| |
about me
atom sitefeed
recent thought / activity
See the full list at LibraryThing or here
audio
|
|
|
poetry beat : li bloom
A Myopic Poetry Series event
Sunday April 25 at Myopic Books
Came in late and so missed any opening remarks.
Bloom's poems sound like syntactical chains strung together into a series. Each "unit" conveys some burst of sense although the "units" don't necessarily follow one another in a traditionally coherent sense.
"another world keeps opening your pillow"
"when love produces complexity, suspense hangs"
"mimosa pot Indian rice grass"
She doesn't pause between poems or preface individual poems with remarks, and since the short syntactical units resemble the short syntactical units commonly used as titles, it becomes difficult to tell whether she is reading a series of short poems or one longer poem, although I believe it was the former.
Despite the formal experimentalism of these poems, they seem to be in dialogue with / in debt to a more traditional poetics: the traditional rhetoric of love poetry can be found here, although heavily disordered / reordered (terms like "heart" crop up surprisingly often)
Some seem to draw from a tradition of landscape poetry, explicitly Southwestern landscape poetry: references to sagebrush and saguaros pass by, as well as Southwestern place names (Pima, Scottsdale)
The sensual (sensuous?) is a theme: one poem (a found poem?) is a recipe for chocolate-dipped strawberries
She references an Elizabeth Bishop quote on the relationship between the conscious mind and a poem, and later reads a Bishop poem ("Varick Street") and a poem dedicated to Bishop
She reads two poems from Jane Hirshfield's Women In Praise of the Sacred anthology, by Lal Ded and Mirabai, respectively: she follows up the Lal Ded poems by reading a response poem
The reading is followed with a lengthy Q&A period, during which she recommends print-on-demand outfit iUniverse (her book Radish is self-published), discusses the personal difficulties that fueled her recently-completed manuscript North, and remarks upon her ambivalent relationship to the culture of poetry blogs (although she stresses that "community is OK—collective is OK," she ultimately warns that "[blogging] takes away from the integrity of the singular voice, and the singular voice is what you're after").
Also in this period she discusses the relationship between dance and poetry (she has been a dancer and choreographer before writing poems): both dance and poetry are "about spirit;" both desire to "transcend" the quotidian. She also remarks that the poems are "choreographed in a way ... there's a lot of kinetic energy in my poems." (She shows a manuscript page here, but even a quick glance at her website will reveal what she means)
At around this point, one group perceives the reading to have basically ended and broken up into post-reading conversation, and accordingly begin having a conversation among themselves. Another group perceives the Q&A session as still being part of the formal reading, and want the other folks to keep quiet. Tension flares momentarily between these two groups, which effectively ends the evening (and on what felt to me like a rather sour note). This makes me realize that a ritualized event (such as a poetry reading) demands a ritualized way to signify its completion, although whether this demand should be obeyed or resisted is anybody's call. Labels: poetry_commentary |
Monday, April 26, 2004
8:44 PM
0 comments
|
|
individualism / collectivism
Noticed the following passage in Tony Kushner's Afterword to Angels In America, and I thought it was relevant, given that in May I'm going to be entering my first long-term collective living arrangement in five years, and will also be embarking upon a collaborative writing project with poet Eric Burger. More on that later, for now here's the quote:
"Americans pay high prices for maintaining the myth of the Individual: We have no system of universal health care, we can't pass sane gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan, we hate and fear inevitable processes like aging and death. Way down close to the bottom of the list of evils Individualism visits on our culture is the fact that in the modern era it isn't enough to write; you must also be a Writer, and play your part in a cautionary narrative in which you will fail or triumph, be in or out, hot or cold. The rewards can be fantastic, the punishment dismal; it's a zero sum game, and its guarantor of value, its marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity."
Labels: personal, writing |
Saturday, April 24, 2004
12:16 PM
0 comments
|
|
business
Will be changing apartments over the next week, so updates around here are likely to be sparse. This is probably also a good time for me to apologize to those of you who I owe you a e-mail, phone call, or letter... your wait is likely to be a little bit longer.
Move should be concluded by: April 30
Final grades for spring semester should be submitted by: May 7 |
Thursday, April 22, 2004
3:47 PM
0 comments
|
|
disbelieving
About six months ago, I promised a rant on The Believer, then I got distracted by other things and never delivered.
At the time, I wrote that the "short version" was that I was "undecided," and there is some part of me that badly wants to love The Believer. I could justify this desire in a handful of simplistic ways: I could point out specific articles I found interesting in their pages in the past; point out how sometimes they publish authors whose work I enjoy. But when I come to really love a magazine, I'm responding to more than just the sum of its articles and authors taken together: I'm responding to the whole editorial ethos of the magazine.
So I've been trying to put my finger on exactly what The Believer's ethos might be, and I've come to conclude that it's characterized by a certain smug knowingness, a certain breezy dismissiveness.
This explains part of the appeal—after all, it's comforting to find yourself agreeing with a group of people who seem able to confidently reject individuals, aesthetic movements, entire schools of thought. These folks seem to have all the answers—who wouldn't want to be in their club?
And, of course, there's a value to reading writing by knowledgable people. But I find that the certainty that characterizes the collective tone of The Believer—smugness is the word I keep coming back to—begins to rankle me: I'd rather take the feelings of intellectual insecurity that comes with having to admit that I don't have the answer. I'd rather have the company of someone like Robert Creeley, who at his reading quoted Franz Kline: "When I paint what I know I bore myself; when I paint what you know I bore you; I try to paint what I don't know."
This problem is compounded by the fact that, often, what ends up being dismissed by The Believer are cultural developments (of one form or another) that strike me as politically / aesthetically / intellectually progressive. This can perversely be mistaken as "edgy," by the same sort of people who think it's somehow "daring" to set up and knock down various straw men labeled "politically correct." (VICE Magazine is also commonly guilty of aiming for "edginess" in exactly this way; functioning as a sort of street-level cousin to The Believer's ostensibly high-minded liberal-artsiness.)
I should not need to point out here that it's not daring to be culturally conservative. This is embedded into the very meaning of the words.
So if I was thinking all this six months ago, why the rant now? It's because The Believer recently ran an article ("Hyperauthor, Hyperauthor!") that touches on the Kent Johnson controversy and (predictably) dismisses the idea that Double Flowering might raise interesting questions and (predictably) makes the overall (conservative) claim that readers "need" an author. The article isn't online, but Typo Magazine has published thirty letters, many by poets, which criticize The Believer article and make many of the points I make here more succinctly and eloquently.
I like this bit:
"In the end, Atkinson's treatment of Johnson and Yasusada is just MEAN: he trots out the weirdo, calls him names, tells him that nobody will ever love him or buy his book, pulls his pants down, rubs his face in the snow, and sends him back to the other freaks: readers and writers of poetry who, despite Atkinson's pronouncements, DO read the work and DO get many, various, polymorphous and perverse pleasures from it. "
Labels: magazines, rants |
Monday, April 19, 2004
9:32 AM
0 comments
|
|
arrgh
Had the date on the Armantrout reading wrong; it's actually today—an hour and a half ago, to be precise.
*bangs head against wall* |
Saturday, April 17, 2004
2:08 PM
0 comments
|
|
extremities
Rae Armantrout will be reading at the Harold Washington Library this Sunday, as the latest reading in the Chicago Poetry Project. This may be a good time to remind everyone that Armantrout's out-of-print debut volume, Extremities (1978), is available as a free PDF file through the Eclipse Project.
In other news, Google poets and interface geeks alike should delight in Newsmap, which organizes all the Google News headlines into a dense, gorgeous, stratified mass of information. |
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
10:20 PM
0 comments
|
|
kent johnson / john tipton
Friday April 9 at 3030
A Discrete Series event
Jesse Seldess, in introducing Kent Johnson, remarks obliquely on the controversy surrounding Doubled Flowering; his take involves comparing it to Anna Deavre Smith's Fires In The Mirror, he describes the way that performance/project uses personae as a device to enhance "empathic capacity"
Johnson's first two poems are anti-war poems, one ("Baghdad") which appeared in Poets Against the War, and one ("Falluja Exceeds Its Object") which appears (with a slightly different title) in Brian Kim Stefans' Circulars ("Poets, Artists, and Critics Respond to U.S. Global Policy"). Both strike me as sincere expressions of anger and feelings of helplessness. I'm reminded that Johnson has written a defense of didactic anti-war poetry. No sign in Johnson's delivery of any sort of postmodern game-playing; this makes me think that the "Hiroshima survivor" element in the Yasusada story is indeed a sincere attempt to imagine oneself as victim.
His pronunciation of the Middle Eastern names in "Falluja" and the Middle English terms in a later poem is, to my ear, impeccable, which again bespeaks a level of sincerity—he does not strike me, in person, as someone who is making fun of "translation culture."
He cites a chance discovery of David Shapiro's Poems For Deal (in Poetry) as being the experience which "turned him on to poetry"
His final poem is a self-described "School of Quietude" poem about going out with his two sons to watch a meteor shower; again its overall tone is one of great sincerity. Perhaps this is all a postmodern pose but if so he is a phenomenal actor: although his intro to the poem is somewhat self-effacing his reading of it contains no hint of irony
-----
John Tipton's poems are grounded in syntactical play
"it waking wounds the eye blue"
"the mirror shaving loses hold this man"
mathematicians, scientists, and linguists are figures that pass through these poems: I caught references to Markov, Claude Shannon, Whorf ("and his fictive Eskimo")
a section of the reading is dedicated to his translations of Sophocles' Axis
"I've taken liberties with these choral passages ... it's good if they sound a little crazy."
He's been working on sonnets for the past 18 mos. / 2 years
His final poem, in five parts, deals with patterns: "trees, rings, arrows, strings and a coda"—reminiscent of Tyler Volk's Metapatterns
this poem seems to be digesting the language of fractals, grammar, formal logic, and music |
Monday, April 12, 2004
8:20 PM
0 comments
|
|
between stud and submissive
This is the meme that's making the rounds at the moment (via Caterina):
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
I might not have played this game, except the nearest book was Sexuality in World Cinema : Vol 1 : A-K, an odd gem of a book. Sexuality in World Cinema looks like (and purports to be) a reference text but it is so bizarrely subjective in both scope and tone that it is all but useless for any sort of serious reference, and in fact serves much better as a source of comic relief, which is why it's sitting out instead of sitting on the shelf with the rest of the books in my office.
Anyway, page 23 is right in the middle of the "Glossary of Sex Terms," and contains no sentences as such, but the fifth definition is as follows:
"STY: an S&M game room equipped with racks, slings, and whips."
Well, that should bring my hit count up. |
2:34 PM
0 comments
|
|
too likely to be likely : kent johnson
One of the readers at tonight's Discrete Series event is Kent Johnson. The e-mail invite gives his bio as follows:
"Kent Johnson has edited Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof, 1998), as well as Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English, forthcoming from Combo Books. He has also translated (with Alexandra Papaditsas) The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek (Skanky Possum, 2003) and (with Forrest Gander) Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (California UP, 2002), which was a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation selection. He was named Faculty Person of the Year for 2003 at Highland Community College, in Freeport, Illinois, where he teaches English Composition and Spanish."
What this bio doesn't mention is that Araki Yasusada, apparently, doesn't exist. (Thanks to K. for the tip-off.) Selections from the Yasusada notebooks were published by a handful of journals under the pretense that they were newly discovered work by a Hiroshima survivor who died in 1972, but, as this interesting article by Marjorie Perloff points out, the writings contain inconsistencies, obvious anarchronisms, and things that may or may not be in-jokes; the most likely author is Johnson himself, although Johnson continues to disclaim authorship.
So the question arises: if Johnson is, in fact, the author, what exactly was he trying to accomplish? Is this the poetry world's equivalent of the notorious Sokal hoax, an ugly attempt to "pull one over" on editors? Or is it something more benign: a heartfelt attempt to imagine the perspective of the "other" through the time-honored tool of the pseudonym?
Of course, as Edward Said famously points out, when imagining the perspective of the Japanese, Westerners are prone to indulge in stereotypes and exotic generalizations: in adopting an air of "Japaneseness," some of the Yasusada work runs the risk of being "Orientalist"—or is it working as a parody of Orientalism? Can a parody of Orientalism itself be guilty of Orientalizing?
Were the Yasusada poems a repugnant, cynical attempt by a (presumably Caucasian) poet to gain attention in a marketplace that feels good about multiculturalism and the poetry of victimized peoples? (In 1999, Charles Bernstein referred to the Yasusada poems as an expression of "white male rage.") Or are they a tour-de-force of postmodern gamesmanship, where this entire set of questions is intended to arise as part of the work, a brilliant conceptual framework "bundled with" a set of striking poems? Can they be both?
Do these questions even matter? Does the identity and "authenticity" of the author matter when trying to assess whether a poem is "good" or not? Does intent?
The later Johnson material only further compounds these questions: after thinking about all this stuff, the title The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek begins to sound distinctly tongue-in-cheek, an impression that is not exactly put to rest by the fact that Johnson claims his co-author to be "Alexandra Papaditsas," a recently deceased Greek poet with a horn growing out of her head. And this forthcoming Language Poets in Leningrad: Post-poems and Elegies, 1998-2003 also seems a bit too likely to be likely.
None of these questions are particularly clarified by this interview with Johnson. But I'll let you know what I think after the reading. (Which reminds me—I enjoy the elliptical way Drew Gardner blogs poetry readings (say here); this may be a model to actively emulate.) Labels: poetry_commentary |
Friday, April 09, 2004
5:39 PM
0 comments
|
|
networks and scenes
More thinking on the Internet and contemporary poetic culture.
Ever since the AWP conference, I've been spending enormous amounts of time exploring the blogs of poets, using K. Silem Mohammad's limetree as a central node to explore from. It's been fascinating to try to mentally map out all the interconnections; I'm giving serious thought to taking all of this data and running it through some network visualization tools to try to see which poets constitute the network's "hot points." (It's worth noting that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published a special issue focusing entirely on similar work being done within the field of the sciences. Brief overviews can be read here and here; these links courtesy of Boing Boing. Also related: Data Mining the Amazon, a project which uses Amazon.com data to generate stunning graphics of strange findings.)
Like any other dense network, the poetry network is one in which memes can spread rapidly: perhaps the key example to date is the "New Brutalism." New Brutalism may or may not exist as a coherent movement (the New Brutalism group blog has been dead for nearly six months at this point), it may not, in fact, have ever existed as a coherent movement (as Mohammad's list of myths about New Brutalism nicely hints at)—but one thing is certain: the rise of the meme was notably, perhaps fatally, accelerated by the growing number of poetics blogs.
This insightful article by Stephanie Young traces the rise (and fall?) of the New Brutalism meme, and uses it as a lens through which to discuss the influence of poetry blogs in general, as well as the politics of temporary ("soft") assembly and the friction generated when offline or institutional sources attempt to document online networks. Fascinating stuff, resistant to excerpting, since there are so many good bits, but a must-read for anyone interested in this sort of material.
Related: Ron Silliman on networks and scenes (1977). |
Thursday, April 08, 2004
2:58 PM
0 comments
|
|
poetic technologies : google
No discussion on how the Internet has affected poetry culture can be complete without a discussion of Flarf, a contemporary poetic genre that uses (used?) Google as a sort of aleatoric language generator.
K. Silem Mohammad summarizes its origins:
"Flarf came about a couple of years ago when Gary Sullivan submitted a deliberately bad poem to Poetry.com, one of those vanity companies that lures the unsuspecting with lavish praise of their poetry and then offers to 'publish' it for an exorbitant fee. Theorizing that no submission, no matter how heinous, would ever be treated with anything other than solicitous fawning, he sent in a poem titled 'Mm-hmm':
Yeah, mm-hmm, it's true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my "huppa"-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!
oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take
AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah
hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get
off the paddy field and git
me some chocolate Quik
put a Q-tip in it and stir it up sick
pocka-mocka-chocka-locka-DING DONG
fuck! shit! piss! oh it's so sad that
syndrome what's it called tourette's
make me HAI-EE! shout out loud
Cuz I love thee. Thank you God, for listening!
[...]
The initial aesthetics of Flarf ... can probably be approximated by the following recipe: deliberate shapelessness of content, form, spelling, and thought in general, with liberal borrowing from internet chat-room drivel and spam scripts, often with the intention of achieving a studied blend of the offensive, the sentimental, and the infantile. ... [Flarf] has no principles as such, beyond some characteristic compositional techniques that developed along the way (collaging Google search-engine results, etc.)."
Sullivan sketches out the surrounding history:
"Drew [Gardner] began to do odd word-combo searches on Google for things like 'Rogaine bunny' and wrote poems using the results. ... In March or May of 2001, a number of us started the flarflist—I'm not entirely sure who all was on it then: Me, Nada, Drew, Mitch, Jordan Davis, Carol Mirakove, Kasey, Katie Degentesh. Soon after, Maria Damon, Erik Belgum came on. ...
The first post to the list was 'Angry at God,' a play I'd written doing a Google search on the words 'awww' 'yeah' and 'God.'"
Other relevant passages on this page include these from Mike Magee:
"'Flarf' is a collage-based method which employs Google searches, specifically the partial quotes which Google 'captures' from websites. In its early manifestations it was VERY whimsical and went something like this: you search Google for 2 disparate terms, like 'anarchy + tuna melt' - using only the quotes captured by Google (never the actual websites themselves) you stitch words, phrases, clauses, sentences together to create poems. To me, it's interesting for a number of reasons -- its collaborative texture, its anthropological implications (the sampling of an enormous variety of public speech based on a single word or phrase shared in common), its comic (not to say unserious) frame."
and:
"[T]he flarf method resembles in some sense: a) the use of a thesaurus; b) eavesdropping and quoting; c) sampling; d) collage / cut-&-paste (for which I can think of many many precedents from Eliot to Langston Hughes to Berrigan and just about every experimental writer from that point on). What makes the flarf methodology different, to my mind, is the willful democratization of the method: the EXTENSIVE and even sole use of Googled material and the hyper-collaborative quality of the CONSTANT exchange -- the SPEED (or seeming speed) of composition."
Intriguing, entertaining. |
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
11:35 AM
0 comments
|
|
open networks / social networking and its discontents VII
David Weinberger on why he hates Friendster. The most interesting bit, for me, is this one:
"Look, I want to say to the Friendsters of the world, we already invented a social network for friends and strangers. It's called the Internet. Why are you privatizing it? Why do we need a proprietary sub-network to do what the Internet has already done in an open way?"
Excellent questions, although one answer might be that the proprietary sub-networks have a gentler learning curve—these proprietary networks are appealing (I think) to people who aren't particularly web-savvy. Just follow the link in your invitation and fill in the blanks and within three minutes you can be enjoying some of the pleasures of connectivity. It's a closed, limited network, yeah, one that walls out most of the bewildering wilds of the Web, but if the success of AOL has taught us anything, it's that what some people want out of the Web is a managed (or manageable) experience.
This does beg the question of whether the more-managed (closed) parts of the Web might be hurting the less-managed (open) parts. The Web is not a finite resource like geography: each managed "area" does not take the "place" of an unmanaged "area." But attention is a finite resource, maybe the key one in talking about the Web, and when a service like AOL steers its users around and around in its own little content ghetto it siphons that resource away from the rest of the Web. Some of the better social networking websites (Flickr, Orkut, Tribe) are less guilty of this, since they allow you to include a link to your webpage in your profile, appends a little arrow that points "out"...
Related: Caterina's continued enthusiasm for social networks. Labels: internet, networks, rants |
Sunday, April 04, 2004
9:36 AM
0 comments
|
|
robert creeley, closed cultural groups, and open networks
The Creeley reading was pretty amazing. He struck me, charmingly, as a person who is utterly bewildered by having produced the work that he's produced: he reiterated several times that he doesn't have a clear sense of what his own poems mean, or even that he himself is genuinely the author of them. He suggested that writing exists outside of one's self, and then comes into the world by being sort of channeled through the artist, who may exert no more intentionality than just sort of stepping aside.
From my notes:
"Writing is as much how do you get to it, how do you find your way to it—once you get to it there's no problem."
"One thinks that because one wrote something that one wrote it—not so simple!"
This seems in accord with what Sluk wrote about ideas coming from the unconscious mind—if I train myself, as a writer, to "find" my unconscious / let those unconscious intuitions through (harder than it sounds), then, in a very real way, "I" did not write the poem (if we take "I" to mean the bundled assertions / beliefs / strategies / whatever that constitute my conscious self).
There's another interesting thing that Creeley does that I still can't quite put my finger on: something to do with the way he freeley uses words that other poets might reject as banal or exhausted. There's an argument that I want to make here about individual words as "machines" ("micropoems?") and Creeley poems, aware of words functioning on this level, operate as assemblages of these independent units—but then I wonder if I'm not thinking too hard about it.
I also enjoyed the reading because I knew a lot of the people there... people I know from UIC; people familiar from Discrete Series events; people I met in Arizona during my UIC days who are now in Chicago. Going to an event an recognizing a fair percentage of the crowd always gives me a good feeling, there's something vaguely communal about it. Or maybe it is recognizing my membership in a closed cultural group.
Or is it so closed after all? I've grown really interested, lately, in how the Internet is affecting contemporary poetic culture. The Internet is enabling a national (international probably) discussion among poets on a scale that has not really been seen before—we could say it is intensifying the culture. But we could also say (arguably) that it is opening the culture to outsiders: the Internet is, after all, an open network.
Poetic culture, in the past, could perhaps be described as an invisible college, a "group of peers ... who band around a shared interest" (thanks to Black Belt Jones for my introduction to this concept).
The Internet turns invisible colleges into what people are calling "echo chambers": social networks which allow like-minded people to come together to agree (or to argue).
As you might guess from the pejorative name, echo chambers are often critiqued as being insular spaces, feedback systems where all of the participants mutually reinforce one another to the point of myopia. But others point out that since echo chambers operate within an architecture which is accessible and open, other people can look in, comment, and critique, injecting a heterogeneous element that keeps the system evolving...
Tools for thought, anyway. Labels: poetry_commentary, writing |
Friday, April 02, 2004
11:06 AM
0 comments
|
|
this week's cultural events
Did I mention that I went to go see a taping of the Jerry Springer show on Tuesday? Still not sure how to even begin blogging it.
Also, tonight: Robert Creeley reads in Chicago. I'm also going to try to make it to his lecture tomorrow. |
Thursday, April 01, 2004
2:04 PM
0 comments
|
archive >>
|
|
