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    fractal economies, by derek beaulieu

    A quick litmus test for whether or not you should read derek beaulieu's fractal economies would be to look at the image below:


    "sinus headache"

    This is one poem from the book.

    If you can accept this as a poem, you might enjoy this book.

    If you can see it as an exciting poem, one that expands the field of what a poem can be and expands the toolkit of ways poetry can represent, then you might love this book. I did.

    "sinus headache," above, is taken from "surface," a long sequence of Letraset experiments that comprises most of the first half of the book. The second half is made up of two other sequences, "depression" and "blister," in which beaulieu investigates other visual means of poetry-making: photocopier and scanner experiments, relief experiments (rubbings), found poems, diagrams, etc. These other sequences are slightly less interesting than "surface," although this might be a matter of personal taste—part of what I enjoyed about the dry transfer experiments, for instance, is their compositional intricacy, a quality that doesn't naturally inhere in, say, a photocopier experiment. Ultimately, I'd argue for the importance of these other sequences as well, for they contribute to the book's larger effect: broadening the field of possible techniques for contemporary visual poetry. (There are, by my count, four poems in the book that don't even use letterforms.)

    As an extra bonus for the truly hard-core: the book closes with a theoretical essay by beaulieu, "an afterward after words: notes towards a concrete poetic." I'm still digesting the ideas in this essay, and may write more on it later.

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    Thursday, June 28, 2007
    10:52 AM
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    poets on war

    Yesterday I posted a list... today I'm posting a list. Maybe we can make this a thing.

    Today's list is books on "US military expansionism" written in the past five years and recommended by the great Juliana Spahr at her blog, Swoonrocket. I've read only two on this list, K. Silem Mohammed's Deer Head Nation and Lisa Jarnot's Black Dog Songs, both are a lot of fun, which is a little bit odd to say about books on US military expansionism, but which is, in fact, true.

    Alice Notley, Alma, or The Dead Women

    Amiri Baraka, Somebody Blew up America

    Barrett Watten, Bad History

    Carole Mirakove, Mediated or Occupied

    Eliot Weinberg, “What I Heard about Iraq”

    Fanny Howe, On the Ground

    Judith Goldman, Deathstar/Rico-chet

    Jules Boykoff, Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge

    Rob Fitterman & Dirk Rowntree, War, a Musical

    Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino, editors, War & Peace 2: Poetry and Essays

    Jena Osman, Essays in Astericks

    K. Silem Mohammad, Deer Head Nation

    Kent Johnson, Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz

    Kim Rosenfeld, Trama

    Kristin Prevallet, Shadow Evidence Intelligence

    Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs

    Meg Hammell, Death Notices

    Drew Gardener, Petroleum Hat

    Linh Dinh, Borderless Bodies

    Spahr—who wrote one of the best books I read last year— was here in Chicago on Friday, giving a talk at UIC, where I teach. In point of fact she was giving her talk in Room 2028 on a floor where my office is 2026. Despite this I missed the entire talk (I was teaching) and managed to slip in just in time to see the very tail end of the Q+A session. I did at least get to say "thanks for coming." But it still sucked.

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    Monday, March 05, 2007
    9:35 PM
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    "ruptures of diverse sorts" : some scavengings on collage

    Gregory Ulmer: "[C]ollage is the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century."

    David Antin: "[F]or better or for worse, 'modern' poetry in English has been committed to a principle of collage from the outset"

    Groupe Mu: "[To collage is] [t]o lift a certain number of elements from works, objects, preexisting messages, and to integrate them in a new creation in order to produce an original totality manifesting ruptures of diverse sorts."

    Ulmer again: "[C]ollage is the transfer of materials from one context to another, and 'montage' is the dissemination of these borrowings through the new setting [?]"

    Charles Bernstein: "[Montage is] the use of contrasting images toward the goal of one unifying theme" and collage is "the use of different textual elements without recourse to an overall unifying idea." [Questionable.]

    All quotes scavenged from Pierre Joris' "Collage and Post-Collage," in his essay collection A Nomad Poetics. And for anyone who wants to do further investigation along this axis, Joris also provides a whole list of "limit-breaking" artists who he sees as inspired or influenced by collage techniques, including:
    >p>Jerry Rothenberg (specifically his ethnopoetics + "total translations"), William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, "Allen Fisher's epic-sized montaged procedural / processual works," and "the serial-epic visual collage work of the French writer and artist Claude Pelieu." Those last two are unknown to me but sound like they're worth investigating.

    Oh, and PS: one of my own collage poems, "Gjallarhornet," has just been published in the new issue (#15) of Brendan Lorber's "annual compendium of horrible mistakes," Lungfull!.

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    Wednesday, January 17, 2007
    4:56 PM
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    the palate of available actions

    For Xmas, K. got me the new issue of Ploughshares, which features Jorie Graham as guest poetry editor.

    I've been slowly (over breakfasts) reading the poems she's selected. They are strange, and good, like much of her own poetry.

    In her introduction to the issue, she sets down some of her thoughts about poetry in general, and it is worthy reading.

    "I like ... to render the process of 'reading' as some version of 'being allowed and enabled by the craft of the poet to do the emotional and intellectual work the poem is asking me to do.' If there are images being used, for example—not just objects or pictures, but those mysterious chambers of deepening emotive resonance, those meaning-charged clusters that, if undertaken by the senses of the reader, do yield sensorial 'content'—for example—then I want to be made able, by the formal virtues of the poem, to undergo them. If I find myself unable to do the work the poet asks for, I can’t proceed with the poem, and it will remain private to the poet. The same applies to the whole rest of the palate of available actions in the poem: the architecture of rhetoric, the ideas, the musical modulation that invokes story, the turns of mind, the acoustic activity—how it generates its own chambers of echoing meaning—and so on. I love poems where I can do what the poet asks. Doing what I am asked to do is deeply different from interpreting what the poet means."


    Six of the poems that Graham has written for Ploughshares, dating from 1979 to 1995, are linked at this archive.

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    Wednesday, February 06, 2002
    11:11 AM
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