Tonight at Myopic, Cincinnati poet Dana Ward will be reading.

A chapbook by Ward, The Imaginary Lives of My Neighbors, is available as a free PDF as part of the Duration Press e-book series.

Here's a direct link to Ward's book, but the whole series seems worth taking a look at.

Sunday, May 30, 2004
2:22 PM
0 comments

I've been reading a little more deeply into the history of Conceptual Art lately, as part of a broader investigation into imperative / instructional language. (I'm working on a series of poems written in the form of "instructions.")

The history of Conceptual Art is important to students of instructions because somewhere in that history the emphasis shifts from the production of actual, material, "artistic" objects to instead the production of plans or instructions for artworks. The plans themselves, then, become the artist's work; whether the artwork that they posit is ever realized, or whether it even can be realized, is immaterial.

Ideas alone can be works of art. ... All ideas need not be made physical.
—Sol LeWitt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," 1969

The main book I'm reading is Conceptual Art : A Critical Anthology, edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson. It picks 1966 as the starting date for Conceptual Art (the same date Lucy Lippard starts with in her excellent book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, 1966-1972). The figure presented as the central figure with reference to instruction pieces, in the Alberro & Stimson anthology, seems to be Lawrence Weiner. In 1968, Weiner begins to present the artwork only in the form of a statement, say for instance his 1969 piece ONE QUART GREEN EXTERIOR INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL. (Interestingly, Weiner doesn't use the imperative form, which he describes as "fascistic.")

Weiner receives a lot of praise from various writers contributing to the book for the way that his pieces de-commodify art (since the text is the art, they can be transmitted by any medium, including word of mouth; in addition, anyone who wants to "actualize" the piece described can do so by simply buying the materials and performing the action). All of these things are true, but I'm puzzled as to why he's presented as the vanguard figure here, as his pieces do not seem substantially different from work being produced nearly a decade earlier by artists associated with the Fluxus group, most notably Dick Higgins and Yoko Ono.

In 1962, Yoko Ono exhibits "instructions as paintings" at Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, the earliest piece anthologized in the Instruction Paintings anthology dates to 1961.

PAINTING TO SEE THE SKIES

Drill two holes into a canvas.
Hang it where you can see the sky.

(Change the place of the hanging.
Try both the front and the rear windows,
to see if the skies are different.)

Summer 1961

Occuring concurrently is Higgins' Danger Music series, a set of linguistic scores for conceptual "music":

DANGER MUSIC NUMBER ONE

Spontaneously catch hold of a hoist hook and be raised up at least three stories.

April 1961

I find the total omission of Higgins and Ono from Conceptual Art : A Critical Anthology to be peculiar at best and troubling at worst. Why aren't either of them mentioned even in Joseph Kosuth's essay "Art After Philosophy," in which he cites pre-66 forerunners to Conceptual Art such as Robert Morris' Card File (1962) or Rauschenberg's Erased DeKooning Drawing (1953)? (I wonder particularly if Ono's omission can't be chalked up to art-world sexism and racism.)

Labels: art, conceptual art, instructions

Saturday, May 29, 2004
2:02 PM
0 comments

A Myopic Poetry Series event

Sunday May 16 at Myopic Books

Hatmaker is working on a series of "crime lyrics": poems which take crimes (and crime writing) as their subject/inspiration

The poems she presents at this reading focus particularly on the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short in Jan 1947, the case which comes to be known as the Black Dahlia case

In her opening remarks, she outlines the facts and speculation on the case through a discussion of the various texts written about it (Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon II, John Gilmore's Severed, James Ellroy's Black Dahlia, Janice Knowlton's Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer, and several others)

"I'm interested in her as a person ... I'm also interested in her as the Black Dahlia, [a figure] who resonates in a lot of psychological ways"

"a kind of similar figure to Williams' Elsie, a pure product of America gone crazy"

The poems themselves seem to use the murder as a springboard for broader meditation. Some (the early ones in particular) retell parts of the narrative in a narrative-lyric style, but then begin to circle outwards from there, meditating on various topics

Some of these meditations sketch out the cultural landscape of 1947—she incorporates reflections on both the recently-ended World War II and 40's-era dental science and funerary techniques

Some segments move into Short's consciousness, although (mostly) remaining at a third-person remove: "when she cooks, she sees the glint of steel before she feels the pain"

Some segments are dialogues

Some are Hatmaker's present-day reflections: one segment riffs on the upcoming film about the Dahlia, to be directed by Brian DePalma (she wonders whether Lynch would not in fact be the more apropos choice)

One poem is in the form of a jukebox track listing, although I'm uncertain as to whether the song titles she lists are actual songs from the era or poetic inventions. In any case, the song titles presented seem to emphasize body parts, presumably female (lips, eyes, etc.) and themes of finality (the end of relationships, and the like). Taken together, they imply a culture obsessed with morbidity and disembodiment

She meditates on how best to tell these stories; who to validate (the cops? the lawyers? the victims?)

One poem applies the logic of dismemberment to the alphabet: "take the t and tear the arms off ... deflate the o"

One poem in Short's voice (first-person this time) has her take on the role of the oppressor: "You'll shout my name—Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Elizabeth!—and you'll masturbate on my command"

"I'll bury the myths of your flesh"

"That's the final logic. That's the new world order"

The contemporary culture of violence seems to operate in the background of many of these poems, implying the figure of G.W. Bush although not invoking him specifically by name

A poem which imagines the Dahlia as a comic-book hero

"she holds the hand of the rapist and the victim as well"

"She knows the world is lonely whether you hold the knife or not"

A poem inspired by Sun Ra's "Space Is The Place," imagining a zone in outer space where the Dahlia can peacably exist

The final poem raises the question of poetic activism: it asks overtly "what can a poem do?" (presumably in the face of a violent world)

This poem instructs directly: "Talk to your children tonight about what it means when you call a woman a cunt or a whore"

It includes the phone numbers of women's health centers and rape crisis centers

"Poetry can be didactic ... Poetry can be about public outcry, same as the next form"

Labels: poetry_commentary

Thursday, May 27, 2004
9:01 AM
0 comments

I've been spending a lot of time lately working on various non-weblog projects: Chris and I have been mastering the new Number None album and finalizing art, and I've been revising old Imaginary Year entries, as well as beginning to orchestrate a much-overdue beautification of the first two volumes of that project.

In addition all of us here have been continuing to get the new apartment organized—we're deep in the project of unifying the book collections of three people who have been lifelong readers and book-buyers.

So far, these are the books that we have in triplicate:

Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault
Literary Theory, by Terry Eagleton

I think it's likely that a few more will emerge before the shelf organization is all over.

Organizing bookshelves shelves is a project that I enjoy because it involves the creation of taxonomies, which for some reason I never tire of thinking up. We're currently using this as our organizational system:

» Fiction
» Poetry
» Drama
»Theory / Philosophy / Literary Criticism
» Reference / How To
» Cookbooks / Health & Diet
» Comics / Design / Art / Children's
» Assorted Nonfiction

The "Assorted Nonfiction" section will probably undergo further subdivision. As it stands, this taxonomy is considerably more coarse-grained than my last one, which was subdivided perhaps to the point of obsession. If I recall correctly, it looked like this:

» Art
» Graphic Design
» Comics
» Children's
» Fantasy
» Horror
» SF
» Slipstream
» Fiction (American, subdivided by region, beginning with NYC)
» Fiction (South American)
» Fiction (European, subdivided by country)
» Fiction (Asian)
» Fiction (African)
» Fiction Anthologies
» Essay Anthologies
» Memoir
» GBLT
» Erotica
» Drama
» Poetry
» Myth & Religion
» Psychology
» Science
» Theory / Philosophy / Literary Criticism
» Urbanism / Architecture
» Media Arts
» Pop Culture

My favorite thing about that particular taxonomy was the way that each category gradates smoothly into the next; there's always at least one book that sits exactly on the boundary between categories. (For instance, Jung's books sit on the border between Myth & Psychology, as, say, "A Wrinkle In Time" fits between Children's & Fantasy.)

I now conclude this enormously indulgent and self-congratulatory post.

Labels: personal, projects, taxonomies

Wednesday, May 26, 2004
5:14 PM
0 comments

Friday May 14 at 3030

A Discrete Series event

Nicolas Collins and Jonathan Chen begin the evening by doing a "talk poem" on the topic of Donald Rumsfeld's use of language

"Rumsfeld actually has changed language, hasn't he?"

They carry on in this vein for a while, analyzing Rumsfeld's public appearances, and politics in general, as "performance work"

"I think of [Rumsfeld] as a sound guy—I'm not impressed by the visual ... if you're successful in certain terms like body count you stop worrying about how you look on camera"

The dialogue occasionally seems to trigger a computer to play small clusters of piano notes. The notes seem not only triggered by the speech but also determined by it—some of the notes' characteristics (most notably pitch) match the characteristics of the dialogue. It seems as though the computer is algorithmically converting chunks of the "speech-matter" into short bursts of "piano-matter."

Accordingly, the speech, at times, touches directly on the topic of conversion processes—Collins discusses how, in reading to his young son, he noticed that "all that mattered" was the inflection of what he was reading, not so much the content

"I would take whatever I was reading and intonate it in the style of Dr. Seuss ... I pushed the Autobiography of Janis Joplin through the sieve ... it's like vocoding."

It seems very much like in this performance, the computer is, similarly, "sieving" music out of the dialogue

This process may be intended as the central focus of the performance, as the dialogue itself eventually begins a long slide into increasingly banal territory, to the point where it begins to attain the status of comedy (with Chen, who punctuates Collins' long flights of digression only with occasional brief responses, serving as the "straight man")

Eventually the conversation stops, but the piano continues to play "algorithmic jazz." Chen improvises along with it on the violin and Collins blows into a box that produces odd electronic sounds. The overall result is similar to a performance I saw a while back, where George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell improvised against a computer-controlled grand piano. There may be a thematic point here about the similarities between conversation and improvisation? But are the two phases of the performance akin to one another? The improvisational segment seems more collaborative than the dialogue (which was predominantly a punctuated monologue)

-----

Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley are presenting a piece of software they call the "Error Engine": "an attempt to write the book that writes itself"

"a tool for self-organizing language"

"a page rewriting and reconfiguring itself"

"we are developing our tool in the context of creative evolutionary systems"

This speech alternates between Morrisey's description of the program and Talley's more lyrical description of the demolition of a building (video of a demolition site is playing behind them). The hybrid nature of this dialogue is key, as the Error Engine is essentially a device which creates a hybrid text by connecting several "text nodes" appropriated from various sources

Morrissey begins to (verbally) bracket Talley's lyric phrases with markup code, indicating how an operator might mark up code in order for it to be manipulated by the Engine

"our current research is concerned with allowing the engine to acquire its own text" (via the Internet—shades of the Google poem here)

They collectively demonstrate the software: Morrissey reads through a block of text on the screen. Talley repeats a word and Morrissey clicks on that word, which splices in a new chunk of text somewhere nearby, whereupon Morrissey begins to read through the text again

There's a point about repetition and variation here although after a while Morrissey (having grown nervous about the high level of repetition?) switches to only reading the new chunks as they appear, which mildly erodes the point about the text as an object which gradually mutates itself—it begins to seem more like the point is just that each click serves up some fresh new text, which I don't think is the theoretical angle they're going for here

The various texts include a description of an AB85 Harrier jet, more narratives of demolition, first-person narratives about performing in the theatre

The key forerunner here seems to be Burroughs' cut-up machine, although the Engine seems to have a greater control over the lexical relationships here—it rarely, if ever, breaks a sentence in the middle—so there's less junk syntax in the "end result." A more orderly mosaic, overall.

Saturday, May 22, 2004
4:40 PM
0 comments

The last three of the Oliveros questions:

How do we get them to fund us?

I'm presuming that "them" here means government institutions, corporations, etc. A government that's spent sixty billion dollars on missile defense programs over the past twenty years might appear to be the proverbial fool easily parted from its money, but I know that poetry doesn't have the cultural cachet of weapon technologies, and I'm not going to pretend that that can easily be changed.

Corporations may be easier, as there is some degree of interlock between an institutional emphasis on innovation and novelty and an institutional desire to finance artistic experimentation; in Wednesday's post I pointed out that many corporations are indeed currently financing the investigations of a sizable number of cultural producers. I have no idea, however, how to compel them to do more of this kind of work.

There's an entire set of caveats that circulate around any kind of artist-patron relationship, of course. I would stop short of saying that all artist-patron relationships are inevitably compromised, but in our attempts to increase the amount of funding that "we" receive from "them" we need to remember that safeguarding artistic integrity is equally important. We do not want to find ourselves in a situation similar to that which reportedly is currently afflicting the "hard" sciences, a situation where work with obvious commerical application receives funding while "pure" research tends to languish.

How could we strengthen our position in the social fabric of our country?

I am not certain that this is either possible or desirable. The problem with the "strong positions in the social fabric" is that those positions bring with them substantial secondary rewards (power, celebrity, wealth) and thus attract people to them who desire the secondary rewards over the rewards of inherent in doing the work. (This is, I would argue, why so many young people want to be doctors or lawyers.) I write or make sounds primarily because I enjoy the process of doing so, and I feel like this is the way it should be. People who make art primarily because they want to be famous or rich generally make bad art (which does not necessarily prevent them from getting famous and rich). There is enough of this happening already: strengthening our position in the social fabric is likely to exacerbate this problem.

Who do we need to speak to or wake up?

I agree with DB when he writes about the elitist assumptions inherent in the phrase "wake up," so I'll be focusing more on to other half, the question of "who do we need to speak to?" And my primary answer is that we need to speak to one another. I believe that increased communication between artists is good for art.

Artists are commonly chided by insiders and outsiders alike for being insular, or courting "inaccessibility"—for writing poetry that mostly appeals to other poets, or music that mostly appeals to other musicians, etc. But I don't think that this is a bad thing. The main audience for a specialized field should be other practicioners in that field. This appears to be the case in most other specialized fields: we do not, for instance, think it would be particularly virtuous for most scientists that they write their scientific articles in a language that will be accessible to the layman—I think most scientists would view this as a colossal waste of time and energy. (This is not to say that there aren't scientists who do occasionally write for a lay audience: there are, and I'm grateful that their books exist, I just think that culturally, we understand that whatever value we might get from all scientists striving to do this all the time would not match the value that we get from scientists speaking to one another in their own specialized language.)

We need to interact more, support one another's events more, buy one another's work more. And I think the kind of dialogue that takes place on and between poetry blogs is a very healthy sign.

Labels: personal

Friday, May 21, 2004
11:41 AM
0 comments

Is your art functioning in your community or beyond?

I guess my answer to this question hinges upon how one defines "community." Does it strictly mean "local community"? Or is it accurate to speak of "literary communities" or "experimental music communities" or "Internet communities?"

It's hard, actually, to say whether I feel like my art is "functioning" effectively in any of these—sometimes I feel like I am working very much in isolation. For instance, although Chris and I fairly frequently distribute some of our sonic output to other people making / circulating / reviewing experimental music, we rarely get even a perfunctory response. This leads me to feel that the work barely "functions" at all in that community. Regardless of whether it circulates in / is recognized by the community, the process of working on music remains incredibly rewarding, both personally and artistically—I do think, however, that it would be easier to "survive" if the work received more response. I'd enjoy being able to participate more fully in the community as an artist, rather than just as a spectator.

What happens when grassroots art spreads to large venues?

The arguments about "selling out" have been amply discussed to death elsewhere. The argument about, say, the grassroots art of Language poetry moving into the "large venue" of the academy is marginally more interesting in that the exact specifics are relatively fresh, but really it's a rehash of the same sets of pros and cons. These don't need to be reiterated here.

How do we respond to the continual rip-off of our research and our art by commercial interests?

I'm not sure precisely what Oliveros means here, as most art produced today ends up serving the interest of some commercial enterprise, even if that commercial enterprise is an indie record label being run out of someone's bedroom. As Ron Silliman points out, all books of poems are commodities (although not all poems or all PDFs) and the same goes for all audio CDs (although not all music or all MP3s). I'm going to guess that she means things more like corporations appropriating and watering down an art movement (say Surrealism) in order to make interesting advertisements for shoes.

One possible response is to focus on producing art in forms that are resistant to easy appropriation. A preliminary list might include works that utilize duration, process, or context as key components: a long-form drone will never properly "fit" within a 30-second commercial; an artwork that decays through time is difficult to treat as an ordinary commodity. Much contemporary poetry might also be found on that list, as it resists meaning effectively enough to be essentially useless to those who would "rip it off." And let's not forget the Dada gesture, which has survived for nearly a century largely without having been appropriated by commercial interests.

Another way of looking at it, though, might be to realize that commercial interests are currently paying many people to "research" new visual and cultural strategies, in the hope of finding ways to stand out in a field crowded with information: who among us can't think of a music video or a magazine ad that hasn't contained "avant-garde" elements more striking than those in, say, a more "grassroots" piece of culture such as a student film? Why not counter-appropriate: rip off the "artistic" research funded by the corporate dollars? (Adbusters embodies only the most straightforward realization of the many striking effects possible here; the more recent work of Ryan McGuinness presents a perhaps more "artistic" direction that these sorts of explorations could take.)

Coming up on the final three.

Wednesday, May 19, 2004
10:19 AM
0 comments

Made it to both the Discrete Series event and the Myopic event over the weekend: writeups will hopefully appear sometime this week.

But first I want to try to tackle some of the Oliveros questions:

As an artist, how have you survived?

I should preface my answer here by saying that I don't comfortably self-identify as an "artist." I'm more comfortable with thinking of myself as "a person who makes art," or, even better, as "a person who writes" (or draws, or organizes sound, or whatever). This may be a case of the narcissism of small differences, but the idea that capital-A Art is something made by capital-A Artists has always been anathema to me.

But in any case. As a person who makes stuff, time is really the key necessity. Consequently, I've tried organize my life to maximize the amount of time I have for making things, which means trying to avoid the 40-50 hour work week, which means having to live pretty frugally. I could list a bunch of small sacrifices here but I want to avoid the martyr's litany. Suffice it to say I've kept my vices affordable.

What is your current situation?

Like many writers, my current situation involves an uneasy relationship with academia. I currently exist at the low rung of the adjunct lecturer, which means bad pay and low job security (both of these things have been partially mitigated by the fact that I've integrated myself into a special program at the university which is moderately well-funded, although whether this program is permanent or ephemeral one remains to be seen).

I continuously grapple with the question of how much energy I should expend on advancing in academia—I hate the "publish or perish" mentality. Unlike many artists, I have been unable to conceptualize of the scrabbling for tokens of "achievement" as an extension of my creative process. Additionally, advancement in academia is likely to require relocation, which would mean severing (or at least diluting) the relationships between me and my collaborators and intimates in Chicago, not to mention my relationship with the city itself as a substantial source of creative inspiration.

What information or services would help you continue to survive?

In terms of financial survival? More arts funding is an obvious answer. Also better information on the funding that's already out there (the Internet has helped—I would not have gotten my grant last year if not for the easy availablity of the information through the Internet).

Better public funding of universities, so that to choose the adjunct path is not to choose to make quite as many sacrifices.

Cheaper groceries. Cheaper and more expensive public transportation. Cheaper technology. More access to expensive technologies (perhaps in the form of technological co-ops).

Separate from the things that might contribute to my financial survival are the things that might contribute to my creative survival: that is, things that might help to further inspire and stimulate me and other artists, such as:

More short-term arts colonies and retreats.

More quality reading series. More events like Oakland's house readings. More events that combine the local and the out-of-town like Nomads and Residents. More cross-disciplinary events: more bills that combine both experimental music and experimental writing (or experimental dance, or experimental puppetry, or whatever). Better coverage of performances.

More parties where people get together with the specific goal of reading/making poems or playing/making music.

Less apprehension in general about collaboration.

An Underground Railroad of crashpads and performance spaces in communication with one another, enabling interested artists to quickly throw together independent roadtrip-style tours. (I'd like to be able to say "I'm going to Milwaukee in July—I wonder who can I get in touch with about doing a reading there?" and be able to get an answer.)

More people setting up online PDF/MP3 distros. Better coverage of the PDF/MP3 "scene."

More independent reviews. The New York Times Book Review, if not irrevocably corrupted, is essentially irrelevant to the tribal culture of poetry, and Rain Taxi can only cover a fraction of what's out there.

More temporary autonomous zones.

I'll do the other six questions later.

Labels: personal

Monday, May 17, 2004
10:57 AM
0 comments

As I mentioned earlier, I have a concern about "the mass amateurization of nearly everything," which is that it (further) complicates the question of how artists can make a living. I think it's good that books can circulate as PDFs without needing to go through the homogenizing publishing industry or, in fact, needing to enter the "market" at all, but as an academic my ability to advance beyond the adjunct level hinges upon my ability to convince what Clay Shirky would call a "professionally skeptical system" to publish my writings as a book, even if those writings are in a form that isn't a natural "match" with book technology.

Raccoon reader "Jenny" suggests: "Work an easy job as little as possible to maintain life, save as much time as possible to do your 'real' work." If I were to follow this strategy, I could just decide to camp out permanently at the adjunct level—the work is hard (at times) and often tedious, but it does make me enough money to eke out a frugal living, and it does lend me enormous amounts of free time (I am writing at you from my summer vacation). But ultimately I can't quite surrender the ambition to at least attempt to advance.

In any case, I'm interested in how other artists negotiate these issues, and I was reminded of a series of nine questions that experimental composer Pauline Oliveros circulated among a group of experimental composers, on topics "regarding survival." I've revised these questions slightly to be applicable to artists more generally (mostly by replacing "composer" with "artist," and "music" with "art") and I'd be interested to hear answers from any readers of this site, particularly poets or other writers. My own answers will be posted soon.

As an artist, how have you survived?

What is your current situation?

What information or services would help you continue to survive?

Is your art functioning in your community or beyond?

What happens when grassroots art spreads to large venues?

How do we respond to the continual rip-off of our research and our art by commercial interests?

How do we get them to fund us?

How could we strengthen our position in the social fabric of our country?

Who do we need to speak to or wake up?

Labels: personal

Friday, May 14, 2004
12:50 PM
0 comments

Despite the continuing lack of home phone or Internet service, I have still managed to get a special catch-up Imaginary Year update online. Special thanks to CJO who let me park at her computer all morning.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004
9:58 AM
0 comments

Currently on Day 11 of no home phone service or Internet connection. I phoned the phone company once (on May 1st) to intitiate the changeover of service from one apartment to the next; they told me it would be done on the 6th. I've phoned them two times since then (May 7th and today) to inform them that this had not yet been done. It still isn't done.

Eleven days seems like ample time for competent people to complete their job, particularly when goosed along by two reminder phone calls. Therefore, I must conclude that I am dealing with incompetent people. Which means I will need to adjust my strategies accordingly.

More soon.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004
10:02 PM
0 comments

"To become a commodity a product must specifically be created with the purpose of exchange within a market. All books and magazines are commodities, but not all poems, a fact which complicates literature, creating numerous levels of bastard cases."

—Ron Silliman, "Of Theory, To Practice" (from The New Sentence, 1987)

I'd imagine that the number of bastard cases is even higher now, in 2004, particularly since the Internet (and specifically the PDF file) has made it possible to publish books or keep books in circulation without needing to resort to commercial markets. For instance, check out the UBU Editions website (thanks to lime tree for the heads-up). Last fall, the UBU site began to offer free PDF chapbooks by contemporary poets such as Kevin Davies (author of the great "Lateral Argument") and Silliman himself (of the three Silliman texts available through UBU Editions, my favorite is Sunset Debris, a tour-de-force of sorts).

The long-term ramifications of having a viable non-commercial system for textual circulation remain to be puzzled out—as do the questions of what consitutes "viable" and whether the Internet qualifies as legitimately "non-commercial". But my gut feeling is to think that anything that separates the world of publishing from the world of commerce can only be a good thing... part of the overall process of mass amateurization of everything?

Of course, there remains the issue of how to make a living as a cultural producer once cultural production is fully "amateurized"... a post for another day, perhaps.

Friday, May 07, 2004
11:18 PM
0 comments

"Talking About the Talk Poem"

A Myopic Poetry Series event

Sunday May 2 at Myopic Books

Beer begins the "talk" by playing a recording of a woman reading a passage from Spalding Gray's Swimming To Cambodia

This goes on for some time, Beer remaining silent. He is eventually "interrupted" by an audience member, who begins to harangue Beer for dragging us out to listen to a pre-recorded passage taken from "a seventeen-year-old movie" in an uncomfortable basement during a time-slot when we could be watching The Simpsons. It's clear from the get-go that the audience member is a plant (he is reading from a script). He raises some points that he would have hoped the talk would touch on (the relationship between David Antin and the New American Theatre from which Gray emerged; whether the talk poem is, in fact, a recent phenomenon, etc.)

This audience member is, in turn, interrupted by a third (Kerri Sonnenberg, one of the organizers of the Discrete Series) who critiques the conceit of a performer organizing the disruption of his own performance as a "tired Andy Kaufman routine"—referencing instances in which Bob Zmuda would disrupt Kaufman's performances.

She, in turn, is interrupted by another audience plant. (After each plant is done speaking, Beer leads them over to a row of seats set up to his left, designated as the "Peanut Gallery" by a sign on an easel.)

The new speaker (the third, not counting Beer, who has still not spoken), discusses a seminar he took with Bob Perelman, and a conversation that grew out of that seminar, about Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra," allegedly a transcrition of a poem that Ginsberg narrated spontaneously into a tape recorder on a drive.

This speaker raises some questions: how much of our appreciation of this poem depends on whether we believe Ginsberg's claim? Does the claim add an additional (conceptual) dimension to Ginsberg's poem? A time dimension? How does our understanding of the poem change when we understand it as an event in "real time," or what Ginsberg might consider to be "sacred time?"

"integrating speech into poems is not new to Antin"—the whole tradition of the lyrical ballad, for instance, implies a voice. Poets interested in "everyday speech" include Williams (and the Beats, and Creeley), but also individual poets that fall outside of that lineage, such as Eliot or Lowell.

This speaker is in turn interrupted by a fourth speaker, who discusses what superhero she would be if she were a superhero (possible candidates: Speed Racer, Wittgenstein, and the metamorph from Space : 1999)

She is interrupted by a fifth speaker: "If I were a superhero I'd be Judas"

The fourth and fifth speakers trade back and forth, and the evening shifts from being a chain of interrupted monologes into something more dialogic. Once all five are seated in the Peanut Gallery the role of speaker begins to alternate between them. They touch on a variety of topics, such as Robert Bly (in particular his notion of "passing the stick," but the discussion on him leans more towards critique, as a purveyor of "counterfeit ritual"). At times the "talk" begins to resemble a disjunctive modern poem, particularly in a sequence where each of the speakers issue a statement that follows the form "When I think of [x] I think of [y]." Notably, the entire "talk" to date can be distinguished from one of Antin's by the fact that it's entirely scripted—all of the performers are reading, none (as near as I can tell) are improvising

Eventually Beer (who continues to sit, silently, at the front of the room) plays a second recording, a male speaker this time (Beer himself?). The voice tells a few stories and eventually once again brings up the names of the three artists who have figured heavily in the evening's performance from the outset: Antin, Kaufman, and Gray. The speaker praises them (Gray and Kaufman particularly) for their willingness to confront an audience with something that's hard to make sense of or something that's "terrifyingly open." The easel at this point designates the talk as being "for Spalding Gray"

At some point during this recording, Beer leaves the stage—I begin to wonder whether this is the way he has chosen to end the performance. But he returns with an acoustic guitar [!], and performs a rendition of the Vaselines' "Jesus Doesn't Want Me For A Sunbeam" (in the style of Cobain's version).

Final easel card: "Tenk You Veddy Much"

Tuesday, May 04, 2004
7:15 PM
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Last night's Myopic Poetry Series event was John Beer's "Talking About the Talk Poem."

I'll post a write-up soon, probably tomorrow, although I thought it might be useful to start off by giving a short background on the most well-known practicitioner of the talk poem (as such), David Antin.

The Norton Postmodern American Poetry does a good job of this:

"Known for his practice of the 'poem-talk,' an improvisatory talk performance before a live audience, David Antin is at the foreground of performance poetry internationally. Presenting himself as a speaker rather than orator, dramatist, or actor, Antin tends to work in sequences of narratives, often inspired by memory, which he interweaves with general musings and even statements of poetics. In an introduction to a poem-talk in his first major collection, talking at the boundaries (1976), Antin wrote:

...i had always had mixed feelings about being considered a poet     'if robert lowell is a poet i dont want to be a poet     if robert frost was a poet i dont want to be a poet     if socrates was a poet ill consider it'"

OK. More tomorrow.

Monday, May 03, 2004
4:06 PM
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From "The Apartment," a section of Georges Perec's "Species of Spaces":

Closing

Leaving an apartment Vacating the scene Decamping Clearing up Clearing out

Making an inventory tidying up sorting out going through

Eliminating throwing away palming off on

Breaking

Burning

Taking down unfastening unnailing unsticking unscrewing unhooking

Unplugging detaching cutting pulling dismantling folding up cutting off

Rolling up

Wrapping up packing away strapping up tying piling up assembling heaping up fastening wrapping protecting covering surrounding locking

Removing carrying lifting

Sweeping

Leaving

No phone service or Internet service until May 6, so updates here and to the book will be intermittent until then. Phone number will stay the same. Those of you who know me can expect other change-of-address info in an e-mail. Until then~

Saturday, May 01, 2004
7:58 PM
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