INDEPENDENCE DAY | EPHEMERA | DEMOCRACY

A week ago I was fortunate enough to carve out some time to print a hastily set broadside for Jow Lindsay and Posie Rider just hours before they read at Rust Belt Books here in Buffalo on June 25th. Media announced the death of Michael Jackson earlier that evening. No full moon but somehow all the shithouse wild ones holed up in this crippled city seemed to find their way to Allen Street that night. Strange times all around.

Given the mercenary character of the broadside I was only able to run off a small handful of them and gave all but one to Lindsay and Rider. The poem — drawn from an ongoing collaborative series between the two — frames "the stomach for you" as "a liquid / as though democracy / is a caryatid kidney." Democracy as a caryatid kidney and also the freedom to: a) vote in a CNN Situation Room viewers' poll; b) bury your view in blog comment boxes at the New York Times; c) choose between Pepsi and loganberry pop at Jim's Steakout on the corner of Elmwood and Allen.

(Loganberry: hybrid developed through the unholy union of the European red raspberry and the American blackberry. Loganberry pop: our kidneys filter this highfructose corn syrup slop and are neither strengthened nor destroyed by it.)

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died just a few hours apart on Independence Day, 1826. Whitman was then five years old.

(Mark Lombardi:




Post-Independence Jefferson and Adams discussed the design of the Great Seal of the US. In a letter to Adams, Jefferson — an avid Anglo-Saxonist that angled to situate the study of Anglo-Saxon as a staple of mandatory education — considered including an image of Hengst and Horsa on the reverse side of the seal, confident these Saxon warrior-politicos embodied "the form of government we have assumed" (Cf. Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins). In Bede's Ecclesiastical History, a text especially important to Jefferson, we find Hengst and Horsa were invited to post-Roman Britain by Vortigern to aid in defending the region against invaders from the north. Accepting the invitation, Hengst and Horsa used the occasion to undermine Vortigern's trust, conquer Britain and occupy the region indefinately.

Today the reverse side of the seal features the totalizing gaze of the Eye of Providence radiating outward and is accompnaied by a quote from the Aeneid: "Novus Ordo Seclorum." The scope of the ambition embedded in the phrase is global.

I recall a Dorn poem titled "Song Called Thomas Jefferson" but can't seem to find it at the moment.

Tocqueville: "Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendents and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart."

Before the Rust Belt reading Lindsay gave me a copy of Francis Crot's Xena: Warrior Princess (Critical Documents 2008):

Xena is a mighty warrior, everyone knows that. She can wound her enemy in the belly without damaging his skin. She is a master strategian. She once commanded an army of insects in a victory over an amry of people, though the insects were two to one outnumbered. She can make the kind of mistakes nobody makes nice nice. Xena is a skilled sea woman. She learned to sail and fish from a corsair admiral, whose beard changed length with the tides and sometimes rushed and hissed with breakers. He tutored Xena's heart to swim like a fish through her body, so that her enemies never know where to pierce her. Xena is an unsurpassed tumbler. She can spring up the side of a mountain which crumbled to dust centuries ago or climb up a flock of birds or bats or the barks of a pack of dogs. Xena was incensed and had no plans to tire.

No secret: Francis Crot = Jow Lindsay. Last year's Veer Off anthology includes Crot's curiously titled "PRESSURE IN CHESHIRE, or TOWARDS A TRAGEDY OF BEYONCE KNOWLES, a discovery of the late and bloody treason in Cheshire, including a true detection obv. of the doings of Arthur House, unfolding certain diverse speeches with his conspirators in the canting tongue of gypsies, beggars, thieves, cheats &c, useful for all sorts of people, especially immigrants, to secure their money and preserve their lives, together with the names of those notables that should have been slain, and also including a tragic brief of the life, dignites, benefactions, principal actions, sufferings and deaths of the Pooja Ali and Paul Litle-Kiev, lately of Chester, faithfully recorded by F.C. and illustrated and C.C.C.L. of Edinburgh this year; to which is added, A NOTE ON THE CONDITIONAL, or the institution, ceremonies and laws of conditional aid, digested into one body by Jow Lindsay; and also OBSERVATIONS ON SUBTERRANEAN FIRES by Sir Thomas Pope Blount, Baronet, salted with the wit of Harvey Gabriel et al.; printed by Stephen Mooney et al. of Veer Books in London, in the Summertime of 2008."

My landlord tells me — just now — the Seneca Casino at Niagara Falls is packed today.

MISC. NOTES ON FLARF, CONCEPTUAL WRITING &c

Q: What happens when a gaggle of middle-aged financially-secure nobodaddys tell an old boring joke as if it were new and not boring?

A: Their ponzi schemes are backed by cultural and economic muscle and richly rewarded. The Whitney. The latest issue of Poetry. Viz. whoever's got the cash can make it sing. Nothing tough or edgy in making cultural capital that challenges nothing sing like a nightingale. It always has the blessing of power.

Or:

GRANDMA'S EXPLODING DIARRHEA
=
GRANDMA GOT RUN OVER BY A REINDEER

The joke is safe — like a knock-knock joke. As such boring and old. We share these side-splitting, hilarious jokes with our grandparents over Thanksgiving dinner. These jokes are a species of gratitude that never goes unrewarded. We give thanks by reproducing them.

And if we ironize the boring jokes our grandparents so admire.

Perhaps then we can share them with our grandparents and our friends and cop cheap laughs from both. We can stay out late, impress our pals with something resembling avant-garde "edginess" and at the same time climb into the good graces of the old folks at home. We can have our cake and eat it too. And we can say let them eat cake and boldly call it a shit sandwich because it really is a shit sandwich and our grandmother looking back on her own care-free days as a sprite middle-aged fleamarket giveaway will say, "Those zany kids. They're a wild bunch. But at least they pay their bills on time."

The joke is. Is why we pay our bills on time. Is what guarantees the interminable flow of bills. In other words, the same virtues we admire in the succesful sale of the joke are those we admire in Bernie Madoff. Ponzi schemes are nothing new. Like any appeal to avant-garde practice they promise futures based on forward-looking projections engineered to fool and fail and reproduce themselves like rabbits. They gleefully enter into an already entrenched feedback loop and are in fact produced within it. Like capital. A feedback loop. They profit by it — are constitutive of it — are grist for the mist-producing mill.

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The avant-garde is a risk taken at another fool's expense. Like financial markets, avant-gardes anticipate future outcomes. They anticipate anticipations of future outcomes. They make poorly informed investments based on the probabilty of these outcomes and when their far-sighted investments give way to catastrophic but highly profitable short-term results they're handsomely rewarded by the market and protected from their failure by the state. Their failures are regarded as forms of success achieved by way of a certain daring-do.

Put differently, what publicly announces itself as avant-garde through market and state funded megaphones scarcely ever is. Their daring lies in doing what others have done with the blessing of the market.

(NOTE: The spectacular failure of GM should not be considered apart from its decision to manufacture military vehicles — the Hummer — for civilian consumption. Responding in part to Arnold Schwarzenegger's desire for a street-legal version of the HMMWV, the American Motors Corporation began churning out a civilian version of the Hummer in 1992 and then sold the brand name to GM in 1998. Defending the manufacture of these super-sized, hyper-aggressive, utterly inefficient, economically insensible, rolling disavowals of community, Schwarzenegger exclaimed, "Look at those deltoids!"

It wasn't until GM was muscled into filing for bankruptcy and the Obama admin insisted Rick Wagoner step aside as CEO that GM began brokering deals to unload the Hummer on China. Yet Wagner's disastrous reign at the helm of GM from 2000 to 2009 was rewarded rather than punished, allowing him to saunter into the sunset with millions. After GM lost $30.9 billion in 2008 and accepted however many billions in federal bailout loans, Wagoner's salary increased by 35 percent. In 2007, after announcing the closing of four GM plants, Wagoner's combined pay rose 64 percent to a total of $15.7 million for the year.

Here we find a cowardly form of failure which is in fact a smashing financial success for the engineers of this failure. To laugh all the way to the bank on the back of a destructive joke generated by market forces. The joke is called avant-garde. And like the civilian version of the Hummer, any notion of an avant-garde cannot be disentangled from its martial character. The avantgaird — the coward called hero — can never be considered beyond its relation to notions of leadership, aggression, power and, in the end, military conquest and domination. Shock and awe. This preceded the ground invasion of Baghdad. And this is what the cultural "avant-garde" call for? To be shaken, grabbed by the shirt collar, enraged, unsettled, disgruntled, distrubed and eventually awakened into new forms of consciousness by way of cultural hijinx? This is the joke. From Stein to Tzara to Fluxus to Warhol these challenges to dominant forms of consciousness and the sway of an unconscious grounded in the logic of capitalist accumulation have been for more than a century financially lucrative and economically sound. Warhol behaved like a ruthless investment broker and we worship him for it.

There's a marked difference between a rhetoric of struggle and the rhetoric of military aggression. And any identification with an avant-garde or committment to innovation paves the way for a promising career in the culture industry.

Introducing flarf and conceptual writing for the second or third or thirtieth time in the current number of Poetry, Kenny Goldsmith situates what he claims are two "movements" as "two sides of the same coin." Are these social or cultural "movements" as such? Where does Eurocentric economically-privileged coterie end and the expansive popular appeal of a "movement" begin? Are these "movements" global in scale (and do they cut across internally differentiated communities) or is this simply another artificially-constructed self-appointed center presenting itself as representative of the whole (viz. the bulk of contributors to the feature are grounded in the US)? Is disjunction really "dead" or is it a strategy that continues to offer different but nonetheless productive ways of grappling with similar or shared concerns? Must one practice be disavowed, smeared and disarmed in order to valorize or identify the usefulness of another? This either/or logic is oddly reminiscent of Bush admin rhetoric (i.e. you're either with us or you're with the terrorists) and curiously in alignment with the ill-tempered, bourgeois rhetoric of avant-garde manifestos from the nineteenth century on.

For Goldsmith "digital environments" set flarf and conceptual po apart from other approaches, allowing this "new writing" to "continually morph from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs." Fuck. This just seems like a negligibly small part taking credit for the work of the whole. If we can bracket out the digital divide and issues of economic privilege, who in the whole of the western world is not producing work that "continually morphs" in this way? Kamau Brathwaite's x/self provides a powerful and well-known early example of the overdetermined relation between digital and print technologies Goldsmith insists characterize this (viz. his) "new writing." If we consider contemporary letterpress production, much of it wouldn't be possible without digital technologies (i.e. the electronic transfer of photoshopped image files for the production of photopolymer plates used on otherwise obsolete proof presses). Who isn't aware of the interplay and confluence of conventional, obsolete and emergent technologies that make the present multiplicity of poetries and poetry communities possible?

The insistence that this writing is fundamentally "new" is itself nothing new and in fact disguises in an especially pernicious way commitments to unnamed traditions and tendencies (i.e. the fetishization of newness and innovation that emerges with the rise of industrial production and consumer culture; the slavish privileging of a temporality that destructively pits a hastily discarded past against a recklessly misread present and ill-conceived future).

Nihil Novi. WCW remarks somewhere or other than the avant-garde is nothing more than a set of stubborn peasant loyalties. An uninterrogated fidelity to innovation is undoubtedly one of these loyalties.

But if this writing is "new" in some fundamental way (recall the necessity of newess as an indispensable category for Adorno in Aesthetic Theory; his careful theorization of the new that insists on the separation of surface charm from deep structural differences), then how is it new? Plagiarism, pouching and citationality are practices old as the hills and were certainly coeval with the rise of Enlightenment commitments to authorship, copyright debates and notions of intellectual properties. Goldsmith tells us no practitioner of flarf or conceptual writing has written even a word in the conventional sense: "It's been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry." Based on this description, what appears to separate the "new writing" from, say, Eliot's Wasteland, Pound's Cantos, Benjamin's Arcades Project or any number of Alan Halsey texts is that this work is not disjunctive or "shattered" but crammed "into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard." In other words the practices Goldsmith regards as fundamentally new are heaps of (presumably unedited, uncurated and potentially unread) signs. Heaps of them.

Referring to his Historia Brittonum, Nennius remarked in the eighth century, "I have made a heap of all that I could find." In this heap are any number of indeterminacies, ambiguities and contradictions that Nennius was arguably aware of. David Jones, a disciple of Eliot's, begins his Anathemata with this quote from Nennius and then, after an unusually long preface not unlike those found in works of conceptual poetry, invites us to enter into his impressively complex and contradictory heap of information. But in the case of conceptual writing and flarf it's unclear what is particularly new beyond the use of digital technologies (for instance, how can we not see the continuity that cuts across procedural conceptual works like Jackson Mac Low's Words nd Ends from Ez and Caroline Bergval's Shorter Chaucer Tales or Steve McCaffery's "The Property: Comma" and Christian Bok's "Great Order of the Universe"?

To beg the question again and again: what makes any of this new? Unrelenting critiques of subjectivity (a deep skepticism of identity, expressibility and sincerity)? These have been with us for — wot — more than half a fucking century, as have investigations of flux, fluidity, indeterminacy and undecidability.

Beyond insisting on the newness of the new writing, Goldsmith also leans on "materiality" as a concept. But he seems to confuse it with perhaps mass or excess. In the production of digitally produced excess (viz. the "repurposing" or "regurgitation" of excess information in works like Day, Traffic and The Weather) Goldsmith believes "Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seem to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean." In other words, not representation or signification — no exterior scene or self mediated through a seemingly transparent system of signs and corresponding referents — but a sort of truth to materials as old as Mondrian and Stein. Appeals to notions of materialism and materiality get a lot of play these days, but when a figure like Zizek refers to himself as a materialist philosopher he means this in the post-Hegelian sense (arguably the Marxist sense precisely in spite of his early critiques of Marx by way of a Hegel filtered through Lacan). But what Goldsmith seems to mean by materiality is grounded in the quantity/quality split, matter over mind, body over spirit, etc. Investigations of materialism and materiality in the present moment typically refuse or trouble this split and seek rather to consider the overdetermined relation between the material and ideological conditions of existence (that is, the relations of production are recognized as material relations. Materiality as a concept usually addresses much more than simply the product manufactured by way of these relations. In any case — given Warhol &c — attention to "materiality," citationality and reproducibility is in itself nothing particularly new.

Google: what flarf folk do with search engines, wiki technologies and other web-based applications Ashbery, Bruce Andrews, Bern Porter, Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles and innumerable others have done with print objects and sound texts.

At bottom there's nothing at all fundamentally new about the "new writing." The new boss bears a striking resemblance to the old boss. Perhaps defetishizing innovation and directing attention away from newness and toward shared concerns or sources of pleasure might be the most innovative thing any contemporary writing could hope to achieve.

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If we think about Lang Po as an Anglophone "movement" or (richly heterogeneous) tendency we don't have to look too hard to find calls for innovation and newness (Ron Silliman's New Sentence being the obvious example). But for my money the most useful catalog of Lang Po concerns and achievements appears in a 2007 academic book review by Steve McCaffery and mentions neither innovation nor newness but instead the practices that emerged out of a culturally specific historical conjuncture. Reviewing Jennifer Ashton's From Modernism to Postmodernism for the summer number of Twentieth-Century Literature, McCaffery critiques Ashton's narrowly defined view of Lang Po and writes:

A contrived textual indeterminacy was but a single facet of Language poetry, a facet alongside a critique of voice and authenticity, an embrace of artifice, a laying bare of the method of production, a preference for heteroglossia over monoglossia while at the same time rejecting narrative modalities, and a general critique of instrumental language under capitalism, mass mediation, and the consciousness industry — all key elements in its early theorizing. Moreover, fragmentation, disjunction, grammatical transgression, and catachresis are ... modernist tactics reincorporated in a different historical moment ...

Beyond associating with Lang Po all of the characteristics (except use of digital technologies) that Goldsmith suggests separate flarf and conceptual po from earlier tendencies, McCaffery avoids the rhetoric of innovation in this description of Lang Po's concerns and achievements.

_________________________________________________

Recall Goldsmith's January 13, 2009 posting to the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog—a post saturated with nostalgia for an early twentieth-century avant-garde he identifies himself with, unabashedly referring to himself as an "avantist." Comparing the economic and political contours of the present moment to those that characterized the shift from roaring twenties to depression era thirties in the last century, Goldsmith buys into the utterly untenable split between high art and low art, good art and bad art, illegible or difficult work and intelligible or popular work. He predicts this historical conjuncture (marked by Obama’s tenure as president) will yield a base and terribly unsophisticated populist order of cultural production. For him this moment recalls "the exile of adventurous art during the Depression when intelligibility wiped innovation off the map…."

The crucial terms in the statement are of course "intelligibility" and "innovation"—terms Goldsmith sets up as mutually exclusive categories. Here intelligibility is equated with the low, the popular, the seemingly readable—in other words, forms of culture so dummed-down that a slobbering rabble untrained in the arts can apprehend and delight in cultural objects produced by formally trained intellectuals and artists. But Goldsmith would be the first to point out that such intelligibility, such accessibility, is itself only an illusion grounded in the notion of a mythic popular audience, a mythic popular reader, a mythic masses. What Goldsmith seems to fear most is that artists and writers, scholars and critics, will buy into this myth. By buying into the myth of a popular intelligibility Goldsmith believes we foreclose on the possibility of popularizing—or exposing the rabble to—authentic forms of cultural and artistic innovation (i.e. formal techniques that can somehow be authenticated by an advance party, a messianic few, and then set apart from those forms that aspire to reach a seething mass of idiots through intelligibility. Goldsmith situates innovation and newness in a privileged position, one that attempts to conceal the relation between the culture industry's lust for innovation on one hand and the market forces that rely on appeals to innovation and newness on the other. Goldsmith also fails to point out that what Peter Bürger long ago referred to as an historic avant-garde—an avant-garde historically located and responding to specific situations—stood in aggressive opposition to the institutions and institutionalization of art. In other words, the very same avant-garde of the nineteen teens and twenties that Goldsmith nostalgically looks back to worked in fact to destroy the cultural institutions Goldsmith presently supports and depends on.

________________________________________________

These notes necessarily incomplete. And at the Niagara International Airport a few days back I saw an adolescent dragging a set of clubs after what must've been a lovely stint on the golf course in Myrtle Beach. He wore a shirt with a smiley face, smile turned upside down into a frown and a tear rolling down the cheek. The text above the face read "CHEER UP EMO KID!"

Aside from wondering what's especially innovative about Gary Sullivan's Brainardesque comic in the Poetry mag flarf feature, I also wonder how dated, banal and completely inoffensive the emo joke is. For a community that fetishizes contemporaneity and innovation, it's surprising to find such an old boring joke still in circulation. Emo = bowdlerized pejorative for emotionally needy bourgeois kids that first emerged as a subgenre of music with DC's Rites of Spring in the mid 80s. Later what? K Records? The mid-90s Olympia scene? In any case, a handful of the records sit here within arm's reach but in the end a genre I was never particularly fond of. In its present usage, a community of kids (adolescents? or for Sullivan confessional poets committed to bankrupt notions of creativity and self-expression?) that make a delightfully easy target.

*yawn*

Like spitting on a scrub at the front of the cheese wagon, who of any consequence will come to their defense? Isn't this what the culture industry wants, produces, demands — that ridiculing, hyper-competetive cultural mirror of market forces that privileges muscle at the expense of those without? Where's the courage, the risk, the avant-garde bravado, in ridiculing a defenseless and (evidently for Sullivan) vaguely defined community of poets, artists or knuckleheads otherwise shoved around by hyper-masculine frat boys, high school football heroes or former cowards with a narrow slice of cultural and economic clout? This is precisely the sort of Malthusian survival-of-the-fittest approach to cultural production and criticism that greases the gears of the market. These approaches are always rewarded. Big fucking surprise.

MICAH ROBBINS | INTERBIRTH BOOKS | DALLAS TX

It's not often I encounter a handmade, small press book printed, hand-stitched and bound in multiple signatures like those Micah Robbins has produced under the mantle of his Interbirth imprint. The books are exquisitely built with a measure of care and patience comparable to his facility as editor / curator.

Robbins presently has three titles available: David Hadbawnik's Ovid in Exile, Mary Burger's A Partial Handbook for Navigators and Inter 01: Poetry, Prose Plays and Prints. The last of the three is the first anthology in an ongoing series containing work published monthly at the Interbirth site. Each month Robbins features a single author. Some months back—maybe even a year ago now—I had the good fortune of being included in the project and have a few poems appearing alongside an impressive cast of poets and artists. Contributors include: David Hadbawnik, Erin Pringle, Hoa Nguyen, Clifton Riley, Sharon Yablon, Amy Trachtenburg, Mary Burger, Kyle Schlesinger, Christian Peet, Lauren Dixen and Francis Raven.


Robbins curatorial sensibility is something to behold, the juxtaposition of one contributor against another giving rise to otherwise unanticipated formations. His ability to situate work so that certain aspects or particular readings are foregrounded discloses the extent to which editing is a highly interpretive practice. The hand of an editor—like the market—is neither invisible nor disinterested.

This inaugural installment of the Inter series includes an epigraph from Gary Snyder that tells us, at the very least, the source of the imprint's title:

It may well be that rebirth (or interbirth, for we are actually mutually creating each other and all things while living) is the objective fact of existence which we have not yet brought into conscious knowledge and practice.

The seven signatures of Inter 01 are bound in a Long Stitch between two handmade coversheets. Unfortunately only 26 were produced and I imagine most if not all are gone. The two earlier titles brought out by Robbins in editions of 100 (Hadbawnik's Ovid and Burger's Handbook) were both bound in bookboard using a coptic stitch and both are still available.

I'm not sure exactly how to think it, but there's a poetics of struggle, excess or exhaustion in Robbins' approach to editing and bookmaking. Each project seems to exceed any number of limits (labor, strength, material and possibly financial resources, etc). There's also an ethics at play in Robbins' work. The cost for each title ranges between $15.00 and $25.00 dollars—figures which clearly fail to include the hours of labor invested in reading, editing, making (I recall now the itemization of labor in Robert Duncan's prospectus for Groundwork, that he recognized the work of the poet as a form of labor that one should be able to live by).

Editing and publishing. I wish there were a single word, a single concept that would allow for thinking these practices as part of a larger single practice. No one concept allows for imagining editing, criticism, paper-making, printing, binding, distribution, etc as part of a single practice yet for many of us these activities are each part of a single but unnameable activity. Anna Moschovakis, Matvei Yankelevich and others at Ugly Duckling Presse refer to their role in editing/bookmaking as "shepherding"—a concept that seems, on one hand, to minimize their role in bringing a book out and, on the other, to allow for the inclusion of activities that fall outside the rubric of editing or publishing. Diminishing the role of an editor/maker is troubling for me, but making a gesture toward a more flexible and inclusive concept, one that addresses precisely what small press publishers do, is crucial. Either way, I can't imagine a single word that adequately addresses what Robbins does. Shepherding comes close.

ONE ROOM TO ANOTHER: ROBIN BLASER (1925-2009)

Charles Bernstein sent out a message to the Buffalo Poetics list re-marking Robin Blaser's passing. Blaser died this morning just a few days shy of what would have been his 84th birthday.

Spicer on Blaser (Vancouver Lectures): "Robin Blaser once said in talking about a serial poem that it's as if you go into a room, a dark room, the light is turned on for a minute, then it's turned off again, and then you go into a different room where a light is turned on and off."




The picture of Blaser above—out of focus—is one I snapped during a reading he gave at Trinity Church on Delaware Avenue during the October 2006 Creeley conference here in Buffalo. Despite the poor focus I find the image pleasurable. It seems to disclose a quality in Blaser utterly undefinable to me but something uniquely his own. We see this same quality in early photographs of Blaser. It is the jaw perhaps—maybe the brow—something that comes with the calm, certainty and confidence of a stone in the wood. Self-possessed.

The Creeley conference happened the weekend of a storm that quickly unfolded into a destructive sort of arborgeddon. Winter snow arrived a season too early and as it settled on the turning but unfallen leaves of thousands of trees across the region it brought many of them crashing down across roads, driveways, powerlines, homes, cars and trucks. Much of the city was without electric for several days if not a week. The beginning of the storm coincided with the first day of the conference. Neither Bernstein nor Marjorie Perloff were able to make it. Fortunately Blaser, Ashbery, Rosemarie Waldrop, Anne Lauterbach, Michael Davidson, Stephen Fredman and others were. The mayor of Buffalo declared a city-wide state of emergency and placed a 24-hour ban on driving but the conference unfolded largely as planned.

When Blaser first arrived at the opening reception with DuPlessis, Peter Quartermain, Ashbery, Peter Middleton and others in a large conversion van driven by Michael Cross, I recall Blaser making his way through several inches of snow, ascending the stone steps of the chapel flanked on one side by Michael and the other by his partner David. At 81 years old Blaser moved with a measure of dignity and grace I found myself stunned by. And his body, like his movements, appeared delicate—not fragile but delicate and unswerving. I see this same delicacy, the quiet fall of light metrical feet, in his sense of the line (i.e. "Forest I": "this lovely mind, but the word fall is, for me, too loaded / with a theological beforeness—rather, he or she may step / into oblivion—the state or act of being forgotten—an / answer in real terms—philosophical as they are—of our exit / from origin, that summertime and lacy curtain where we become")

At times Blaser willfully undercuts this delicacy—this measured grace—to great effect with unmasked indignation, scathing irony and humor. Take "The Skill," first written in 1975 and later revised in 2004:

the heart must not be confused
with the body—
the lives of the star-fuckers
who believe a quick rub-down
and come will turn them
into this poetic, thoughtful
art—must not be mistaken
for the desire they never had
except to be beyond themselves
and I love this desire
to go beyond...

A desire to move beyond oneself, the body as permeable shell or discarded shield (that Archilochus fragment, Lattimore's trans:

Some barbarian is waving my shield,
since I was obliged to
leave that perfectly good piece of equipment behind
under a bush.
But I got away, so what does it matter?
Let the shield go; I can buy another one equally good.

Blaser read the opening night of the conference, shortly after the reception. The size of the crowd was surprising given the circumstances (by 7:00 or so in the evening a deep, rolling thunder punctuated the calm of Trinity Church while snow continued to fall and accumulate.

The theological. This was a church (Episcopal) and the podium Blaser and others were to read from was situated immediately in front of the altar. I think now of Blaser's Nerval—Les Chimeres. The epigraph by Jean-Paul that opens "Christ Among the Olives" in both Nerval's French and Blaser's translation: "god is dead! The sky is empty / weep, children, you no longer have a father." According to Stan Persky (his comment in Caterpillar 12) when Blaser read Les Chimeres to he and Spicer shortly after completing it Spicer remarked, "I wish I could write such an apocolypse." Ἀποκάλυψις. A revelation. To lift the veil—that a translation once removed from the source might cut to the chase and disclose or make a forward-looking gesture toward the real. To point us in the direction. The gesture is deeply theological but grounded in a carefully imagined system which, as Bernstein says in his afterward to The Holy Forest , "is wholly secular."

When Blaser stepped up to the podium in front of the altar at Trinity he began to read but couldn't be heard. People in the audience (everyone seated in pews) began shouting, encouraging him to get closer to the microphone. And it snowed out. Each time he stepped closer to the mic people told him to get even closer. And no matter how much closer he got we still couldn't hear him. This went on for what felt like an absurd length of time until finally Blaser climbed up on the mic and mimed a hummer, as if he planned to take the mic into his mouth whole. He asked, "Is that loud enough for you?" And at precisely that moment a sonorous shock of thunder rattled the stained-glass windows of the church. No joke. No hyperbole. Thunder crashed. A priceless moment. A sacred moment. I can't recall if he read from Les Chimeres but I would like to think that he did.

Through the reception, up to that moment, the Church was somber and tense—seeming more a memorial for Creeley than a celebration of his life and work. But Blaser's gesture seemed to break the tension and realign the event. A desperately needed gesture of defiance in an oppressively sacred space. The gesture was apocalyptic, disclosing at one and the same time something about the present moment and also the unactualized possibilities embedded in it. I would like to think of his poetry—his Cups, his Faerie Queene, his Nerval—as work that performs in a similar way, a way that reimagines the sacred, redefines the theological and redirects our attention to the primacy of a particular type of heart capable of moving freely from one space to another, from one room to another. In "The Truth Is Laughter 6" Blaser begins with the following lines:

moving from one room to another a shocked
resilient heart...

And closes the poem with a quote from Blake:

'I cannot,' he wrote, 'consider death as anything
but a removing from one room to another.'

LATTA: CLARK | KEROUAC | ALLUVIAL DEPOSITS

To come across a blog that's not merely information, caster oil or any other pharmaceutical we desperately need but don't necessarily want. To encounter something else. What is a pleasure to read — that jumps and bumps with the same force rhythm speed differentiation and wildly shifting registers that first drew me as a young man to Melville, Crane, Hopkins, WCW, Pound, Olson, Loy, Howe &c — the big guns that made reading a pleasure and not a duty. Like throwing a record on the turntable or pulling a book from the shelf when one doesn't want to work. When one has had enough of work. This is Latta's Isola di Rifiuti. A blessing that strategically understates itself.

Latta mentions "alluvials" in a March 12 posting — a concept Kerouac appeals to when describing the work of Lester Young. Clark Coolidge later devotes some attention to this notion of the alluvial in Now It's Jazz. Like Pound's notion of the Luminous Detail or what Benjamin refers to as the memory that flashes up in a moment of danger, an alluvial is a deposit, a thing distilled, left behind, evidence or trace of prior movement. According to the OED alluvium are deposits of transported matter left by water flowing over land. Disparate and displaced elements of an interminably moving moment bent on echoing itself over and over — a moment that insists on announcing its already having happened but never as it happened.

The very idea of the "alluvial" — as it comes to us through Kerouac via Coolidge and now Latta — is itself alluvial: concept deposited and lodged, embedded and reproduced in dislocated discussions removed countless times from any discernible trace of a source. To drag a rake over a field of cultural production and measure the historically determinate confusion it yields.

Thoreau meditating on a railroad embankment (included in McCaffery and Rasula's Imagining Language):

When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom.

That language, memory, the cobbled histories and perniciously convoluted forms of consciousness potentially operate as such. Alluvium as concept has perhaps the potential to be developed further and drawn into discussions of history, memory, consciousness and the unconscious. What comes to us through contingent arteries. Fractals. Broken bits. All things incompleat. Etc.

AMIRI BARAKA | ED DORN & THE WESTERN WORLD

Amiri Baraka's essay Ed Dorn & the Western World arrived yesterday — the chapbook an exquisitely designed title brought out jointly by Effing Press and Skanky Possum. Edited and introduced by Dale Smith, the essay is a welcome intervention that points toward the ongoing importance of Dorn, Olson and Black Mountain to Baraka's poetics and articulates well with the work Claudia Pisano's been doing for the past couple of years with the Jones-Dorn correspondence. The essay was first delivered as the keynote address at the University of Colorado's Ed Dorn Symposium in 2008. But unlike a formal keynote talk the essay moves like a memoir fueled by Baraka's desire to mark the signal moments of his decades long and at times tense relationship with Dorn.

As Dale writes in his introduction:

Baraka has provided here a rare living document that presents dynamic motivations for ideas and actions that defined the period for him. The vision he offers is of strife, argument, and struggle to attain self-definition against the ideological positions that contested individual freedom of perception and speech. In an era where the heart and mind of the individual are under assault by every element of our so-called culture it is instructive to attend to Baraka's comments carefully.

The period Dale refers to extends from the late fifties, when Baraka and Dorn first began corresponding, through the nineties when their correspondence came to a gradual close. But the thrust of the essay concerns itself with encountering and responding to the west or westness, Baraka reflecting back on the way emerging crises specific to their moment but symptomatic of a more deeply seated longue durée forced him and Dorn to radically rethink their poetics and break from dominant cultural tendencies. As Baraka locates his own transition in the jump from Greenwich Village uptown, Baraka sees the transitional moment for Dorn embodied in his departure for the UK:

So that it was not just Jones journeying through the land of Blackness to become Baraka up through Harlem... there had been deep change in Dorn, but one that had been always sharp in observation, perception is poetry he said, brilliant in rationalization, and the use he made of it in poetry and in practice. The journey away from the states was to me, his own way of signaling the breakup of our camp.

Dorn bounces to England in 1964 to teach at the University of Essex as a Fulbright scholar — a moment that gives rise to much of Geography (1965) and all of The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), both first published by Stuart Montgomery's Fulcrum Press. The years in England also see Dorn developing early drafts of what would later become Slinger. So what Baraka identifies as a break for both he and Dorn in the mid-sixties can be sensed to some extent through Dorn's early publication history, his first two titles coming out through Baraka's Totem Press (in association with Ted Wilentz's Corinth) in New York and the following titles published between 1964 and 1967 brought out by Montgomery in London. This break can also be located in the shifting form of the poems contained in Dorn's early collections, the shorter lyrical interludes of the first two books (The Newly Fallen and Hands Up!) giving way to much longer and at times far more ascerbic meditations. Where the lyrical character of the earlier work registers in large part as eulogy or playful celebrations, the work brought out in London through the mid sixties snaps and bites with a cantankerousness and cynicism commensurate with Baraka's increasingly militant position following the assassination of Malcolm X.

But it's in thinking through how he and Dorn each approached an idea of the west that allows Baraka to point toward a deeper continuity in their individual poetics and their enduring friendship:

The moving out to investigate the real West the Westness of us, that is the real openness, freshness, innovation of America the promise is to finally see that this promise has been the threatened future of this world.

Or as he says of Dorn's west:

...the West for Dorn was not just the western part of the United States but that is how he got to the bigness of the whole West. That Western World that Europe claims and has never been.

Or as Dorn says himself in "Song: Europa" (Geography):

The brutality of your frankness
has come to me
inches at a time,
and so slowly the pain marches
through the veins of my soul
with the heavy step of a migrating herd
tramping out the vintage

Just as Baraka's early work as Leroi Jones tends to enjoy more critical attention than the poetry produced after the transformation into Baraka, Dorn's Slinger tends to be read in isolation from those poems produced before and after, dislocated from the broader field it emerges out of — a field of work Baraka suggests coheres to some extent through Dorn's lifelong investigation of the west as both an interminably broken promise and a space of possibility.

MICHAEL CROSS | IN FELT TREELING | WORKING NOTES

In a recent review of George Albon's Momentary Songs Michael Cross writes, "When I’m really listening to Oppen [not Albon], I find it difficult to read anything without demanding that each word, each lone phrase... call into question the ground it has just established." The same set of demands Cross places on each word, begging each to self-reflexively investigate the conditions — the consequences — of its own call to being no matter the poet, are demands we can responsibly place on his own work. At even a quick glance, In Felt Treeling announces itself as a careful project that unfolds with a keen awareness of the material force of language and the need to develop a language that might adequately respond to the present cultural moment.

On the level of form, the work is a libretto — a form that immediately calls attention to the intersection of text and sound, poetry and music. Libretto. Libro. A relation to the book — a text-based semantic construction that, in Cross' appeal to the form, rigorously thinks its complicated relation to sound through sound. Presenting In Felt Treeling as a Libretto reminds us also that the composition of such work typically resides not with a composer but with a poet, one working in collaboration with a composer or with a prearranged composition. And it is precisely the character of this working with embedded in the libretto form that calls our attention to certain signal words and phrases that recur throughout the work, particularly the words "yield" and "cede":

a smith / wrought burlesque
handsome and to yield / and yield alike
forthright / cede
thy static / chatter there
a useless slag / of villainy

Vengeance. Process of inquiry. Accountability. This is the figure of Eumenides speaking. In Felt Treeling: a libretto — text containing both stage direction and dialogue. Here there are three characters: Eumenides, Lavinia and Forest. Eumenides = Furies. Lavinia of the Aeneid, Titus Andronicus — of another source or perhaps a conflation of these instantiations of the figure. A language of the pastoral ("petals to the ground," "beneath the sycamore / drew crystal to the wood," etc) courses through the work suggesting Shakespeare's Lavinia — and it is this Lavinia, raped and silenced in order to preserve an order of force operating both through and beyond legitimate forms of power, that allows us to think the multiple forms of "yielding" and "ceding" the poem grapples with.

The question the poem relentlessly thinks over and over again is one of gender and its relation to force. But there's the role of language in figuring gender: "useless slag," "wrought burlesque," "debutante," "pasties." On the terrain of gender class difference lends itself to shoring up a zero sum game. But what is it to "yield" and what is it to "cede"? To yield to power is perhaps not to give up power but to accept its terms, allowing it to legislate and effectively determine relations (viz Lavinia's attackers — and later her father — ape the contours of power, yielding to it but not ceding it). And what is it for Lavinia to yield and what does she have to cede beyond the character of a living always already subordinate to the force of those that unknowingly yield to the demands of power? What would it mean for those that yield to power to cede force? Even Eumenides — the Furies — operates by way of an ethics of vengeance registered in an economy of force.

Force. The Forest. A character without dialogue. And a forest is not a ground. An undisclosed narrator discloses the character of this Forest to us. And the character of this persona too is imbricated in a discourse of force and is perhaps force itself or the spaces of relation through which force moves. The narrator tells us:

             (desiccate too tied yield
                                     a tint in berths
                  the upper wealth enlaced
                                               a sanction
                             vines the more still   
                                 virus in the grass

For this Forest, the space within which Eumenides and Lavinia move, the question of yielding is also central. Desiccate. To be desiccate. Lacking in spirit. This too tied yield — possibly an ability to yield, to defer, to renounce the demands of force. Forest itself, the space through which we move, is itself complicit. A form of contagion resides in the grass (recall Burroughs' remark: language operates like a virus).

Like Zukofsky's 80 Flowers or Hopkins' "Harry Ploughman" the poem involves a relentless play of torsion and tension at the level of sound. The insistence on non-normative syntactic formations calls one's attention to sound first — to signal words and phrases and their ability to generate latent but unremarked meanings through a commitment to turning, twisting, reconfiguring. Through the poem familiar words unfold again and again into strange formations and specific narrative contexts such that we've no choice but to reconsider these familiar words and attend to them more carefully, considering the consequences and potentialities embedded in their material force.

As ever, I may be grossly misreading the work. But the book is unsettling. The questions it pursues. The work is difficult — the narrative architecture of the work disclosing just enough to make demands on the reader that work which completely jettison's narrative structure typically does not.