the frame here suggests. I don't have the answer. Just wondering how it might look.

I feel caught in one of those look one way and you see fuzzy kittens and then look another way and you see scary rats cards.

My guess is that the program ties might be more for some sub-categories of literature than others. (I'm guessing... very high for language writing? and New York school? But I'm back in poetry land again. But poetry land is where the questions feel harder to me.)

Other question: Do faculty--of literary criticism and creative writing--have a tendency to give more attention to the literatures that come out of the "programs" in their classes?

Is there any way to be outside of the program era here? Or is it just that to be a writer is to be of the programs? (I should probably confess to being a Program Writer also.)

Minor point... While it claims to go up to 2008, the study feels like it has yet to catch up to the contemporary post-1980s (so examples of the contemporary feel as if they are those that fit the category of "postmodern" fiction as it was defined in the 1980s-1990s academy). But some of the things that feel not yet discussed--such as the "international" novel in English and the sorts of "experimental" fiction that seem to be showing up in/out of MFA programs like Brown and Denver and the McSweeney's sorts--probably still fit easily as being of the Programs.

2010-02-28T22:13:00.000-08:00

My cancelled class. It didn't "make." Also the registrar emailed me because she was confused because she wasn't sure it was a "real" course description. She said she wasn't used to seeing them in the first person.

Systemic Theories of Literature

When I began to think about this seminar, I began by thinking about what books published in the last five years have most changed my thinking about literary criticism. When I sat down and looked at my list, I realized that a number of books on it had something in common: all were attempting to think about literature less through close reading and/or aesthetics and more about how it functions in (world) culture. Many of these works were discussing literature as if from a great distance, were indulging in what has been called a sort of “sociological formalism.” On my list were Franco Moretti, who provocatively argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead; Pascale Casanova whose work charts out relationship between literary capital and the struggle of international power; James English who studies the ever expanding literary prize circuit; and Mark McGurl who looks at the defining impact that creative writing programs have had on US literature in the last fifty years. I have not yet finalized the reading list but I am fairly certain we will read from these… Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, and James English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. The first half of the semester will be spent reading in the criticism and discussing it. The second half will be spent on student presentations written under the sway of this sociological formalism. I’ve designed the course so that it is not genre or historical period specific. You should be able to bring your own areas of interest to the course (including the culture around the institution of creative writing). If you are thinking about applying to graduate programs in literary criticism, this might be a good opportunity to develop a writing sample. But at the same time, this course does not require previous knowledge in literary theory. We will be reading the criticism as slowly as we need to.

2010-02-28T22:12:00.001-08:00

Also, Kaia Sand, Remember to Wave. Thinking about starting a book list of tours and teaching a tour section in kraft class next year. I kept thinking at same time, while reading this, there should be more discussion about writers who use "strategic sincerity."

2010-02-28T22:00:00.000-08:00

The Selected Melanie Klein. "The Psycho-genesis of Manic Depressive States." and "Mourning and Manic Depressive States." Somewhat weirds me out: the "good" mother and the "bad" mother.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake. Hard not to read it as all about the bay area.

2010-02-28T21:57:00.000-08:00

For CWS...

Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.

Lasana Sekou, The Salt Reaper: Poems from the Flats. At his reading he said that St Martin the only place where all significant European languages and all the significant Caribbean creoles spoken.

2010-02-21T16:42:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago... David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit's The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle. Contains reprint of Chris Dixon essay "Five Days in Seattle: A View from the Ground." This essay very helpful.

2010-02-21T13:20:00.001-08:00

It being thesis season, and various other life things happening, such as a dedicated strategy by a toddler to prevent any sort of typing, has meant that I have not said how much I have been loving Hiromi Ito's Killing Kanoko for so many weeks. Super loving it.

2010-01-28T15:27:00.001-08:00

Finally getting to Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai'i. Ed Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura. Super helpful. Also feeling really happy by the way creative work is treated as equivalent of scholarly. So in the section called "Settler-Dominated Ideological State Apparatuses: Literature and the Visual Arts" (this book stands tall in its willingness to use unusual circumlocutions to get at complicated and very location specific ideas) there is both a really great essay by Ku'ualoha Ho'omanawanui on "Kanaka Maoli versus Settler Representations of 'Aina in Contemporary Literature of Hawai'i" and also a photo series by Kapulani Landgraf.

2010-01-20T17:45:00.001-08:00

95 Cent Skool: Summer Seminar in Social Poetics

The 95 Cent Skool is a 6 day long experimental seminar that will be offered in Oakland, California, July 26-31, 2010. It is convened by Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr. It will explore the possibilities of poetry writing as part of a larger social practice, at a distance from the economic and professional expectations of institutions. We believe a dozen people sitting around a table can’t ruin poetry, but that costs, professional context, mythologies of individual genius, and client/service-based models can — and in our own experiences teaching in pay-to-play writing programs, often do.

Our concerns in these six days begin with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. “Social poetics” is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision. It simply assumes that the basis of poetry is not personal expression or the truth of any given individual, but shared social struggle.

The 6 days will feature:
• Morning discussion groups lead by Juliana and Joshua
• Two guest speakers: one on the political economy and one on ecology
• Afternoon group and/or collaborative writing sessions
• Dinners and drinks at a nearby bar

The 6 days will not feature:
• Workshops led by a “master poet”
• Agents or editors who will advise your work into publication
• A Richard Wilbur Celebration Night
• Instruction in reciting poetry to bring out the emotional content of the poem

The final program will be available later in the Spring.

Each participant will be asked to contribute up to 1% of annual gross income as their 95 cents exclusively towards operating expenses. The workshop leaders and as many other organizers as possible will donate their time. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Email us if you’ve got questions about how much you can pay. We will also help in finding free housing for any participants in need.

The program is open to any interested participant with any level of prior engagement with poetry. This program is not affiliated with any institution of higher education and no transferrable institutional credit will be offered. There is no application fee, but space is limited. Please send a note indicating interest and experience to 95centskool@gmail.com

Please feel encouraged to re/post this listing to your blog or otherwise redistribute. If you would like to receive further information about the 95 Cent Skool, please email 95centskool@gmail.com, or join the 95 Cent Skool facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=300963159304&ref=mf
The 95 Cent Skool will happen with the support of Small Press Traffic and 'A 'A Arts.

Thank you very much,

the 95¢ Skoolers —

2010-01-10T20:50:00.000-08:00

Landscaping with Native Plants of Southern California. George Oxford Miller.
I've exhausted the books about native plants of northern California.

Cometbus #53. One section of it an article/interview/oral history with John Holmstrom, publisher of Punk.

2010-01-06T22:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes get insane idea that there is no possible way for me to say anything about something--in this case literature of the 1990s in English--without reading about this or that--in this case the literary history of some parts of Africa--and so buy some collection like Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature, edited by Graham Furnisss and Liz Gunner, late at night on the internet. Was not at all helpful for critical study on the 1990s but still... Nice section of the book that has essays on gender. Also fascinated by Herbert Chimhundu's claim in "Sexuality and Socialisation in Shona Praises and Lyrics" that "In a way, Afropop music has taken over from love poetry as one of the strongest conservative influences that psychologically condition the young in particular to conform to traditionally prescribed norms in order to be socially acceptable individuals." p. 147 And throughout some translations of some great work and I wish there was an accompanying collection that collects the work discussed.

2010-01-06T22:03:00.000-08:00

David George Gordon, Western Society of Malacologists Field Guide to the Slug.

"During courtship, two slugs will circle each other, often for hours, with both partners engaged in ritualized bouts of lunging, nipping, and sideswiping with their tails. The two slugs may also display their disproportionally large sex organs. The great gray garden slug's penis is nearly half its total body length...[great gray garden slugs] are able to copulate in midair, suspended by stretchy strands of mucs up to 17 3/4 inches (45 cm) long. As courtship progresses, a banana slug pair intertwines, wrapping themselves in an 'S' position and stimulating each other for several more hours. Their genital areas (immediately in front of the pneumostome) swell as the pair move even closer together. Penetration takes place, then each slug alternately releases and receives sperm. But in the case of the banana slug, that's hardly the end of this amazing routine. Now the slugs must disengage--a challenge for two animals so amply endowed and thoroughly covered in sticky mucus. After long bouts of writhing and pulling, the pair may resort to what scientists call apophallation. Translated, this means that one slug gnaws off the penis of the other." p. 32

2010-01-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

Could not stop reading Bruce Boone's Century of Clouds and the Cometbus #52, "the Spirit of St. Louis or How to Break Your Own Heart, a tragedy in 24 parts." Then had thought that both are the same, defenses of the friendships that come out of subcultures. Also both moments of rapture. The beginning of Century of Clouds especially beautiful. Both about the midwest in some way.

Good moment in the Cometbus about everyone in the friendship group having a rat tattoo and then later he realizes how many of the tattoos are "accidentally or purposely removed." Also there is jogging in the Cometbus. That made me happy. Memory of moment when Jclo, Syoung, and I go jogging while on the poetry bus and walking into some truckstop hotel lobby all sweaty and others on the poetry bus looking at us with horror. Slightly stupid discussion with Syoung today while jogging on whether jogging is punk in some way.

Then in same way, could not stop reading Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. I am obsessed with the short academic book, which I am convinced is the only way to save the genre. This book is super short. I tried to find word count on amazon but it wasn't available. Missed at moments the Groszian depth. But it is also a really beautiful book. "Art is of the animal." (p. 63; but throughout the book) Lots of good quotes about the long march of lobsters across the ocean floor. The tick and the mammal "whose blood it extracts" as "contrapuntal or harmonic forces, dueting features that much be considered as part of one and the same refrain." (p. 53) At moments gets all loosey: "But art is not simply the expression of an animal past, a prehistorical allegiance with the evolutionary forces that make one; it is not memorialization, the celebration of a shared past, but above all the transformation of the materials from the past into resources for the future, the sensations unavailalbe now but to be unleashed in the future on a people ready to perceive and be affected by them." (p.103) At other moments reminds me not to forget to get all loosey when talking about art. Three chapters. One setting the terrain of the argument. One on music and somewhat on sex also, with animals mixed in. And one on painting, which is a lovely defense of aboriginal painting. Also sweet reminder not to limit art to representation or realism.

2009-12-31T09:37:00.000-08:00

Jesse Cohen, "The End of Communication? The End of Representation?" and "What is Anarchist Cultural Studies?: Precursors, Problems, and Prospects."

Reminder to read/find:
Voltairine de Cleyre, "Literature as the Mirror of Man"
Roger Farr, "Anarchist Poetics"
Charles Hotz (Edouard Rothen), L'Art et le Peuple

2009-12-18T15:07:00.000-08:00

The bibliography created by Emily Critchley's "'[D]oubts, Complications and Distractions': Rethinking the Role of Women in Language Poetry" in Hot Gun!, issue #1, is a really great reminder of how much talk there was about gender in the theoretical and/or explanatory work written by women associated with language writing in the late 80s/early 90s. I should add, if there was one. The end notes, I mean.

In same issue, amused by scathing review of Marc Voge's presentation skills which ends with "the hot lady in the business suit." Then on next page review of Keston Sutherland's Hot White Andy. Bikini bottomed lady on the cover. Clothed old man on the back. Overleaf of their respective chests.

2009-12-16T14:19:00.000-08:00

Sherwin Bitsui, Flood Song. Not the anti-aesthetic.

Best book ever on California natives for the Garden: Carol Bornstein, David Fross, and Bart O'Brien's California Native Plants for the Garden.

2009-12-16T11:02:00.001-08:00

James Tar Tsaaior, "Oral Aesthetics and Cultural Distillates in Elechi Amadi's The Concubine."

2009-12-15T09:16:00.000-08:00

Catherine Wagner, My New Job.

First I got really depressed. Like weeping in bed before going to sleep. Thought it was coincidential. My emotions are wired differently lately. Woke up the next morning and realized it was the way "M" or "Martin" or "Martin Corless-Smith" showed up in the poems but couldn't figure out why. Was it bragging?, that was my first thought. Then realized this was way wrong thought.

Loving the phrase: everyone in the room is a representative of the world at large. Also convinced it is not true. Or could only be true when one talked about something other than the self.

Identification: I job like that; I boyfriend like that; I child like that; I exercise like that; I (white) body like that; I sexuality like that.

Does this aesthetic, which feels like an anti-aesthetic that is suddenly all over the place, induce emotions other than identification for me, white girl with job like that, boyfriend like that, child like that?

When the poem is no longer the Poem, what is it?

Tradition: in the notes, "Other poems quote Robert Burngs, John Keats, Stephane Mallarme, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, Philip Sidney, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Wyatt."

Eileen Myles compares to Frankenstein. Driving to my job today, after dropping off child at day care, I kept thinking NY School Confessional + Confessional + Bruce Andrews + straight Kathy Acker and Myles.

In my new/old job, have been thinking a lot about how women talk about men in their work (and the much less prevelent reverse; I teach at an all women's undergraduate college). I have quote from book that I left at home today that I want to stick in here. Will do it later. But keep saying in class, what do we do with confessionalism right now? And then there is no answer. Fantasy of teaching a feminism and poetry class.

"This part is for girls, college highschool girls"

This book "takes place," if it has a place and it mainly does not, two hours from where I grew up. This makes me look at the trees in the author photo a lot. Although who knows if those trees are the trees near where I grew up.

I saw the Yvonne Rainer movie Privilege last week and it super killed me. Its moves are all different.

My tic my friend says is to insist on the systemic. Or that is how I say what he says. But is it a tic?

2009-12-14T22:52:00.000-08:00

Lara Glenum, Maximum Gaga.Minky Momo and Normopath. If it reads like flarf, is it flarf?

2009-11-15T15:22:00.000-08:00

Via Meg Day... Josh Healey, Hammertime: Poems and Possibilities. "Invocation" uses "yo" like "oh."

2009-11-06T14:49:00.001-08:00

While at Jena's I realized I was sleeping near Ubu and the Truth Comission by Jane Taylor. So I read it.

2009-11-03T10:49:00.001-08:00

My attention span 2009 already feels out of date.

2009-11-03T10:47:00.001-08:00

I had to introduce and then ask questions of Jonathan Skinner at a reading at the U of Arizona, Tucson Poetry Center.

Introduction:

I sort of want to introduce Jonathan Skinner by talking all about myself. But narcissism is not my motive. I feel that he is exemplary as an example of how one can be a poet in the world and I have learned a lot from him about this work of being a poet and I think I am not the only one who might tell this story. The story goes like this… I was for many years a poet who was well schooled in experimental traditions. I barely thought about any sort of poetry that wasn’t written in the modernist tradition. Which meant I didn’t think much about nature poetry. If I had, I probably would have thought that it was not of my concern; that this sort of content was better left to those beats influenced by the eastern traditions, like Gary Snyder, or the lyrical poets of what I probably would have dismissed as suburban pastoral. I was two things that I felt had no use for nature poetry: I was rural industrial by birth and I was urban by choice. But one thing that Jonathan’s work as both a poet and as an editor of the journal Ecopoetics did was insist that the planet needed the attentions of all sorts of poetry. That this issue—the environmental collapse that so defines this time—needs all of our attention, needs all of our brains, needs all of our poetic forms. Jonathan is well aware of the special status that the natural world has to poetry. That its traditions have long held irreplaceable knowledge of plants and animals and winds and currents. That it has often held within it systemic and ecological representations. And his own poetry acknowledges this as it is attentively listening to the quiet an the loud, refusing the divides between nature and culture, full of clash and meditation. Please welcome him.

Three questions:

You somewhat “own” the term ecopoetics. And yet, as a student pointed out to me the other day, you are constantly disowning it. Or complicating it. I am thinking here of your piece “Statement for ‘New Nature Writing’ Panel at 2005 AWP” where you come up with four very complicated and multisyllabic terms. And the journal itself is relentlessly inclusive. At moments almost puzzling so. Talk some about this strategy.

We’ve been emailing a lot and we keep talking about this issue of inclusivity. About how an ecopoetry should do all sorts of work and also some about when it isn’t doing any sort of work at all, or what I want to call the “March of the Penguins” problem, where something might seem to be deliberately covering over or ignoring something crucial about environmental crisis. Are there limits to your inclusivity? And if so, what are they? Is there a bad ecopoetry/nature poetry?

Composition. You are always telling us to get out. You tell us to visit the wetlands in your Katrina poem. And yet your poetry also often shows its book learning, its reliance on the field guide. Talk some about this.

2009-10-23T10:04:00.001-07:00

Then right after finishing the Coming Insurrection, I pick up Jordan Scott's Blert. Oh, this one making me so happy also for entirely different reasons. I want to say something dumb and nation state stupid about all the best writing coming out of Canada. I love the move between complication of stutter inducing language and then the pause lines of "What is the syllable?" Keeping thinking of that Green Day song of so many years ago--1996?; I lived in Albany--and how it did this. What is that song? It was super catchy. It had what I can only describe as a pause refrain.

2009-10-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

Ok, I confess how susceptible I am to loving the Coming Insurrection. I tell Charles it is written for the unaffiliated. Which is why I feel love and he feels annoyance. Perhaps also because it uses the language of the love poem, or is so attentive to social relations and unafraid of being all sappy about them. I need my insurrectionary texts filled with sap?; I confess.

I am wondering if my depression lately is because the much promised end did not come with the the economic crisis. I am convinced I will find happiness in the end times. Why is that? My depression is what the Coming Insurrection acknowledges and then claims it can cure.

In the revolutionary insurrectionary text generator, Charles points me to this code:

def recognize: "Confronted with those who #{dont_do} to recognize themselves in our #{events} of #{fun_stuff}, we offer neither #{get_along} nor #{get_along} but only our #{go_away}."

The Automatic Insurrectionary Text Generator complains: "The purpose of this little program is to expose the seductions of rhetoric, not to criticize actions taken."

But the writer self in me is all like if not the good line with its seduction, then how?

My list of some of the #{fun_stuff} (aka poignant moving writing that might begin the emotions of motion) from the Coming Insurrection...

terrible bonds: "To organize is not to give a structure to weakness. It is above all to form bonds--bonds that are by no means neutral--terrible bonds. The degree of organization is measured by the intensity of sharing--material and spiritual." p. 15

"How do we find each other?" p. 19 This is throughout the book. The find each other being first part. That is the part that is so sappy lovely.

About November 2005: "The grapevine can't be wiretapped." p. 56

I love the description of the problem: "A graphic designer wearing a handmade sweater is drinking a fruity cocktail with some friends on the terrace of an 'ethnic' cafe." p. 69 And then a few sentences later: "And they are right."

This line about the environment: "And now it's caught up to us, invading the airwaves like a hit song in summertime, because it's 68 degrees in December." p. 73

2009-10-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

Thursday night, after yoga ("raise the inner lining of your anus and take it into your chest" or something like that) and after frantic conversation about teaching in steam room and while waiting for dbuuck to meet me at bar for something resembling dinnersnack, I was loving Aase Berg's selected Remainland. Buuck was late so I felt desperate for more of the book. More please! All of Transfer Fat please!

Then petulant and stupidly refusing to sleep reading Thomas D. Church, Gardens are For People. So many pools! I keep trying to understand shapes other than squares.

2009-10-13T22:09:00.001-07:00

Do you really want to say “rubbing my chest”?
Is this the right gesture to remind a lover of his/her beloved?
Why not just say “last month” or “last week”?
What do you mean by the mist spreading?
What does it mean that the lover is illuminating?
Why does illuminating mean that one cannot see the beloved?
How can the lover read love letters while walking in the rain?
Why was the love bought by money that separates?
What does “it” refer to?
The sky?
Love?
Why does it pour rain of desertion and dreariness?

2009-10-03T02:16:00.000-07:00

Jerome McGann, "Pseudodoxia Academica"

Frances Ferguson, "Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text." Super useful old skool style discussion of the dialogue that the Moretti and Casanova works are creating (both of which I plan to assign next semester).

Two by David Larsen...
"Precedence and Innovation in the Bilingual Nabataean Inscription at 'En 'Avdat." Which is fascinating for how far it feels from the sort of literary criticism that I'm used to reading. Detailed discussion of a few lines that read something like "And he acts neither for benefit not favor. And if death claims us let me not be claimed. And if affliction seeks, let it not seek us. Garm'alahi wrote this with his own hand." Although that is just one possible version. And the point of the article is to suggest some others.

Then, LRSN-voice returns, in "Translation as Conceptual Writing." Which made me love his Names of the Lion even more. "But translation from the language of the colonized to the lang. of the colonizer's is the more characteristic direction of empire, because it's empire that has the resources and the need to know about its subject populations."

Also in print out, a bunch of work by Jonathan Skinner...includes a really great syllabus on ecopoetics that states "Unless otherwise noted, and weather permitting, we'll hold our classes around the old fireplace at the top of Thorncrag."

"So I wanted to include a lot of information in this poem--to document, as it were, the recent and not so recent history--I needed a new form, something radically more expansive than the lyric condensery of the warblers. So broke into very long, 'landscape'-format lines, three to a stanza."

And yet more in print out... Bea Gates, "DOS."

Brian McHale, "How Not to Read Closely" which is a review of Peter Middleton's Distant Reading and I want to remind self to get this book and to read in particular the chapter on the history of the poetry reading.

Ines Hernandez-Avila, "A Conversation with Juan Gregorio Regino, Mazatec Poet."
"I also wanted to write poetry, because it wasn't enough to say, 'Well, now we have the alphabet.' What is important was to create things, to produce written work. In that momen I thought poetry could be an excellent form of expression, of communicating, and above all to have written material that could help teachers in the process of learning the Mazatec alphabet. That's how I began." p. 122-3.

"to say, 'I recover things,' but through poetry I'm able in turn to transmit it [once again]. So how this is ultimately written is important to me." p. 124

Great conversation over breakfast with Inger Elisabeth Hansen, who works as an editor reading poetry mss, about gender and the interior/exterior and how women are writing now in Norway. I was reading Ariana Reines' Coeur de Lion at same time so I kept talking about it.

Began working my way through Algeria in Others' Languages.

2009-09-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

On plane ride home, two Berkeley moments…

Richard Kempton’s Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt. Kempton, writing about the limits of Provo, about how it does not extend much beyond the Dutch speaking, also notes: “Self-proclaimed Provos did raise their heads in the United States: Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Davis (on the University of California campuses), among other places. One legacy of this ‘invisible’ heritage is Provo Park (formerly Constitution Square) across the street from Berkeley City Hall.” p. 130

(Once home, I look it up. It turns out it is the park that I think of as the place to take Sasha to watch skateboarding but it is now renamed the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park.)

Interested in the Provo technique of placing all happenings or protests or whatever at “an appropriate local statue.” p. 129

Then in an old issue of Harper’s (April 2009) an article on payday lending by Daniel Brook. The article ends with this: “Each year, the rest of the country looks a little more like Cleveland [Tennessee]. In 1949, Tennessee’s poverty rate was twice that of California. Today, they are equal. During the civil rights era, when middle-class Californians from Berkeley came to the South for sit-ins and voter-registration drives, they were shocked--and rightly so--by the poverty they saw. But today Berkeley, a capital of our laissez-faire tech and finance economy, was as of the most recent census the second most unequal city in America, right below Atlanta.” p. 48

2009-09-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

Friday
Jules Boykoff, Hegemonic Love Potion

Also, good portions of E. S. Burt's Poetry's Appeal: Nineteenth Century French Lyric and the Political Space on Thursday. I picked this up at the MLA book fair a few years ago and keep not getting to it. There was much to steal, I mean reference, in the talk of how the lyric intersects with the political space. And convinced that the 19th century in France is a really interesting time for thinking about this. I confess I kept skipping the close readings. Mainly because I am not that familiar with 19th century French lyric and probably am not going to make myself anytime soon. Which made me wonder some about why "close reading" isn't more for its own sake.

Also, and I'm sure I'm the only person in the poetry planet who doesn't already know this, learned that the Tennis Court Oaths is not just a title of a book by Ashbery but an actual moment when some oaths were signed on a tennis court during the French revolution. Feeling super stupid and myopic.

Earl E. Fitz, "Inter-American Studies as an Emerging Field: The Future of a Discipline."

Paul Giles, "Commentary: Hemispheric Partiality."

2009-09-17T12:24:00.000-07:00

Thursday
Fred Moten, Hughson's Tavern.

2009-09-17T12:06:00.000-07:00

Tuesday
CA Conrad, Advance Elvis Course.

Wednesday
Lisa Robertson Magenta Soul Whip. I am reading this line "We go/Daily to the botanical gardens to witness/Complication" (p. 20) and realize what time it is and walk out of hotel just as Peter pulls up to drive me to the arboretum.

2009-09-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

Day Three of Together We Will Attempt to Write A Book About Tuscaloosa

The idea was that there would be two groups. And each group would take the material we had generated in the first two classes and then together make a long piece. The groups were to ask themselves this as they did this...

What could this book about Tuscaloosa say?
How could it say it?
What are its alliances? Who is it written for?

And also think about the balance between systemic critique (as distinct from complaint) and celebration/uplift.

And also at some point the long piece should admit somehow who the writers are (we were a room full of people who had spent no more than 5 years in Tuscaloosa and that felt very important to all of us).

I thought this would take an hour. But it took two.
And then we heard the pieces. And that took another 45 minutes. They were great to hear and I really liked hearing them.

And then we discussed what we might be able to do next. But it felt as if time was running out. Actually, time was running out. So we discussed what we might do if we had time. What discussions we might have.

I should also note that the first day of the workshop no one talked. We all just grabbed prompts and wrote.

And then the second day of the workshop, we all wrote on the same prompt together and then heard what the others had written before we went on to the next prompt.

2009-09-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

Day Two of Together We Will Attempt to Write A Book about Tuscaloosa

Prompts...

Celebrate.

Add to "The thing to do in Tuscaloosa..."

Add to neighborhood piece by using these phrases as a beginning:

In a neighborhood, on one side...
In a neighborhood, on the other side...
In the house across the street...
In this house...
In this neighborhood...
says...
says...
says...

Why should we write this "book", write about Tuscaloosa? Who should we write it for? What are its alliances? Begin though with this phrase: What I want you to realize is....

Two pieces about specific spaces. Such as 17th Street and 34th Avenue or Spring Hill Lake or McFarland Blvd.

I typed up everyone's work from yesterday. Then alphabetized by first letter. The typing took too long and so can't do today's. 20 pages of data on Tuscaloosa.

Found pieces in it...

I’m a crushed can of beer.
I’m a crushed can of beer.
I’m a wet cardboard box in a parking lot.
I’m bread molding on the porch / mustard dried on the front door
I’m chaw spat in a 20 oz pepsi bottle sideways in a gutter
I’m hog waste animal bones.
If blessing fails.
If bombs are clear.
If contact is.
If contact neutralizes.
If failure blesses.
If it all keeps growing and turning and twining then we do not need to keep moving it down despite the rain day in and day out, late in the afternoon, drenching it all so.
If leaves are medium, green deciduous.
If love is a bomb that won’t.
If love is a train that.
If love.
If neutralizing doesn’t.
If play is.
If the branches arch to form a mound.
If the flowers are yellow terminal clusters.
If the fruit is a capsule.
If the leaves are prominent with silvery scales.
If the leaves are simple.
If the margins are sharp toothed.
If the shade is dappled.
If the soil is moist, well-drained.
If the stamens appear evenly.
If the stamens protrude.
If the twigs are silvery brown and scaly.
If there is no clear.
If there is no fruit.
If together our.
If together we.
If turning back doesn’t.
If we fail.
If we love.
If we.
If you are a woman walking with your hand on another woman’s, you will be called names.
If you are heartsick in Tuscaloosa, you drink.
If you do not dress like 2 or 3 you are almost asexual, you are certainly a queer.
If you want to find poetry in Tuscaloosa, drink.
If.

The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is a fence post.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is a train whistle.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is bite your tongue.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is car body.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is ceiling plaster.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is cicadas, begging the night to expand, to take in their aggressive songs, listen.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is cockroach hopscotch.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is cooked in pork fat.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is count flowers.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is count the seasons by their flowers.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is discuss over beers how the railroad tracks divide the town, how there are storms but not snow, that there is a deliberateness in its insularity and rules to graciousness.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is discuss over beers why the American south is not unionized, is underdeveloped, is low wages and takes it.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is drink.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is drive to a factory and take photographs until security kicks you off the premises.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is explain how the south is sorry for this but not really.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is floor board beneath the shower.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is fruit in the refrigerator.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is let him write their lover back home, let them write, I’m in the American south. Their monuments say things quietly as a footnote, filled with are more like connections than reverence.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is let your body’s water out.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is let your body’s water settle on top of you.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is let your house rot in the humidity.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is magnolia blossoms.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is mattress.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is mimosa blossoms.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is roaches on the window sill.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is rot in humidity.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is rot.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is stay home.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is the skin in the creased part of the body.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is to call everyone a faggot. There is nothing worse. You are a faggot because you are NOT ME, as in your are UNLIKE ME or so NOT LIKE ME that you are “the other”; you have crossed the forbidden landscape of being, at your most cavernous root, so UNLIKE ME that you will never recover. It is the most fear based word. You are also, because of your faggot ways, unwanting of living. You are so different thtan me that WE WILL KILL YOU. Everyone, no matter the gender or actual sexuality, is gay-bashed. You Are All Faggots and We Wish You Were Dead.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is trumpet vine.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is under a bright autumn moon, the plantation style houses, thick white columns, a sense of proportion.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is walk to get drinks and point out the hairline sweat and that it is October.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is watch your ass.
The thing to do in Tuscaloosa is wisteria.

In a neighborhood on one side of this house: a man and his mother and his lawn.
In a neighborhood on the other side of this house: enthusiastic mother with cigarette, 22 year old nursing school daughter, teenage boy floating up and down the street, up and down the afternoon on a pushscooter with little expression; quiet father.
In a neighborhood, what constitutes class?
In the house across the street, the college age son is going to Bible school to learn what to say to those people who think we come from the monkeys, says the neighbor who smokes.
In the library a land surveyor’s photos from the turn of the century flicker and echo boating parties in the river. In the hundred year old photo, it looks swampy. Family portraits with seated matrons in their frilly whites, handsome sons, even the dogs looking serene and well fed. It is impossible to wonder how people made lives in the heat, the damp, the closeness. The way anyone does, anywhere.
In this house are a couple from the north whose neighbor comes home with plastic bags of soda bottles every weekend, a couple who move from city to city getting educated and not believing in God and trying to avoid 9-5 jobs.
In this house: organic milk milled in state; Alabama’s only dairy, nonhomogenized (is it milk? is that it?)
In this neighborhood, one gallon of the cheapest Winn-Dixie milk available made its way next door, minor gift.
It is difficult to locate canned pumpkin in the grocery store.
It is hard not to get annoyed when your white students in white polo shirts write about their hero General Lee
It is hard to know what to way when your students at the prison all worship the American dream and individual responsibility because they’re right and they’re white and black and yet more of them are black and yet and
It’s easy to think slavery is in the past when a black man is president and
It’s hard not to worry about slavery when you move to Alabama from the north and
It’s hard not to worry when you discuss the legacy of slavery with blackmen in prison you’re not a carpetbagger with good intentions.
It’s hard not to worry when you worry about slavery you’re being patronizing and
It’s hard not to worry you’re assuming a black person checking you out at Winn Dixie or Target is poor because of the legacy of slavery or Reconstruction or Jim Brow and welfare reform or is poor for some other reason or is not poor but earning some extra money for college
It’s hard not worry that you’re all wrong when a white student says reconstruction was the North’s revenge on the South
It’s hard to ask that question because the answer is and
It’s hard to feel okay about a black man twice your age adding Mr to your first name when you tell him your name when he’s pruning and
It’s hard to know whether low wage employment is better than none at all and
It’s hard to know why but easy to assume why every person who comes to your door at your house in the middle class neighborhood looking to mow your lawn or paint your house’s numbers on your mailbox or sell you a magazine or a cleaning fluid and
It’s your yard and it’s only because you don’t know how
Like the train, everything here makes a sound when close.

2009-09-15T11:04:00.001-07:00

participant submitted prompts on the free cards:

What church do you go to?
T-town as seen through the eyes of visitors.
biggest Tuscaloosa fear(s)
conversations to have before you leave

2009-09-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

Together: We Will Attempt to Write a Book about Tuscaloosa.
a workshop I'm attempting this week at U of Alabama.

description...
Guy Debord wrote that in the derive "one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there." We will attempt this; attempt to write something that captures the flow of acts, the gestures, the strolls, the encounters of Tuscaloosa. I have never been to Tuscaloosa before so I will merely provide some example works, some writing exercise, some discussion, some eye and ear. You will provide the local knowledge of all sorts: celebrations, critiques, complaints, memories, stories, inventories of plants and animals, histories, spells, maps, incredibly personal information. I am hoping that together we can write something about Tuscaloosa that the Tuscaloosa Convention and Visitors Bureau would never want to distribute as it will get at the psycho in psychogeography. The first two sessions will be discussion and in workshop writing (so bring pen and paper and legal stimulant of choice). I’m thinking of the last session as “editorial” where we together attempt to write a book about Tuscaloosa but it might look more like a “workshop.” We will assemble what we’ve done in some sort of order and then talk some about what sort of Tuscaloosa we’ve created and what sort of Tuscaloosa we did not yet create but might. If you want, feel free to check out Bureau of Public Secrets (www.bopsecrets.org--see especially key works like Debord's "Theory of the Dérive" or Chtcheglov's "Formulary for a New Urbanism") or Historic Waikiki (www.downwindproductions.com) or Deep Oakland (deepoakland.org) or _Here is Tijuana!_ (by Fiamma Montezemolo, Rene Peralta, and Heriberto Yepez; Black Dog Publishing) or... But none of this reading is "required." All writers and other sorts of thinkers welcome.

THE PARAMETERS FOR TOGETHER WE WILL ATTEMPT TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT TUSCALOOSA

We are here to together attempt to write a book about Tuscaloosa. Hold this in your mind.

There will be a series of prompts. The prompts might be examples. They might be a word. They might be a poem. Do with them what you will, just do it interestingly. They are meant to be provocative and not mandating.

Please write legibly.

Please write on one side of paper only.

Please begin each prompt on a new sheet of paper.

You do not need to put your name on the piece but you can if you want.

This writing might be in any genre or form. Please don’t feel obligated to stick to a genre.

I mandate that you fail on at least one of these assignments and I invite you to fail at all of them. The point is not your individual perfection. It is that Together We Will Attempt to Write a Book about Tuscaloosa.

Feel free to trade if you do not have the right prompt at right moment.

Feel free to redo a prompt any time you want. Just write something different.

At least once, do a prompt and then take a 10 minute break where you think about the prompt (no phone, no checking email, etc.) and then redo the prompt. Submit both pieces of writing into the written stack.

I have given all of you a card where you can add a prompt. Please feel free to use at any moment if the mood strikes.

I have provided you with crude map print outs. Use as you desire.

Do not hold onto things. Place what you have written in the written stack. Place your prompt back in the prompt stack.

Please physically stay in the general area.

Some advice…

Strive to do at least 5 each meeting? I’m thinking of each prompt as good for about 20 minutes of writing. (Again, the point is not your individual perfection. It is that Together…)

Because we are here to together write a book about Tuscaloosa, try to write things that will add to this book. The prompts should lead us to write something that is multivoiced and multiconcerned.

Advice that could probably be productively violated: avoid character-based he said/she said fiction.

Because Tuscaloosa is, like all places, a complicated place, keep thinking about what else we need to know to get a sense of this complication and then write it for us and we will thank you.

You might want to spend some more time on some prompts and/or concerns and less on some.

You can go through as many prompts as you want all super fast and should you do this, just start over again once you’ve done them all.

homework…

It would be lovely if you did these things:

On your own, made a map for each day that this workshop is ongoing of some sort with at least five points on it and then submitted it into the general stack.

Brought a bit of found text or a list of something (all the trees on a certain street; all the color reds you saw in five minutes; open the window and turn on the light at night and list all the bugs circling the light; last night’s dream; etc.) for the stack.

Prompts for first session...

park bench
[see attached David Buuck, “Bench, Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge”]

gaps
areas that need further research, further investigation

slavery
[see attached list of “Largest Slaveholders from 1869 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census”]

show the money
[see attached Joshua Clover, “Cheria”]

things to do in Tuscaloosa
[see attached Ted Berrigan “Things to do in Providence”]

the thing to do in Tuscaloosa

garbage, shit, pesticides, bombed and smoldering cities,
microchips, cyber, astral and biological pollution

I cannot stress enough how much this mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in ever increasing brutality, has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry. If I am an extension of this world then I am an extension of garbage, shit, pesticides, bombed and smoldering cities, microchips, cyber, astral and biological pollution, BUT ALSO the beauty of a patch of unspoiled sand, all that croaks from the mud, talons on the cliff that take rock and silt so seriously flying over the spectacle for a closer examination is nothing short of necessary. The most idle looking pebble will suddenly match any hunger, any rage. Suddenly, and will be realized at no other speed than suddenly.
--CA Conrad

big giant metaphor

interview
The first person who gets this card should write three questions below that might help us better understand Tuscaloosa.
1. ___________________________________________________________
2. ____________________________________________________________
3. ____________________________________________________________
Please also place a copy of these questions in the written stack.
If you are the second, or third or…, person to get this card, answer the questions. Please copy the questions that you are answering on your own paper.

map of a walk you tend to take, might take at some point

ghosts, castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors

All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
IVAN CHTCHEGLOV

free card
Write below a prompt you might add to the set. Put the card back when done.

intimacy: either or both imagined and real

I have taken ‘contact,’ both term and concept, from Jane Jacobs’s instructive 1961 study, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs describes contact as a fundamentally urban phenomenon and finds it necessary for everything from neighborhood safety to a general sense of social well-being. She sees it supported by a strong sense of private and public in a field of socioeconomic diversity that mixes living spaces with a variety of commercial spaces, which in turn must provide a variety of human services if contact is to function in a pleasant and rewarding manner. Jacobs mentions neither casual sex nor public sexual relations as part of contact—presumably because she was writing at a time when such things were not talked of or analyzed as elements contributing to an overall pleasurable social fabric. Today we can.
--Samuel Delany, Times Square Red Times Square Blue

interclass contact

Astute as her analysis is, [Jane] Jacobs still confuses contact with community. Urban contact is often at is most spectacularly beneficial when it occurs between members of different communities. That is why I maintain that interclass contact is even more important than intraclass contact.
--Samuel Delany, Times Square Red Times Square Blue

mass observation

Mass Observation was an organisation was founded in 1937 by three men, who aimed to create an “anthropology of ourselves.” They recruited a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. This original work continued until the early 1950s.

bugs

a map of dreams that you have had that include various locations in Tuscaloosa

$20

AMERICAN poem, AMERICAN poet, the roots the roots the roots there are roots

[You are sitting in a government building.] Go to a local government building or monument, courthouse, statue or prison, but a government structure, one paid for by all tax payers. This monument or building is something you paid to create, something you pay to upkeep. It stands for the collective stronghold of our nation, as Americans, as America moves and removes our collective fingerprints around the world as a military, as a business, as a structure of faces supplanting trust and empathy with a guise of trust and empathy under the guise of one flag. This is not to say an angry poem must ensue. This is just saying LET'S GET CLEAR. This is not to suggest you read up on American assassinations of leftist governments in South America, this is just saying KNOW what you already know to be true when coming to this poem. We're here as Americans. It's an American poem in a way that has roots, literally roots. Study the plants if there are plants. Study the grass around this government building or monument. Smell samples of the soil. What's around? See everything as best as you can, sit very still and look closely at the world as it always is around this structure you have come to today. DO NOT ENGAGE IN COVERSATION WITH OTHERS. You're here for how you see it, how you see this structure, how you see our country. This is personal. The date presently is April, 2009. We are at war on more than one front, millions of lives have been lost, and who knows how many more are at stake as our tax dollars purchase bullets and bombs, prisons and worse. Look at this structure you have come to, and know you are paying for its upkeep. You have a claim to it today. Take a list of notes about the structure, but these will be the notes you glean from later, as these are not the real notes for the poem. Take another list of notes while investigating the plant life, the soil, the natural surroundings. Take yet another list of notes about the government structure, only this time take notes about WHAT it is made from. Is there wood? Is there metal? Write in your notes about trees and rocks, iron and oil. Write about the elements all these parts of the structure originated from, and how they arrived here by boat and truck. Take the notes of the government structure broken down into the finer notes of the natural elements the structure originated from, and combine those notes with the notes of the natural world surrounding the structure today. Weave these notes, as this is an exercise in weaving notes. Now with the FEELINGS you have of being an American TODAY, whose tax dollars continue to pay for the cost TRUE HUMAN COST of two wars, form these final notes into a poem BUT WITHOUT EVER mentioning the government structure. And without directly involving America by name. Write a poem as a poet of the world with feelings for our collective human costs of war. Write this poem through THE GRASS AND TREES you see around you. Now take all your notes, and using THE FILTERS "ALERT" and "EXILE" shape your poem.
--CA Conrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry Exercise

story of a specific often overlooked place in Tuscaloosa
[see attached “Oral Alley, Oakland" by David Buuck]

possible commemorative plaque

Near the concession stand a commemorative bronze plaque narrates the park’s civic historical status: “Here Vancouver began. All was forest towering to the skies. British Royal Engineers surveyed it into lots, 1863, and named the area Hastings Townsite…Everything began at Hastings. The first post office, customs, road, bridge, hotel, stable, telegraph, dock, ferry, playing field, museum, CPR Office. It was the most fashionable watering place in British Columbia.” We shall add to this inaugural mythos an additional fact: the site also compromised the first real estate transaction in what was to become our city. From its inception New Brighton has remained emblematic of colonial economies: primary industry, leisure, and real estate find here their passive monument.
--Lisa Robertson, “Site Report”

emotion map
[There are numerous examples of this. See attached “Circle of Fire” renga map that uses haiku.]

tell a specific narrative story of someone included in the attached “Selected Social Characteristics of Tuscaloosa”

native
[see attached “Alabama croton” and “Alabama snow wreath”]

work
[see attached “interview” from This is Tijuana!]

weather

football
[see attached CLUI description of Bryant-Denny Stadium.]

nearby
[perhaps the Emelle Hazardous Waste Mound?]

University Avenue as a dividing line
Hand draw a map that centers around University Avenue. Present at least five different points of information about University Avenue.

childhood memories of Tuscaloosa, if you’ve got them

foundations

The 'Black Warrior Village' has been in existence as early as 1580, although it was abandoned at times. The village was unoccupied circa 1750-1760 according to several historical sources. The primary native tribes of the area were the Choctaw and Creeks. The Creeks resettled the old village around 1800. By order of General Andrew Jackson, General Coffee and his men attacked the Creek village in 1813 during the Creek War. The village was burned as retaliation to the kidnapping of a Mrs. Crowley at Duck River, Tennessee, leaving few Creeks in the area. After the Creek War any remaining Creeks were removed to land in eastern Alabama west of the Coosa River. The Choctaw Indians removed to lands west of Tuscaloosa, although some remained in the area. By 1836 President Andrew Jackson had decided that all Indians must be moved to the Indian Territory, a move which we all know as the 'Trail of Tears'. According to several sources, the first permanent white settler of the Black Warrior Village was Thomas York, and family, who came to the area in early 1816. By late 1816 several families were in the area. The county seat was established in the town of Tuscaloosa, which was incorporated 13 December, 1819 from the 'Black Warrior Village'. Tuscaloosa was 'laid out' by Collin Finnell in early 1821 for the government. Lots were sold at auction in November 1821. The initial delay in laying out Tuscaloosa by the government caused another town to be established, known as New Town.
-- Tuscaloosa County History

2009-09-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

Monday
Hazel Smith's The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media. Amazing design that is usual now for Tinfish books. Super meta. Interesting piece on "The Body and the City." And piece on gossip that is great on talk about how gossip functions: "In some cultures gossip is closely/linked with song. Andalusian/carnival songs, written by men,/tell of local concerns and secrets./The Tuareg, in Nigeria, voice their/personal conflicts through song/rituals and gossip." p. 75-76 Made me laugh that the examples of gossip in the piece are so mundane and generic.

2009-09-13T20:24:00.000-07:00

Sunday
I am in Tuscaloosa or "nestled perfectly just outside of Downtown Tuscaloosa" right off I-59 and 20 at exit 71, in the heart of "Roll Tide" country Tuscaloosa Alabama. Before I left I gathered all the poetry in my to read or to reread or to read more seriously stack and then just grabbed the top 6. My plan is to read one a day. Because I am here without my son. Because having a son has meant that I have cut much reading out of my life for the last two years. I told myself that I have more trips soon, too many, and so I didn't need to take the entire stack. 6, or one a day, was enough.

Tonight I read again C. D. Wright's Rising, Falling, Hovering. On airplane I read the Vanity Fair with Farrah on the cover. I keep thinking about mothers and sons in a way that feels too much right now, alone, nestled right off the I-59 and 20 at exit 71. I keep meaning to write my list for Attention Span and in this list I keep thinking this year so far there has been this book and Philip's Zong! and Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary. I am thinking that it is a good year for me to able to read these three amazing books.

on p. 51:

I have been to Pilates I found my old coat
I took my will to the notary I found my good glasses
I have filled my tank I am going to the market
then I think I'll cut my hair off with a broken bottle

2009-09-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

This week loving the "worldfactory" in Johan Jonson's collobertorbital. Thinking also a lot about what it is doing with sexuality. Haven't figured it out yet. I'm so nervous about moments where any other than normie sexuality gets equated to things like the excesses of capitalism. Hard for me to think it through in this book. Which interests me about the book finally.