damn the caesars

LUKE ROBERTS HIS FALSE FLAGS

2012-01-23T23:05:00.000-08:00

On the day Luke Roberts's False Flags (Mountain Press 2011) arrived Foreign Policy magazine reported that Israeli Mossad agents have been posing as US spies in an effort to recruit members of the Pakistani militant organization Jundallah in order to wage a covert war against Iran. Such an operation is a "false flag" operation which, as Roberts points out in a closing note to False Flags, "is a manoeuvre by which one group incriminates another, usually in an act of sabotage or violence." Although the Jundallah is outwardly regarded as a terrorist organization by the US, Iran (along with Seymour Hersch) maintains the US has long supported the Jundallah. In this instance it wouldn't be unreasonable to speculate that the Foreign Policy article itself might be part of a false flag operation oriented toward holding Israel accountable for a US transgression. Such speculation, however, would situate us firmly in the realm of conspiracy theory, the stuff of Tom Clancy novels. But in the final pages of False Flags Roberts is remarkably clear on this point: "DECOY || No conspiracy theory is dialectical."

For anyone invested in dialectical thinking from Hegel forward the claim Roberts puts forth seems perfectly reasonable; the logic that typically governs conspiracy theories is crudely empiricist, not dialectical. But the word "DECOY" which precedes Roberts's proposition is troubling, undermining any possibility of absolute confidence we might otherwise have in this absolute statement. As a decoy, the absolute character of the proposition exploits our desire for certainty, distracting us as we're quickly reabsorbed into a world of radical instability and interminable contradiction where any meaningful synthesis resides just beyond the horizon of possibility. Looking broadly at the poems, this ongoing push-and-pull seems to move the book as a whole forward and through to the false confidence of a closing statement that, in the end, refuses the sham finality of closing statements.

Initially imagined as a satirical consideration of "conspiracy theories and New Age irrationalism starting at Ground Zero and stretching back to the space race and other territorial contests of the past fifty years," False Flags takes up questions of strength, ambition, belligerence and violence. A line from the opening poem "Colossal Boredom Swansong" states, somewhat bluntly, "the weak slap down the strong," reminding us of those horrifyingly well-known lines from Yeats's speculative comments on the second coming: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst | Are full of passionate intensity." And like Yeats's "Wild Swans at Coole," Roberts's swansong features a narrator saddened by "those beautiful creatures" who, instead of alerting one to the passage of time, serve only to signal a species of flight we all participate in destroying. As such, swans become an object of hate:

Every starling I see I will kill with my brain-mask, my weak
hand strangled by the jury, whose task must be to shine
through to the hurtful limit. Twelve or so I thought, the rest
caught by public confession to betrayals they didn't
fight. I accept everything, every tiresome imitation of flight.

A lot is happening here, far more than I can now reasonably address, but the final statement in this first poem appears to set the tone for the whole of the book, this surrender to simulated flight, from cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's inaugural 1961 voyage into space, to the 1986 Challenger disaster, to the flights that leveled the twin towers. In each instance the same "passion and conquest" that "attends upon" Yeats's wild swans also attends upon these, but tiresomely, violently. This passion is the passion of the weak and the worst and their efforts at flight can bear no more than a misguided trace of the flight they so desperately pantomime. Situated as a sort of prolegomena, "Collosal Boredom Swansong" is, as a lyric whole, a fairly extraordinary thing, an abject stretch of scorched earth where "Galileo swoops from the sky and kills the whole farmyard, | tearing the throats of geese with his universe, holding | down pigs, ripping the tails from rabbits to fashion | a new love." And for Roberts the horizon of this post-apocalyptic past extends, somewhat naturally, to the savagely terraformed terrain of culture to which the poet responds:

I, champion of poetry, salute the elders, put my
foot in a desk, kicking poetry with a desk lamp
strapped to my heart. Send me a sick bag to speak
to you from, leaving the pre-snow, glass headed
swans slowly tunnel through the mountain. In my dream
phones signify 'family', so synthetic brothers, sisters,
put your money all over the table. I am so tired it's
not true. I could do this all day, eating figs, eating
the remnants of the New British Poetry, warring clams,
pelicans vomiting blood into boring glands, buying floor
fans to keep the city cool.

I spoke warmly and my speech turned into a wing
and the wing broke my arms, and my arm continued to sing.
Dear cowards, the sea dries up and you remain. The presses
are idle and the censor's lunch is so long and dream-like
you trouble nothing, not even my heart. The craters on the
moon are okay, dogs' bark drowned between
the tables where the bets were being made. I cut limbs
from my Axolotl and they re-grow, I will go blind
and recite the best poems to my children in the dark.

It's difficult to exaggerate my enthusiasm for the extraordinary shape and force of these lines — I mean, the pleasure I find myself taking in this poem is no different than the incredible pleasure I first found in, say, Crane or Moore or Pound however long ago. And for fear of falling into an absurdly maudlin endorsement of the work it's probably best at this juncture just to say the entirety of the book moves likewise. Dear cowards.

NOTES TOWARD A READING LIST

2012-01-07T08:54:00.000-08:00

Thinking for weeks now about the wide range of publications — poetry and otherwise — that complimented, emerged out of or responded to the past year of global upheaval, riot, occupation and protest. The hope is, against experience and reason, that this is only the thin wedge of a much broader moment of resistance which, on the terrain of the cultural, will continue to cut a little deeper than the slogan-ready sound bytes so easily kettled by safety-orange polyethylene fencing or so viciously subdued by industrial strength pepper spray.

J.H. Prynne. Kazoo Dreamboats, or, On What There Is. Cambridge: Critical Documents 2011. Although I haven't yet gotten hold a copy, I'm told this slim collection turns previous readings of Prynne's work from Brass (1971) forward upside down. A sort of extended paraprosdokian, the appearance of this book has the potential to compel a critical reappraisal of all Prynne's previous work. This view of the work might be hyperexuberant overstatement, but the following posted Dec 12 at Sad Press:

[...] Rule One: people with top pay are rubbish,
everyone knows this, it’s a law of nature. Rule Two: Diogenes
offered himself as a master, in the market, to any slave who needed
one. Rule Three: you do not see into the life of things, dimension-
less or not, except by harvest of data plotted against uncertainty.
Rule Four: justice is scarce ever the obverse of injustice, since
the one is the top end and the other the bottom. None of this it
must be said is the power of harmony even in charge fluctuation
or lifetimes except the desire integrate the variation of sep-
arate notice, that’s what spirit mostly does who where she went
bare in her forehead morning, only men write their socks off like
this: better to be clear than dizzy or cynic, not to refuse joy
in favour of rapture or contentment, the gradients are lateralised
in additive counterflow. But rapture is also pretty nice [...]

A second edition of Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern's Snow Sensitive Skin. Displaced Press 2011. Edition includes a new foreword from Michael Cross, who published the first edition through his Atticus / Finch. Cross: "It is no accident that the most frequently used words in Snow Sensitive Skin (after requisite prepositions and articles) are 'we' and 'our.'"

Parenthetical note: EVERYDAY RESOLUTIONS: 1) Cheap ambition is the enemy; 2) Building a mirror — or, as some seduced by the language of technological determinism have it, a "monitor" or "screen" — was never enough; 3) Imagining oneself as a machine, recording device or passive site of transmission is a total cop out. Every intervention is an active and partisan intervention.

Ryan Dobran. Confection. ©_© Press 2011. An astounding book that, despite however many readings, I'm still finding my way into, the work characterized by an oscillating and somewhat disorienting movement from prose to lineated writing. The opening epigraph preceding the title page: "OUT, YOU DOG-LEECH, | VOMIT OF ALL PRISONS." Each line or clause in the book is deeply sedimented and the first stretch of prose is, I think, representative of the unrelenting intensity that drives the whole of the work from beginning to end:

Seems thus pittanced ease against just, so thinking that for thus, missed shat for trust, mistook, under grave conditions no less which bloodied for hours some dumb serpent wheezed to bone-level diagrams of stumps, and in turning that path downward leans to frame the arousal of last cupidity, genuflected prior to a vision left wilting on the printer, left the lab soon after, get this seeming lost to frowning upon a gesture stacked and busty with strawberry tongue all the more of which that until then had not yet gone under, this, yet something not unsavory prolonged the gasp, bite clench, as if the inlay were interior parsimony, chevrons lately of desire came later in the last pass by otiose decorum, and this, yet not until bye accounts for procedural distemper, clouds of quartets in the pyrocentric tabula unfit for cheery entrance, sits down, blades lock into announcements of typographic patter, rump tipples in trails the crimped blood snuggie, talked to without circles of data to hold talked to like never before crass with blow nose and fruits of those fiendish time exchanges, lest in spring breed views to concrete music and value tacks settle into broke, term mantic swirly, and to sundryfold cheaters same sparkling fascia tends, nowhere spotted the pink noose slipping off the lofty dais, assurance registered into likeness, gummy and marrow, demi-gag to the apple of his throat, restores voyager spitum to the sweat before taste all roomy dancing.

Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles and New Political Scenarios. Eds. Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra. Semiotext(e) 2010. Far and away the most affirmative intellectual response to the financial crisis and the first book-length collection from the UniNomade network in Europe. In her introduction Fumagalli writes:

We come, as we've said, from the great tradition of revolutionary Italian workerism, and our work is collocated within what is now, in the international debate, referred to with the certainly insufficient but also somewhat effective term "post-workerism." We nevertheless feel the need to question our own theoretic tools and to be open to discussion with other currents and with other theoretic practices that have contributed to the critical comprehension of the present in the last few years: from postcolonial studies to the most recent developments in feminism, from the reflections in new media studies to the frontiers of political philosophy ... We hold dear the science — and consequently the reasonableness — of subversion and don't hesitate to define ourselves, once and for all, as revolutionaries.

A good deal of the thinking emerging out of the UniNomade network has a decidedly Foucaultian bent, which troubles me a little, but not so much that I would dismiss the absolute necessity of this work or the extent to which it so productively responds to global crisis in ways that no other network of intellectuals have managed, at least not with comparable success. The book includes essays from Fumagalli, Mezzadra, Christian Marazzi, Carlo Vercellone, Stefano Lucarelli, Federico Chichi, Tiziana Terranova, Bernardo Paulré and Karl Heinz Roth, and closes with ten collectively constructed theses on the financial crisis:

1. The Current Financial Crisis Is a Crisis of the Whole Capitalistic System
2. The Current Financial Crisis Is a Crisis of the Measurement of Capitalistic Valorization
3. The Crisis Is the Horizon of Development for Cognitive Capitalism
4. The Financial Crisis Is a Crisis of Biopolitical Control — A Crisis of Governance That Demonstrates a Systematic Structural Instability
5. The Financial Crisis Is a Crisis of Unilateralism and a Moment of Geopolitical Re-equilibrium
6. The Financial Crisis Demonstrates the Difficulties of the Construction Process of the Economic European Union
7. The Financial Crisis Marks the Crisis of Neoliberal Theory
8. The Financial Crisis Highlights Two Internal Contradictory Principles of Cognitive Capitalism: The Insufficiency of the Traditional Forms of Labor Remuneration and the Vileness of the Proprietary Structure
9. The Current Financial Crisis Cannot Be Resolved With Reformist Politics That Define a Renovated New Deal
10. The Current Financial Crisis Opens New Scenarios of Social Conflict

This is certainly not the space for offering an extended critique of this first wave of UniNomade essays, but I sense an intellectual overinvestment in theories of cognitive capitalism has the potential to present any number of difficulties, as does a critique of political economy that situates a theory of biopower front and center. But in "Cognitive Capitalism and the Financialization of Economic Systems," Paulré says, "In our opinion, the essential feature characterizing the accumulation system of contemporary capitalism is cognitive accumulation, broadly assumed as including knowledge, information, communication, creativity: in a nutshell, everything that constitutes intellectual activity." When he says "our" one can only assume he is speaking on behalf of the whole UniNomade network. For the UniNomade "cognitive accumulation" (imagined, following Michel Aglietta and the French Regulationists, as a "regime of accumulation") is a fundamentally unique regime of accumulation different from Fordist (not Taylorist) industrial production. But Fumagalli writes in her introduction:

When we talk about a radical transformation in the modes of capitalist production, of a capitalism that is no longer "industrial," we are far from negating the importance (that, in a sense, is ever growing) that industrial production and labor continue to have on both a global level and in our own territories. Instead, we are insisting on the fact that this production and this labor are progressively "articulated" in (and commanded by) valorization and accumulation processes of capital that function according to a logic that differs from "industrial" logic.

David Harvey advances essentially the same assessment in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), but what separates the UniNomade approach from Harvey (or other assessments of post-Fordism / flexible accumulation) is the reliance of the UniNomade network on a theory of "the becoming rent of profit," a theory articulated with notions of cognitive accumulation and biopower but connected most immediately to certain moments in the third volume of Marx's Capital. And perhaps it is this I find most affirming and useful. Rent, according to Negri, is what mystifies the common of social production. It is what enabled the earliest forms of enclosure and what, more recently, enabled the foreclosure of homes on such a breathtaking scale. As Carlo Vercellone explains, there is a "manner in which the tendency of the development of credit and stockholdings companies was leading to a deep separation of capital ownership from management." Vercellone continues: "According to Marx, capital ownership was following a similar path to that of ground rent in the shift from feudalism to capitalism: it is to say that it was becoming external in relation to the sphere of production and, like land ownership, capital ownership was extracting surplus value whilst no longer exercising any function in the organization of labor." Viz. the relative autonomy of the financial sector which, while it determines the shape of productive of forces, is not itself so beholden to the push and pull, ebb and flow, boom and slump of industrial production.

Drifting here (arguably a necessary peripatetic ambling), but I find myself thinking a good deal about processes of labor extraction lately, a subject several of the UniNomade theorists have taken up, i.e. Tiziana Terranova and Christain Marazzi. Cary Nelson and Marc Bousquet have written a good deal on the use of adjunct labor in the university industry (all the full-time faculty brains at less than half the price and yielding ten times the profit in an economy that has long since rendered privately funded education beyond high school mandatory for all US citizens stupid enough to desire a standard of living just above total poverty). Commenting on the information industry and the nascent digitariat up to the dot.bomb and beyond, Terranova writes:

While the workplace atmosphere became ludic and more informal, wages as fixed income were integrated into a participation of variable income constituted by rent earned through stock actions. Sprinkled by a potent flow of financial capital — also in mutation — hardly anyone seemed to care that the rhythms of digital labor made agreements and compromises like those of [the] videogame [industry] ... and ... the wages of the most part of new media employees were much lower than those of traditional media workers. Under this financialization push schizophrenically, a new labor culture emerged that ... absorbed the refusal to work and transformed it into a new modality of labor that partially accounted for the needs for liberty and informality that had come from the preceding cycle of social struggles, imported the partial dissolution of the borders between life-time and work-time from academic and university labor and, in many cases, an entrepreneurship that combined self-education with self-exploitation.

Terranova also addresses the externalization of labor and accumulation of surplus value through the Web 2.0 platform (i.e. end-user reviews, online surveys or the unremunerated reportage news networks and programs extract from viewers desiring recognition). Christian Marazzi picks up on this thread from Terranova's essay in The Violence of Financial Capitalism (Semiotext(e) 2011), an extended version of the article that appears in Crisis. In this instance the end-user or consumer becomes an active agent in the coproduction of value, and the logic of this coproduction of value extends well beyond the web, pervading most every area and aspect of consumption. Marazzi points toward Ikea as an example:

Ikea, having delegated to the client a whole series of functions (individuation of the code of the desired item, locating the object, removal of shelves, loading it into the care, etc.), externalizes the labor of assembling the "Billy" bookshelf; this is externalizing consistent fixed and variable costs that are now held by the consumer with minimal benefit in prices, but with large savings in terms of company costs.

Ikea, of course, appeals to a very specific demographic, at least in the US: the "poor" young urban professional (individuals short on financial capital but rich in cultural capital). Most every other major retailer, however, has long since adopted similar strategies of extraction: Wal-mart, Target, Lowes, etc. Home Depot offers one of the more stunningly pernicious examples of externalized production and labor extraction. See, for instance, Chris Roush’s chillingly titled corporate biography Inside the Home Depot: How One Company Revolutionized an Industry through the Relentless Pursuit of Growth (McGraw Hill Professional 1999). Commenting on the stratification of customer service within Home Depot — now the fourth largest retailer in the US with 321,00 employees — Roush describes three types of highly specialized customer service employees: “[E]mployees called ‘Bernies Buddies’ — retired contractors or home builders who have expertise in do-it-yourself projects — spend time handling customers on the floor. There is ‘Arthur’s Army,’ a cadre of electricians, plumbers, and painters who also help with customer service." With the aid of specialized trade workers displaced through deindustrialization and the recent collapse of the housing industry and now (under)paid an hourly wage between $11 and $16, customers, especially “home-owners” whose properties plummeted well below the price of purchase following the 2007 mortgage scandal, take on the wholly unremunerated task of coproduction. As of November 16, 2011 Home Depot reported a third quarterly profit of $934 million, up almost precisely $100 million from the year before (Wall Street Journal 16 Nov 2011).

Chicago Review (Autumn 2011). Veronica Forrest-Thomson feature exquisitely edited by Michael Hansen and Gareth Farmer. Three previously unpublished essays from Forrest-Thomson and new writing from Keston Sutherland, Tom Pickard, Marjorie Welish, Stephanie Strickland, Anne Blonstein, Trevor Joyce, William Fuller and others. Hansen and Farmer insist in their introduction to Forrest-Thomson's essays, "At a time when literary studies is struggling, often clumsily, to find new ways of talking about form, Poetic Artifice feels remarkably vital." According to Hansen and Farmer, the Forrest-Thomson essays in the feature apply the strategies developed in Poetic Artifice to nineteenth century poetries (Swinburne, Rossetti, Tennyson, Hardy, etc). Pound, as Hansen and Farmer acknowledge, stands at center in Forrest-Thomson's poetics (her 19th century bears a remarkable resemblance to Pound's). Forrest-Thomson herself writes:

I suppose I shall have to repeat that Pound's strength comes from the fact that he believed literally what was only a fiction to the English nineteenth century. I do not mean that he believed literally the myth of Proserpina seeking flowers, a fairer flower herself by gloomy Dis was gathered, nor even that he believed in the transience of love. What he believed was the value and vigor of beautifully shaped words — "who speaketh words as fair as these" — to create an earthly paradise.

To read such a passage against Sutherland's first "Ode to TL61P" is an astounding, if not nerve-shattering, experience (Laura Kilbride notes in an interview with Sutherland published in The Literateur back in November that TL61P is "a now obsolete product code for a replacement door on a Hotpoint tumble drier which doesn't exist anymore"). The ode begins thus:

In future you cover your cost in void too empty to be lost, static at terminal velocity; on the opening night as light parts and you jump out to gravitate orderly to ballot the flattering flesh you missed resist arrest in its shattering petty larceny, who looming over a motto executed in the Ottoman style of the sex jargon recited by Ériphile at II.i.477-508, in the mannequins' scan of which smudged erotic jottings alleged in a hologram into the deep • private end of the primitive primary streak canal bound in stratified squamous • epithelium to descant many few billion one-liners into the hot squamocolumnar • junction with its teat cistern, a photocopy blurred into alienating aleatory poésie concrète by being roughly swiped back and forth with an aging raging hard-on for dysphagia over the scratched platen glass of the Canon MF8180C or Brother DCP-9045CDN all-in-one fax, printer and copier of the incomplete catechism that stubs out the real Shelley's "Triumph of Life," the leading question "What is lite?," under the table propped up at right angles folded until they froth, to triple accountability to an afflatus, doing as the banks just did, not as the banks just said, I understand the hole that George is in, a dot whose innuendo comes too late ...

In section 1.2 of the ode Sutherland writes:

Dispersing the riot in smoke like love in conscience: "the use value of a thing does not concern its seller as such, but only its buyer." In which case use values are exclusive to consumers, and consumers are in that case the Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde of the way of despair squared, so that as our art is increasingly sold, and love is, so that there are many more sellers, many of them good sellers, its use value as what the Nigerians call a supernumerary proportion of its total combined value including its exchange goes into improbable dramatic decline, like Chekhov.

I can't adequately reproduce the visual appearance of the poem here, but these blocks of prose appear much narrower in the Autumn 2011 number of CR. The quoted passage from 1.2 of the ode is from a section of Marx's Grundrisse that appears under a brief abstract beginning "Production process as content of capital" (hallelujah Google, master of extraction and successor of the Toyota mode of misery):

The use value of a thing does not concern its seller as such, but only its buyer. The property of saltpetre, that it can be used to make gunpowder , does not determine the price of saltpetre; rather, this price is determined by the cost of production of saltpetre, by the amount of labor objectified in it. The value of use values which enter circulation as prices is not the product of circulation, although it realizes itself only in circulation; rather, it is presupposed to it, and is realized only through exchange for money.

Reading this, I now wonder to what extent "Ode on TL61P" is an elegiac lamentation for the living labor objectified (and thus rendered dead or surplus) in a tumble drier replacement door. The manufacturer's product code, the very name of the object invested with value, is now obsolete, but not necessarily the object as such, however likely this may be. Nor does "TL61P" signify a singular object but rather an unknown quantity of strikingly similar objects manufactured as a ready reserve of replacements for a particular part on a machine that, in all likelihood, will itself wear out long before its door does. A commodity like any other, TL61P is transformed into an object of affection through the objectification of living labor embodied in it. And in its capacity as a replacement part for which there is presumably little demand and whose use value can only be fully realized through and beyond the moment of exchange, the moment when a desiring consumer summons the object by name, TL61P seems an incredibly lonely object. But the object (or set of objects the specificity of the product code designate) is neither metaphor nor allegory but precisely the object itself.

Youssef Cassis. Capitals of Capital: The Rise and Fall of International Financial Centres 1780-2009. Cambridge University Press 2006, 2010. A strange but usefully comprehensive history of international finance. Strange for its source: the book was commissioned to commemorate the bicentennial of Pictet & Cie, a private investment bank based in Geneva. Partner Claude Demole writes in his foreword: "At its inception in 1805, our establishment was a merchant bank, ready to undertake all sorts of banking business and trading operations. Often working closely with other private bankers in Geneva, it gradually evolved over time into an investment bank, placing its capital in various ventures, such as shipping, before setting up an investment trust in US and Mexican shares in the early years of the twentieth century. Finally, from 1910 on, Pictet & Cie turned to specialise in private banking and, later in the century, branched into institutional asset management to become eventually what it is today: a small international banking group dedicated to wealth management." The book celebrates one bank's ability to weather two centuries of financial crisis.

Alice Teichova et al, eds. Banking, Trade and Industry: Europe , America and Asia from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press 1997, 2011. Essays on banking and finance across the whole of capital's longue durée. A book that reads well against Giovanni Arrighi's Long Twentieth Century or any of the World Systems Theory analyses. Larry Schweikart's essay "Banking in North America 1700-1900" seems especially useful, his treatment of banking and state power from Hamilton's Bank of the United States, through the Panic of 1837, Andrew Jackson's attack on centralized banking, the subsequent proliferation of state-chartered banks, etc. Also a brief history of banking in Argentina from 1850 by Andrés M. Regalsky (thinking the 2001 collapse of the Argentine economy, the emergence of politica afectiva).

Enjoyed the incredible honor of publishing four essential titles in 2011: Down You Go, or, Négation de Bruit by Frances Kruk; Inebriate Debris by Rosa Van Hensbergen; HAX by Francis Crot; Four Letters | Four Comments by Sean Bonney (the letters followed by speculative remarks from Jennifer Cooke, Pocahontis Mildew, Danny Hayward and Lara Buckerton). The whole of the Kruk and Bonney books, and part of the Van Hensbergen book, will appear in the forthcoming volume of Damn the Caesars. Cooke, in her comment on Bonney's letters, writes:

Even if protest fails or achieves very little, it is vitally important, for the same reasons as Bonney's poetry is important: we need a record of our desire to protest and a record of our protestations. We need those to be part of a chain of continuity of different historical constellations of protest, into one of which, to take an example from the letters, Rimbaud wrote his soul.

A series of Fiery Flying Roules, single sheet pamphlets circulated electronically and subtitled "To All the Inhabitants of the Earth, Specially the Rich Ones," emerged likely out of Oakland and through the same impulse that informed the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza, the November 2 general strike, etc. Several installments of the series have yet to be uploaded to the tumblr site, but these digital sheets seem to demonstrate and supplement the "record of our desire" Cooke refers to.

JEROME ROTHENBERG HIS TOTAL TRANSLATION

2011-12-22T04:56:00.000-08:00

David Antin's well-known remark about anthologies and zoos notwithstanding, one of the more astounding postwar electromagnetic containment fields published after Donald Allen's 1961 New American Poetry is, at least for me, the 1969 double issue of George Quasha's Stony Brook magazine, a strange publication that resides somewhere between formal magazine and ambitious anthology. The issue opens, albeit somewhat eerily, with an imposing facsimile reproduction of Blake's America: A Prophecy, which seems to stand as an anterior index of the magazine's transhistorical and broad geographical reach. The number is then split into a series of sections that include a section on Objectivist writing (Pound's note on Oppen, Niedecker, Bunting, Rakosi and Creeley on Bunting), a section titled "the universe as environment" (David Antin, Eleanor Antin, Oppen's note on Armand Schwerner, Diane Wakoski, Clayton Eshleman, Jackson Mac Low, George Bowering and others), a feature on William Carlos Williams with reproduced images of letters and a letter from Hugh Kenner to David Antin, a section evidently on song and scoring (Helen Adam, Robert Duncan, Creeley, Levertov and James Laughlin) and a section on Ethnopoetics following one on Chinese poetry.

The construction of the journal is unquestionably messy, but excitingly so, and every engagement with it feels something like falling into a pool of unprocessed archival materials. In any case, the recent occasion of Jerome Rothenberg's 80th birthday reminded me of his "Total Translation," an essay included in the Ethnopoetics section of Stony Brook. Concerned with the translation of Native American poetries, particularly Navaho and Seneca — the latter of whom Rothenberg spent a considerable amount of time living among — Rothenberg writes: "Translation is carry-over. It is a means of delivery & a bringing to life. It begins with a forced change of language, but a change too that opens up the possibility of greater understanding. Everything in these song-poems is finally translatable: words, sounds, voice, melody, gesture, event, etc., in the reconstitution of a unity that would be shattered by approaching each element in isolation. A full & total experience begins it, which only a total translation can fully bring across." Speaking specifically to Seneca poetry and the question of totality a little earlier in the essay, Rothenberg says:

Seneca poetry, when it uses words at all, works in sets of short songs, minimal realizations colliding with each other in marvelous ways, a very light, very pointed play-of-the-mind, nearly always just a step away from the comic (even as their masks are), the words set out in clear relief against the ground of the ("meaningless") refrain. Clowns stomp & grunt through the longhouse, but in subtler ways too the encouragement to "play" is always a presence. Said the leader of the longhouse at Allegany, explaining why the seasonal ceremonies ended with a gambling game: the idea of a religion was to reflect the total order of the universe while providing an outlet for all human needs, the need for play not least among them. Although it pretty clearly doesn't work out as well nowadays as that makes it sound — the orgiastic past & the "doings" (happenings) in which men were free to live-out their dreams dimming from generation to generation — still the resonance, the ancestral permission, keeps being felt in many ways.

Rothenberg's interest in the historically specific but recombinatory permutations of the past as they are repeatedly, necessarily and often strategically invoked in a persistently unfolding present (now as event), in conjunction with his phenomenological imagining of experience as a sovereign totality, is an essential interest. And this question of "ancestral permission," that a particular historical event might allow itself to extend outward beyond the sovereignty of its moment, seems everywhere writ large in Rothenberg's writing at the time. In Poland / 1931, a strangely constructed "book" of poems published by Unicorn Press in 1970, just a year after "Total Translation" appeared in Stony Brook, Rothenberg notes, "The poems presented here are the first installment of an ongoing series of ancestral poems begun in 1956." Set by Christopher Lee and printed by Noel Young on twelve separate leaves of handmade Japanese paper (Hosho) collected in a hardboard cover that also contains a photomontage by Eleanor Antin, the selection begins with an italicized epigraph from Edward Dahlberg: ".... And I said, 'O defiled flock, take a harp, & chant to the ancient relics, lest understanding perish."

Eleanor Antin's photomontage for Jerome Rothenberg's Poland \ 1931

Most of the poems appear to address, among other things, Semitic culture in Poland, but the second from last poem, "A Poem for the Christians," masterfully performs the mystical transformation of the fetish commodity which, for Rothenberg, appears to correspond with the degradation, if not annihilation, of a much older and far more affirmative mysticism:

the skull, the air, the fire
the holy name
but destitute of good works
in a land that was not sown for us
& on the sabbath day
two buicks of the previous year
without blemish
& two tenth parts rubber
for a meal offering
mingled with gasoline
& chrome
this is the burnt offering of
every sabbath
for which rabbi yosi
left us
& rabbi abba came in his place
to praise the president
(selah)
our mouths are full of songs
(selah)
our hands hold offerings
the grieving bear, the moth
the leopard
the seven kinds of quantity & six kinds of motion
& on the sabbath day
black bodies &
bodies green with oil
& bodies gone for a burnt offering
two tenth parts for the buick
& one tenth part for the rambler
& one tenth part
for every lamb of the seven lambs
(selah)
& for their jewish god

Here a Buick and a Rambler are invested with the qualities of living beings and the burnt offerings given them, the "black bodies" and "bodies green with oil," suggest not only the oil industry itself but also self-immolation as a gesture of protest against the Christian Diem regime installed by the US in Vietnam. As such, the poem seems to suggest that, even if and when we ignore the necessity of imagining totality, global capital will at all times assert its own perverse and destructive tendency toward totality. The other poems in the selection are no less extraordinary, but this poem registers a shattering sadness, a recognition, that arguably compels the ambitiously transhistorical, interdisciplinary and global scale of Rothenberg's work in and beyond Ethnopoetics. And strangely now I notice that The Game of Silence (New Directions 1971), which includes in its final section almost all of the poems from the Unicorn Press edition of Poland / 1931, does not include "Poem for the Christians," an interesting gesture given the force of this astounding poem.

NOTES ON YELLOW FIELD FOUR (FALL 2011)

2011-12-09T23:38:00.001-08:00

Buffalo-based poet and collator Edric Mesmer — who I was surprised and thrilled to see contributed an engaging comment on Harriet Tarlo's anthology of contemporary landscape poetry The Ground Aslant (Shearsman 2011) to the Dec/Jan issue of The Poetry Project Newsletter — has recently brought out the fourth issue of Yellow Field, a large-format (8.5" x 11") mimeo-style print journal of Anglophone poetry. This fourth number is astounding and what most immediately strikes me is the broad reach of the thing. The ambitiously catholic constellation of geographically dispersed contributors include: Adachi Tomomi (Japan), Siobhan Hodge (Australia), KG Price (Chicago), Andy Spragg (UK), Jeremy Balius (Dallas), Scott McCarney (Rochester, NY), Anne Reed (Buffalo), Tyrone Williams (Cincinnati), Drew Milne (UK), Eric Selland (San Francisco), Mark Dickinson (the Orkney Islands), Eva Shockley (New Brunswick, NJ), Rachel Blau DuPlessis (formerly Philly, now I believe NC), Amy Pence (Atlanta, GA), Jo Cook (undisclosed) and Mesmer (Buffalo). But against, or more likely through, the generosity of such a wide net, the whole of the journal has a clear and no doubt carefully curated shape.

My crude gut sense of the thing may be wrong, but this fourth number of Yellow Field seems somehow dominated by right angles. From the cover image (rigidly arranged silhouetted profiles of student and faculty heads drawn from a 1934 issue of The Lafayette Oracle, Lafayette High School in Buffalo), to a series of stunningly immaculate, delicate and precise graphic scores from Japanese composer Adachi Tomomi to Drew Milne's visually oriented "Embrasures" and so on, throughout the whole of the number. But this sense is wrong. The number is dominated by music, or at least visual scoring. KG Price, who performs with the Chicago Scratch Orchestra (named, I suppose, after the ensemble Cornelius Cardew collaborated with) offers a musical score titled "Departure" which looks strikingly similar to the scores Cardew produced during his "avant-garde" period (i.e. Treatise), but unlike Cardew's scores which were characterized by mechanical precision, Price's are rough in appearance, clearly hand drawn with text for voice appearing at various points throughout (i.e. "to a car she now owns").

Adachi Tomomi | Score for Tenor Sax | 4th of 5 in "Chinese Character for Instrument"

Adachi's scores, on the other hand, maintain all the mechanical precision that might be found in Cardew's earlier work, but none of the fluidity or contingency. The work is instead mercilessly rigid. And in this series of five visual scores offered by Adachi, the most rigid is the final score, which is characterized by a terrifying inflexibility. The sequence is titled "Chinese Character for Instrument" and, according to Adachi's prefatory note to the work, "All elements of scores consist of zoomed, reversed and/or superimposed Chinese characters (Mincho-tai font), which only expresses the instrumentation as their titles describe. If the title is 'For Piano,' the word 'Piano' is translated in our understandings about the instrumentation/instrument visually because a Chinese character is an ideogram." Unlike Japanese, which has a distinct set of characters for phonetic inscription, the various modalities of Chinese text are ideographic — but not entirely or at least not in the way a cultural complex like the Pound-Fenollosa Consortium imagined it (cf. Yunte Huang's or Jonathan Stalling's work on Pound and the Chinese). And so I find it difficult to take Adachi's prefatory introduction to his scores at face value and I suspect there may be a critique of Western imaginings of East Asian culture implicit in the work. Whether or not this is the case, the sequence moves through five individual scores: the first for flute, the second for harmonica, radio and stone, the third for trumpet, the fourth for tenor saxophone, and the fifth for orchestra. As the sequence progresses it does so in a gradated sweep, from a single instrument to an entire orchestra such that the scoring on the first of the series (for flute) is the sparsest score and offers the most negative space on the page while the final score in the sequence (for orchestra) is the densest, leaving the least white space on the page. In any event, as the sequence progresses there is a sense of "crowd out," an increasing and somewhat ominous occupation of space that may demonstrate a form of overaccumulation, something I've been thinking a lot about lately. But crowd out, in the financial sense, as a reduction in private spending effected by a rise in interest rates, is not likely during moments of unusually high unemployment. Maybe, instead of crowd out, just blackout, as the final score in Adachi's sequence suggests. Here the negative space, the silences, become precious and incredibly desirable, because there are so few of them. In this final score they become the stars that steer through what one can only imagine is an unbearable cacophony, a manic racket motivated by overwhelming conditions.

The first of Drew Milne's five "Embrasures"

Here Mesmer's editorial juxtapositioning, what he would insist is more appropriately understood as collating, is masterful. Immediately following the last of Adachi's five scores are five of Drew Milne's "Embrasures." Their visual construction reminds me at first of Eugen Gomringer's "Silencio" or "Schweigen." The text in the upper part of the page is arranged with an interior cube, the outer shape of which looks something like a cross (more like the symbol identified with the Red Cross than a crucifix). The topmost text in the first of the five "Embrasures" begins, "here an almshouse there | a palladian disability unit." The text on the interior of the cube in this first piece is aligned left and reads, "care | shed | tree | folly." At bottom, arranged as something of a footnote appended to the text above, is the following passage:

Cushion Capital. A cubical capital, also block capital, sculpted to suggest a cushion weighed down by its entablature. A name given to Romanesque church capitals cut away on four sides leaving vertical faces. Bank vernacular for the buffer of liquid assets set off against the haircut value of securities at risk of delay in the realisation of liabilities.

The polyvalence of the term "Cushion Capital" seems to offer something of a nodal point here, articulating the contemporary (financialized) world with the ancient, language (the authority of capital letters inscribed in stone) with political economy, all of it more an almshouse rather than a prison house, or at one and the same time both imagined as a cushion. And so, while visually these "Embrasures" may remind us, somewhat lazily, of Gomringer or Brazillian concrete poetry, their construction and the labor they perform refuses any pretense toward minimalism or simplicity; but these pieces do, however, seem to insist on rigidity, or the rigidities embedded in financial, political and cultural flexibility.

This fourth issue of Yellow Field closes with an incredibly perceptive comment from Mesmer on Susan Howe's September 2011 performance in Buffalo with composer David Grubbs, with whom Howe has been reading Souls of the Labadie Tract. The whole of Mesmer's comment on the performance is wonderfully constructed, split into two parts, and two passages in particular strike me. The first:

A "path": colony shares its root with culture, cult, couture. The space of sound is assuaging the blank indifference between the ghost of text and text — an invented or reinvented ghost, now embodied in fragmented, spirit of reconnoitering tracts. The titanium plated keys, our evidence of modernity, are adjusting alphanumerically, justifying voice in flective nonaccompaniment: "this place shields". At times the reader's voice is echoed: a traipsing technology — a knowledgeable deployment in the diphthong of time.

And the second passage:

Architecture inhabited as though by a haunting, Howe's text [Labadie Tract], as mentioned, largely comes from actual collages of [Hannah Edwards] Wetmore's diaries, composed visually on the page; thus the reading as chirpings of sound, staccato. And whisperings: "and was ready!" When asked how to read such collaged pages, the poet answers "It made itself sound." The aurality of the visual is something Howe herself claims "isn't even me," confessing that she felt the text was a channeling of Wetmore, though she hates "to sound hokey."

I recall here Sean Bonney's essay on Geraldine Monk (the one included in the Salt Companion) that situates Noctivigations (West House 2001) as a book that, through its interest in witchcraft and the occult, offers one among many modes of response to a common source of violence generated and reproduced by and through a very specific set of material conditions that cut across the centuries, however much they might change. Thinking along these lines, I sense Howe's future-oriented gaze toward the enduring specters of long lost congregations or the ghosts of violently transgressed figures isn't "hokey" at all. In any case, by documenting and commenting on Howe's performance, Mesmer has provided something I find incredibly valuable. And the overriding theme of scoring, an effort toward thinking the otherwise intractable relationship between the visual and aurality, the text and orality, lends to the whole of the journal an extraordinary shape.

Yellow Field. yellowedenwaldfield@yahoo.com. 1217 Delaware Avenue, Apt. 802, Buffalo, NY 14209.

OCCUPY FORECLOSED HOMES

2011-12-06T20:44:00.001-08:00

There can be no question that the occupation — the collective seizure and reclamation — of foreclosed properties is one of, if not the, single most important action happening now. I say this with absolute certainty. The turn from occupying "public" spaces to the seizure of "private" bank-owned properties marks a tidal shift in this moment of occupation and, regardless of whether this change in strategy was motivated by the mass eviction of activists from public spaces or increasingly cold weather, it radically alters the shape of the moment, extending it well beyond the widespread misrecognition that what occupy activists pursuing economic justice most desire is merely to be recognized, assuaged and thrown a bone. For my own part, I'm awed and humbled by these actions, honored to bear witness, and hope only that these actions can be sustained.

I'm not sure how to even begin the search for information that might offer a sense of how many foreclosed homes were occupied today, or how these seizures were responded to by authorities, but today's actions bring to mind the recently leaked photos of the 2010 "Homeless Halloween" party hosted by Steven J. Baum P.C., a New York based foreclosure firm. Held at an office decorated to resemble a tent city, 89 employees attended the party costumed as homeless evictees.

Not surprisingly the New York Times failed to adequately address today's occupation of foreclosed properties in East New York and other locations across the US. But The Guardian, an ocean away, did.

UK GENERAL STRIKE | JANICE GODRICH IN GLASGOW

2011-11-30T10:15:00.001-08:00

As over 1200 police continue to clear out the occupy encampment in LA, having arrested at this stage over 200 activists, more than two million public sector workers in the UK have engaged in a one day general strike. Rifling through any number of video clips to grasp in some way the scale of the strike, I cam across the following clip of a rally earlier today at George Square in Glasgow, where president of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) Janice Godrich delivered an awe-inspiring speech culminating in a merciless summary of the logic of austerity: "From each according to their vulnerability; to each according to their greed."

Watching Godrich, I'm reminded of a recent article on the rise of women to leadership roles in US labor unions. Troublingly titled "Redefining the Union Boss" (the willful confusion of union leadership with employers is clearly a cheap provocation), the article profiles three women: Sandy Pope who is now competing for against James Hoffa, Jr. for presidency of the Teamsters; Rose Ann Demoro, the executive director of the 170,000 strong National Nurses United; and Mary Kay Henry, the first woman to lead the Service Employees International Union. Likewise, Janice Godrich is the first woman president of the PCS.

Janice Godwin (center) in support of Building Workers, London, July 2010

Somewhat obviously, this shift in leadership coincides with the increasing feminization of labor and here, however scatteredly, I'm reminded now of the essential role women played, and shockingly without the privilege or promise of employment, during the 1972 Brookside Strike documented in Barbara Kople's soul-shattering film Harlan County, USA.

The increase in women union leadership in the Anglophone world with (but likely not proportionate to) the continued (global) feminization of labor also coincides with an increasing radicalization of union activity articulated, one can hope, with a broader shift in consciousness. In any case, if a decisive shift in consciousness is too much to ask for (Prynne: "hope is a stern purpose"), it is enough and really a privilege from this distance to be so moved by the force of ones devotion.

MELVILLE ON THE LAST FIRST PEOPLE

2011-11-24T10:42:00.001-08:00

At 18,000 lines Melville's Clarel is, as the Wikipedia entry for the poem indicates, the longest lineated work in American literature and longer also than the Aeneid, Iliad and Paradise Lost. Stephen Ratcliffe's triptychs / trilogies no doubt exceed the scale of Clarel, but I sense Ratcliffe's trilogies aren't built toward this sense of the line, or what a line is in terms of quantifiability. The gesture of counting and measuring is crucial, or maybe just the most honest thing we can do: I mean, critical commentary that relies on quantifying data hides out in the open, reducing literary analysis to a system of weights and measures oriented toward rewarding pure unceasing production over more deliberate undertakings on a smaller scale. Size matters and, though we tend to prefer writers that are both hard and good workers, a hard worker is preferable to a good worker any day.

Toward the end of Clarel there's a debate between Rolfe and Ungar, two of the pilgrims traveling with Clarel through the Holy Land. While Rolfe, who has been with Clarel most of the way, is a Protestant skeptic, Ungar is situated as a committed Catholic, Civil War vet and descendent of Anglo colonists and Native Americans. Here's the closing part of the debate, beginning with Rolfe:

"But leave this: the New World's the theme.
Here, to oppose your dark extreme,
(Since an old friend is good at need)
To an old thought I'll fly. Pray, heed:
Those waste-weirs which the New World yields
To inland freshets — the free vents
Supplied to turbid elements;
The vast reserves — the untried fields;
These long shall keep off and delay
The class-war, rich-and-poor-man fray
Of history. From that alone
Can serious trouble spring. Even that
Itself, this good result may own —
The first firm founding of the state."
          Here ending, with a watchful air,
Inquisitive, Rolfe waited him.
And Ungar:
                      "True heart do ye bear
In this discussion? or but trim
To draw my monomania out,
For monomania, past doubt,
Some of ye deem it. Yet I'll on.
Yours seems a reasonable tone;
But in the New World things make haste;
Not only men, the state lives fast --
Fast breeds the pregnant eggs and shells,
The slumberous combustibles
Sure to explode. 'Twill come, 'twill come!
One demagogue can trouble much:
How of a hundred thousand such?
And universal suffrage lent
To back them with brute element
Overwhelming? What shall bind these seas
Of rival sharp communities
Unchristianized? Yea, but 'twill come!"
          "What come?"
                                    "Your Thirty Years (of) War."
           "Should fortune's favorable star
Avert it?"
                        "Fortune? nay, 'tis doom."
"Then what comes after? spasms but tend
Ever, at last, to quiet."
                                                "Know,
Whatever happen in the end,
Be sure 'twill yield to no one and all
New confirmation of the fall
Of Adam. Sequel may ensue,
Indeed, whose germs one now may view:
Myriads playing pygmy parts —
Debased into equality:
In glut of all material arts
A civic barbarism may be:
Man disennobled — brutalized
By popular science — Atheized
Into a smatterer -----"
                                               "Oh, oh!"
              "Yet knowing all self need to know
In self's base little fallacy;
Dead level of rank commonplace:
An Anglo-Saxon China, see,
May on your vast plains shame the race
In the Dark Ages of Democracy."

               America!
                                In stilled estate,
On him, half-brother and co-mate —
In silence, and with vision dim
Rolfe, Vine, and Clarel gazed on him;
They gazed, nor one of them found heart
To upbraid the crotchet of his smart,
Bethinking them whence sole it came
Though birthright he renounced in hope,
Their sanguine country's wonted claim.
Nor dull they were in honest tone
To some misgivings of their own:
They felt how far beyond the scope
Of elder Europe's saddest thought
Might be the New World's sudden brought
In youth to share old age's pains —
To feel the arrest of hope's advance,
And squandered last inheritance;
And cry — "To Terminus build fanes!
Columbus ended earth's romance:
No New World to mankind remains!"

SOME NOTES ON THE PRELUDE

2011-11-23T11:52:00.001-08:00

An article from today's NYT addressing the use of pepper spray in efforts to repress protest closes with a comment from Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson: "we are in the age of pepper spray, not the age of real bullets." The claim is a curious one and, however well tempered it may appear, the message it discloses is rigidly clear. Participants in this moment of defiance should be grateful police are equipped with industrial-strength instruments of repression like pepper spray, tear gas, beanbag rounds and flash grenades rather than "real bullets." If we abide by this logic then Scott Olsen and other injured activists can be gingerly bracketed out of the conversation as collateral damage.

In any case, I can't help but wonder if the tear gas used against protesters in Oakland was, like the endless stream of CS canisters deployed by soldiers to disperse the tens of thousands gathering again in Tahir Square, also manufactured in western Pennsylvania by Combined Tactical Systems, a company whose self-flattering domain name (www.less-lethal.com) further suggests our civilization has indeed advanced beyond the savage age of real bullets. Repression, torture and suffering should always be preferable to death and, as millions in Greece and elsewhere continue to bravely demonstrate, the illimitable reduction of living to bare survival builds character. Capital is a lightening rod that cannot be spared to spoil.

Reasonably early on in the first book of The Prelude there's a phrase that never fails to suspend me in awe: "I was a fell destroyer." Fell as field or fen; earlier hill, associated with the northwest of England (cf. Cursor Mundi, Cotton Library version, circa 1300, easy pickings from the OED: "Moyses went vp-on þat fell, and fourti dais can þer-on duell"). At this juncture in the poem the narrator is not yet nine years old, the age at which Wordsworth himself would have been enrolled in Hawkshead Grammar School, Cumbria where he "was transplanted" after his mother's death. The poem goes:

In thought and wish
That time, my shoulder all with springes hung,
I was a fell destroyer. On the heights
Scudding away from snare to snare, I plied
My anxious visitation, hurrying on,
Still hurrying, hurrying onward; moon and stars
Were shining o'er my head; I was alone,
And seemed to be a trouble to the peace
That was among them.

That one could imagine their own childhood self as a site of disruption, a "trouble to the peace" among the moon and stars. In this instance I'm not sure how to take the assertion "I was a fell destroyer." Alone in a field setting small game traps one by one — and later stealing birds caught in traps set by others — a child no older than nine is cast as a nuisance to the cosmos. The passage can be taken lightly, read as a lighthearted boast, a way of saying, "Yes, I too was a mischievous kid." But the passage is more than this, the assembly of its lines disclosing an astounding force reasonably commensurate with the wild expenditures of childhood energy they address. "I was a fell destroyer." This means much more than mischievous. This is ominous. A threat. Beyond field and hill, the word "fell" is also associated with animals, their skin and hide, their feathers and hair (cf. the late medieval poem Richard the Redeless, where the clothes of Richard II become a prop for critiquing surfaces: "his ffelle to anewe"). In Wordsworth's usage of "fell," at least here, the child appears to be a destroyer of surfaces, of fields and hides, such that the cosmos under which these surfaces reside is itself shaken by the force of this child's living. And I now recall David Harvey saying in one of his lectures on Capital that young children are perhaps the sharpest dialectical thinkers; the contradictions that we, in our wisdom, have long since learned to accept, appear confusing to children and worthy of inquiry against the brow-beating belligerence of common sense. To break these surfaces. Tear gas, pepper spray and beanbag rounds don't break the surface; they generously permit us to continue enduring a largely unbearable surface. But to be so permitted without formal permission is to acknowledge no permission at all; it is instead to engage in the necessity of an essential taking, to break these surfaces, to imagine oneself as a destroyer of this.

ABIEZER COPPE HIS FIERY FLYING ROULE

2011-11-07T17:27:00.000-08:00

Edited by the eternal and radically disembodied spirit of an Abiezer Coppe called into rematerialized being by the now unbearable severity of suffering and crisis, A Third Fiery Flying Roule contains a love letter from Rosa Luxemburg, a letter from Chicago on the People's Mic by Adam Weg, photographs by Andrew Kenower and an apropos poem from Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract.

Earlier today on Democracy Now, George Pagoulatos, Athens University professor of economics and business: "Time is of the utmost importance because the eurozone is operating not on political time anymore but ... on a time that corresponds to the speed with which the markets operate ..." The eurozone is every zone and it seems essential to ask whether the tidal shifts of the political landscape were ever governed by a temporality other than calendar days announced by market bells.

Weg's short letter on the people's microphone alerts us to a number of issues -- questions of leadership, participation, authority, surrender and trust -- but I find myself most excited by Weg's approach to the question of citationality. Committed to a sense of readership over authorship, Weg insists the people's mic "announces the commons as an erotic potentiality necessarily external to the strict economy of author and reader, producer and consumer, but decidedly ... on the side of the reader." Weg continues, "This commons will never be written, and you can only take pleasure in the pleasure of its readers."

Weg's assertion that the commons will at all times resist any form of hypostatizing inscription reminds me of a recent comment by Danny Hayward regarding our "infinite need for heaven." But Weg's insistence on the readerly quality of the people's mic suggests a sense of citationality that refuses to imagine itself as a form of appropriation — that is, repeating the word's of another, quoting the word's of another, is imagined as participation rather than appropriation. This distinction is crucial, and, within the site specific context of an assembly, this form of citationality is, in the imminence of its moment, a species of readerly participation that rigidly refuses appropriation and resists being misread as appropriation. Participants are not taking from one another; they are devotedly reading one another.

Reimagining temporality is central. If through crisis political time is subordinated to the whims and unpredictable volatility of financial markets, then perhaps the people's mic offers us an opportunity to rethink our relation to one another from moment to moment, through the time required to re-sound one another rather than the unbearable moments meted out by an economically-oriented clock governed by the violent fluctuation of financial instruments. In this instance time is decidedly not money. Framing the people's mic as a technological instrument, Weg writes, "At the assembly I enforce the new technology — ruthlessly even. Is it the Law? A kind of orthodoxy? I don't think I know for sure. But I shout verbatim across the delinquent speaker, listening with their own words for the fine caesura and motivating my own aggression to the cited oblivion of the coming text. How else will we survive the chronicity of such a fine-grained political process?"

The editorial articulation of lines from Susan Howe's Labadie Tract with Weg's letter is stunning. Howe: "You can't | hear us without having to be | us knowing everything we || know — you know you can't ..." The heteronymous Bay Area editor encourages readers to print the above images out, back-to-back on a single 8.5" x 11" sheet, then fold down the middle width-wise and distribute as desired — or circulate otherwise.

OAKLAND GENERAL STRIKE

2011-10-31T19:48:00.000-07:00

Gorky to Stalin, 8 January 1930: "It is perfectly natural that many of the millions become very genuinely and furiously insane. They don't even realize the full depth of the turn-about that is occurring, but they feel instinctively, down to their bones, that the destruction of the deepest foundation of their centuries-old life is beginning. You can rebuild a destroyed church and set any god you like in it, but when the earth slips out from under your feet, that is irrevocable and forever.'"

NOBODY LAUGHS ANYMORE

2011-10-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Sutherland | from Stress Position (Barque 2009):

How can the conditions of any group's life sum up all the conditions of life in their most inhuman form, when the only group that qualifies for the arithmetic is disallowed the majority of pleasures? The end. If the thing I who am passionate can do most passionately is reverse, but passion is irreversible, is time contradictory? Epilogue. If you are alone entering the room and the pain is on the floor only because the floor doesn't fly away, is the only way up? Epilogue. What does torture really interpret, if not by the natural compliancy of pain? The end. Is murder ever free, and if not, is it a corollary of the gift? Introduction.

Brad Flis | from "Not Safe for Work" (P-Queue 8, 2011):

when a company, while in the process of gaining momentum
by standardized samples, remotely influenced
would-be retirees confronting the doom loop
in the great project manager's second final episode
confronting the brutal facts
I slept on the nail that brought us out
of retirement into bodily Tetris
making experience your rented day's companion
yesterday I blamed the doom loop for the reason I can't find much
to do (9 things I programmed for the next generation of feds)
It's amazing what people will tear up
when listening to the doom loop in their beds
as unexpected guests pop in and matter all
of a sudden

RECENT ACQUISITIONS: EXPAND OR DIE

2011-10-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #45 (circa 9th millennium BCE): "Expand or die." Within Ferengi cosmology, the Blessed Exchequer determines entry into the Divine Treasury once a Ferengi has died and their remains have been divided up, vacuum pressed and auctioned off. To be unsold is to be unmourned.

Thomas Lever, "A Frutfull Sermon Made in Poules Churche at London" (1572 CE): "Lette vs therefore euerye one acknoweledgynge our owne fautes, where as moft euyll fpryngeth, there laboure fyrfte wyth mofte diligence to plucke vp the roote of that euil, whyche is couetoufnes ..."

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #284: "Deep down everyone's a Ferengi." By the twenty-fourth century Earth no longer has a currency-based economy rooted in neoclassical notions of exchange value, but as a founding member of the UN-like Federation, Earth's moneyless economy is not wholly incompatible with the state mandated laissez-faire stylings of Ferengi culture. At least the induction of Nog into Star Fleet, the militarized peace-keeping wing of the Federation, suggests as much (i.e. Nog's catch-phrase: "I may be a Starfleet officer, but I'm still a Ferengi"). In any case, the deep logic that sustained Ferengi civilization for millennia seems also to inform the Borg, the Federation and generally every other intergalactic social formation throughout the known universe. Or as the Federation's most wanted Maquis terrorist Michael Eddington once remarked in our future anterior, "Everybody should want to be in the Federation. Nobody leaves paradise. In some ways, you’re even worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You assimilate people and they don’t even know it." All civilizations tend toward interminable growth and the sooner we come to terms with this the better. Deep down everyone's a Ferengi.

Rom leads the first Ferengi labor union (DS9 "Bar Association")

(It's worth noting that when Gene Roddenberry first introduced the Betazoid telepath Deanna Troi in 1987 he wanted her to have four breasts rather than two; his wife Majel Barrett, who went on to play Deanna's mother Lwaxana Troi, gently talked him down from that ledge.)

(Thanks to Boyd Nielson for calling attention to this.)

As I work through my own Ferengi-like acquisition spreadsheets, I see I've failed to register some 99% of the books that arrived over the past couple months. Three remarkable slim books by Ryan Dobran: Your Guilt is a Miracle (Bad Press 2008), Ding Ding (Critical Documents 2009), Confection (©_© Press 2011). Got On by Tom Raworth (©_© Press 2011). Three by Ian Heames: Bad Flowers (©_© Press 2009), Gloss to Carriers (Critical Documents 2011), Out of Villon (©_© Press 2011). Mayan Texts: A Galactic Birth Canal by Edgar Garcia (no press no date). Lobe Scarps & Finials by Geraldine Monk (Leafe Press 2011). Trailers by Michael Basinski (BlazeVOX 2011). CJ Martin's Two Books, a somewhat large book and the first from Michael Cross's Oakland based Compline (2011). Various issues of Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, edited by Robert Sheppard and Scott Thurston (the March 2011 number contains an astounding range of comments, including Danny Hayward's essay on Keston Sutherland's "The Proxy Inhumanity of Forklifts," an essay on Douglas Oliver by Simon Perril and notes on Eric Mottram, Sean Bonney and others by Giles Goodland). A North Atlantic Wall by Donald Wellman (Dos Madres Press 2010). The Summer 2011 issue of Polis magazine, edited out of Gloucester and San Francisco by James Cook, David Rich and Zachary Vincent Martin (includes recent writing by Donald Wellman, Peter Anastas, and Gerrit Lansing among others). A range of broadsides from the 2010-2011 reading series at Small Press Traffic curated by Michael Cross (striking print work from Cross, Kyle Schlesinger, Andrew Rippeon and others). Several Barque Press publications that are new to me: Mike Wallace-Hadrill's Ketamine Boxing With Fun Boy (2011), Petrarch by Tim Atkins (2011), Loving Little Orlick by Kevin Nolan (2006) and William Fuller's Three Replies (2008). Robert Sheppard's Warrant Error (Shearsman 2009) and Far Language: Poetics and Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978-1997. Various installments of the Chadwick Family Papers by Lytle Shaw and J. Blachly (most recently Nelson Man o'Bar and Half Seas Over, both 2011). Issue 8 of P-Queue, the first under the editorship of Joey Yearous-Algozin and Holly Melgard (includes work from CA Conrad, Ish Klein, Thom Donovan, Chris Sylvester, Jenna Osman, David Buuck and others). Loads more that I've no doubt misplaced and will stumble upon momently, overwhelmed and wanting to think through all of them much further, as I hope to.

Immediately struck by Ian Heames's ©_© Press, most if not all of the titles hand-built letterpress objects (he and Mike Wallace-Hadrill appear to be doing print work more akin to the early titles published through Simon Cutts's Coracle Press , at least in terms of book making, but the poetry itself seems far more closely connected to the poetries published by Bad / Sad Press, Critical Documents, Grasp Press and Barque. This from Heames himself, his Gloss to Carriers:

And follow the insects of this world
But also of the other
They kill the exact case of the statue
The pink smoke of bitter passwords
They'll sob, thinking of your orbits

Exhaust ardour sprained the flaxen ground staff
CGI brushed steel on sedge phosphorous
And approaching the white hot templates
Of Capitalism and Love
Its dismal optic carbine

Commenting on the police repression of various #Occupy encampments in the US, and well in advance of the violent destruction of the encampment at Oscar Grant Park in Oakland, California at 5:00am on October 25th, Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover and Annie McClanahan write: "It is hard to imagine anyone denying that it would be a good thing if the police were to take the side of the occupations. This is a far cry, however, from the belief that such a thing could reasonably happen. We must distinguish between analysis — an analysis of the concrete situation and accompanying historical record — and wish fulfillment fantasy. The latter tends, after all, to lead toward quite disastrous strategic and tactical decisions. In Tahrir Square — a place and idea toward which the Occupy movement swears fidelity — there was, despite some folks’ hysterical amnesia on this score, no commitment to non-violence, no gesture of complicity with the police, and no hesitation in resisting the government’s armed thugs. The Egyptians understood with clarity who their antagonists were, what their relationship to them was, and what would be needed to prevent the movement from being crushed by the folks with the guns and clubs." (Thanks to Eirik Steinhoff for calling attention to this.)

Call for Oakland police to participate | Oct 25th

An exclamatory remark from Jean-Luc Picard on the Borg to Lily Sloane (Star Trek: First Contact): "I will not sacrifice the Enterprise. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done."

PETER MANSON HIS LAMENT

2011-09-14T04:14:00.000-07:00

Unpacking a box of books a few months ago I came across some brief notes I sketched out on Scottish poet Peter Manson. They were tucked inside Between Cup and Lip (Miami University Press 2008), a book I planned to write about formally when I first encountered the work three years ago. But I hesitated, uncertain as to how the poems can be or ought to be read. The poems seemed haunted by an enigmatic unevenness, an oscillating movement between continuity and rupture, between the determining force of a philological rootedness and the chaotic play of seemingly disconnected free-floating signs and sounds. But more than simply appearing new and feeling old — more than the tired juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary, or the filtering of ancient codes through contemporary forms or the other way around — the poems seemed to be doing and desiring something else. And this elusive quality, this "something else," which appears to characterize Manson's various undertakings became more readily apparent to me in two brief comments he made on the procedurally-based construction of a few serial poems, a practice he abandoned after composing the line, "Hear now voiced echoes of your face going transparent in buttercup light."

In the prefatory note attached to "Campaign for Really Authentic Poetry" and "Serial Drunken Boat Fragment," the two serial poems contained in For the Good of Liars (Barque 2005), Manson writes:

This is intended as a quick footnote to a few poems I wrote in 1993: the term "serial poetry" as used here has nothing to do with the serial poems of Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser (which I hadn't heard about then) but is a reference to the serial music of Arnold Schönberg and others, in which each of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are used equally often. My accent of spoken English (I come from Glasgow) has twelve vowel and diphthong phonemes, and the poems are written in groups of twelve words, with each of these twelve phonemes being represented exactly once in the main stressed syllable of a word in each group.

A couple years prior to the publication of this note, talking on Rob Holloway's Resonance 104.4 FM program Up for Air in February 2003, Manson says of these same serial poems:

I made an analysis of me own accent in spoken English which, as it turns out has twelve separate vowel and diphthong phonemes and my process in those works was a bit like serial music, like Schönberg. I attempted to use each of the vowels in my accent equally often in the piece of writing. Now, first of all, that gives you a very very odd sound text. There's absolutely no assonance. You feel as if when you're performing it that your tongue is getting the grand tour of your mouth. The other upshot of that process is that obviously if every word is locked very very tightly into permutational pattern you're working with a very heavy formal process. But because the actual structure of the poem only exists when its spoken by somebody who has an accent similar to mine ... [pause] ... So I think there are interesting political consequences of that. The poem in the mouth of an RP [Received Pronunciation] speaker, let's say, the words are the same, but the structure of the poem disappears completely ... 'cause you have a different phonemic structure.

Unfortunately the second of the two comments on the serial poems is my own transcription included among the notes contained in my copy of Between Cup and Lip. As such this transcription from the Holloway show is likely unreliable, but what it offers, beyond a critique of the violence implicit in RP and standardized orthography, is a politically oriented strategy for investigating the spatio-temporal specificities of regionally specific language communities by way of a procedural poetics. In other words, unlike earlier procedural strategies aimed at "defetishizing" and thereby "liberating" signifier from signified, Manson's approach seeks the inverse; Manson's approach seeks to sheer away extraneous but nonetheless deteminate forms of interference like standardized pronunciation and orthography to arrive at sound structures and speech patterns which are culturally and regionally distinct and which are also, one can reasonably assume, class specific. The serial poems, and perhaps a good deal of Manson's work beyond these, are grounded in the logic of the shibboleth. Of course, any notion of shibboleth calls to mind Celan's well known poem of the same name ("Heart: | make yourself known even here, | here in the midst of the market"), and with Celan it is difficult not to think of Derrida's comments on Celan and shibboleth:

A shibboleth, the word shibboleth, if it is one, names, in the broadest extension of its general usage, every insignificant arbitrary mark, for example the phonemic difference between shi and si, as that difference becomes discriminative, decisive and divisive. The difference has no meaning in and of itself, but it becomes what one must know how to recognize and above all to mark if one is to get on, to get over the border of a place or the threshold of a poem, to see oneself granted asylum or the legitimate habitation of a language. So no longer as to be an outlaw there.

Derrida continues:

In the word, the difference between shi and si has no meaning. But it is the ciphered mark which one must be able to partake of with the other, and this differential power must be inscribed in oneself, that is to say in one's body itself, just as much as in the body of one's own language, and the one to the same extent as the other. This inscription of difference in the body (for example the phonatory ability to pronounce this or that) is nonetheless not natural, is in now way an innate organic faculty. Its very origin presupposes participation in a cultural and linguistic community, in a milieu of apprenticeship, in short an alliance.

To make oneself known, even here, in the midst of the market, where one is otherwise rendered invisible by virtue of appearance or rendered silent by virtue of their ability to speak. Or to hear voiced echoes of one's face going transparent in buttercup light. If we look only at the cover image from the 2009 Barque edition of Manson's Adjunct: an Undigest (previously published online by Ubuweb in 2001 and in print through the Edinburgh Review in 2005), we see voiced echoes of this face, his face, going transparent, collapsing into or out of the Mona Lisa which, precisely through its everyday banality, functions as the belligerently enforced horizon of standard perfection in western culture. There is no synthesis here, only conflict, and looking at the image closer it becomes unclear which face is coming into focus and which is fading behind the dominance of the other.

The super- or meta-imposition of one image over another here is much more than a cavalierly installed mustache above the lip of a Beatricean idol and the gesture points toward the text itself, Adjunct, an addition or supplement, an external addendum appended to the shirttail of a cultural totality which, through the very process of connecting itself to the totality thereby alters — or, to put it more modestly, aspires to recalibrate — this totality. Every shibboleth presupposes at least two, shi and si, and this condition is embedded in the very construction of Adjunct, an "undigest" that insists on announcing its situatedness as an external component, an exiled party and, toward the future perfect, an amendment.

On a very basic level Manson's prose Adjunct is an homage to Scottish poet William Dunbar, a reimagining of his Lament for the Makaris (circa 1505) that convincingly bodies forth cultural and historical continuity without refusing the contemporary. Like Dunbar's Lament, a danse macabre composed of quatrains written in Middle Scots and punctuated by the Latin refrain "timor mortis conturbat me" ("fear of death troubles me"), Manson's Adjunct contains within itself a frequently repeated refrain remarking the deaths, both literal and figurative, of various artists, writers, intellectuals and others. Generally any passage from Adjunct, taken at random, includes this refrain. Take the following, selected quite by chance from page 79.

Watching Come Dancing with the sound turned down and Marcus Stockhausen on the radio. Acromegalic cheerleaders. Prynne-phone. Christmas card from Clydeside Press turns out to be from Robin. Crazed cripple. Strap-on Avon. The one about We like the Language Poets but not because of anything they believe. Job-matching section. Ken Wood is dead.

Or this from page 23:

Thought I'd dreamed that Norman MacCaig was dead. Kurt Schwitters does the Laurel and Hardy theme tune in the middle of the Ursonate. watestiflagiess. Cltalisycho. Adding value to their cheeses. A bee in his vomit. Sensible drinking (giggle). Kneecap bruise larger than handspan. Three bottles of whiskey in six days. Peter Cushing is dead. Larry Grayson is dead. Donald Davie is dead.

When we read, however, that "Enoch Powell is dead" (37) it becomes difficult to discern exactly how Manson may be remembering, lamenting, considering or mourning the deaths he announces. Perhaps in the simplest way finitude is regarded as nothing more than a leveling agent, that in death an unabashedly racist statesman like Enoch Powell and a filmmaker like Robert Bresson are the same. In Dunbar's case the deaths acknowledged are those of cultural and political figures Dunbar appears to have admired. At the very least Dunbar acknowledges, by way of inclusion, their cultural and political influence and this may in fact be what Manson is doing through the inclusion of a repulsive but nonetheless influential figure like Powell.

In any case, Manson's danse macabre reminds me, however inappropriately, of Spicer's Lament for the Makers. Published by White Rabbit Press in 1962, the book features a cover collage by Graham Mackintosh which, in its own way, is strikingly similar to the image on the cover of Manson's Adjunct.

In Mackintosh's collage, likely constructed under the sign of Jess, we have two masks connected to the body of a single figure: a protective respiratory mask fastened to the head and, in the hand of the figure, a mask that resembles what might be his actual face. In this image one face is not repressed or subordinated by the other, as in the image on the cover of Manson's Adjunct. Instead, in the Mackintosh collage one face is replaced by the other. But in each instance it's hard to establish which of the two is the true face, despite the absolute plasticity of the gas mask in the Mackintosh image and the constructedness of the Mona Lisa in Manson's.

The Spicer book is an exceptionally brief volume containing only five short poems beginning with his redux of "Dover Beach," a poem of particular relevance to Manson's work. The poem begins: "Tabula rasa | A clean table | On which is set food | Fairies have never eaten. | Fairies, I mean, in the ancient sense | Who invite you to dinner." Although Spicer's usage of "fairies" is "in the ancient sense" it is uncertain whether these fairies are themselves ancient. The word "pop" is repeated several times throughout the poem, suggesting most immediately "pop art," a moment marking a break with the past. But in "Dover Beach" Spicer is particularly sensitive to ghosts ancient or otherwise: "Only in one skull | Those waves | They change | Patterns. | The scattered ghosts of what happens | is kelp." Where Spicer sees forms of erasure and displacement, the eradication of the old by the new, Manson seems to see an opportunity for more firmly establishing historical continuity by way of recent cultural developments, practices and strategies. This difference allows Manson to attend, however successfully or not, to our inexplicable relationship to the matter of history and identity, "the voiced echoes of your face going transparent in buttercup light," or what Spicer refers to in the title poem of his Lament as "the timber drifting in the waves," "the sound that is not | really sound at all."

MICHAEL CROSS HIS HAECCEITIES

2011-08-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

There are few poets who labor as intensively and with as much consideration for and toward others as Michael Cross. Any number of names come to mind, dozens in fact who work with a commensurate measure of intensity and generosity, but I often find myself struck and humbled by Cross' ability to work so completely without any discernible horizon of expectation.

Editing is act says Barrett Watten and I have for some time now taken the totality of Cross' various practices — writing, reading, curating, publishing, thinking — as forms of editing, a paring down, as with a knife, to make use of only what is needed, what can be reasonably carried like the whole of a house on a single back. Before the contraction, when the confluence of technologies, resources and conditions invited the tendency toward gratuitous over-investment that generated vast bubbles built on air and crude ambition, Cross was, so far as I know, given to the sharp blade — excision, distillation — a desire perhaps to extrapolate dense resonating kernels from vast bodies of work, the reduction of bloated estates to tents over and against the cheap desire to peddle shacks as mansions.

Rifling through the second edition of Snow Sensitive Skin — a collaborative effort between Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern first brought out in 2007 by Cross' Atticus/Finch and just recently republished by Displaced Press — I was shocked and delighted to see a new preface provided by Cross who, as Tyrone Williams suggested in an XCP essay a couple years back, functioned as something of a silent collaborator in the building of the book, the original design and material production drawing the work somehow out of itself, the object itself embodying radical contradiction, at once an almost grotesquely opulent excess and an asphyxiating austerity. The force of this contradiction, its explosive yield toward the impossibility of a perfect vacuum (the perfect void is particle free) appears to inform the whole of Cross' investment in poetry, his own, as Brady himself acknowledges in a comment on Cross' Haecceities (Cuneiform Press 2010), referring to the work as a digging, not simply excavation but the radical evacuation of matter by matter and toward something:

What emerges for me in this digging — research as song, singing as search — is how densely the domain ... of these words is packed with sites of emergence, points at which the abstraction of meaning from song, law from custom, value from use, army from body, state from commune, first proposes itself as possibility, but has not yet installed itself as the inevitable ... To drive a wedge — to disenclose space — between these two powers, discovering the field of words' public illegality, is a central task for poetry, and this gap of historical closure's not-yet might be the waste margin in which to glean a new life in common with words.

What cuts can, I suppose, dig (certain digs cut to the bone, shear away the flesh that frames). Speaking first to Brady in his preface to Snow Sensitive Skin, Cross writes:

I first discovered Taylor Brady’s work after a memorable conversation at Small Press Traffic circa 2002. Brady made some trenchant comments about the work of noise—how distortion too falls prey to the whims of capital unless it succeeds in reconfiguring the frames of legibility around it: that to be noise it must remain noise. I was struck then by how decisively Brady honed in on the value of the negative, especially because, post-9/11, everyone wanted to make noise but nobody seemed to know how against the din of rhetoric and sophistry and predator drones washing over our impotent negations in waves of terror and abjection.

What I find crucial here is the attention to negativity, an interest which informs Cross' approach to writing no less than the other modalities of building he participates in. Although I find myself more than a little suspicious of writing practices that devote an inordinate amount of attention to questions of framing (management / administration) and illegibility (which might presuppose difficulty but is not itself difficulty as such), I think Cross — and no doubt Brady — are doing far more than, say, blindly transcribing and reframing. Thinking specifically about Cross' poetry, the work is absolutely discriminating, a deliberate thinking. Take "blitz" from "Throne," the last section of Haecceities:

porphyry bore a rebus that

lambent by a nacreous

glaze, mottled modular

nodes, each flayed

palm rapine and exly rackt

the vexierbild asks the filch

lucent by the drain's spate

of cocytus, Terrifier, eyes gleed

faced charis as an impasse

dehiscent that they will

aggregates where we find them

At the level of the intuitive, certainly at the level of affect, my first impulse (and you'll have to trust me on this) is to trust the work, suggesting there is something legible within it, however faintly. Difficult but not entirely illegible. The shards of normative syntactic formations and the somewhat alien but vaguely familiar fragments and word formations like "dehiscent" offer a gesture toward communicability, at once noise and not noise, an object both familiar and alien. The traces of familiarity offer a promise that creates the conditions for, or invites, a reading of the work — that is, the ghostlier presence of something distant but familiar in the work functions itself as a sort of frame or sign that invites further investigation. But what is most important is that here there is no sign or frame beyond what is already contained within the poem itself, this promise that something is there, that the work we are now engaging was built in good faith. In this way the poems saddle a horizon or threshold, holding in their grasp both a here and there, embodying precisely the same sort of explosive contradictory movement which, through the act of struggle which difficulty at all times presupposes, allows the work to offer an unspeakably essential something, this promise it grants, an imminent or sovereign quality.

HASTY NOTES ON BONNEY RIOT HACKNEY CROT

2011-08-10T08:36:00.001-07:00

Explosive displays of rage on the streets in various UK cities have kept astounding pace with the volatility of global financial markets. However accidental or not, the doubled character of this strikingly irrepressible and somewhat inexplicable volatility offers itself as a signal confluence, a juncture where the chaotic fluctuation of abstract value nakedly intersects with the unpredictable spontaneity of concrete violence.

Considering the confluence of forces that gave rise to the UK riots, Cris Cheek writes in an Aug 10th message to the Miami University UK Poetry list: "many things are converging in this moment in England (it seems to me). a lower than usual credibility for the police in the wake of News International and anti-cuts kettling, let alone the shooting of Mark Duggan . . . a diffused sense of fragility in financial systems . . . a specific sense of immanent cutting back in welfare state provision . . . it's summer and hot and people are bored and frustrated and those who can afford to are off on holidays . . . disillusion with all existing political parties . . . perhaps a sense that if the nation state is increasingly marginalized (if the benefit system goes and traditional law and order is broken and one's name is taken in vain and one's wages are taken for conflicts one has no connection to and does not condone . . .) then what other affiliations and resistance networks are desirable and sustainable . . ."

Friday, August 5, before news of S&P's downgrade of the US credit rating sent financial markets spiraling out of control, and well before the Tottenham vigil for Mark Duggan gave way to pandemic rioting throughout the UK, Sean Bonney posted "Letter on Riots and Doubt" at Abandoned Buildings:

Anyway, I’ve totally changed my method. A while ago I started wondering about the possibility of a poetry that only the enemy could understand. We both know what that means. But then, it might have been when I was walking around Piccadilly looking at the fires, that night in March, my view on that changed. The poetic moans of this century have been, for the most part, a banal patina of snobbery, vanity and sophistry: we’re in need of a new prosody and while I’m pretty sure a simple riot doesn’t qualify, your refusal to leave the seminar room definitely doesn’t. But then again, you are right to worry that I’m making a fetish of the riot form. “Non-violence is key to my moral views”, you say. “I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill”, you say. But what about that night when we electrocuted a number of dogs. Remember that? By both direct and alternating current? To prove the latter was safer? We’d taken a lot of MDMA that night, and for once we could admit we were neither kind, nor merciful, nor loving. But I’m getting off the point. The main problem with a riot is that all too easily it flips into a kind of negative intensity, that in the very act of breaking out of our commodity form we become more profoundly frozen within it. Externally at least we become the price of glass, or a pig’s overtime. But then again, I can only say that because there haven’t been any damn riots. Seriously, if we’re not setting fire to cars we’re nowhere. Think about this. The city gets hotter and deeper as the pressure soars. Electrons get squeezed out of atoms to produce a substance never seen on Earth. Under such extreme conditions, hydrogen behaves like liquid metal, conducting electricity as well as heat. If none of that happens, its a waste of time. Perhaps you think that doesn’t apply to you. What inexhaustible reserves we possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms, in the nightmare of their lives as slaves to the rich. Don’t pretend you know better. Remember, a poetry that only the enemy can understand. That's always assuming that we do, as they say, understand. Could we really arrive at a knowledge of poetry by studying the saliva of dogs? The metallic hydrogen sea is tens of thousands of miles deep.

While not falling into the claptrap of reading this statement retroactively as an overzealous endorsement of the rioting that now continues into its sixth day, the timing of the letter's publication is undeniably canny and worth acknowledging. Bonney's critique of riot as act and form is remarkably prescient, particularly when he writes: "The main problem with a riot is that all too easily it flips into a kind of negative intensity, that in the very act of breaking out of our commodity form we become more profoundly frozen within it." Rosa Luxemburg comes to mind, the extent to which the riots in the UK appear to reside hopelessly outside her utopian dialectic of spontaneity and organization. Bonney addresses the shortcomings of riot and warns against a fetishization of riot form, but his critique stops short of a wholesale rejection of riot, instead insisting on the absolute necessity of grasping the potentialities contained within the changing states of properties in flux (elemental and commodity, chemical and human). Otherwise, "its a waste of time." The tenor of the letter feels far more speculative than prescriptive but it somehow escapes a debilitating skepticism.

Photo: "Dalston Occupation" by Sean Bonney. Adapted as the cover for HAX

Likewise apropos, Francis Crot's HAX, a book I had the honor of publishing and which arrived, like Bonney's letter, on Friday, August 5. HAX is the London borough of Hackney and the cover of the book features a photograph by Bonney of a Hackney street corner, the intersection of Dalston Lane and Roseberry Place. The structures in the photograph have since been leveled to make way for a Crossrail Station in advance of the 2012 Olympics and, in anticipation of their demolition, the banner from the rooftop in the photograph reads, "Support the Occupation." In the wake of this week's riots, the words ring differently. The opening epigraph of HAX, culled from David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, similarly feels different, even chilling, in the wake of the riots:

"[...] 'utopia' first calls to mind the image of an ideal city, usually, with perfect geometry — the image seems to harken back originally to the royal military camp, a geometrical space which is entirely the emanation of a single, individual will, a fantasy of total control [...]"

A second epigraph appearing later in the book is taken from Sean Bonney's Black Water and reads, "hackney declare's WARR on tha city -- ." As a whole the book is an overdetermined instance of overcrowding or, perhaps more accurately, crowd out; a composite of conventionally set type against scanned images, typewritten passages, drawings, handwritten notes and missives, heavily annotated spreadsheets and documents. Crowd out (economics) = any reduction in private consumption or investment triggered by an increase in government borrowing or the fluctuation of unstable floating rates of exchange.

While as a book HAX is in many ways a fixed print object, Crot has constructed a web-based adjunct to the book that extends the work, lending itself to contingency and instantaneity, absorbing into itself the guerrilla excesses of riot. As overdetermined as the book, the HAX site includes fragments from messages to various lists, photographs, video clips, passages from blogs, lineated comments and verses, ripostes to various pundits and bloggers, links and other digital ephemera. One passage in quotes and attributed to "dh" (likely Danny Hayward) reads:

‘Senseless’, by the way, was a word first used to describe corpses. In the face of all this it seems to me that our first task has to be to identify every manifestation of intelligence and guile in every smashed shopfront and every last looted shoelace and nappy. How galling is it to think that the sum total of human passion and social solidarity might be leveraged against capital only to reinstall us in the position we occupied five years ago; and doesn’t the knowledge of what it was like five years ago (of the illimitably vacuous and poorly paid and insecure and atomising service sector jobs and the same old circus of morons on the television, justifying the slaughter and scourging the idle) become even more corruptly unbearable when it becomes not the knowledge of actual life but instead a horizon of return, a goal to be won through a massive expenditure of collective energy and desire? Isn’t the British capitalism of the self-aggrandising boom era in fact worse from the perspective of 2011 than it was at the time? For so many of us this must be so incontrovertibly true, but I haven’t yet seen anyone suggest that it might be on the minds or in the hearts of the male and female teenagers tearing their way down high-streets all over this fucking country, because so much of even the most ‘sympathetic’ writing of our journalist caste (that obnoxious eighteenth century term) is lividly insistent on treating these ‘underprivileged’ masses as bovine delinquents, capable of passively suffering and instinctively resisting, stuck in a perpetual present, lowing in touching, idiotic pain, and not at all different from the cattle in the slaughterhouse at the beginning of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality.

Another comment culled from Evan Calder Williams' blog Socialism &/or Barbarism quotes from an August 9th post titled "An open letter to those who condemn looting," the passage more or less congruent with Hayward's statement. In part two of the letter, posted separately earlier today, Williams remarks:

What is happening in London of late has been a lot of destruction. Buildings and cars have been smashed and burned. Nothing is being constructed. There is not a blueprint, plan, or program. One speaks of social negativity, and it shows itself in the destruction of a portion of what exists. It indexes a hatred: a hatred of police, of a city that keeps them shunted off to the side, of windows that guard things that cost too much too own, of being told you need to make your own way and getting arrested when you try to do so, of all those who look suspiciously at them when they pass because they wear hoods and have dark faces.

But this is not negation as such, even as it is part of the process of it. Negation, rather, is the removal of the relations that sustain a given order as it stands. Relations like property, law, and value. It is not obliteration, not a razing to the ground, but the placing of all under doubt and critique, often of a very material order. (Property shows itself highly resistant to arguments, no matter how well-worded.) It is an acid bath: privileging nothing, it removes the consistency that excuses the existence of things to see them as they are, see what stands, what falls, what has long been poisoning many.

The clear distinction Williams marks between "a razing to the ground" and "the placing of all under doubt" refers us back to Bonney's statement on riot and doubt, where the radical doubt ensconced in riot form trumps reductive accusations of criminality and vandalism.

The naive imagining of the riots as a consciously motivated form of anti-capitalist insurrection seems somehow as wrongheaded as the opportunistic reduction of these riots to baseless violence by mainstream journalists and government officials. But as Williams insists, the riots offer, if nothing else, an index, a metric, an invitation to not knowing against the self-assured, hyper-confident hand of law.

Somewhat lazily, I'm reminded of the 1992 LA Riots catalyzed by the acquittal of five police officers responsible for beating Rodney King into critical condition following a high speed chase. The language and logic deployed by US media during these riots was almost precisely the same as that deployed in mainstream comments on the UK riots. Indiscriminate violence. Thuggery. Opportunism. Senseless destruction. Pundits unabashedly mocked rioters for looting and setting their own neighborhoods ablaze (I recall more than a few journalists asking, "Why not take it to Hollywood?"). Catalysts are not a cause but an occasion, an invitation, an opportunity. The expectation that displays of rage should somehow maintain a fidelity to the trigger than ignites rather than the conditions that create seems, at best, hopelessly misinformed. And the expectation that such expressions of rage can be adequately understood through normative or dominant forms of reason are likewise foolish. Crot: "The city today lives on its nerves."

FROM SOUL TO SOLD

2011-08-05T09:56:00.000-07:00

In a usefully lucid but far from reductive introduction to the Dorn issue of Hot Gun! Josh Stanley writes, "The work presented in this issue of Hot Gun! focuses on Dorn's anti-capitalism, emphasising the materialist and political aspects of Dorn's writing, which are linked to a highly metaphysical discourse." I take this editorial gesture as one committed to undoing the considerable violence performed by crudely depoliticized readings of Dorn's work, readings that persistently reduce Dorn's accomplishment to a species of formal innovation.

Gold is, of course, up — quadruple what it was before the meltdown. In her contribution to the Dorn feature, an essay on gnosticism and alchemy in Gunslinger, Reitha Pattison remarks, "The Western psyche is still largely at the mercy of the mineral realm." Nowhere too distant from swords and sandals.

Heading out for a few odds and ends yesterday my wife asked me to grab a copy of the local paper. Not to read — we cull most news from the web now — but for cleaning. And standing at the checkout, I couldn't help but take notice of a surprisingly bold front page story on the economy:

Companies are reluctant to hire until they're convinced enough customers are ready to buy their products or services. Corporate profits are booming, though, because companies laid off millions of workers, learned to operate more efficiently with smaller staffs and expanded in growing markets overseas.

The article continues:

So companies are waiting for consumers to spend, and consumers are waiting for companies to hire them or offer generous raises and job security. It's a tough cycle to break.

Most striking about the article is its cunning rhetorical construction. The unemployed and underemployed, uninsured or under-insured, are imagined as a community financially capable of intervening in the economic crisis. The article suggests working people and the working poor, following fast on the heels of an enduring foreclosure crisis and the collapse of a construction industry which hasn't yet recovered, can intelligently call the bluff of "booming" corporations and ameliorate stagnation simply by spending money. The logic is an impressively grotesque manipulation of the old and at all times destructive adage: "It takes money to make money." Dorn was especially attuned to these forms of cunning and manipulation. In an October 1987 editorial for Rolling Stock magazine he writes:

"Americans" are a weirdly subject people. They are often berated for not saving ... And yet again, immediately the economy slumps, they're accused of not buying enough. It's rather difficult, as a whole, to get pushed around more than that.

More than most, Dorn recognized the extent to which even the crudest mainstream punditry had a decisive impact on, and was itself produced by, consciousness. As such, and as Josh Stanley suggests in his introduction to Hot Gun!, Dorn's investigation of consciousness completely circumambulates the solipsistic situatedness of self as the ground zero of poetic inquiry, but without the wholesale disavowal of self characteristic of "innovative" poetries:

Dorn's concern in poetry was to recognise "the inch of space in time I have" and work out what I just now woke up from and what rubbish dump of history my living is going to be done in, noisily refusing the avoidance of self-knowledge: Dorn said we're all sinners — justification as a concept follows disgust.

To be so reminded is a privilege. The trick is not to lose sight, or as Amiri Baraka insists in "Doc-I-Meant," a 1999 essay written in memory of activist and poet Gaston Neal:

From Soul to Sold. For a profit, we abandon our deepest function as Prophets, to tell the world where it is and where it was and where it going.

This sense of "prophet," the antithesis of its contradictory homophone "profit," is one Dorn would have likely agreed with and it appears to be used in a way strikingly similar to Rimbaud's understanding of voyant in his 1871 "Lettres du voyant." In Rimbaud's usage the double-meaning of voyant is at all times retained so that a voyant is at once a prophet whose future-perfect imaginings allow him to stand as an instrument for gauging and calibrating this machine, this inch of space in time we have.

The Baraka essay comes to mind because I take it as an absolutely indispensable ars poetica that was composed relatively late in Baraka's writing life. The essay remains uncollected and has, so far as I know, received no critical attention. Composed prior to a wide range of crises — the dot-bomb, the increasing privatization of war, Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, the subprime mortgage crisis (Bear Stearns, AIG &c) and the collapse of the housing industry — the essay presciently calls our attention back to class struggle and the determinate character of the economic.

The direction of Baraka's gaze is fixed on the "un-new," as when he writes, "History, WISE 1 ' ... ban yr oom boom ba boom ... you in deep deep trouble ....'" For Baraka "The Word is the FIRST DRUM" — not was but is — and like Cornelius Cardew after his disavowal of atonal and aleatory forms of "avant-garde" composition, Baraka, possibly thinking back to his turn away from New York School poets and the contemporary art scene following the assassination of Malcolm X, insists: "Now it is abstract, in the main! Like Hieroglyphs under the weight of commerce becomes Hieratic. Drum Word, under the weight of middle passage and Homolocus Subsidere betraying the method to Slave Master obscures its ultimate Science and becomes abstract expressionism!" The insistence is against abstraction — against, that is extraction, reduction, extrapolation, anything that would compartmentalize and thereby allow one to deludedly imagine an interdependent component of the social whole as discreet, sovereign, imminent.

The Baraka essay appears in the Spring 2000 issue of Prosodia, the journal of the recently bankrupted New College of California. However strangely, the same issue features a memorial tribute to Dorn that begins with a stretch from Chemo Sabe followed by a touching comment from Tom Clark and ending with a well selected passage from Book II of Gunslinger:

Yet the sad fact is I is
part of the thing and can never leave it.
This alone constitutes
the reality of ghosts ...

There is no wholesale refusal of lyric subjectivity in Dorn; instead we find a persistent turning and a constant pressure that presupposes ghosts are more than a deceptive fiction, that every fetish commodity, including the self, contains within itself an elusive remainder — to say, perhaps, as Hegel did, the spirit is a bone, or what for Benjamin is aura; but more than this, against the destructive nostalgia that would have us believe newsprint is for more than cleaning windows, this I is the ineradicable trace of a freeze-dried self, at once hypostatically universal and cryogenically individual, the citizen, "the sad fact."

ALAN HALSEY | BILL GRIFFITHS

2011-07-18T19:01:00.000-07:00

The following is a brief comment I sketched out on Alan Halsey's Lives of the Poets (Five Seasons 2009) and Bill Griffiths' Collected Earlier Poems (Reality Streets 2010) which appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Colorado Review. Posting it here if, for nothing else, to further register my continued interest in what feel like two monumental publications. I'd add to this Geraldine Monk's Escafeld Hangings (West House 2005), an historically-oriented cultural excavation of Sheffield which includes reference to Griffiths in its opening poem and can, I think, be read well against Francis Crot's forthcoming HAX, an explosively chaotic anthropological investigation of Hackney (Punch Press 2011). In any case:

Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey | Alexandria, VA 2008 | photo Tom Orange

Strictly on the terrain of material production one of the most stunning books to come to out of the UK in recent years is Alan Halsey’s Lives of the Poets (Five Seasons Press 2009), a lush book built after Samuel Johnson’s Lives and subsidized as many eighteenth and early nineteenth century titles would have been: through advance subscriptions that testify to the kindness of poets, readers, bookshops and friends. A substantial number of beautifully reproduced engravings from Portraits of the British Poets (W. Walker 1824) further cement Halsey’s Lives to the period of its model. But Halsey’s project is not invested in a destructive nostalgia, nor is it intended to reductively sentimentalize a prior cultural moment. This is where the continuities that connect Halsey’s Lives to the time of Johnson come to an end. Unlike the prose assessments we find in Johnson or other such volumes from the period, these 191 lives (including eighteen authored by Halsey’s collaborator Martin Corless-Smith) are lineated and wonderfully vertiginous distillations that read more like Exeter riddles shot through a twenty-first century critical sensibility than eighteenth century biographical sketches. We see this in Halsey’s Thomas Wyatt:

to mark and remember nerawhyt erring
and to make into our englysshe
Wiat que la dame Anne Bulleyn
avait este trouvee au delit avec
my thinges so rawlye goyng to nowght afore mine Ies
I restles rest in suspect
for better poursuyte the tyme to seke (17).

In his Wyatt lecture delivered at Newcastle University in 1974 Basil Bunting insists that, as a poet of the Tudor court, “Wyat was even further from the ancient tradition of English than Chaucer was, but unlike Chaucer he went directly back to the headsprings of poetry; back to song itself, to music, and perhaps to dance.” Whether we accept the terms of Bunting’s statement or not, we see at the very least that Halsey’s life of Wyatt angles well to reproduce the music that so moved Bunting. Lurking somewhere beneath the early modern English and French in Halsey’s distillation is a music that troubles semantic meaning but refuses to jettison it completely. What we have instead is the articulation of subsemantic or paralinguistic sound (the radical unfamiliarity of pre-standardized early modern English now utterly alien to most Anglophone readers) with an undeniable narrative that reads the history of the language (“our englysshe”) as a living thing shaped by the contingencies of the political (“la dame Anne Bulleyn”).

Upper left and right Griffiths with Tony Jackson | Bottom Bob Cobbing and Griffiths | Morden Tower 1985 | photo David James

In fact the whole of Halsey’s Lives seems, as the first line of his Wyatt suggests, “to mark and remember.” But what he marks and remembers here is not so much the lives of poets as it is the complexities of a language unfolding across time and intersecting with the work of poetry. Or as the couplet that encapsulates the life of Samuel Rogers maintains, “Memory still making alterations | the work ready printed in boards” (142).

The skeleton key to these lives, however, resides in Halsey’s life of Samuel Johnson. The title of the life reduces “Samuel” to the more familiar “Sam” and situates a colon between given name and surname, acknowledging the limit between what can be chosen and what is always already the case. We are born, the title suggests, into language and the politics of genealogy. A fatalistic tone resonates through Halsey’s life of Johnson, who in the frame of the poem sees “my wife crying” and insists “There is no arguing with vain terrour and negligence” (117). In a post-911 moment this “terrour” naturally extends beyond the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century and the subsequent terreur in France, toward perhaps a far more expansive and seemingly interminable terror advanced under the auspices of eliminating terror. In this context the lives (we cannot tell if they belong to Johnson or Halsey) become prayers uttered for lack of agency into the wild:

would not trouble too much with the Lives of the Poets
in unmerciful nights and great want of company
sadly broken but one of the most fervent & Eloquent prayers (117).

Johnson’s life among others—like Johnson’s call for the standardization of English in his 1755 preface to The Dictionary of the English Language—stands as a nodal point, a center of gravity around which the other lives are constellated. But the radically shifting registers we encounter when we leap across Halsey’s lives are disorienting, pointing toward the exceptionally rich linguistic and textual differentiation within the British Isles. And it is perhaps the deep appreciation of linguistic difference embedded in the full range of Halsey’s work that best lays bare the continuities connecting Halsey to his late friend Bill Griffiths, whose Collected Earlier Poems (Reality Street 2010) Halsey co-edited with Ken Edwards.

Where Halsey’s life as an antiquarian bookseller clearly informs his work (mine eyes hath seen Steve McCaffery dance on receiving from Halsey a well-maintained seventeenth century edition of Chapman’s Homeric Hymns), Bill Griffiths’ work as a scholar of the Anglo-Saxon seems to have informed his. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Before his life was cut short in 2007, Griffiths’ work in poetry preceded his work as a formally trained scholar by more than a decade. And if his poetry and scholarship emerge out of anything it is likely connected to his brief but formative years as a young borstal boy and member of the Hells Angels. The defiant piss-and-vinegar sweep that characterizes the poetry Griffiths produced while studying under Bob Cobbing at the London-based Writers Forum and later under Eric Mottram at King’s College is palpable, influencing not only his early poetry and publishing activities during the 1970s but also his work during the 1990s as a scholar of non-standardized Northern dialects identified with powerlessness and devalued forms of labor. From formal investigations into the “Old English Alcoholic Vocabulary” to the countless essays and word lists attending to regionally-specific dialects associated with coal mining and fishing, a deep-seated commitment to cultures beyond the pale of power firmly connects Griffiths’ otherwise incongruent interests in poetry, the Anglo-Saxon, Northern dialects, labor, prison and publishing. Indeed, the long serial poem Cycles, published in installments during the early 1970s, begins with prison and gestures toward much more than poetic cycles or cyclical structures:

Like where’s a little kid
making
motorbikes out of sand (69).

Here we have cycles within cycles—motorcycles—embedded in the poem as the figuration of resistance which, if it is available to us at all, is fashioned from the materials at hand, even sand. And it is resistance that drives the attention Griffiths devotes to prison, politics and language in Cycles. From Dover Borstal to H.M. Prison Brixton, from Elizabeth to York Minster, Griffiths’ work carefully thinks through the overdetermined relation between the cultural and the political as these unfold across time. But unlike any species of critical theory, Griffiths’ thinking is predicated on the need to integrate the experiential into the texts produced, suggesting any critical analysis we might construct is always already mediated through bodies as they move upon the earth:

dreaming ghosts
alwayz all ways night
death-dreamer
to lie dried as a stick
or singing the insultz the
wet wickid bastards throw in their shit bastard boxes.
how do you reckon people that walk trhu wallz?
get close
in their uniform of bownd bones (89).

But where linguistic variation in Halsey’s Lives alerts us to regional difference (the distance between, say, texts produced in the North or South prior to the standardization of orthography) Griffiths early and late work alerts us to economically specific, class-based differences within British English that run along both a vertical and horizontal axis. The use of dialect in his earliest poems, well before he devotes himself to any formal study of regional dialects in the North of England, emerge first out of his affiliation with prisoners, bikers, workers—people identified with linguistic practices specific to laboring classes. And through the mid 1970s—well before Robert Grenier announced his hatred of speech and shifted his attention, like many other US-based poets, from the transmission of meaning through the body to the transmission of meaning through the materiality of texts—Griffiths seemed concerned with the complex and fundamentally intractable relationship between speech and writing, dialect and text. In his work Griffiths appears to privilege neither speech nor writing but instead investigates the dynamic commerce between the two within a specific, politically determined conjuncture of historical forces. The shift back and forth from speech-based writing to translations from the Anglo-Saxon to normative writing practices in conjunction with the frequent and fluid movement from one language to another within many of these poems suggests Griffiths was unwilling as a poet to sacrifice an interest in the complexities of language for fashionable dogma or inflexible doctrine.

Focusing on the materiality of Griffiths’ work in his essay on Pirate Press included in The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths (Salt 2007), Halsey remarks that Griffiths “is a signal example of a poet dedicated to maintaining control over the appearance of his work, often re-presenting it with a shift into a new context; in some cases this involves revision in the commonly accepted sense, in others it is more a case of re-vision—the text reproduced verbatim but in a different page space and/or variant setting, and so arguably in some sense fresh work” (55). Here Griffiths’ understanding of language appears to reach well beyond the split between speech and writing and into the territory marked out by the limits of material production, i.e. the difference between a poem hastily produced on inexpensive A4 run through a mimeo press versus a poem carefully set in type and printed on handmade Italian rag. Influenced by the publications produced through Writers Forum during the 1970s, Griffiths disavowed the fine and commercial press practices that slowed or impeded the rapid circulation of texts. Instead Griffiths published dozens of titles through Pirate Press using technologies conducive to speed: mimeo, silkscreen, offset and eventually photocopy. And despite the compromise in print quality, Griffiths preferred having total control of production over bending to the pressure of publishers that might offer a fine press quality at the cost of compromising the work. But if we attend to the forms of community and support that motored the publications brought out by Pirate Press we find a continuity that cuts across the distance between fine and small press practices. Like the Five Seasons edition of Halsey’s Lives, the 1975 mimeo edition of Beowulf translated by John Porter and published by Griffiths through Pirate Press relied on the advance financial contributions of subscribers later listed in the book. The list offers a clear view of the community Pirate Press titles circulated among and for that reason alone is especially useful. But what I find most striking is the radical contradiction in the practice of subsidizing a work through subscription. Rather than appealing to a larger publisher that might legislate and standardize the shape of that work, the poet-publisher in this case maintains total autonomy in a curiously paradoxical way by making himself available and in fact beholden to a community of others—that is, it is precisely community formation and the intervention of others that makes singular vision and uncompromising control over cultural production possible here. And perhaps it is this we see most clearly in Griffiths’ early poetry and Halsey’s Lives: singularity.

CANTICULI: SOME RECENT PUBS

2011-07-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

David Hadbawnik. Field Work: Notes, Songs, Poems 1997-2010. Buffalo: BlazeVOX, 2011. This work, possibly more than any other, attempts to return the banal — the excruciatingly dull — to its proper condition. There is no misguided effort to elevate the ordinary to a state of grace. There are no epiphanic moments culled from the dull, the daily, the ordinary. There is only a dry, laconic, deadpan ordinariness returned to itself as nothing other than itself, a feedback loop punctuated at times by the exclamatory edge of thwarted desire or the interiorized violence of wish-fulfillment. This is the gift the work offers. "The astonishing shit of dogs."

David Hadbawnik. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Buffalo: Habenicht Press, 2011. One of a set of five chaplets edited, designed and published by Hadbawnik. The other four include: Brooks Johnson's Five Windows Light The Cavern'd Man, Sara Jeanne Peters' Triptych, JodiAnn Stevenson's Houses Don't Float, and 5 Works by the Rejection Group.

David Hadbawnik, ed. Kadar Koli #6. Includes: Zack Finch, Geoffrey Gatza, j/j hastain, Henri Deluy (translated by Jacqueline Kari), Edmond Caldwell, Micah Robbins, The Rejection Group, Sarah Jeanne Peters, Josh Stanley, John Hyland, Robin F. Brox, Brenda Iijima, Morani Kornberg-Weiss.

Simon Jarvis. Dionysus Crucified. Cambridge, UK: Grasp Press, 2011. An absurdly large format publication (13" x 13"), one among several out of the UK in the past year or so (Prynne's Sub Songs at 11.5" x 14.5" is perhaps the other, more obvious example). Through a protracted period of austerity and contraction, the tendency toward large format print publication is interesting. Like a blow fish expanding against the terror: "How does the sun go out | Now that it knows its whole life to be gases expiring protractedly through what would otherwise be just some perfectly blank and impertinent gap?"

Joe Luna. LVRS 2.0 (or perhaps LOVERSLOV | ERSLOVERS | LOVERS). Brighton, UK: Hi Zero!, 2011. "That what you took to be a piece was mashed in transit made of culprit | Gone down in sea for image count abate inventorial parts coolly reckoned."

Joe Luna, ed. Hi Zero! magazine, issues 1-4. Issue 1: Amy De'Ath, Timothy Thornton, Jonty Tiplady, Danny Hayward, Joe Luna. Issue 2: Rachel Warriner, Josh Stanley, Tomas Weber, Francesca Lisette, Harry Sanderson, Luke Roberts, Jonty Tiplady, Keston Sutherland. Issue 3: Harry Gilonis, John Wilkinson, Ed Luker, Jennifer Cooke, Sarah Kelly, Laura Kilbride, Edmund Hardy, Joe Luna. Issue 4: Jonty Tiplady, Ashley French, Fabian MacPherson, Tom Graham, Harry Gilonis, Ian Patterson, Liquid Bros, Marianne Morris and an essay by Justin Katko on Keston Sutherland's poem 10/11/10 (Issue 5, which was just recently published, contains a response to Katko's critique by Sutherland). From the opening editorial statement in Issue #2: "The reflex of your truest fractal responsiveness is the form of its dissent in this inverted world, that which is also the means to identify and re-invert it."

John Phillips. What Shape Sound. Nottingham, UK: Skysill Press, 2011. Phillips works quietly, somewhat isolated in Cornwall, but I sense at times his isolatedness sets his practice apart from most any other poet presently working in the UK. Thomas A. Clark or Simon Cutts are possibly the closest analogs, however crude. The poems are small in their way, driven by an odd humility which is almost completely undercut by the publication of the work but not quite; idle thoughts that refuse their own importance. "There is | inside | thinking || another | pleasure | I know."

John Phillips, ed. Hassle, issues 12-14. Published out of St. Ives, Cornwall. Each xeroxed on a single sheet of A4 folded into quarters. Each devoted to a single poet. These include: Aaron Tieger, Jonathan Greene, and Henri Deluy (translated by Jacqueline Kari). 27 Treverbyn Road, St. Ives, Cornwall, TR26 1EZ, UK.

THE SEVENTH SON OF A CORNISH VICAR

2011-06-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

Ned Maddrell, a fisherman and the last native speaker of Manx — the Goidelic language associated with the Isle of Man — passed away in 1974. This fact evidently has no bearing at all on the poetry of Geoffrey Grigson, whose biographical note on the dust jacket of his Collected Poems 1963-1980 identifies him as "the seventh son of a Cornish vicar." David Hadbawnik, who visited earlier this week, pointed this wonderfully odd statement out to me after we returned from a bookshop in Portland, Maine where I was thrilled to find both volumes of Grigson's Collected Poems. And stranger than the statement itself is the fact that someone in Southern Maine saw fit to discard these largely wrongheaded but delightfully peculiar volumes.

Grigson is, no doubt, most well known as editor, from 1933 on, of the UK poetry journal New Verse. In an editorial statement featured on the cover of the first issue, Grigson claims that New Verse "favours only its time, belonging to no politico-literary cabal, cherishing bombs only for masqueraders and for the everlasting 'critical' rearguard of nastiness..." In tone and texture, the editorial statement in the first issue of Claudius App — a web-based magazine that bills itself as a journal of "fast" poetry — is strikingly similar: "The point is not to articulate a school, but to articulate so quickly it registers as a slur." Nihil novi, no matter the speed (viz. I find it useful to walk at a moderately brisk pace, not so slow that I arrive at the bar after last call and not so fast that I break a sweat en route).

Beyond the banal appeal to speed (even the worst of cars has a range of gears), the first number of Claudius App includes an impressive range of poets, including Joshua Clover, Joe Luna, Marianne Morris, Rod Smith and Keston Sutherland, among a wide cast of others. But the explosive character of its generosity is, I think, best captured by the inclusion in this first issue of work from both Charles Bernstein and Kent Johnson, each representative of incredibly distant and largely antagonistic poles within a broad constellation of often-overlapping poetry communities.

The Bernstein poem, titled "Autopsychographia" and written after Pessoa, begins: "Poets are fakers." The poem is interesting, especially since it's the first piece included in the issue — that is, Bernstein's clickable name appears in the upper left hand corner of a three-column front-page index. As such, the journal begins with an insult or, perhaps more likely, a self-reflexive comment on authenticity and authorship. But the Bernstein poem appears to take on a curiously self-excoriating, even confessional quality when read in the context of Johnson's essay "Poetic Economies of Scale," an extended and thoroughgoing critique of the recent acquisition of Jacket magazine by PennSound and the Kelly Writers House, two institutions Johnson corals together under the aegis of what he refers to as the "Bernstein Group." Framed as a letter to the editor, Johnson writes:

For example, I'd had in mind to write, using advanced micro and macro-economic analysis, supported by graphs and charts, concerning how J2 [Jacket 2], in context of the avant-po-biz economy, is to be seen as a massive acquisition that moves the Bernstein Group into the territory (sub-culturally speaking) of quasi-monopolistic status: Tranter's independent, multifarious, often cantankerous, unruly, sometimes satirical upstart bought up and aesthetically downsized (rationalized) as tame and proper subsidiary vertically integrated into the Academic Post-Avant Consortium (APAC).

In a closing postscript, Johnson includes a message sent him by an anonymous poet-critic, who comments:

I think the analysis of BG's (she means the Bernstein Group) acquisition is exactly right — Penn Industries receives the academic equivalent of gov't funding, as well as, I imagine, plenty of actual gov't funding, so that snapping up an undercapitalized but ferally innovative Jacket at a bargain-basement rate was something like Wells Fargo using TARP funds to buy Wachovia. The analogy isn't exact, if only because, as you indicate, it doesn't go far enough: I'm not sure there's a bank as (sub-culturally) monopolistic, as horizontally and vertically integrated, to compare it to — really a rather shocking concentration of institutional power in very few hands, as even the small staffs of these supposedly individual organs completely overlap (PennSound, Jacket2, Kelly Writers House, etc.) ... the new Jacket feels, especially in the reviews, almost hysterically groomed, like the university quadrangle it in fact is.

Whether or not we agree with the whole of this critique, there can be little doubt that an overwhelming amount of cultural capital — along with the power, at least in a US context, to include or exclude, promote or ignore, various tendencies in poetry — does in fact reside within a very limited number of hands that, since the acquisition of Jacket, are now even fewer.

HASTY NOTES ON CITIZEN CAIN

2011-05-31T20:31:00.000-07:00

With almost no sense of shame an impressive number of Germans have taken up the leisurely activity of reenacting the US Civil War. In a recent Atlantic Monthly article, Wolfgang Hochbruck, professor of American Studies at Freiburg University and Union Army reenactor, remarks, "I think some of the Confederate reenactors in Germany are acting out Nazi fantasies of racial superiority ... They are obsessed with your war because they cannot celebrate their own vanquished racists." The kernel of an as-yet-unrealized joke is concealed in this recent phenomenon; something like that moment in episode ten of the television series Party Down when blond-haired blue-eyed Uda Bengt, the team leader for Valhalla Catering, sternly establishes dating guidelines after making a pass at actor-turned-caterer Henry Pollard: "I like art films. Nothing too depressing. No Holocaust shit."

There are jokes and then there are jokes and I often find myself fascinated by those incredible and often disingenuously deployed jokes that cut below the radar, the slap in the face that goes wholly unregistered because our ability to name the violence cannot keep pace with the shape-shifting contour of the violence. In the poem "AIPAC" (acronym for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) from Citizen Cain (Salt 2011), Benjamin Friedlander writes:

OK here's a joke:
A lady approaches her rabbi and tells him,

Rabbi, obesity is a trend
that is prevalent In fact,
I blame Chinese food on Christmas

every day
the wine symbolizes blood
at sunset Saturday

eating Christian babies for their streetwear
Jewish dolls for Jewish children Just click
on Law

of Return
on Investment (ROI), Le Roi David
King David vinyl transfer

The amount of work the poem performs here, the astounding range of the interrelated details and information contained within it, mirrors the vertiginality of the overdetermined conditions and transgressions that too often escape naming. The language of investment and finance bucks up against an increasing Sinophobia in the West, pandemic obesity, web-based consumer practices, tensions between Jewish and black communities in the US, urban violence and the enduring vestiges of anti-Semitic representations stretching back to the medieval period (i.e. Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln).

Le Roi is no doubt Leroi — Leroi Jones — a poet Friedlander confronts earlier in Citizen Cain through his lineated critique of "Somebody Blew Up America." Like Jones / Baraka, the territory Friedlander treads here is delicate, his poem presumably responding to several particularly provocative and now well known lines by Baraka (i.e. "Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion | And cracking they sides at the notion"). Toward the end of Friedlander's riposte we find Baraka choking:

Did you know, for example, that stuttering affects
many more men than women?

This is why women chew slowly
and men eat steak. Now make a fist

and place the thumb side of your fist
against Amiri Baraka's upper abdomen, below the ribcage

and above the navel. Grasp your fist
with your other hand and press into

the upper abdomen with a quick upward
thrust. Do not squeeze Amiri Baraka;

confine the force of your thrust to your hands.
Repeat until the terrorists are expelled.

These instructions are, of course, for the Heimlich Maneuver — to dislodge the terrorists stuck in the poet's throat. The unheimlich, or unheimlichkeit, also comes to mind. Heim. Home. To be without and to bring it back so by way of expelling a colonial presence. Curiously, however, heimlich in contemporary German usage also suggests stealth or, in cruder colloquial usage, sneakiness, a bone chilling fact which no doubt ratchets up the tension coursing through Friedlander's riposte to Baraka (we think in terms of terrorist cells). In this application of the Heimlich Maneuver we find a desire for Homeland Security which is not Homeland Security, a desire for Baraka — one of the most influential and outspoken poets opposed to the War on Terror — to come to terms with a culturally interiorized and fundamentally ineradicable alterity which ought to be always already at home in itself among others.

While it is mischievously tempting, at least for me, to recklessly read Friedlander's response to Baraka as a poetic echoing of the enduring tensions that characterized something like the Crown Heights Riot, Friedlander's bold appeal to the Heimlich Maneuver indicates his approach to Baraka is incredibly nuanced. When Baraka invokes the state of Israel in "Somebody Blew Up America," his attention is presumably fixed on the complex, deeply troubling and virtually inextricable relationship between US and Israeli governments. Friedlander is no less critical than Baraka of US-Israeli relations (cf. comments on former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in the poem "Fucked Relationships Archive," which ends, "No more f-words, just 'aith' | A spoken word for ministry"), but what Friedlander appears to identify in Baraka's poem is an unchecked antisemitism that sneaks in through the backdoor. Plenty of others have taken issue with this, nearly to the point of exhaustion and often to the exclusion of the poem's productive political thrust in the face of overwhelming ideological repression. But, if I'm not putting too much pressure on this appeal to the Heimlich in Friedlander's response, the call here is for a more fully developed and responsible consideration of 911 — not to dismiss Baraka out of hand but to eliminate the destructive elements in his view of the political landscape "until the terrorists are expelled."

In an especially useful essay commenting on Franz Rosenzweig's aesthetic theory and the decidedly Jewish character of theories of the uncanny, Leora Batnitzky writes, "Like so many of his German speaking contemporaries, including Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Buber, Rosenzweig connects being wrenched away from one's 'homey place' [Heim] to a feeling of Unheimlichkeit. Unlike his contemporaries, including Buber, Rosenzweig maintains that the feeling of uncanniness not only expresses a general insight into human existence, but is a particularly Jewish contribution to the understanding of human existence." Batnitzky later relates that, in Rosenzweig's formulation, "Because of its unique relation to God's revelation, the Jewish community is wrenched away from its homeland [Heimat] and thereby produces a feeling of Unheimlichkeit in the Heim of others."

Whether or not we accept this particular theorization of the uncanny, there can be no question that a certain uncanniness pervades every page of Citizen Cain. And the scope of Friedlander's poetry extends well beyond any disagreement he might have with Baraka, outward to the forms of unheimlichkeit produced, exacerbated and mediated by the vertiginous and fundamentally unstable flow of web-based information. This in conjunction with a larger sense of homelessness that situates any Odyssean homecoming as the work of a comforting but nonetheless misguided fantasy.

FROM CAMBRIDGE WITH LOVE

2011-05-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

Or not. But probably. There appears to be a gross excess of love radiating outward from Cambridge, Brighton, London and possibly other articulated loci of poetic production in the UK. A package just in of recent publications wrapped in the Autumn 2010 issue of Naked Punch: Engaged Review of Contemporary Art, the number containing a feature on Brighton poetry, including poems by Chinc Blume, John Tiplady, Richard Parker and Michael Kindellan and an interview with Keston Sutherland by Zoe Sutherland, Danny Hayward and Jonty Tiplady. This from Kindellan's "Terra form A":

Calculate that it begins with the simple problem
that if the Earth ceases to support life, and human
life does not continue elsewhere, all economic
activity will also cease. There are several ways
to estimate the value of Earth. Assign the Earth
its home components, that everything lives, at least
is not value. All life is little overvalued high risk,
so avoid estimations. One way to avoid this systematic
inflation of the price of life compared to others
is to estimate the cost of replacing Earth
compared to costing another planet with compatible
orbit. And if the work were nearly complete, ask
how much is comfort going to cost, competitively,
which is also the total of barely natural, nearby and
at issue. Plus transport.

The coordinates are hard to nail down — there are no satellite photos, no military maps to mark out with any measure of precision the shape and interrelatedness of poetry communities in the UK — but the University of Sussex in Brighton, with Sutherland as an organizing nodal point, seems to have taken up where the University of Essex left off, its connectedness to Cambridge, as though an express line cuts across from one to the other. Sutherland on love, in response to a question from Tiplady:

I think I can remember feeling that I was too much dependent on love. Not too much dependent on any particular individual's love, not anaclitically tied to a mother or a substitute or something, but that the pitch of dependency on a no doubt at least partly idealised love was ludicrously high in my poetry, and that whilst this was in a sense its essential wager, it was liable in the longer term to be unsustainable for me because it would wreak terrible damages on my life and my writing. I am now becoming very dramatic but I think this is true. The question then might be that if this is really an excess and not just a valorised and spectacular excess, but an excess which is too much to bear, and there I hear Prynne in that expression of mine, then by what measure can you reduce the significance of love in your life, so as not only to be able to stay alive but still to be able to honour its centrality and its foundation in your existence.

Then, commenting on his poem "The Proxy Inhumanity Of Forklifts," Sutherland says, "That once something is deducted from universalism by whatever measure, love is then inhuman ... The moment we deduct anything from universalism, we get inhuman love." It is easy, I suppose, to write about love irresponsibly, or devote rudderless attentions to it out of lonesomeness or frustration or a deep and driven wanting of some thing or situation furiously unavailable. Prynne's "Discursive Commentary" on George Herbert's "Love [III]" (Cambridge 2011) dedicates the whole of its attention across 92 pages to "Love" and to love. Prynne's analysis begins with a series of glosses delineating the loadedness of signal words and phrases in the Herbert poem. The first word glossed is, of course, "love":

In Germanic as in Celtic the Indo-European word for love thus assumed the meaning 'free', so that another word meaning 'desire' took its place; Proto-Germanic *lubo, Sanskrit lubhyati, '(he) desires eagerly'; compare Latin libens, lubens, 'willing, acting with pleasure', Old English leof, 'dear', lufu, 'love' (Beowulf 1758; 1728); Latin cognates are words based on liber, 'free, set free, unconstrained'.

Conceit is not constraint. The question of love persists almost unconstrained, as in Finite Love by the Two Brothers (Critical Documents in collaboration with Bad Press 2010), which the authors (rumored to be Justin Katko and Jow Walton) refer to as "Love Poetry" dedicated to friends:

The dream was over, and although he understood that with the half of his mind that had paused to wonder why he had begun the sentence, he knew that the letters had to go on and on to the end ... like the glass circling and circling the ouija board ... an order of ritual that would cease only when the green gulls, finishing their last flight, circled for the final time and landed, breaking their legs on the sheet of thick plate glass stretched two feet above the ground. Oh, the surprise on their faces when the gas jets lit beneath the glass and they sizzled their way to eternity. That's all it is.

Katko — with Ryan Dobran, Ian Heames, Laura Kilbride, Luke Roberts and Mike Wallace-Hadrill — curated the inaugural year of the Cambridge Reading Series (CRS), each of the thirteen events accompanied by a pamphlet and punctuated by an anthology titled THAT MERCILESS AND MERCENARY GANG OF COLD-BLOODED SLAVES AND ASSASSINS, CALLED, IN THE ORDINARY PROSTITUTION OF LANGUAGE, FRIENDS. Referring to the publication as an anthology might be troubling, but at the very least this hastily produced, photocopied selection offers a provisional road map or textual instance of community formation. In addition to poetry from CRS organizers, the publication includes work by Johnny Liron, Joe Luna, Marianne Morris, Sophie Robinson, Stamina Teacup & Julia Bashmore, Caitlan Doherty, Gareth Durasow, Mahmoud Elbarasi, Peter Gizzi (poet-in-residence at Cambridge), Danny Hayward, Frances Kruk, Francesca Lisette, Jaya Savage, Connie Scozzaro, James Staniforth, Joshua Samuel Strauss, Will Stuart, Jefferson Toal, Rosa Van Hensbergen, Tomas Weber and Adam Weg. Cover art is provided by Sean Bonney.

Aside from a table of contents, some acknowledgments and a brief run of biographical notes, there's very little framing — that is, beyond the likely less-than-accidental appearance of these poets between two covers, there is no introduction or afterword that announces a community, a poetics or any unifying principle at all beyond perhaps, as the title suggests, friendship. The insistence of this work against career and professionalization is incredibly affirming (here I come back to the preface of Finite Love titled "Reasons Not to Publish," worth quoting at length:

(1) to evade some alert, punitive power, like an oppressive state. (2) Paranoia. (3) We undervalue our texts; for instance, we take them for something unreadable, or occurring in abundant natural deposits. (4) The texts are injurious personal literature. (5) We forget that we have written the texts, or give away our manuscripts. (6) We want total control over who sees our texts. (7) The texts are morally corrupt. (8) We desire and have no reliable access to anonymity/pseudonymity. (9) To be nearby to e.g. clarify. (10) We want our peers working in a similar mode to flourish (or more generally, want them to take receipt of the visibility back-flow, whatever it is). (11) We are reluctant to obviously improve on the work of yet-living elder writers. (12) To withhold something from an object of criticism; perhaps attention/drive/dignity/interim knowledge of its weak points. (13) As industrial action, perhaps secondary ... (19) To prevent lock-in. (20) The work's not yet begun. (21) Conviction that 'finished' criteria do not exist. (22) We await a formal moment. For example, the texts are occasional verse composed in advance of the foreseeable. (23) We have waited too long. For example, the texts now serve interests that oppose us, or the nature of virtue has changed. (24) People will dislike, misunderstand or feel intimidated by the text; in particular, ones we love. (25) Our verba macks mightier than our res, our expression outwits our content. We are concerned that our texts will punch above their weight, will be more persuasive than they deserve to be ... (30) Memento mori: we want to remind ourselves they will not outlive our lives. (31) More generally, we don't trust ourselves to be as virtuous after we publish the texts. (32) Even more generally, any apprehension relating to the personal effects of fame/failure, or of critical attention/neglect ... (34) We don't wish to distract our friends or allies, who have better shit to be doing ...

But against this self-reflexive and even self-flagellating catalog of reasons not to publish the work is published, an astounding contradiction that throws the very question of publication into overwhelming uncertainty (i.e. In relation to career and professional advancement, what exactly qualifies as publication? Are these hastily produced textual objects publications in any formal sense? How do these print objects frustrate the distance between the public and the private? Where do the intellectually militarized boundaries of coterie end and the trembling limits of humility or affection begin? In the title poem of Commitment (Bad Press and Critical Documents) Marianne Morris writes:

COMMITMENT: stand here screaming like
a flaming proselyte pig happy in translucent muck
that glows when you plug me in. The representativity
of the representation in so far as it is representable
is hilarious.
IF semantic trips through ambiguity
yield sign anarchy THEN we're out
out of a job we never had anyway
and listening pule vigorous devout
Gaga's call to individuality

The poem begins with an epigraph from Henry Reynolds' Mythomystes (1632): "And yet to speake a troth, I cannot herein blame the diseased world so much, as I do the infelicity of that sacred Art of Poesy; which like the soueraigne prescriptions of a Galen or Hypocrates, ordered and dispensed by illiterate Empyricks or dogleeches, must needes (as the best phisicks ill handled) proue but so much variety of poyson instead of cure." The epigraph is crucial, calling out the same apprehensions, reservations and trepidation addressed in the Two Brothers' preface to Finite Love — a recognition of the stakes in the work and the cost to all of work produced in bad faith.

___________________________________________

ADDITIONAL PUBLICATIONS:

Marianne Morris, Luke Roberts, Sophie Robinson, Josh Stanley. Untitled Colossal Parlour Odes. Bad Press 2011. Josh Stanley, "Ode":

and our minds will go back to their perennial corruption
from which no escape premised on moral
decisiveness and only compulsive will eating all in all
underpins sustain philosophical going on
in hope, inevitably beautiful as it turns on itself like a
childish pelican to show itself less all you can eat

And in the same collection Luke Roberts, a passage from "Colossal Boredom Swan Song":

I spoke warmly and my speech turned into a wing
and the wing broke my arms, and my arm continued to sing.
Dear cowards, the sea dries up and you remain. The presses
are idle and the censor's lunch is so long and dream-like
you trouble nothing, not even my heart.

Mike Wallace-Hadrill. Nettle Range Bladefear. ©_© Press 2009. Letterpress chapbook printed "on a Miller and Richard Albion press serial | number 4993 built in 1898, which still works | beautifully." From the book:

Vox gameshark bow at charge about won't nest
below this level let's fall in less than three hamfist
fruitful subsong, fold to tract. Fairlight erotic plot
frequency were in blank skin attack envelope were

position referral µ-opioid smash and grab nuit
blanche mother snake. How shine when she turbo
cannot, gear itch up. Overwing petal scram syrinx
fleet at suck, babel dive nucleate field will seeding.

Came out warning chevron also did breach adverse
camber, hazard embryo daydream hold shy focus
fast. Unmediate sewage calypso sync invidious 2.0
ever had she never sex for evidence, split fatigue.

Ryan Dobran. Ding Ding. Critical Documents 2009.

Josh Stanley. Contranight Escha Black. Critical Documents 2010.

Pamphlets from the Cambridge Reading Series, all of which can be downloaded from the CRS site. Each of the pamphlets features the work of two poets and brief but incisive commentaries on those poets by the organizers.

HERIBERTO YÉPEZ ON HYBRIDITY

2011-05-06T07:14:00.000-07:00

Just now coming round to Heriberto Yépez's usefully aggressive definition of "hybrid" for a cross-cultural poetics "dictionary." The definition seems wonderfully congruent with Keith Tuma's recent essay "After the Bubble" (Chicago Review 55:3/4):

HYBRID. Postmodernism’s key notion, maybe the notion that sustains most postmodernism’s quackery. Through the illusion of hybridism contradiction is obscured, turned commodity. Not able to recognize and accept the other in its complete otherness, we turn it into hybrid, i.e., half me, similar to Us. (Not Other). Not Either/Or but always proper. Property. Not completely stranger. ‘Mixed’. In denial of otherness we constructed ‘hybrid’. We have naturalized the ‘hybrid’ category so much, that the mere mention of this category as purely cultural, artificial, contextualized (in imperialistic epistemology) seems a ‘menace’, an evil return to ‘Nationalism’ or ‘Pure’. Using the ‘hybrid’ category we have remained Hegelian. We arrive to syntheses. (Isn’t that wonderful, daddy?) We prevent radical dialectics to take place. ‘Hybrid’ has taken control of cultural industries, such as music where fusion has become institutionalized. Such happens also in the arts and writing communities, where being ‘hybrid’ is the key to enter. And become “trend”. In the same way, ‘activism’ is replacing ‘revolution’, ‘hybrid’ replaced ‘contradiction’—and denies the real relationship between One and the Other. Otherness. Hybrid is sameness. Hybrid tends to become Happy Hybrid. That’s why the hybrid category plays so well in ‘postmodern’ discourse. A capitalistic notion to kill rupture. No negation anymore! Let settle down with hybridism, ok? Don’t even talk about resistance. But resistance is what really takes place where hybridism is now used. Resistance doesn’t mean borders or ‘essences’ are not transgressed. To the contrary. It means participants enter into a strong relationship. A magnetic field where attraction and repellence both take place. Resistance is all about magnetism. And the hybrid category is all about denying resistance.

Beyond what I recognize as a misreading of the Hegelian dialectic (like economic determination in the last instance, the end of history never arrives; nor is the moment of aufhebung reducible to the simple notion of a crudely transubstantiating synthesis), Yépez's clear insistence that the illusion of hybridity masks and reifies contradiction arrives as a breath of less polluted air at a moment when productively antagonistic differences are absorbed, willed to the outskirts or wholly disappeared under the mantle of hybridity. In other words, the manic production of cuddly labradoodles will never yield an efficacious poetics that adequately assuages the murderous rage of grossly mistreated pit bulls.

However embarrassing, I was totally unaware of Yépez's work until Donald Wellman addressed it at the March 2010 Olson conference in Worcester, Mass. Thinking through Yépez's study of Olson, El imperio de la neomemoria (Almadia 2007), Wellman's talk was something of a provocation oriented toward addressing Olson's potential complicity in US economic and cultural hegemony. The talk created quite a stir, generating as a result an exceptionally productive and in fact essential conversation. During the talk Wellman offered his own generous translation of a couple passages from Yépez's Olson study, one which is specifically apropos to Yépez's thoughts on hybridity:

Olson mixes himself with the other. He bases his knowledge of the other in his own self knowledge. From Dahlberg, Pound and Cagli, he went on, shortly after, to Frances Boldereff and Robert Creeley. If the work of Olson refers centrally to expansion in the direction of the other, toward the fusion and appropriation of it, this incorporation also works at the limits of his own personal existence. Olson devours the other, he consumes it to support his own life and, at the same time, he is devoured by his catch. The whale who devours Job. Olson is fundamentally a cannibal. And he is also the cannibalized.

This is no doubt one among many readings of Olson and I don't think Yépez is calling for an out-of-hand dismissal of Olson. But the reading Yépez offers calls into question Olson's (occasional) preference for hybridity. Take, for example, Olson's invitation to Ed Dorn to take up the narrative of "Jim Beckwith" (James Beckwourth). Born into slavery in Virginia, Beckwourth was paternally of Irish and English extraction and maternally African-American. Beckwourth's father, Sir Jennings Beckwourth, moved west in 1809, taking his son with him. Later a fur trapper and mountain man, James Beckwourth lived among the Crow population for several years, taking up Crow practices and behaviors. Framed by Olson as "our kind" of "You-liss-seas," Beckwourth is for Olson the embodiment of hybridity and migration, a figure that effectively absorbs and synthesizes the antagonism of encounter as he moves across the landscape. Ed Dorn tacitly refused to take up Olson's invitation to investigate Beckwourth, privileging instead figures associated with the rapid and monopolizing circulation of culture and capital, figures like Daniel Drew, Howard Hughes and Walt Disney, figures Dorn believed signified a more accurate and no doubt less attractive "national soul" grounded in insatiable accumulation rather than hybridity. Here Dorn and Yépez are in agreement.

AMERICAN EXPRESS | CASTING OUT THE MONEY CHANGERS

2011-04-24T05:23:00.001-07:00

Marchands du Temple; Cleansing the Temple. Passover coincides with Easter. Blake: "As Unity is the cloke of folly so Goodness is the cloke of Knavery Those who will have Unity exclusively in Homer come out with a Moral like a sting in the tail" ("On Homers Poetry"). When Mel Gibson invited my wife, Libya ...

[An ebay auction titled "TYRE SHEKEL 30 PIECES of SILVER Judas Christ Greek Coin" describes a Tyrian coin struck 90-89 BC: "Tyrian shekels (Tyrian tetradrachmas) were coins of Tyre, which in the Roman Empire took on an unusual role as the medium of payment for the Temple tax in Jerusalem, and subsequently gained notoriety as a likely mode of payment for Judas Iscariot. The coins bore the likeness of the Phoenician god Melqart or Baal, accepted as the Olympian Herakles by the Greeks and derided as Beelzebub by Jews in the time of the Seleucids, wearing the laurel reflecting his role in the Tyrian games and the Ancient Olympics. These coins, the size of a modern Israeli half-shekel, were minted in Israel, but were required to bear this image by the Romans to avoid accusations that the Jews were given autonomy."]

When Mel Gibson invited my wife, Rancière: "The equality of the written word is not the same thing as the equality of exchange. The democracy of the written word does not come down to the arbitrary nature of signs. When Plato criticizes the availability of the written word, he calls into question a form of unsupervised appropriation of language that leads to the corruption of legitimacy. The circulation of the written word destroys the principle of legitimacy that would have the circulation of language be such that it leaves the proper transmitter and goes to the proper receiver by the proper channel. 'Proper' language is guaranteed by a 'proper' distribution of bodies. The written word opens up a space of random appropriation, establishes a principle of untamed difference that is altogether unlike the universal exchangeability of commodities. To put it very crudely, you cannot lay your hands on capital like you can lay your hands on the written word" (The Politics of Aesthetics).

CYCLIC SERIAL ZENITHS FROM THE FLUX

2011-04-22T06:31:00.000-07:00

Andrew Duncan's painstakingly edited run of Joseph Gordon Macleod poems, Cyclic Serial Zeniths from the Flux (Waterloo Press 2009) appears to have been as quickly forgotten as Macleod's work was the first time around. Aside from brief mention in the TLS or the books blog at The Guardian, the selection has fallen quietly away — I mean, I don't get the sense anyone's actively reading Macleod, though of course there may be a substantial readership out there somewhere.

Macleod's Ecliptic, out of print since its publication through Faber in 1930, is an utterly singular poem, or a poem of singular force, one of the few that manages to sustain an intense and electric charge across the whole of its sixty-some-odd pages. The poem is architecturally underpinned by the diurnal confabulations of the Zodiac, each of the twelve signs signaling a transient stage in a "single" consciousness. Duncan selects three of the twelve sections: Taurus, Cancer, Leo. Although "Cancer" has continued to circulate with a surprising measure of consistency since The Ecliptic first appeared in 1930 (cf. Rexroth's New British Poets; Keith Tuma's Oxford anth of 20th-c British and Irish po), "Taurus" and "Leo" appear here in print for the first time in eighty years. A stretch from "Leo":

Wherefore he turns, oblivious of the yells
Desiderative employers and pert damosels
(With similar intents) direct at him —
If he is Lion, he has Lion's whim —
Yet not forgetting manners due to friends
Nor due success honorarium
He bows the compass of the auditorium,
And walks away. And so the contest ends.

Macleod's approach to diction is wholly his own. Syntactic formations are largely normative, prosody and meter are, with some exceptions, remarkably conventional in the early poems. But his diction radically defamiliarizes the work, particularly The Ecliptic and his second long poem (unpublished during his life) Foray of Centaurs. Bunting — with Pound one of Macleod's earliest supporters — had little use for Foray, regarded the poem as an exhausting failure. But Bunting's dismissal of the poem is a little baffling and no doubt partially misinformed, or at the very least hasty. This from "The World Bursts Like a Pod" (1936 version of Foray):

Deliberately broken cycloid, bitten pediment,
correctly ovolated entablature
and hexastyle unpinned by utile dummy or urn:
the lawn's compaction and the tailored topiary,
salvias uniform in column of platoons,
the muted parterre quasi-semi-italianate:
these masses gather, these lines join
where apsed marquee lies anchored
within the balustrade,
and the wedding breakfast is spread, and metal peacocks
share mulberries with enamelled chinese pheasants.

The striking distance is reduced considerably in such passages; we encounter the brute force of an unfamiliar object. The objects closest to us are utterly alien. And this radical unfamiliarity is delivered through wholly conventional means: viz. largely Anglophone words arranged in completely conventional linguistic formations. The poem offers the promise of meaning, but this meaning is persistently deferred. And what we have is not indeterminacy or the free and unanchored play of language but philological saturation and overdetermination (a crucial distinction that needs further consideration).

Duncan's Macleod edition excludes three-quarters of The Ecliptic, but it offers the entirety of Foray and a rich selection of Drinan poems (by the late thirties Macleod begins publishing poetry under the name "Adam Drinan"; Duncan notes in his smartly titled introduction "The Gaelic-Soviet-Greek Triangle": "The books Macleod published as 'Adam Drinan' are Socialist-documentary works, usually set in the Hebrides, which are seen as a region ruined by Capitalism." The opacity that characterizes the earlier poems, "modernist" in orientation, is exchanged for a faux accessibility, but the facility with language Macleod demonstrates in his earlier poems resonates through the Drinan poems, most of them, like The Ecliptic and Foray, book-length works, work given often to the figure of the book and the possibilities available in the flexible arc of ballad-like narrative structures. The Cove (1940). Men of the Rocks (1942). Women of the Happy Island (1944). Others.

REITHA PATTISON HER FABLES

2011-04-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

ANTERIOR ADDENDUM: Prefacing statements below with a stretch from Ryan Dobran's open-circuit comment on Pattison's fables included in the pamphlet published in conjunction with her February 18 reading at Cambridge: "The movement from without and then further through and back within translation is the discovery of amplified historicity, of vectors both deeply intimate and ejected; by routing the potential overlaps, mismatches, frictive displacements, and subtle solutions, the acoustics of belief dissipate by heady imposition."

____________________________

Loathe to comment for fear of diminishing the splendor of their force, but here a couple of Reitha Pattison's extraordinary fables (Some Fables, Grasp Press, 2011):

IV

Mistaken for fame, notoriety clings
tourniqueted in the height of guise.
This tumble in armour from the talons
of greed or want is highly instructive.
Some caress away the indelible mark
written broadside on the itching pelt.
In alien furs words reveal the pitcher
empty. Deceit in a dust bath there
on the lane often floors the moralist,
tricks the carrion's rapt onlooker.

[I see now in the Cambridge pamphlet that Pattison read from John Ogilby's 1651 Fables, paraphrasal politicization of Aesop's. Ogilby on Aesop: "On his plain Song I Descanted, on his short and pithy Sayings, Paraphras'd, raising my voice to such a height, I took my degree amongst the minor Poets."]

IX

The cock missed the asterism of the gem.
Not eating wisdom or starlight his red eyes
focus only on corn which at least sticks
to the ribs. Grounded meal is a celestial
mirror; axis mundi lies in a yard tended
by an unregenerate astrolabe, the other
element braced in a dun husk. Farmers
and vipers are plangent for their venom,
jewel-like nearer veracity than being
left in snow, which makes a frail
parable, more reptilian comitas in scales.

In all twenty fables split down the middle, separated into two books; a diadic construction that supplements poems targeting the self-congratulatory constructedness of the imagined distance rescuing human civilization from a pure animality; targeting, too, the reduction of animals, their wholesale ghettoization, by way of a reason that assuages the irreconcilable uncertainties of a far more savage, fundamentally economic beast.

XIV

No deluge: now the dove's mouth
carries grass. The undersong of
the "economic cosmos" is heard in
the meadow where the herbicides
work swift harm for a margin like
inharmonic blue prairie fires. In
this one, sous get stone again, miser
bereft, the pain is phantasmal or
in the pocket, coffered in the grove
in locked land of external goodness
for: "who dothe enuy at the treasury?"

Pattison's fables offer an opportunity to refuse the allure of shiny stones — of aggressive writing strategies and grandiose forms of poetic production — and take up the poem as the pathological or pathetic lyric space of an active and internally explosive thinking. The pathetic is puny, small in its way. There is a recognition, or more a valorization, in these poems of smallness, the character of one's scale among others. Naming the undersong, registering its destructive force, seems essential; or "Excessive conceit of hides: whichever beast | ventriloquises its instinct for the fabulist | through the sockets of quarry can't prop | up the dictum."

SPICER HIS BEOWULF (ROUGH NOTES ON INSURGENT PHILOLOGY)

2011-03-17T19:49:00.000-07:00

Nothing so postcolonial as the New Philology, but a reimagined philology that likewise dispenses with the eighteenth-century antiquarian's creepy devotion to dusty parchment and linguistically determined claims to power, race and nation. Even Thomas Jefferson was an amateur Anglo-Saxonist (recall the First Barbary War, the first US assault on the Muslim world in 1805; or, later, when Seamus Heaney's Beowulf fell from Faber like Little Boy from the Enola Gay.

Jack Spicer's Beowulf is work of a markedly different variety. Brought out as part of the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and collaboratively edited by David Hadbawnik and Sean Reynolds, Spicer's raw and unfinished translation of the Anglo-Saxon is overwhelming. Until now — and aside from, say, his Troilus or The Holy Grail — there has been little in the whole of Spicer's formally published work that points so boldly to his scholarly investment in the Anglo-Saxon and medieval.

Hadbawnik frames Spicer's translation with an extensive introduction to the work, and what I find far more interesting than Spicer's interest in Beowulf — or any investment Duncan or Blaser had in the medieval — is Hadbawnik's interest in it all. Hadbawnik's introduction is careful work built not only on an intimate familiarity with the poetries of the Berkeley Renaissance but with medievalism as a discipline — that is, Hadbawnik comes to Spicer with formal training in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Medieval Latin and any other number of languages essential to a responsible appraisal of the medieval. But — and I may be wrong in assuming this — Hadbawnik's deeper, more fundamental interest appears to lie in the production of poetry and an investigation of language itself (viz. I'm not sure his desire is to participate in the practice of Anglo-Saxon or medieval studies in the same way scholars like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Louise Fradenberg or Patricia Ingham have). So I am reminded of Alan Halsey's or Steve McCaffery's neoantiquarianism, Bill Griffith's Anglo-Saxon scholarship — or, more recently, Geraldine Monk's poetic excavation of Sheffield, Caroline Bergval's foray into Middle English, Andrea Brady's commitment to Early Modern studies, Keston Sutherland's theorization of a conceptual philology (built on a rigorous familiarity with the rise of German philology), Andrew Rippeon's attention to eighteenth and nineteenth century theorizations of lyric practice, the incredible scope of Rob Halpern's inquiries into German and French Romanticism, and Michael Cross' various interest in Icelandic sagas. All of these come to me first and foremost as poets, or poet-critics, whose scholarly commitments are given to the construction of an efficacious poetics. And this is not to say their scholarship is secondary or subordinate to their work as poets, but I do believe their scholarly work is driven by deep commitments that extend far beyond the disciplinary limits this work emerges out of.

The type of work I'm addressing here and which I see embodied in Hadbawnik's devotion to a rigorous study of the medieval and its reception across centuries — at bottom brutal, painstaking work — is something utterly singular and wholly distinct from the usual scholarship given to twentieth century or contemporary poetries. Not sure what to call it, or that it needs to be named at all, but I see this work as a sort of radically reimagined philology, oriented toward questions of language and history and fundamentally different than the more hermeneutically oriented critical work produced by poets during the 80s and 90s. This work is given to the matter of history differently than, say, the theorizations and critical work constructed by many Language poets (i.e. Silliman, Bernstein, Hejinian, Andrews, Watten). This work extends well beyond critiques of interpretive processes and, as such, the work seems — or at least feels — more contiguous with what we encounter in Prynne's commentary on Wordsworth or his critique of Saussure and structuralism. The materials of history are imagined and engaged differently; the speculative character of the work takes into its purview vast panoramas that allow for critiques of cultural tendencies and practices as they develop across centuries.

Thinking in broad strokes here — and 2007 MLA president Michael Holquist's odd call for a return to philology in the classical sense hasn't escaped me — but perhaps something more in line with Nietzsche, "We Philologists": "To make the individual uncomfortable is my task," or, earlier, commenting on the weaknesses of nineteenth century philology and the unconscious (ideology, hegemony, or culture in other languages:

It is the task of education to change certain conscious actions and habits into more or less unconscious ones; and the history of mankind is in this sense its education. The philologist now practices unconsciously a number of such occupations and habits. It is my object to ascertain how his power, that is, his instinctive methods of work, is the result of activities which were formerly conscious, but which he has gradually come to feel as such no longer: but that consciousness consisted of prejudices. The present power of philologists is based upon these prejudices ...

We might say the same about the contemporary English Department, or the humanities as a whole, or what Spicer refers to more broadly in Admonitions as "the English Department of the spirit":

It was not my anger or my frustration that got in the way of my poetry but the fact that I viewed each anger and each frustration as unique — something to be converted into poetry as one would exchange foreign money. I learned this from the English Department (and from the English Department of the spirit — that great quagmire that lurks at the bottom of us all) and it ruined ten years of my poetry.

(viz. Gavin Douglas' "Conscience": "And fra conscience the con thay clip away, | And maid of conscience science and na mair." Or the whole of the opening paragraph from Ryan Dobran's introduction to the Prynne number of Glossator:

In the ‘Preface’ to Daybreak, Friedrich Nietzsche states his preference for lento, for what Roman Jakobson would pass along to his students as the definition of philology: slow reading. Nietzsche writes: “For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of ‘work,’ that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book....” There is no mistaking this model of devotion, which presumably inheres to all good philological readers: the physiological intimacy with the texts, reading with recursive parafovea, attending to obscurity with curiosity and research; all of these approximate a rough ethics of thinking the text, rather than about the text as a completed or completable event. Nietzsche’s critique of the ‘present-moment’ figure, whose speedy “work” must hasten to meet the mass allotment of task, whose epitomization of sameness would later become un-lost in the illusory image-mediation of Debord’s spectacle, is also a call for commentarial labor, which invokes the pleasure of the text, as much as it enhances perceptivity and description of those yet unmarked potentialities into which reading may move, pre-articulate feeling born of pre-representation, prior to the delimitation of paraphrasis and readerly introjection. If the slow reading of the philologist aims to complicate presumed epistemological achievement, knowledge as circumscribed locus for the residence of belief, then the speed-reading of the sensationalist requires the ideological vacuity of that which can never begin, for its historical valency is anoxic; in remission without desire for truth-claims, it bites the first idea it thinks, sloughing off the pressures of precision for quotidian ressentiment. While interpretation can end, commentary is endless.

Care or a notion of committedness — a particular type of attention — can, no doubt, stand in as an adequate substitute for slow (which I fear might elide the energy and urgency of the work at hand if construed too narrowly). The point is, I believe, as Dobran suggests, to avoid "the speed-reading of the sensationalist" that too hastily "bites the first idea it thinks" in a desperate effort to close the circuit and get on with business.

AGAINST POLICE REALITY: SEAN BONNEY ON ANNA MENDELSSOHN

2011-03-14T11:16:00.000-07:00

The Feb/Mar number of The Poetry Project Newsletter features an excellent essay by Sean Bonney on poet-activist Anna Mendelssohn. Using the simplest of language, the essay begins with a seemingly self-evident but too often ignored appeal:

If you want to find good poetry written in Britain, you have to go looking for it: with very few exceptions, it is hidden away behind a poetry of more or less genteel self-expression, metrical sentimentalities and easily digested liberal homilies that are essentially reports on police reality.

Reading English and American literature through the late 1960s at the University of Essex — at a moment when Donald Davie, Ed Dorn and Elaine Feinstein were among the faculty — Mendolssohn dropped out a year before completing the degree. In the bio note attached to her work in Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos, which Bonney quotes, Mendelssohn writes: "My academic career was brought to an abrupt halt in 1967 by harassment, both political and emotional. Upon returning [from Turkey] to this country, in 1970, I was attacked, my own poetry seized, and my person threatened with strangulation if I dared utter one word of public criticism. I was unable to return to university at that point and was silenced."

Such a note could, I suspect, be dismissed as the hyperbolic excesses of an unprovoked paranoia were it not for her arrest and imprisonment in 1971. Convicted as one of the "Stoke Newington Eight" for her alleged involvement in a series of bombings attributed to The Angry Brigade, Mendelssohn served seven years on a ten year conviction. By the mid 1980s Mendelssohn relocated to Cambridge, where she resumed studying literature and writing, falling in with Peter Riley, Rod Mengham and others who would publish a small portion of her poetic output through Poetical Histories and Equipage. In a December 15, 2009 obituary at the Guardian, Riley writes:

Anna's legacy, apart from a room heaped to the ceiling with books, poetry manuscripts and drawings, lies in her unique artistic temperament, beholden to no cultural dictates, fiercely reclaiming her rights as a woman and Jew, but partaking equally in art as a theatre of linguistic and visual delight.

Bonney seems most interested in Mendelssohn's unbeholdenness, but for Bonney the poetry Mendelssohn produced during the 1980s is not just detached from cultural norms and dominant tendencies; her poetry embodies and enacts a poetics of total refusal and unrelenting struggle:

Mendelssohn's utopian society of art is overridden and taken away by the sentences of authority. It is unsurprising, then, that a dominant mood in Mendelssohn's work is anxiety, and even a sense of persecution. It is a political poetry that is fully aware of the limits of what is permitted in bourgeois society, that understands that for a revolutionary, or ex-revolutionary, the prison is the centre and the perimeter of permitted life.

Further on Bonney reads Mendelssohn's poetry through the contradictions and interpenetrations of interiority and exteriority, inside and outside:

As far as Mendelssohn's enemies are concerned, and these are many — not only judges but, variously, pompous poets, social workers, narrow-minded politicos and patriarchal imbeciles of all sorts — it [Mendolssohn's poetry] is a communication that speaks to them in order to deny their ability to read, and to refuse them a place within the poem. It is an outsidedness that also has nothing to do with the easy conformity of the poet as some kind of rebel. Mendelssohn is no rebel; the content of her refusal to communicate with her enemies is one that demands the possibility of communication, and of the reality of a community that can exist despite the accusations of its incomprehensibility and illegitimacy. In the face of those who would have "silenced" her, the response is to speak a language to which they have no access.

If I read this correctly, the poem appears to perform — or simply exist — as a hermetically and hermeneutically sealed terrorist cell within the polis, an impenetrable instance of urban blight that aspires toward its own renewal by otherwise unavailable means. Especially affirming in Bonney's reading of Mendelssohn is his clear rejection of the self-congratulatory outsider status too often assigned to decidedly political poetries. The preference is for taking and occupying the center rather than fetishizing our distance from it.

SO LONG COLLECTIVE BARGAINING HELLO GOOD TIMES

2011-03-10T07:26:00.000-08:00

While the price of arabica coffee will unfortunately shoot up due to rising temperatures in Columbia, the cost of a lambswool cardigan from LL Bean's impressive spring catalog remains competitive with last year's prices ($79.50). Sweater weather is approaching. In other words, the combined net worth of Bill Gates ($54 billion) and Warren Buffet ($45 billion) can easily provide every American child living below the federal poverty level (projections indicate this will soon be 25% of all US children) with a warm lambswool sweater to stylishly arm these starving children against the unforgiving vicissitudes of a cool spring breeze, thus enabling the extraordinary potential each of these children hold deep within their ambitious little hearts. This is giving back. This is philanthropy. Any one of these children might be tomorrow's astronauts working to terraform otherwise uninhabitable planets once we're ready to discard this one and I, like most sensible Americans, want to grow old on the moon.

These are indeed heartbreaking times when every intrepid self-styled poet-activist and cultural critic cannot have a Thule storage shell securely strapped to the roof of their fashionable but eco-friendly Subaru Outback. And while this humble blogger is shamefully ignorant of the finer points of fiscal responsibility, I do have a potentially productive proposal for state-level legislation that might effectively reboot our persistently failing economy and provide a form of renewable energy.

The legislation I propose would contractually oblige every child living just above the poverty line to physically extract fuel-rich blubber from each and every US adult above the 25% income tax bracket according to Internal Revenue Code (though this proposal is generously based on Adjusted Gross Income rather than Total Income). State governments would be responsible for providing each child with four essential tools: a head spade, a boarding knife, a blubber pike and a gaff. The child would then use these tools to extract the blubber from reasonably wealthy adults, including parents, in strips which would then be thrown into a blubber bank and processed into energy-producing fuel. Since starving, powerless children colloquially refer to this ancient but long since forgotten practice as "flensing the rich," the title of the legislation I propose here is the Tension Relief and Flensing Fuel Internecine-Cooperation (TRAFFIC) Act. This act would not only reignite the economy by literally setting fire to the otherwise inactive but rapidly accumulating blubber of the rich, it would also make of every child a productive civil servant of the demos, each an essential component of the world's most internally dynamic and globally aggressive democracy.

Children living below the poverty line are naturally too weak from malnutrition to be tasked with the labor intensive but fulfilling duty of flensing the rich. In order to raise these children to a standard of health suitable for the practice of flensing, the TRAFFIC Act also includes a clause that would require anyone who manages to survive the extraction of their blubber to spoon feed these children the same impressive range of organic groceries, truffles and foie gras that so inflated the fuel-rich flesh of the wealthy in the first place.

Aside from the desire to make flensing a household word again — because it is was, long before the second and even first generation iPhone, a hallowed and distinctly American practice — this call for a return to flensing is built on the simple, delightfully imbecilic Hoosier belief that, if America is to invest in anything in order to rekindle its flagging economy, America should invest in Americans. Flensing is no less American than baseball. And just as most any American child knows how to swing a bat, it is not unreasonable to imagine the delight American children will take in wielding a blubber pike.

Many Americans would agree Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is one of the most inspiring texts generated in an uncertain time of turmoil, difficulty and internecine strife. A similarly inspiring but widely ignored document informed by the same historically transcendental proposition is Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. This book-length work is First Mate Owen Chase's account of the 1820 wreck of the whaling vessel that departed from Nantucket, crossed round the horn from the Atlantic to the Pacific and suffered the devastating attack of an immense but typically docile creature, a sperm whale as large as and far stronger than the vessel that so ruthlessly hunted it. What strikes me about Chase's narrative — and what Melville fails to draw on in Moby-Dick — is how the crew of the Essex behave after the wreck. Moby-Dick ends with wreckage, but Chase's narrative persists onward, toward full post-traumatic eco-political recovery. After a brief respite on a fairly barren and uninhabited island following the wreck, the crew of the Essex are for months adrift, starving on the open ocean in three small whale boats. But, by way of what I recognize as a distinctly American order of entrepreneurial ingenuity and democratic will, the intrepid crew of the Essex agree to begin eating each other in order to survive. Of course, not all of them survive the outcome of the democratic process (all must make sacrifices) but what I applaud here is the visionary strength of the crew: they knew in advance, as if inspired by God, that the only road to spiritual, emotional, fiscal and political recovery involved feasting on one another and, in the worst of times, even sucking the marrow from a comrade's bones.

But what, you ask, does any of this have to do with flensing? Well, flensing creatures far larger but far less aggressive than the crew of the Essex is what first threw the characteristically peaceful sperm whale into the uncontrollable rage that sank the Essex in the first place. And with the same strength of spirit that successfully defended the Alamo, the resilient crew survived by selflessly flensing each other. From this perspective, reimagining one of the more colorful practices responsible for setting these hard-boiled heroic Americans adrift nearly two centuries ago seems, at the very least, apropos.

RECENTLY: SOUS LES PAVÉS & ECCOLINGUISTICS

2011-03-07T09:51:00.000-08:00

Sous Les Pavés (edited by Micah Robbins out of Dallas, Texas) and Eccolinguistics (edited by Jared Schickling out of Farmington, Maine) are two relatively new print magazines, both produced in much the same way: photocopy or desktop printer, a staple in the upper left corner. The description at the Sous Les Pavés site claims SLP

. . . is a bi-monthly newsletter of poetry, prose, ideas & opinions, reviews, photo documentaries, b/w artwork and letters of all kinds. It is conceived in the spirit & tradition of THE FLOATING BEAR, FUCK YOU, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, ROLLING STOCK, THE REALIST, THE DIGGER PAPERS, INTERNATIONALE SITUATIONNISTE, THE BLACK PANTHER INTERCOMMUNAL NEWS SERVICE, PROFANE EXISTENCE and any number of lo-fi no-frills PUNK ZINES & COMMUNITY PAPERS. At a time when much discourse circulates amid the instantaneous push-n-pull of the blogosphere – some of which is sharp, but much of which is soggy pulp – we seek to slow down, pause, and cultivate thoughtful responses to our collective troubles before delivering a polemical flux of ideation via the hands & feet of the world’s postal workers

The call for pause toward the end of the statement reminds me a bit of P. Inman's interesting comments on the utility of "slow writing":

Against it. The overwhelming noise of late capitalism. The omnipresent signal of late capital (of "product" minus production) wearing away at everything else: at anything apart, anything aside from its own tautologism. "Noise [visual, auditory] as a weapon ... " The communications [sic] network driving not only the superstructural, but the economic & political as well. "Electrification" given a perverse twist with the digitalization of banking, commerce, investment, production, text, weapons delivery &&&.

Inman's statement here, delivered as part of the Philly Talks series in November 1999, concerns the production of poetry rather than editing practices, but these thoughts are no less applicable to editing and publishing practices. Inman's call, if I read it correctly, is to offer "an interruption in the ongoing transmission" of capital, and this is something I think magazines like SLP and Eccolinguistics do offer and perform.

Either way, both are magazines I've had the good fortune of contributing to in recent months and both are doing work I recognize as incredibly meaningful.

In addition to several stunning collages from Steve Dalchinsky, the inaugural issue of Eccolinguistics includes writing by Patrick James Dunagan, Whit Griffin, W. Scott Howard, Mary Kasimor, Michael Leong, E.J. McAdams, Deborah Meadows, Philip Meersman, Jonathan Minton, Nate Pritts, Chuck Richardson, Andrew Schelling, Brandon Shimoda and Tyrone Williams. Williams' brief statement on education and poverty in America is especially charged:

The state of American education is not an index of our collective lack of intelligence but a willfully obstinate underdeveloped intelligence. In the current cultural climate of tabloid television news, talk radio muckraking, corrupt political processes and unethical business practices, it is impossible to assess anyone's intelligence quotient, especially since that process itself is little more than the institutionalization of a glorified house of mirrors.

The most recent number of SLP (1.3) is given to protest: "... the past year has witnessed a resurgence of direct-action politics in the streets of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. These actions have taken new and surprising forms and have developed in ways that indicate immense complexities that are invariably distorted by the chatter of the mainstream media. In an effort to both register and understand something of these events beyond the usual clichés, the current issue is largely given over to individuals with first-hand experience of the protests in the UK and is entirely dedicated to the spirit of dissent and revolt." Contributors include Jay James May, Lara Buckerton, Frances Kruk, Susan Briante, Francesca Lisette, Goat far DT, Sean Bonney, Justin Katko, Elliott Colla, Debrah Morkun, Tomas Weber, Linh Dinh, Danny Hayward, Keston Sutherland, Pocahontis Mildew, Sommer Browning, Collective Anon, j/j hastain and David Hadbawnik.

LZ = LIONEL ZIPRIN NOT LOUIS ZUKOFSKY

2011-03-07T06:46:00.000-08:00

Of the five poets Asa Benveniste's Atoz Formula is dedicated to, it turns out "LZ" is not Louis Zukofsky but NYC poet and rabbi Lionel Ziprin. What are the odds, right? Kyle Schlesinger was kind enough to alert me to this fact after receiving a message from poet and film critic Bill Sherman. Schlesinger also forwarded a link to the following short film, a wonder to behold:

Stranger still, it seems Ziprin did a stint during the mid 1960s as a comic book writer for Dell Publishing: "... I wrote a series of comic books on every battle in the Pacific and European theaters."

SUSAN HOWE AWARDED BOLLINGEN

2011-02-24T13:22:00.000-08:00

More often than not I hold prizes of any order in absolute contempt. In fact, I always hold prizes and awards in contempt. As Charles Ives once smartly remarked, "Prizes are badges of mediocrity." But to find Susan Howe awarded the Bollingen brings an incredible joy to the heart. For Howe specifically — no less than Pound, who famously received the first Bollingen Prize — accolades feel well deserved and a long time coming, the Bollingen in particular if only for the prize's connection to its first recipient in 1949. As most any student of Howe must know, the presence of Pound in her courses (or, for that matter, Wallace Stevens who was awarded the prize in 1950) was inescapable. For Howe, Pound and Stevens — along with Melville and Dickinson, in fact the whole of the nineteenth century — were permanent parts of the curriculum, no matter the theme of a course. And, however wrong I might be, I sense any responsible cultural genealogy would situate Howe closer to a figure like Pound than to the vast majority of her contemporaries. Her poetry has always been work of a wholly singular order, work unlike anything produced by her contemporaries.

From the early 1990s through 2007 Howe taught in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo and the energy, the deep care, she invested in her teaching practices was commensurate with the energies she devoted to poetic production. In 2007, the year Howe retired, Kyle Schlesinger published through Cuneiform Press I Have Imagined A Center // Wilder Than This Region, a touching and useful selection of reflections from former students on her pedagogical practice. Edited by Sarah Campbell, the book includes comments and essays from Barbara Cole, Richard Deming, Thom Donovan, Zach Finch, Ben Friedlander, Jena Osman, Sasha Steensen, Jonathan Skinner, Juliana Spahr, Elizabeth Willis, Peter Gizzi, Schlesinger and others. Dozens of other former students could have easily been included — particularly Michael Cross, one of the last students whose dissertation she played a major role in guiding — but I imagine any book-length festschrift devoted to a figure like Howe introduces impossible limits. In any case, Jonathan Skinner recalling a seminar with Howe:

We read essays by Emerson or poems by Stevens as — in Susan's words — "allegories of the sublime power of their rhythm." Susan's seminar on "Conversion Experiences" was a reconnoitering the border life of this power, exploring the religious background of American writing, especially as expressed in the colonial "conversion narrative." (Noting Quaker, Calvinist, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Lutheran, Pietist, Moravian, Swedenborgian and other religious roots in American writers from Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and Melville to James, Stein, Stevens, Eliot and Duncan, Susan would exclaim, "Religion — you've got to deal with it!") Only conversion, it seemed, could express the violence entailed in daring to write, to begin on a white page.

It's been a couple years since I looked at my own seminar notes from the last two course she offered at Buffalo — or the endless and heavily annotated piles of photocopies from any dictionary Emerson, Melville, Whitman or Dickinson may have used (Howe never taught the twentieth century without intellectually intensive and, for her, absolutely essential forays into the nineteenth). But I suspect the close attention to the historicity of language, the philological orientation of her reading, along with Steve McCaffery's neoantiquarianism, played no small role in shaping my own sense of the landscape, and this is something for which I am incredibly thankful, as I suspect all of her former students are. Awards and prizes are nothing less than grotesque, but in this case delighting in the destructively residual feudal illusions a prize like the Bollingen sustains is, at the very least, shamefully pleasant.

ANDREW RIPPEON | JULIA BLOCH (EPHEMERA)

2011-02-01T11:37:00.000-08:00

Overwhelmed by the sonic and textual fury — the appropriately enthusiastic and militant rhetoric — surrounding unfolding events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, I suddenly feel the need to take a moment of pause and take up, I suppose, the ephemeral — the bodies I mistakenly throw under the bus or the self-possessed babies who, in their calm, I recklessly throw out with the bath water. The privilege of taking a moment of pause, a second to step away from the catastrophe and collect ones head, is exactly that: a privilege. Or the order and specificity of the information one absorbs in a single glance is contingent on the contour and stability of the landscape itself. Or we step away in the wake of catastrophe. This is analysis not strategy.

I found a broadside today containing two poems, one by Andrew Rippeon and one from Julia Bloch, while rummaging through a stack of papers I haven't touched in months. The broadside was printed to mark the occasion of a Segue Series reading they did together in mid October. A beautiful piece of ephemera, well-designed, marked by an impressive measure of labor and care, but nonetheless easily lost.

Andrew Rippeon, untitled:

the hill I am of
ashes hence my father's
son I am no song my
father's name adrift a boat
upon waters the color of
the moon ...

rich tilth of lyme and
ashes turned the living tree
from which he bound hangs
become now water as
hath and doth flow
daily from mine eyes

*

if ocean's edge a
falls remembered sound of
pebbles' wash the portes open
the gates from the hinges this
empty terror houses rent
up and burnt

*

only rope alone against
such edge from which
he bound hangs and gleams
a moon the color of
this water ...

Opposite this poem, running against it, Julia Bloch, "The Selfist":

This narrow fortune, this
hand in absentia. Descent
of any kind, plus ascent.
I feigned a story but it's
all mine, all my mouth.
My spotless love hovers
with white wings. Every piece
of clothing I ever lost
adorns the arm I've got
twisted at my spine.
Darkening stems
of the lower plants —
you'll find me listening
for them to collapse in this heat.

Each of the poems has about it a sort of self-assuredness which, even if illusory, one might imagine as a sometimes sobering necessity. I mean the pace. The pace of each is sober, settled. They are quiet, suspended against one another, in contradiction, each by an ambling prosody with a long contemplative gait.

While the first italicized passage in Rippeon's poem is hard to place (I suspect Duncan and am most likely wrong), a quick search for the second passage points toward Thomas Gates, governor of the Jamestown colony, Jamestown, 1610, "rather as a ruin of some ancient fortification than that any living person might inhabit; the palisadoes tourn down, the portes open, the gates from the hinges..." In one sense Rippeon's use of italics appears to set Gates' phrase apart from the words in the poem preceding and following it. The removal of the comma from the quoted phrase, and the line broken where the comma would otherwise be, offers portes — points of entry and departure — as skeleton keys capable of opening a gate not at the latch, not where it was built to be open, but at a juncture specifically engineered to refuse disarticulation. I think, lazily perhaps, of the "hinges of civilization," and, as such, see the thinking embedded in this poem as congruent with the racket of conflict and upheaval, contradiction and pain; barred doors torn from the hinges against "this | empty terror."

BENVENISTE MOTTRAM RAWORTH ET AL MIMEO MIMEO DER VIER

2011-01-28T06:15:00.000-08:00

Sunshine in winter signals dry bitter cold in some regions. The long awaited fourth issue of Mimeo Mimeo, the British Poetry number, is in. Kyle Schlesinger and the reclusive Matt Chambers in conversation with Tom Raworth. A long out-of-print essay, the only essay ever published, by Asa Benveniste. Alan Halsey on Bill Griffiths and Pirate Press. Alastair Johnston in conversation with David Meltzer. Ken Edwards on UK small press publishing since 1960. Miles Champion talking with Trevor Winkfield. Richard Price on CAT-scanning the little magazine. This issue, edited by Schlesinger and Jed Birmingham, is one of the most exciting excavations of post-WWII British small press poetry since David Miller and Richard Price's British Poetry Magazines, 1914-2000 (British Library 2006). And I don't think my excitement yields any sort of overstatement.

Eric Mottram and Jeff Nuttall, 1984

The number contains several letters from Eric Mottram to Jeff Nuttall which alone are worth the price of admission. This, Feb 14, 1966 from NYU:

Don't let them edit you. Distrust all ambits and baxes and don't be badgered, buggered or otherwise fucked. And if you see Tom McGrath tell him I've started a universal hate-McGrath campaign which is revenge ... Ginsberg hasn't the foggiest idea what Angor Wat is or was, I mean a classic tyranny with those Buddhas he loves so much really the godking's repeated face ...

Astoundingly lucid. Spot on. And another mentioning Bunting, from Buffalo, July 12, 1966:

Basil Bunting's here, and I'm growing to respect and like him — we are in and out of each other's pockets, rooming next door, and offices next door, he talking endlessly about his long experiences and friendships. He gave his first reading in the USA here the other day — and the kids are beginning to dig : he is something, solid and clear.

There is no indication as to who procured, transcribed and edited the letters and no context offered for them. They just sort of drop from the sky, situated at the center of the issue, somewhat pleasantly and appropriately, following Halsey's comment on Griffiths (viz. Griffiths was first published by Mottram in Poetry Review in 1971; he went on to catalog the Mottram archive at Kings College.

The Winkfield interview with Miles Champion, too, is riveting, particularly Winkfield's comments on his early development as an artist:

MC: Your childhood interests in heraldry and medieval pageantry are well documented, and clearly manifest in your work. How did you get from these early preoccupations with flatness and ceremony to wanting, as a fifteen-year-old in late 1950s Leeds, to visit Kurt Schwitters' Merzbarn in the Lake District and Francis Bacon's "Figure Study II" at Batley Art Gallery?

TW: I've just been hit by a thunderbolt! I now realize after all these years that both represented escapes from Leeds -- the first of my long pilgrimages to see single works of art. I must have had a wanderlust even when I was fifteen. I'd already seen a Bacon painting of a man in a shower at Leeds Art Gallery, and the other nearest Bacon was only a twelve-mile bike ride away ... What was even more exciting -- and inconceivable, now that I think of it -- was my pilgrimage to Schwitters' Merzbarn in the middle of a snowy winter ... The farmer who owned the barn, a kind of gentleman farmer called Mr. Pierce, just gave me the key and let me stay inside the barn for as long as I wanted. It was pretty much as Schwitters had left it ten years before ...

From Bacon to Schwitters, Samuel Palmer to Marcel Duchamp, Arthur Cravan to Giuseppe Ungaretti, Winkfield thoughtfully trolls through some of the early sources that informed his distinct approach to the visual before bouncing to the US. Essential reading, like the whole of Mimeo Mimeo 4. Well designed, meticulously edited, thrilling contributions all around. Seriously, from cover to cover, no disappointments.

__________________________________________

ADDENDUM: BENVENISTE'S THE ATOZ FORMULA

Schlesinger's been doing quite a lot of work around Benveniste's Trigram Press — and I recall Michael Cross saying the 1977 Trigram edition of Zukofsky's "A" 22&23 was one of the books he most adored. The Benveniste essay reproduced in Mimeo Mimeo is Language: Enemy, Pursuit, a short essay produced as a slim volume by Alastair Johnston's Poltroon Press in an edition of 100. The essay is an explosive statement that offers Benveniste's view of language as something at once mystical and material:

Gematria. A fierce confrontation with word, one of the best ways to barricade oneself against the confused inlay. Linguistics is not language. No one "understands" language. Communication is the last word to use to describe its purpose. Though to every poet, as to every Kabbalist, there must be more to those words than their beauty. That their meaninglessness itself is part of the divine (linguistic) fabric.

Early in the summer, during a short spell in Vancouver, I had the good fortune of stumbling upon Benveniste's Atoz Formula, a book built around the juxtaposition of Roman and Hebrew alphabets. Benveniste designed, constructed and brought the book out as a Trigram publication in 1969. And it's a haunting book dedicated to five poets, Louis Zukofsky (LZ) and David Meltzer (DM) among them. I am not sure what to make of the book just yet, but Benveniste notes in a "Backword," "These poems ... are extensions of Tarot and other divination images ... but they are also 'alphabet' poems in the way that Cabalists interpret the alphabet."

Oddly, too, a chance encounter with Roy Fisher's "At the Grave of Asa Benveniste" earlier today while skimming for A Furnace: "publisher; not paid-up for a burial |with the Jews, nor wanting || to have your bones burned, | ground up and thrown, you're here || in the churchyard annexe, somebody's | hilltop field walled round, a place | like the vegetable garden of an old asylum ..."

THREE LECTURES & POSTCRIPT FROM MICHAEL BOUGHN

2011-01-22T20:09:00.000-08:00

Michael Boughn — who, with Victor Coleman, recently published his careful edition of Duncan's HD Book through U of C Press — has pulled together in a single volume three lectures given at Charles Olson centenary events in Buffalo and Vancouver (shuffaloff monograph #3 | 11 Conrad Ave | Toronto ON | M6G 3G4).

With, say, Ralph Maud and Kenneth Warren, Michael Boughn is one of the few who refuses to cherry-pick from the chaotically complex poetics developed by Olson; he angles instead to think Olson's poetics on its own terms, without, for example, abandoning Olson's drive to stitch together so many contradictory and otherwise incompatible philosophical systems: Jung, Corbin, Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead, etc.

Some passages:

If words are the bearers of sense well before they are manipulated into combinations of meaning which some idea controls, then the landscape itself becomes a kind of word and also a kind of body. This is cosmos that arises in an instantaneous knowing that is not relational, not based on proliferation of connections, but on the instantaneous presentation of a world. Always the sense of different knowings, of knowing differences, but knowing them here, as they array themselves around us, hard against the fact of what can be seen in one glance. Beyond that lie only stabilities of relation determined in abstraction.

&&&

Olson's notion of a secularization that loses nothing of the divine seems to begin with the recognition of a duplicity to both terms. Secular, then, not as a world divorced from the spiritual, a world of matter without sense, a world from which all vestiges of mind have been stripped other than as they are contained in some idea of the human. What Olson wants to hold on to here has to do with maintaining the, say, ordinariness of the world without some further reference.

Boughn mentions Jean-Luc Nancy here and there, appealing at times to Nancy, Deleuze and others to splay Olson open to a twenty-first century sensibility (viz. sense / perception), but I think Nancy's presence in his approach to Olson are writ a little larger than even he lets on — particularly Nancy's debt to Bataille. Nancy from Inoperative Community:

Divine places, without gods, with no god, are spread out everywhere around us, open and offered to our coming, to our going or to our presence, given up or promised to our visitation, to frequentation by those who are not men either, but who are there, in these places: ourselves, alone, out to meet that which we are not, and which the gods for their part have never been. These places, spread out everywhere, yield up and orient new spaces: they are no longer temples, but rather the opening up and the spacing out of the temples themselves, a dis-location with no reserve henceforth, with no more sacred enclosures — other tracks, other ways, other place for all who are their.

And I sense the secularization of the divine implies (or impels) its own inversion: the sacral character of the secular; gods exalted as men and men reduced to the puniness of gods (recall too Eli's aphoristic remark in Cormac McCarthy's Road: "There is no god and we are his prophets.").

I trust Boughn's reading of Olson in particular ways; there's a fidelity to Olson I find in Boughn, a refusal to instrumentalize Olson. His desire, like Maud's or Warren's or Chuck Stein's, is to take up Olson with a measure of care that keeps one from straining their own concerns, however small or large, through a nearly incomprehensible web of texts.

Boughn's monograph closes with an affirming manifesto-like postscript, a searing critique of careerism and professionalization. Titling the postscript "Major and minor bullshit in the new (old) literary discourse" he writes:

Given all the pressures toward success in the market of today's neo-liberal cultural grotesqueries, it probably should not come as surprise to find those old staid measures of literary excellence, major and minor, resurfacing. This, after all, is a time when the president of something called The Poetry Foundation can publicly declare that "the mind is a marketplace" and not be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail by raging poets. On the contrary, they line up in front of him with their hands out. It is a bit surprising, though, to find them popping up and circulating in the writing of poets who claim some historical relation to those poetries which sprang up in the 50's and 60's precisely as alternatives to the elegant formal constructions then dominating the academic imagination of what poetry's limits were.

The postscript rhymes well with Olson's lineated letter to the Gloucester Times, "A Scream to the Editor": "Bemoan a people who spend | beyond themselves, to flourish | and to further themselves." Here Olson speaks to citizens-not-poets. And, however one regards Olson's accomplishment, Boughn is correct to slug away at the deeper cultural tendencies, the everyday ways of moving, that create the conditions that allow an institution committed to the arts to regard minds as financial markets.

MILTON ROGOVIN (1909 - 2011)

2011-01-18T08:22:00.001-08:00

Buffalo-based social documentary photographer and HUAC survivor Milton Rogovin died today. While his extraordinary diptychs and triptychs of miners across the globe are quite well known, I suspect the thousands of photographs he snapped of Buffalo's Lower West Side might be a little less familiar. Many of them are incredibly moving, debilitatingly so, whatever difficulties one might have with documentary photography. Taken largely during the 1970s, Rogovin's photographs of Buffalo register well the topos of a major industrial city at a crucial historical juncture, through the beginning stages of deindustrialization and radical cultural change.

Here a trailer for the short film The Rich Have Their Own Photographers. Thanks to Tina Zigon for alerting me to the sad news of Rogovin's passing — and here an obit in the New York Times — and here a brief comment on Rogovin in NYT's Lens.

PRYNNE AT DOUBLE CHANGE VIDEO ARCHIVE

2011-01-11T06:41:00.000-08:00

A few days ago Pierre Joris posted a link at Nomadics to Double Change, an astounding video and audio archive devoted exclusively to contemporary poetry. Most of the clips were, I believe, recorded in France and feature an impressive range of largely Anglophone poets that include Claudia Rankine, Cole Swensen, Susan Howe, Steve McCaffery, Karen Mac Cormack, Jena Osman, Rob Halpern, David Antin, Lyn Hejinian and others. But the video footage that most caught my attention was a February 11, 2009 reading by J.H. Prynne, a poet famously unavailable outside of published writing and textual communiqués. While viewing the video I couldn't resist transcribing some of Prynne's prefatory remarks explaining why he so often refuses public readings:

When I come to Paris (too infrequently) I make an exception about my attitude to reading publicly on an occasion like this. Very often I don’t do that. Not because I don’t enjoy it, but because I think it creates a wrong expectation in the audience. When an audience hears reading of work in the poet’s own voice they believe so readily that some special insight has been communicated to them because the poet’s voice is authentic and true and inward and so the whole mystery of the poem is presented directly to the ear of the audience. This belief is completely false; in my impression, totally misguided, misleading, untrue and false. Many poets read very badly. Most poets read their work quite differently on different occasions. There is no fixed way of delivering in acoustic form the text of a poem. And there is no truth about such performances. Only just the occasional choices made on the occasion in particular. And these auditory memories when an audience hears a poet read can stay with you for a lifetime. You open the text of a work that you know and admire and immediately you hear the memory of the poet’s voice and it’s an insuperable obstacle to reencountering this poem in a new way for yourself—a really serious obstacle—and I detest to create obstacles for the freedom of the reader. But Paris is a different place. Paris has a sophisticated culture. Paris understands these things. And so, I am reasonably safe in your hands.

Perhaps, as Rod Stewart says, Paris was a place you could hide away. It certainly was in the Modernist imaginary. And one thing I vividly recall about my earliest encounters with so many Modernist poets — Pound, HD, Joyce, Yeats, WCW et al — as well as any number of other poets is that I didn't hear them, I didn't hear them. So much so that when I first heard a recording of Williams reading from "Asphodel" I was crestfallen; I recognized immediately that something of the poem and, more broadly, something of Williams himself, or his body of work, was irretrievably lost to me. All the poems I so admired as a young man were, in a sense, ruined.

It wouldn't come as a surprise if, like the video footage of his 2009 Chicago lecture on "mental ears" uploaded to the web last year, Prynne insisted that the clips of his performance in France be removed from the Double Change archive. But I hope they are not if, for nothing else, because the first of these clips offers one of the clearest statements available on his reluctance to read publicly. He encourages us, kindly I think, to attend to the work of our own mental ears.

But regardless of how one may or may not feel about the public performance of text-based work, what I find most affirming in Prynne's personal decision to refuse public readings is that, in conjunction with his essay "Mental Ears and Poetic Work," this refusal does not refuse the primacy of music — or, more specifically, sound — in the construction of poetry. Even in silence, Prynne insists, one always already composes aloud, unable to disentangle thought from the sounds associated with language, written or otherwise.

"Mental Ears" is one of those rare essays I find it difficult to extract isolatable quotes from without carefully summarizing it in its entirety and, like a Montaigne essay, extracting passages from it does little more than instrumentalize the work and crush its architecture. But the following passage is worth wrenching from its cradle since it articulates so well with Prynne's reservations regarding public readings:

The poet works with mental ears. Via this specialized audition the real-time sounds of speech and vocalized utterance are disintegrated into sub-lexical acoustic noise by analogy with the striking clatter of real work in the material world. Plus also bird-song, weather sounds, and the cognates. From this first reduction the array of voice-sounds can then be transposed into a textual constellation in which compositional purpose begins to remake the anecdotal variety of actual speech. By this means the sociology of utterance-occasions is part-replaced by the textuality of a language domain.

Earlier, in the paragraph preceding this passage, Prynne writes:

It's widely believed that to read deeply and with enhanced attention the sedimented products of an earlier poetic history is to encounter the meaning of a cultural process, the intricate play of ethical agency and imaginative conjecture as composing a pedigree for full present-tense creative empowerment. But for an emergent poet to read the output of precursory eras is a complex and recursive activity, because what in the record is output must for the poet-reader also be input, dismantled from its bounded emplacement as re-fluidized for soluble modularity.

For some time now I've wanted to read this essay not necessarily against but in conjunction with Bunting's Newcastle lectures, particularly the lecture titled "Ears" and a few of Bunting's comments on Wordsworth. The driving issue concerns presence, availability and authenticity — the notion that one can, by way of listening closely or reading widely, render legible or gain fuller access to a radically unavailable object or event. Indeed, it is precisely the distance between Bunting's moment and that of Wordsworth's — the utter unavailability of both Wordsworth's historical milieu and Wordsworth himself — which allows Bunting to make the following claim:

Nobody had thought of 'standard English' in Wordsworth's time. He spoke as a Northerner, in spite of the years he spent in Cambridge, London and Somerset; in such a Northern way that Keats and Hazlitt found it hard to follow his conversation. And though he did not compose in dialect, he composed in his own voice, aloud. His music is lost if his poems are read in Southern English, and no doubt that is why so many critics imagine he had none.

Even if Wordsworth were himself available it is unlikely that measuring a recorded performance of his work against the texts he performed would disclose anything too meaningful about those texts. Further, the willful confusion of Wordsworth the figure with the texts attached to his name would mask all manner of gaps and contradictions. But in the face of this somewhat recent recognition — a recognition that Bunting himself would have been unaware of — it is clear that Bunting's claim is oriented toward a reclamation of Wordsworth that attempts to redirect the centripetal force of canonicity away from its privileged space in the southeast and outward toward other points of encounter. In fact, for years now I have read the whole of the Newcastle lectures as a modest gesture which insists on the internationality of an Anglophone canon. Not only is Bunting's Wordsworth a Northerner, but he is a poet situated not against Keats or Coleridge or Shelley but against Whitman, suggesting Bunting's primary interest was given to a consideration of regionally specific forms of differntiation within much broader and fundamentally transatlantic developments in poetry.

In any event, I sense that Bunting's "Ears" and Prynne's "Mental Ears" are at times not so different. We see this continuity not so much in the lecture "Ears," where Bunting offers a largely linear narrative that laments the (imagined) separation of poetic practice from the real-time music of lute and lyre, but in his discussion of Spenser:

Much decoration is hardly possible in verse written to be sung. The words must not compete with the notes. But Spenser handled words so as to make them their own music. Even the earliest scraps of his verse, written at school, make use of the sounds of words so fully that they leave no room for the musician to add anything to them. There is no such economy of means as Wyat had used. This abundance of decoration was Spenser's way all his life, and it has been the most persistent of his legacies to English poetry.

For Bunting decoration is the inverse of economy and there are few poets as distant from Bunting than Spenser, something Bunting himself acknowledges. But what is clear for Bunting as for Prynne is the primacy of sound in the construction of otherwise silent texts; for both Bunting and Prynne sound is never (or at least scarcely ever) subordinate to the larger abstract or conceptual architecture of a poetic work. The privileging of sound in this particular way is at once slavishly traditional and surprisingly radical, especially now when the ungainly, overambitious architectures of so many hastily produced textual projects (most willfully engineered to fail from the outset) foreclose on any serious interest in sound a poet might have. And perhaps the greatest irony, and one I think Prynne implicitly acknowledges in "Mental Ears," is the outrageously absurd expectation that poets publicly perform the very texts that refuse a close attention to sound.

CONFIGURING THE GADFLY: TUMA ON JOHNSON & RODEFER

2010-12-28T23:38:00.000-08:00

In the most recent issue of Chicago Review (55: 3/4) a provocative piece by Keith Tuma closes out an impressive portfolio of essays dedicated to Robert Von Hallberg. Albeit in haste, I find myself reading Tuma's essay as a sort of critical agitprop, a performance situating American Hybrid (the not-surprisingly well-received Norton anthology edited by David St. John and Cole Swensen) as tragically symptomatic of "the sentimental courtesies and complacencies" that shut down our ability to adequately think the frustrated, all-too-unsatisfying relation of poetry to the academy.

Tuma's performance, appropriately titled "After the Bubble," coincides with a period of culturo-economic contraction, a time when the staggering number of poets and critics emerging out of graduate programs are increasingly less likely to find secure, tenured homes in colleges and universities. But despite this unlikeliness, many of these poets and critics are no less tethered to (manufactured by) the increasingly irrelevant — at worst, destructive — cultural tendencies dominant in university programs. One of the more pernicious tendencies for Tuma is courtesy, the move away from partisanship and toward a self-canceling sense of institutionally-endorsed openness, fluidity, hybridity (the mutant nephew of the cultural pluralism that woefully dominated the free-wheeling but nonetheless neoliberal 90s).

Tom Raworth and Keith Tuma

With the total absorption of an historically specific avant-garde initially given to the destruction (or radical reconstruction) of institutions like the academy, Tuma extends Peter Burger's well known analysis of the avant-garde through his critique of American Hybrid:

American Hybrid values the legacies of the avant-garde insofar as they help promote an ethos of formal innovation and experimentalism. This does not make the poets included in the book part of an avant-garde. There is no such thing as an avant-garde now — Swensen and St. John are right about that. The term has become an honorific.

Here Tuma points toward Stephen Rodefer and Kent Johnson as productively disruptive agents that bring into focus the extent to which the avant-garde has been fully domesticated and kettled within the university structure, the extent to which it no longer exists as an avant-garde contrary to dominant practices:

Stephen Rodefer and Kent Johnson ... understand this, too, which is part of the value of their work. At the same time, their work has little use for what, on the evidence of American Hybrid and lots of other publications, is pervasive: an aesthetic "courtesy" that "consists of refusing to pass critical judgment for fear of ruffling the sensitivity of the other," to borrow a phrase from Nicolas Bourriaud's The Radicant.

Tuma's argument is a little too complex to responsibly parse on the fly in this space but there are a few striking passages and aphoristic statements well worth quoting:

Perhaps our reluctance to talk about poetry and the university is a new form of an older reluctance to talk about money and art.

[...]

As the economy staggers, faculty and administrators in most American universities are obliged to cope with a reality where new resources are scarce and the organization of the university is under scrutiny. For the moment, MFA programs, which not long ago were growing like the real estate market, continue to crank out poets, but one wonders how long this can last.

[...]

Instead of worrying too much about what constitutes a sufficient degree of autonomy, poets who want to work in the university would do well to suggest what would represent an effective engagement with the discourses of the university.

Tuma on Rodefer, the (institutionally unaffiliated) bohemian, and the avant-garde :

Rodefer has held a few academic appointments, though not appointments with the tenure enjoyed by some of his contemporaries. I would wager that, like his teacher Olson, he thinks of himself as a bohemian intellectual. The bohemian intellectual survives as an ideal among poets after Olson's era, and Dorn's, has passed. It survives together with the idea of the avant-garde as an alternative to the world or professionalisms that are everywhere increasingly the case.

Although I find myself almost wholly on board with Tuma's analysis, I strongly disagree when he posits the need for keeping "the idea of an avant-garde" in circulation — I mean, the only thing at all advance about what passes for a contemporary avant-garde is that we can anticipate being bored in advance by generally anything that identifies itself with avant-garde practice. Too many careers and too much needlessly mediocre work are too easily built on hopelessly banal pretenses to avant-gardness, innovation, experimentation and newness. And my sense — as I've insisted, however inadequately, elsewhere — is that this language, the language of avant-gardness and innovation, is far too deeply entangled in dominant cultural institutions and market systems to be at all recuperable. Further, the blind lust among artists and critics for newness, for advancedness, rests on a deeply troubling relation to time that not only pits new against old but presupposes a single landscape, a single temporality, such that, to point to one frustrating example, the rich multiplicity of American poetries that circulated during the 1970s and 80s can scarcely ever be considered by critics outside their relation to (or distance from) the New American Poetry or Language Writing. The fact of newness, of innovation, is always already built into efficacious work — work that productively intervenes in a situation at a specific moment in time — and so the desire to fetishize newness, avant- or advanced-ness, is to slavishly subordinate our labor to the stagflated market value of a transcendental signified that wrenches our attention away from the far more immediate, material conditions of our making.

But to belabor this point is to miss the broader thrust of Tuma's argument. In reading Rodefer and Johnson as aggressively disruptive gadflies, Tuma's attention is given to the usefulness of disaffiliation, independence and distance from cultural institutions. The question comes back to one of belonging, or, more specifically, the value of not belonging to the institutions within which one resides and within which ones work circulates. For Tuma, Rodefer's and Johnson's not-belonging to the institutions they are nonetheless tethered to provides each of them with a special advantage that allows them to aggressively transgress the unwritten and widely uncontested rules of a professional politesse among poets:

Johnson is an avant-garde poet without an avant-garde. Rodefer might be nearly the last bohemian on the scene. (There are a few others.) Obviously, neither speaks or writes from a position that will be especially helpful to those obliged to defend the study of contemporary poetry or creative writing in the university. But they are an antidote to the sentimental courtesies and complacencies that prevent a conversation about what and where poetry might be soon from beginning.

When Tuma says there are a few others, one name that immediately comes to mind is John Latta. Three of Latta's poems, all of which were first posted at his blog Isola di Rifiuti, appear in the same number of CR as Tuma's essay, and what strikes me just now is the important but understated role CR has played in challenging hegemonic cultural and poetic formations in the academy. The magazine is in many ways an organ of the academy that has, at least as far back as the Burroughs / Big Table fiasco, accommodated dominant and disruptive tendencies alike. And it is in CR that some of Rodefer's and Johnson's more provocative work has appeared (i.e. the 2009 Rodefer issue that also includes an installment of Kent Johnson's critical novella A Question Mark Under the Sun, a book I enjoyed the honor of publishing earlier this year.

Apropos to Tuma's reading of Rodefer and Johnson in "After the Bubble," a 1985 Rodefer essay first published in Ben Friedlander and Andrew Schelling's Jimmy & Lucy's House of "K" and reproduced in the Rodefer issue of CR begins, "The purpose of criticism is to wake the reader and writer out of their complacency." Satirically aping Dorn, but also modifying the critical model Dorn offered in his early assessment of Olson, Rodefer titles his essay "What I See in the Silliman Project." And what does Rodefer see in the Silliman Project?

Understand in what follows if I seem to be exacting this writing more than praising it, it must be heard in a context of belief in its inherent value, or one wouldn't be bothering to question or confront the example at all. Difference is more useful than ambition or applause, and is actually a way of stating the basic concerns of all writing.

What Rodefer sees in the Silliman Project is a value worth confronting and it is in this spirit that Tuma confronts the broader problematique embodied in an anthology like American Hybrid. We might say the same of John Latta, whose exhaustive but far from laudatory notes on The Grand Piano threaten, as Kaplan Harris remarked in conversation some months ago, to completely overwrite the object of their focus. Bluntly put: at this juncture the enemy is professional courtesy.

STUDENT OPPOSITION TO AUSTERITY

2010-12-17T13:43:00.000-08:00

The response of British university and high school students in recent weeks to austerity measures imposed by the Cameron administration has been immediate and explosive. To refer to this response as a movement, which would suggest an imagined cohesion or cohesive program, might not be appropriate. Maybe a term like moment is more applicable given the spontaneity and broad but uneven reach of the protests. Either way, the student response is immensely affirming. I'm not sure these protests — considered as a whole, as part of a moment — can be regarded as a rigid model for responses elsewhere (the specificity of their conditions resists this sort of instrumentalization), but the charged character of these protests allows for the possibility of imagining commensurate responses in an otherwise anemic US cultural climate.

LINKS | CLIPS:

$ The brightest high school student since Rimbaud (previously posted by Mark Fisher at the astounding K-Punk):

$ A powerfully prescient October 20 article by Independent writer Johann Hari.

$ December 16, 2010 article by Joanna Biggs at LRB on the occupation at University College London.

$ Ben Fox on Jobless Britain in New Statesman, December 17, 2010.

$ Laurie Penny Inside the Parliament Square Kettle, December 10, 2010.

$ Students protesting in Sheffield:

$ Press Conference: Coalition of Resistance & National Campaign Against Fees & Cuts, Nov 25, 2010.

$ Students at Millbank Courtyard (Tory HQ) November 10, 2010:

$ Per Reuters: Europe Faces Rising Austerity Protests in 2011.

SHADOW SELF 68 FULCRUM 2010

2010-12-09T13:34:00.000-08:00

It seems essential, in whatever haste, to offer a gesture toward registering several recent economically oriented class-specific struggles that have been largely unpublicized or depoliticized in the US (where attacks on workers documented and undocumented, as well as attacks on the humanities, the social sciences, and education at large, continue frustratingly unabated).

1. Striking air traffic controllers, who brought almost all air travel to a halt this past weekend in Spain, have been ordered back to work under military authority. The controller's union apologized for its actions. NY Times, Dec 8:

In a country with a strong labor movement that is usually tolerant of wildcat strikes, the confrontation has been hailed as a potential watershed event along the lines of President Ronald Reagan's firing of air traffic controllers in 1981.

The unemployment rate in Spain stands at about %20 of the national population.

2. Student protests continue to unfold in the UK in response to proposed (and now approved) legislation that would raise the cap on tuition for students in England. For the past month or so I've had the good fortune of access to a number of online lists and discussion groups where several of these protests have been actively organized and discussed by a number of younger British poets, artists, critics and activists. The militant and enthusiastic character of the dialog taking place on these lists is incredibly enviable at a time when the most virulently (and violently) active people in the US are a frighteningly conservative, xenophobic and largely racist mob identified with the Tea Party.

3. The largest prison strike in US history was (not surprisingly) criminally ignored by mainstream and, to large extent, independent media. Thousands of inmates in ten prisons across Georgia refused to leave their cells in a non-violent protest coordinated using banned cell phones. The prisoners presented the following demands:

A LIVING WAGE FOR WORK: In violation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude, the DOC demands prisoners work for free.
EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES: For the great majority of prisoners, the DOC denies all opportunities for education beyond the GED, despite the benefit to both prisoners and society.
DECENT HEALTH CARE: In violation of the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments, the DOC denies adequate medical care to prisoners, charges excessive fees for the most minimal care and is responsible for extraordinary pain and suffering.
AN END TO CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENTS: In further violation of the 8th Amendment, the DOC is responsible for cruel prisoner punishments for minor infractions of rules.
DECENT LIVING CONDITIONS: Georgia prisoners are confined in over-crowded, substandard conditions, with little heat in winter and oppressive heat in summer.
NUTRITIONAL MEALS: Vegetables and fruit are in short supply in DOC facilities while starches and fatty foods are plentiful.
VOCATIONAL AND SELF-IMPROVEMENT OPPORTUNITIES: The DOC has stripped its facilities of all opportunities for skills training, self-improvement and proper exercise.
ACCESS TO FAMILIES: The DOC has disconnected thousands of prisoners from their families by imposing excessive telephone charges and innumerable barriers to visitation.
JUST PAROLE DECISIONS: The Parole Board capriciously and regularly denies parole to the majority of prisoners despite evidence of eligibility.

With a nationwide population of nearly 2,500,000 inmates, the US prison industry boasts a far larger workforce than the US mining industry which — at just over 300,000 — is about one percent of the population. Yet the mining industry, or the strange figuration of the miner in the American cultural imaginary, carries much greater sway than the far larger prison population. Increasing exponentially since 1980, the prison community in the US is almost 10% of the overall population. And like miners in the US, the prison community is a laboring community.

Within the US, the struggles of the present moment feel far more like the desperate gestures of a starving 1932 Bonus Army than the decisive interventions of a 1965 SDS. But considered in a global context, in conjunction with nationwide strikes and non-violent actions in Spain, Greece, France, the UK and elsewhere, gestures of resistance to economic and social conditions here in the US feel far more affirmative. In most cases the decisions and legislation protested are pushed ahead in spite of popular resistance (viz. pension reform in France), but the scale and ferocity of the protests appears to be having a wonderfully viral, radicalizing effect where the net gain is not located in immediate, real-time concession and reform but in consciousness.

Anyone must recognize well in advance how naive or destructively idealistic this delight in the possibility of shifts in consciousness toward radicalization might be, especially given the failure (and impressive lack of rigor) that characterized so many root-level consciousness raising campaigns in the last decades of the twentieth century. But the strong desire for something not this is everywhere present through the enduring twilight of this economic and cultural blackout. And this desire for something not this is, I suspect, a crucial site of struggle, the wild card up for grabs. This wild card can either be surrendered to "grass roots movements" like the Tea Party or reclaimed by a Left that, however nebulous and internally differentiated, has always been decisively shaped by cultural workers and educators. And perhaps it is this which, from an administrative point of view (or the point of view of capital), makes the elimination of humanities departments so desirable in the US and UK.

ADDENDUM: CIXOUS.

Hélène Cixous' 29 November 2010 appeal to the University at Albany registering her opposition to the elimination of five humanities departments (first posted by Pierre Joris at Nomadics):

November 29, 2010
Open Letter to :
George Philip, President
University at Albany-SUNY

Dear President Philip,

In April 2007 I visited the University at Albany, extremely happy to have been invited by Professor David Wills to participate in a conference organized around my work. I had the distinct impression that the university was an institution focused on intelligence and culture, a place open toward the future, thriving on new initiatives. I encountered very high quality faculty and graduate students and found the sciences of thinking represented there to be strong and alive. I had the feeling of excitement experienced by every scholar or student of knowledge who is able to work with an engaged and motivated group of like minds.

One can judge the future of a country by the space that it provides for the Humanities. The warm welcome I received from the New York State Writers Institute, added to the intellectual atmosphere of the programs in French, Italian and Theatre, made me think that SUNY-Albany was a privileged place for emerging research, and that it possessed, in particular, the good political sense to watch over its interests. You cannot imagine how stupefied and indignant I was to learn that that institution was about to mutilate itself.

I don’t wish simply to be scandalized. I don’t want to believe that you are going, of your own account, to destroy your own riches. I’ll allow myself only to ask you to stop the ill advised process that will surely and irremediably weaken you. It is as if one were to cut out one’s own tongue. Don’t do that.

In 1968 I founded the Université de Paris 8, which still remains an experimental jewel within the French university system. I know full well that one has to struggle in order to allow the proper values for insuring the worthy and dignified development of students to flourish. They are your children, whom you must provide with the best opportunity for succeeding in the world. And, as Aeschylus said, “blood once shed cannot return to the veins”. Beware of doing something that is irreversible.

I would be very sad to know that the University at Albany had stifled its own breath. I want to believe, dear President Philip, that you won’t make the wrong choice.

Hélène Cixous
Professor Emerita Paris 8 University
A.D. White Professor at large Cornell University
House playwright Théâtre du Soleil Paris
Writer, author of 70 volumes of fiction and theory
cc. Susan Phillips, Provost
Edelgard Wulfert, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
David Wills, Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

RAWORTH TAKES THE TARDIS STATESIDE

2010-11-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

[I recently had the honor of introducing Tom Raworth before his October 14 reading at the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative in Buffalo, part of Olson @ the Century: An Archival and Projective Reconsideration. Who fool enough to savagely summarize a lifetime of incredible achievements, collaborations, provocations, poetry? The introduction appears below.]

As many of you well know, Tom Raworth is an internationally recognized poet who, for generally any reader of contemporary poetry, needs no introduction—and so we are obliged to introduce him; to not introduce a poet who needs no introduction would be criminal and, in societies driven by forces of primitive circulation like our own, such crimes are even punishable. One could be sentenced for such a transgression.

In the book sentenced he gives a shape—a beautiful volume brought out by the Tenerife-based Zasterle Press in 1989—Raworth writes:

published poetic answers
nobody as yet wrote
might be termed major
when the patron was replaced
as having transgressed the laws of good manners

Here Raworth tacitly insists we are all sentenced—some new, some old, but in each and every case the sentence meted out is fundamentally primitive in the simultaneity of its having-not-been and its having-already-been.

The thing is, anyone that reads Doctor Who or Torchwood magazine knows Tom Raworth may very well be an illegitimate or at least undocumented incarnation of the Doctor himself; not the Doctor that cruises through coiled wormholes to rescue Queen Victoria from alien werewolves but the Doctor that doubles through every once and again just to think the wormhole in its working. “Coaches,” Raworth says, “leave to take you back | with no speed limit | it was always the same …” I mean, when Raworth says in sentenced, “he might be a little lunatic | questioned roughly in the booth” he clearly means the Doctor and his TARDIS, an image of man in language outlined against the figure of the cosmos. As Charles Olson’s Maximus says, “The only interesting thing | is if one can be | an image | of man.” For Raworth, one always already is an image of man, but this image is anchored squarely at the ideological intersection of an unstable rift in space and time that persistently threatens to splay open the threadbare fabric of the real and destroy the world as we know it. In his capacity as the Doctor, Raworth courts the catastrophic potential of the rift. He does so because he knows no unreasoning beast should be sentenced to the world as we know it.

And here it would serve us well to remember that no one knows the Doctor’s true name. Doctor Who? Just the Doctor. In the poem “Name Unknown” Raworth writes:

also the use of an image
must go into the open
of silent films
buttoned to keep
the secret of his alter ego.

For Raworth as for the Doctor the open is always a hiding place at the center of which sits a horrifyingly banal, Heideggerian police booth that dutifully preserves the secret of its own banality—that is, there’s always a remainder any image must conceal in order to maintain the image of its disguise. Each has an image to uphold.

Anyway, during a visit to San Francisco a few months back I had the privilege of having lunch with Kevin Killian and, over a gourmet cheeseburger, Tom Raworth’s name came up. I asked Killian, how is it such a catholic range of US readers can take such a deep interest in Raworth’s work while ignoring so many other British poets connected to Raworth. Killian said, “But my God, Richard, he’s so warm, he’s so human.” Naturally when Killian said that I couldn’t help but wonder: Does Raworth, like the Doctor, also have not one but two hearts?

Not so much post-human as hyper-human, an unmanageable excess of humanity, the remainder laid bare, terrifying in their triteness and beautiful in the stunning largesse of their surplus; I mean the poems. From his first award-winning collection, The Relation Ship, published in 1966 through his 2010 new and selected, Windmills in Flames, Raworth’s poetry playfully attends to the urgencies of a world faithful to circulation but long since knocked out of orbit. A poetics perhaps of flexible accumulation—or more specifically, flexible spending.

Like the Doctor, Raworth is a master of all trades, apprentice of none, and his intellectual credentials are inscribed in his very abilities. At once poet, visual and performance artist, translator, editor and printer, Raworth’s commitment to the labor of art extends far beyond art itself, outward into a transatlantic community of poets he has aided in galvanizing for more than four decades.

As a key contributor to Ed Dorn’s vertiginously constructed one-off newspaper Bean News—a collaborative effort where every contributor masked, manipulated or refused the Cratylean essentiality of their names—the mysterious complexities of Raworth’s identity must be considered. In Bean News, under the headline “Where Is Now?” we find mention of “Timekeepers.” One would be a fool not take this “Timekeeper” as code for Time Lord, an all but extinct alien race, and if, as Olson insisted, we Americans are indeed the last “first” people then there’s no reason Tom Raworth cannot be the last of the space-traveling Time Lords.

For the express purpose of this occasion, it’s important to note that Raworth knew Charles Olson, whose centenary has occasioned his being here today. Raworth read Olson, corresponded with him, edited him, printed him—and when in 1972 Barry Alpert asked him about the influence of Olson on his work, Raworth responded: “My idea is to go the other way, you know. And to be completely empty and then see what sounds.” To be empty is of course to refuse the past and deny the future while inhabiting an uninscribed now, a now desirable even to Maximus: “back is only for those who do not move (as future is, you in particular need to be warned …” Raworth, having taken Olson’s warning, headed the other way: and so here we are, here, in the catacoustic simultaneity of now.

Steve McCaffery and Tom Raworth, Buffalo Poetry Collection, October 15, 2010

Mark Mendoza's brief review of Windmills in Flames: Old and New Poems (Carcanet 2010) in Poetry Project Newsletter #224 might have served as a more appropriate introduction: "Raworth's delicate interplay of intuitive cognition ('understanding / what intuition / writes in language') and tottering states of bewilderment pull us towards that which we might have felt lurking in shadow (where 'in shadow shadows / media cycle manicures') and promises to jolt us out of the workday into an adventure amongst tangible things we felt were lost. The poet has tracked our crises, in a world smothered in pleasant butter and imperialist bullshit, where no link can be presumed stable, and where nothing is to be done unless links are traversed and remade."

HASTY NOTES ON THE HOME DEPOT

2010-10-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

Samuel Palmer's wilder, more electric landscape pieces come to mind — the watercolors, mostly — when I drive through the lower reaches of coastal Maine. Palmer more than, say, Winslow Homer, the artist identified with this region. Homer's pictures are austere, crisp and craggy (they carry, I suppose, the stoic character of an imagined New-Englandness); Palmer's are strangely bloated. Even the figure of water in Homer's pictures is scarcely ever wet while the driest of Palmer's landscapes are saturated, overburdened by a moisture far more commensurate with the marshland and rolling hills of southeastern Maine.

Samuel Palmer | The Garden at Shoreham

Homer nails the figure of contradiction and struggle head on in his seascapes and the Cullercoat paintings and perhaps it is this that trumps the wetness of water in New England; but Palmer grasps precisely what water does to things, to a landscape in any season. There is a greater sense of movement in Palmer, a greater fidelity to contradiction and struggle as wholly and irrepressibly active; like the interminable throbbing of a swollen injury, the active dialectical movement specific to struggle, the way a living thing responds through its living to conflict. Palmer recognizes this active and fluid quality in Blake, his Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

The ever-fluctuating colour, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters; the ripe bloom of quiet corners; the living light and bursts of flame; the spires and tongues of fire, vibrating with the full prism, made the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries; and you lay the book down tenderly, as if you had been handling something which was alive. As a picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought, so, in some of these type books over which Blake had long brooded with his brooding of fire, the very paper seems to come to life as you gaze upon it — not with a mortal, but an indestructible life, whether for good or evil.

Other artists identified with the region, Maine specifically, like Andrew Wyeth often render the landscape dry. Christina's World. We know it from an early age. A stock image. Dry in its longing. Identified with New England, Maine specifically. The tall grass &c. It rains as I write. And the roof leaks. And there isn't a home for miles without a sump pump in its basement or crawl space to expunge the water that accumulates below. I recall, that is, crossing into Maine from New Hampshire a couple years ago, on my way to Orono, and remarking to myself how everything suddenly felt moist, wet, saturated even, as if the state line marked a natural divide already inscribed in the earth. If there is a longing and loneliness here, a rigid and stoic interiority that refuses to share itself against its own better interest, then these are not dry and barren miseries but rather an immanent form of struggle that chokes on the fluids of its own excess and drowns, that pulls one down.

It is likely, too, the dryness in Homer and Wyeth offer a desire toward dryness; the absence of moisture, even when the very subject itself is water, wills it away from the imaginary. Here. Where water is everywhere.

The Christina of Christina's World is an Olson, Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbor in Cushing, Maine, a coastal town just north of here. Olson of course a surname common to the region and everywhere present down through to Gloucester, Massachusetts, the hearth-like space of Charles Olson's imagined demos. There are quite a few Olsons at Beechbrook Cemetery in Gloucester, where Charles Olson is buried. Olsons. Ol' Sun as Olson often referred to himself; and "Old Sun" as Robert Duncan lampooned him in The Origins of Old Sun (performed at Black Mountain in 1952, dormant until staged and directed by David Hadbawnik in Buffalo 2008 and included in the Kenning Anthology of Poets' Theater edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil).

Dryness is its own misery and the possibility of death on dry land a source of regret for fishermen. Two large stones erected in memory of sailors at Beechbrook Cemetery bare inscriptions that speak this regret ("Loyalty," says Prynne, "is regret spread across time"). On a stone just beyond the entrance of the cemetery:

THEIR DECKS WERE AWASH FORE AND AFT
THEIR SAILS WERE TORN TO A SHRED
MASTS AND SPARS WERE ALL ADRIFT
BUT HERE THEY LIE NOT IN OCEAN BED

There is a sense of loss here, an odd and chilling recognition that death itself is something that can be either properly or poorly achieved. John Donne too well knew that drowning is preferable to choking on air, that the most noble of deaths is the smaller death, la petite mort, where the void is wet. The second stone, not far from the first and surrounded by hundreds of smaller stones inscribed only with names, reads:

THEY SAILED THE TRACKLESS OCEAN AND FOUGHT THE ANGRY SEAS WITH UNDAUNTED COURAGE BUT FATE DECREED THAT THEY DIE ON SHORE

The most regrettable death is a retired man raking leaves on Sunday, idly patching a hole where a breeze cuts through. In a 1955 letter to a friend Ian Hamilton Finlay remarked: "I see now it is possible to make any kind of story a fishing story." From Odysseus forward. Those of the American Homer tend toward dry land. And the landscape that surrounds his studio at Prouts Neck, a studio currently being restored at an estimated cost of $10.5 million, is by and large privately owned, the shoreline unencumbered by curious public feet, like any number of fine views restricted from view. A country club stands where people stood: carts, clubs and hole flags.

Winslow Homer | The Herring Net

Workers in Maine, reads a placard for the leading Republican candidate for governor, are among the lowest paid in the country. Cash, they say, tends toward the coast. Poverty is interiorized. When my wife asks an assistant in the plumbing department at The Home Depot for a particular copper fitting, the man insists with some frustration that he knows all the fittings by touch, suggesting he was at one time a plumber, possibly before the collapse of the construction industry a couple years ago. I found myself a little thrown by a man in the lumber department at Lowes that knew the material intimately, from mill to sale, who clearly worked with it before he came to sell it. That circulation (retail and service) provides a security far greater than production ever will; that it has been so for so long, so many of the men and women that actively worked the trades and worked them well now holed up in strip malls. To die so on dry land.

The house my family and I now reside in was previously owned by an Olson, a union tiler working out of northern Massachusetts, two or more hours away. Oddly, I was at the Olson conference in Vancouver, BC when we closed on this house, preparing then to give a talk on Olson

New England is utterly alien to me, the distance between it and the mid Atlantic states greater than I initially anticipated. The ground is not firm. And so we live in a place not home (recall here the Algonquin fable in Maximus, "He-with-the-House-on-his-Head," "chockablock," a native encounters an alien carrying home:

Another distance, in the path in the forest, he
met another man who was carrying his house on his
head. He was frightened at first but the man put
his house down and shook hands with him...

We do not travel light. We were never from Buffalo. And we are not now from Maine. But The Home Depot offers us a faux-Heideggerian hearth that extends endlessly outward. The capitalized definitive article is essential to the promise of home the depot offers; it is the home depot, the key to the center or that which might disclose the center to us. And the stretch of Route 1 connecting Scarborough, Maine to Portland looks strikingly like Niagara Falls Boulevard in Buffalo or Route 46 in New Jersey. We are never too far from The Home Depot. It is not the house we carry on our head, but it is there when we arrive, wherever we go. It is not with us but always present to us. Here there is never not home. But the home — the one and only — is curiously never my home. Nor is it yours.

Loyalty is memory distorted by time. And to make oneself at home is no easy task, even when one is invited to. I have been asked to make myself at home in a home not my own, I have asked others to do the same, and we most often never do.

Again Hegel's phrase "at home with itself in its otherness," specifically filtered through Marx. To be at home in struggle, antagonism and irreconcilable alterity seemed to me before, as it does now, desirable; to not seek synthesis but come to terms with internal contradiction. This being-at-home is the drive itself toward home as an impossibility that never arrives; the task is to be at home with never arriving home. History itself then is, in advance and always, the end of history; to be out in the cold is to be at all times home, focused on the figure of a hearth elsewhere never here.

(Sketched out 1 Oct 2010; publicly posted 18 July 2011; cleaning out the hatch.)

THERE WAS NO MOVING SALE

2010-09-28T00:37:00.000-07:00

Punch Press, the offices of Damn the Caesars and the scene of this writing have moved from Buffalo, NY to Scarborough, ME. We now reside between marshland and ocean, holed up in a quaint hovel that threatens to collapse under the weight of horse chestnuts. They fall from the sky like softballs. And they are useless to any living creature beyond the violently aggressive squirrels that so patiently collect and store them in the attic above. The conker trees the nuts fall from are something to behold. Aesculus hippocastanum. But the outer shell of the nuts they yield are barbed with thorns. Prickly, hostile bastards Luther Burbank would've mongrelized out of existence had he lived here, on this coast.

Critical Documents has announced the forthcoming release of Love Poetry, a volume by Two Brothers likely to appear comparable in thrust to Goat Far DT. Fuck Herzog. To render the day a little more lucid.

Hostas, a stunningly ugly species of plant life, form an almost militarized perimeter around our new home, locking us in. They have always suggested to me cabbage leaves, though hostas offer nothing edible. Their leaves come to a point like spears slathered in wax. Perhaps a philological connection to hasta, Latin for spear. I look forward to tearing them from the ground. The rhododendrons too; another unforgivably banal plant.

Despite threats of legal action and any number of other incredible obstacles, Kent Johnson's A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem "by" Frank O'Hara will appear in the coming weeks. Due to material constraints, the title was subsidized through advance subscription and produced in a run of only 100. Unfortunately each copy of this first print run has been accounted for; the title is otherwise unavailable, though copies will be maintained at the Poetry Collection at Buffalo, the Beinecke and several other libraries.

Ten miles to the north Lady Gaga descended on Deering Oaks Park in the great city of Portland to voice her support for the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT). "Equality," she said, "is the Prime Rib of America." My family and I were unable to attend, but we did huddle around a wide-screen monitor to let the wonderfully moving liveness of it all stream on in. It was like we weren't even there.

Orders from the UK and Canada for Punch Press pubs and Damn the Caesars that were placed in August and September go out this week. To assuage.

We are fortunate to have just outside the back door a Chinese cherry (or crab) apple tree (malus sikkimensis). Since we arrived so late in the summer we haven't had an opportunity to see the tree blossom, but the miniature apples it offers have just ripened. They are somewhat smaller than cherries and surprisingly bitter. But my daughter delights in picking them and gobbling them down by the handful, straight from the tree. Somewhat rare. Not a hosta. A tree I look forward to nursing.

Shortly before leaving Buffalo Mike Basinski passed on a copy of Allen de Loach's From Maine, a slim chapbook published in 1970 as part of "The Beau Fleuve Series" edited by Terry Weaver and "printed in a limited edition of one thousand copies." If only such runs could still be regarded as "limited." The text is an undated letter from de Loach (ed. Intrepid magazine) to Charles Olson. Derivative — of Olson — de Loach notes:

proprioception is not always an easy location

After nearly two months of "settling in" we would like to publicly extend our heartfelt gratitude to any number of friends that helped to make this criminally tumultuous transition from Buffalo to Scarborough less turbulent: Andrew Rippeon and Lisa Forrest, David Hadbawnik and Tina Zigon, Michael Basinski, James Maynard, Steve McCaffery, Micah Robbins, Geoff Gatza and Donna White, Michael and Laurie Kelleher, John Hyland, Kent Johnson, Dale Smith, Kyle Schlesinger, Jonathan Skinner, Jared Schickling; and, for their supportive public gestures regarding rumors and confusion surrounding the forthcoming publication of Kent Johnson's Question Mark we would like to thank John Latta, Edmond Caldwell, David Hadbawnik, Micah Robbins, Jow Lindsay, Michael Hansen, Gene Tanta, Joseph Hutchinson, Richard Allen, Mark Scroggins and David Lehman.

Forthcoming titles by Frances Kruk, Brenda Iijima and Francis Crot. To recalibrate critically damaged neurotransmitters after disorienting blows. Disorienting. Not devastating.

SOTERE TORREGIAN | ENVOY

2010-07-11T16:12:00.000-07:00

May 26, 2010 — the day my family and I flew into San Francisco for a whirlwind tour of love and affection — I had the incredible privilege of introducing Sotere Torregian at Moe's Books in Berkeley for the launch of Envoy, a book I published a couple months earlier. Recognizing my nerves would be shot and my brain would be trash after a six hour flight from Buffalo, I hastily sketched out an introduction in advance. Here tis:

SOTERE INTRO—MOE’S BKS—WEDNESDAY 26 MAY 2009

Since many of us here are more or less familiar with Sotere Torregian’s published work and the scope of his accomplishment, it might be appropriate to begin in media res—that is: we know he traces his ancestry to the Aghliabid Dynasty of Moorish Sicilian rulers and to Greece, Ethiopia, the Levant, the Maghreb and Central Aisia; we know he was a rogue figure among second generation New York School poets that contributed work to journals like Ted Berrigan’s C magazine; we know he left New York to aid in organizing the African-American Studies program at Stanford in the sixties; we know friend and fellow-surrealist Philip Lamantia provided a stunning foreword to his second collection, The Wounded Mattress, published by Oyez in 1968; we know first collection, The Golden Palomino Bites the Clock was published by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh in 1966. What I did not know—though others may have—was that Torregian’s investment in surrealism extends well beyond the limits of North America, as far at least as Senegal, the home of Leopold Sedar Senghor, a figure with whom he has corresponded and discussed surrealist strategy. Traces of that correspondence are embedded in Envoy, a brief constellation of poems I recently had the privilege of editing and publishing. While on the surface the selection of poems in the book may seem eclectic or organized around nothing more than the accident of time, there is in fact a sense to their arrangement and the poems, both individually and as a collection, enact nothing less than Aime Cesaire’s clear sense of the poem: “What presides over the poem is not the most lucid intelligence, the sharpest sensibility or the subtlest feelings, but experience as a whole.” In Torregian we have lucid intelligence and sharp sensibility—but most importantly we have a practice that angles toward the whole of experience. Any sense of a whole—a hole—insists on a fluid and productive commerce between an “inside real” and an “out sidereal,” or what Torregian refers to in the title poem of Envoy as “the course … between the madhouse and the abyss.” And for Torregian this course is plotted and traveled by nothing less than the force of desire.

This desire—desire as the single-most essential instrument of cultural production—is palpable in Envoy. Appropriately the book is dedicated to David Gascoyne. In his Short Survey of Surrealism Gascoyne insisted that the surrealist artist maps “the image of his desires and obsessions upon the concrete, daylight world of objective reality; he actively takes part in ‘accidents.’” While I think Torregian’s sense of surrealist practice is fundamentally more dialectical than Gascoyne’s remark suggests, the extent to which Torregian brings the force of his desire to bear on the material limits of his living cannot be overstated. His very manuscripts are a testament to this force. And I say his manuscripts, NOT his published texts. By the time any of Torregian’s poems appear in print the terms of the accident have been largely washed away. Painstakingly constructed on anything from ruled notebook leaves to card stock or other materials, Torregian’s manuscripts stubbornly sabotage any attempt to reproduce the poems for wider circulation. They are an enduring performance—at one and the same time visual image and text, autograph manuscript and typescript but they are never reducible to the categories through which art is often mediated. And they violently resist reproduction. Indeed, neither faithful transcription nor facsimile reproduction can ever adequately extend any one poem of Torregian’s beyond its utter singularity. In short, these poems refuse both commodity culture and technological development— so much so that editors using digital technologies to bring out the work today encounter precisely the same difficulties editors preparing Torregian’s work for mimeo, offset and linotype reproduction must have faced in the sixties. Although we might look to the work of a figure like Blake as an analog of sorts what we immediately recognize is that Blake produced his work toward reproduction. But an accident—an accident—can only happen once. Accidents cannot be engineered—their logic refuses this—and if Torregian’s manuscripts reproduce anything through their striking singularity it is not accident itself but rather Torregian’s having taken part in accident. In other words, an envoy is never more than a representative, an agent. And if we have anything in the corpus of Torregian’s published work it is never the singularity of the work as such but an agent of desire, a visiting specter that gestures toward the uncontainable excess of the whole by pointing us toward the unfolding and interminable scene of accident.

Andrew Joron writes, “Sotere Torregian has always given his place of birth as ‘No-Man’s-Land”—a place situated between forces in opposition, where the dialectical imagination is most likely to come alive.” Located between the force of desire and the antagonistic limits of material conditions, Torregian’s poems are precisely where this imagination throws itself into being, but in published form the poems are only a trace of this becoming. And for anyone that might have the paradoxically frustrating but urgent honor of handling Torregian’s unique manuscripts, all we can hope is that the circulation of their published traces offer a navigable path toward that species of imagination given to accident.

RUSS FEINGOLD AND NOMI PRINS ON FINANCIAL REFORM

2010-07-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold and former investment banker for Sachs and Stearns Nomi Prins offer an incredibly sobering view of the financial reform bill now touted by mainstream media as the most radical overhaul of financial regulation since the Great Depression. Although the chassy of both analyses are grounded in a clear commitment to market systems (i.e. the belief that a few bad apples rather than the fundamental structure of capital steered us into the dirt), many of the insights Feingold and Prins offer seem especially salient. For a broader and weirdly digestible perspective, see the animated excerpt of David Harvey's lecture "Crises of Capitalism":

In thinking the present financial crisis (referred to by some now as the Great Recession), the Social Structure of Accumulation theory (SSA) developed by economists Samuel Bowles and David Gordon may be useful, however incompatible SSA may be with other theoretical models (i.e. World Systems Analysis).

Cf. Contemporary Capitalism and Its Crises, ed. Terrence McDonough, Michael Reich and David M. Kotz (Cambridge UP 2010) — Samuel Rosenberg's essay "Labor in the Contemporary Social Structure of Accumulation":

Excessive consumer debt and asset bubbles preceded the onset of the current recession, the most severe of the post World War II period. Debt and asset bubbles were the direct result of the "neoliberal" social structure of accumulation [which emerges in the 1980s with the Washington Consensus, etc]. Due to stagnating real earnings and declining employer-provided healthcare benefits, families were forced to take on excessive debt to maintain their desired standard of living or to meet unexpected medical expenses. The rise in profits relative to wages and the increasing concentration of household income at the top of the income distribution resulted in a large and growing volume of funds seeking investment opportunities, be they productive or speculative. With a shortage of available investment opportunities relative to available funds for investment, conditions were ripe for asset bubbles in real estate and securities. The collapse of these asset bubbles led to the current recession.

For anyone given to cultural politics what is missing is clear: the articulation of this — and generally any SSA — economic analysis with a thoroughgoing critique of ideology and subjectivity. On the other hand, what I often find desperately lacking in cultural criticism is precisely this type of economic analysis. And despite any difficulty I may at times have with critical work by, say, Ron Silliman or Barrett Watten, it is here, on the terrain of economics, that both offer models for thinking the cultural that can be developed much further and in a wide range of productive directions (i.e. the usefulness of the painstaking number-crunching Silliman performs in the mid-eighties essay "The Political Economy of Poetry" and in recent years on his blog; or the attention Watten often devotes to modes of production in his criticism).

LEVIATHAN MELVILLEI : IT IS CANNIBALISM

2010-07-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

National Geographics reports on the fossils of a predatory sperm whale found buried in the sand of a high desert plateau outside the Peruvian city of Ica:

Living alongside the largest sharks ever known, the raptorial—meaning actively hunting—whale measured about 60 feet (18 meters) in length, about as big as a modern male sperm whale.
But whereas modern sperm whales feed primarily on squid, Leviathan's large teeth—some of which measured more than a foot (36 centimeters) long—suggest the whale hunted more challenging prey, including perhaps its close whale relatives.

The Book of Job re leviathan:

Can you put a cord through his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook?
Will he keep begging you for mercy? Will he speak to you with gentle words?
Will he make an agreement with you for you to take him as your slave for life?
Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls?
Will traders barter for him? Will they divide him up among the merchants?
Can you fill his hide with harpoons or his head with fishing spears?

What species of cultural imperialism allows the fossils of the most fearsome predatory whale in the world to be subsumed under the mantle of Melville when its remains were discovered far afield in Peru? What oil in the Amazon? Divided among the merchants to fuel the lights that guide.

Merchants (selling futures) do not divide. They consume (consummate), retroactively inscribing their names in bone. Melville re Ahab:

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his heart's hot shell upon it.

Naming is too often never more than an act of appropriation. The sum is nominal. Viz. Tzvetan Todorov on Columbus, The Conquest of America:

Things must have the names that correspond to them. On certain days this obligation plunges Columbus into a veritable naming frenzy. Thus, on January 11, 1493: "He sailed four leagues to the East, reaching a cape which he called Bel Prado. From there to the southwest rises the mountain which he called Monte de Plata, which he said was eight leagues away. At eighteen leagues to the East, a quarter southeast of the Bel Prado, is found the cape which he called del Angel ... Four leagues to the East, one quarter Southeast, there is a point which the admiral called del Hierro. Four leagues farther, in the same direction, is another point which he named Punta Seca, then six leagues farther is the cape which he called Redondo. Beyond, to the East is found Cabo Frances...." His pleasure seems to be such that on certain days he gives two successive names to the same place (thus on December 6, 1492, a harborage named Maria at dawn becomes Saint Nicholas at vespers); if, on the other hand, someone else seeks to imitate him in his name-giving action, he cancels that decision in order to impose his own names: in the course of his escapade Pinzon had named a river after himself (which the admiral never does), but Columbus is quick to rebaptize it "River of Grace." Not even the Indians escape the cascade of names: the first men brought back to Spain are rebaptized Don Juan de Castilla and Don Fernando de Aragon ...

Olson, "Places; & Names" (Human Universe):

the crucialness being that these places or names
be as parts of the body, common, & capable
therefore of having cells which can decant
total experience — no selection
other than one which is capable
of this commonness (permanently
duplicating) will work

Alien objects surgically embedded in the tissues of the body. Names become the body. Not to keep it alive but to keep it functioning in a particular way. Fishing communities in Peru never produced a whaling tale on par with Moby-Dick. This much paleontologists (never Peruvian) know. Or they bring their own utensils abroad to consume the remains of a whale-eating whale that lived time out of mind, on ground before ground. Olson, Call Me Ishmael:

It is cannibalism. Even Ishmael, the orphan who survives the destruction, cries out: "I myself am a savage, owing no allegiance but to the King of Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him."

WORKING NOTES: ANDREA BRADY'S WILDFIRE

2010-06-18T10:35:00.000-07:00

Eliot seems to reside in Wildfire (Krupskaya 2010) as an absent center — albeit an incredibly inverted absent center. Wildfire is The Wasteland — or more so Little Gidding — sans the messianic self-exalting hopelessness packed in the saddlebags of the poet's call to care. But a theological impulse, in conjunction with the foregrounded figure of fire, seems to connect Brady firmly to the biblical rhetorical stylings of Four Quartets. Viz. the opening poem "Pyrotechne":

here's the church here's the steeple,
open the doors and see all the people dipping
their digits into a font of automatic fire:
clothes of the damaged to be baptised in saline,
tunics of the irrecuperable can melt on them ...

Fonts or founts are typefaces produced at foundries. Derived from fonte (MF): an object already cast from molten material. In contemporary French usage fonte assumes in advance an already having been melted. In Italian fonte suggests a source or spring — a fountain from common ground. Physicians of generally every nation are inclined to treat a burn of any species with normal saline. Here a stretch from Little Gidding IV that articulates well with "Pyrotechne":

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre —
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Neoplatonist commitments to light. A neoscholasticism perhaps. Duns Scotus. White light. That an investigation of phosphorous can work through itself with the aim of arriving at the total destruction of both its object and itself. Philology in the older sense, the Greek. Not the nineteenth century digging that piled its findings in messy heaps but the white hot love that aimed to create the conditions for a radical negativity; a desire for white light as total absence. Like the CMYK color code: an endless string of zeros, the ground beneath ground, an abandoned property even the gods fail to recall.

For Brady fire and water are not, as they are for Eliot, simply allegorical constructions. Wildfire is a lineated essay that, according to a note on the text, "concerns the history of incendiary devices, of the evolution of Greek fire from a divine secret which could sustain or destroy empires, into white phosphorous and napalm; the elliptical fires of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle's service to Alexander in the fashioning of pyrotechnics, the burning/blooming/mating bodies of G.H. Schubert and the self-feeding crowds of Elias Canetti; mechanisms to project fire, to make it burn on water and stick to wood and skin, to keep it off the walls of the besieged towns, and what those mechanisms (projection and defense) have done to geometry; the courts of fire, the legal chamber and the hortus conclusus, and the margins of ambiguity where it is lobbed with impunity ..."

Further in her note Brady comments specifically on allegory (the threat or temptation of retreating into it): "I wanted not allegory but the recovery of material history, which tests the luxuries of myth and enjoys, but does not endorse, the luxuries of language." It is difficult , at least for me, not to think of Olson when Brady refers to geometry (to see "projection" and "geometry" in the same sentence). I am reminded of Olson's interest in non-Euclidean geometry (Cf. "Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself"), though I think Brady is referring here to the shape of things, the shape of the landscape, as it presently exists, rather than geometry as discipline. Regardless, Olson's interest in nineteenth-century non-Euclidean geometry (Bolyai and Lobatschewsky) in conjunction with his sense of history ("History is the want to. It is the built-in.") seems, on some level, apropos to Brady's project. Olson on non-Euclidean geometry (in relation to Melville):

I take care to be inclusive, to enforce the point made at the start, that matter offers perils wider than man if he doesn't do what still today seems the hardest thing for him to do, outside of some art and science: to believe that things, and present ones, are the absolute conditions; but that they are so because the structures of the real are flexible, quanta do dissolve into vibrations, all does flow, and yet is there, to be made permanent, if the means are equal.

Olson's concerns here are, for sure, ontological and phenomenological. The question, at least for him, is one of commensuration: if the means are equal. But Olson, at least here, (along with, say, The German Ideology and Grundrisse) seems particularly useful for thinking Brady's sense of history and historiography in Wildfire as an act of desire toward a necessary recalibration of the present moment. Put differently, what she frames as "recovery" might also be recognized as an order of recalibration that aims toward a congruence between the means (method) and "the real."

At times in Wildfire Brady appears to extend her investigation outward, toward a thinking of the reception of fire as a destructive agent in contemporary (digital) culture and consciousness:

Eaten by dogs. viewed: 36,560 times
Eaten by dogs. viewed: 17,809 times
Person with disability: prosthetics above body.
Partially eaten by dogs: viewed: 32,144 times.
Old man killed with daughters; family recognised. viewed 30,411 times.
Man making "Shuhada" sign: there is
one God, because he knew he was
about to be shot. viewed 18,135 times.
No comment. viewed: 23,455 times.
Man killed at home, identified. viewed 13,759 times.

The catalog suggests a web-based portal like Youtube or Vimeo, where the number of views an uploaded video clip receives are publicly tracked for all to see, installed as part of a statistical record tracking viewers' interests. But a quick search for "eaten by dogs" at Youtube or Vimeo yields little connected to what we encounter here in "Chronic," the third of the ten poems (or, more appropriately, sections) included in Wildfire. If I'm not misreading the poem and these are in fact figures that have not been drawn from a specific source, I take them as a gesture toward recovering that aspect of "the real" (material history) that escapes full textual disclosure.

Suffering is everywhere present in Wildfire and the question of suffering is clearly central to the work. But how does one textually gesture toward suffering — or evidence of suffering or representations of suffering — in a meaningful way that does not betray that suffering and works instead to responsibly register and, if at all possible, stem or ameliorate it? A passage from Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, comes to mind:

The darkening world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art. What the enemies of modern art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists, call its negativity is the epitome of what established culture has repressed and that toward which art is drawn. In its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it.

Adorno is, of course, eminently quotable and it's often a little too easy to dislodge and recklessly deploy passages from the larger philosophical framework they reside in, especially passages from Aesthetic Theory. This passage — one which extends out of his consideration of suffering in art — is , when radically decontextualized, just as applicable to Vanessa Place's incredibly troubling trilogy-in-process (Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, Argument) as it is to Wildfire. In fact, one could go so far as to say it is Place's project that more responsibly "takes into itself the disaster" and Brady's that protests "hopelessly against it." But I don't think this is the case and I'm not sure Adorno carefully considered the full extent to which the disaster ("a radically darkened objectivity") was capable of being aestheticized (reframed) and, through this process, fully removed from any articulation it might have otherwise had with the horror it emerges out of. In this way, Place's project seems to angle toward a disclosure of the disaster but succeeds, through itself, only in disarticulating the disaster from the ground of disaster, effectively ironing out through the process of aestheticization what was always already repressed. And Place does this in precisely the same way a show like NBC's To Catch a Predator did when it first aired (viz. the incredible but undisclosed delight the show's host and, by extension, the audience take in the crimes castigated and also the power of castigation). Wildfire, on the other hand, through a materialist historiography that aspires to register the disaster without fully wrenching it from its context (i.e. aestheticizing it), "takes into itself the disaster," without surrendering to it in a way that simply reproduces the conditions of its reproduction, as Place's project seems to. Wildfire does this, at least in part, by situating itself in the chasm between critical work and the work of poetry. Self-reflexivity is crucial to the work, especially in the final poem, "Illuminated":

Art is the limit of the empirical, a hashcake
is burning somewhere and a fistful of
weeping magic beans. So happy
that grown is combustible, the entelechy
made joules for the class is not,
so happily married. At the plummet
we have made our representations
besiege the represented and rep
resenters for honour
hey the task is serious: marathon irony
in which the man cradling his little son
is an instrument for a border
critique

Again Place comes to mind here. The basic architecture of her trilogy, structured after the Divine Comedy, is comparable to Wildfire. The outline of Place's trilogy and Wildfire feature a particular trajectory that ascends or moves into a sort of crescendo or epiphanic moment, toward a suture, a wholeness, that both the trilogy and Wildfire already anticipate never arriving at. But the self-reflexive character of Wildfire separates it from Place's trilogy. And the way each handle suffering is crucial here. In Brady's case, a sort of thoroughgoing (self) excoriation ("hey the task is serious: marathon irony") allows Wildfire to somehow emerge out of itself as art object so that it situates itself at one and the same time as both an object of contemplation (art object) and an active thinking that resists the instrumentalization of suffering in the name of art.

POETRY WITHOUT WALLS | UNCONTAINED EXCESS

2010-05-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

Shockingly, American Book Review is a hard publication to locate in Buffalo unless one runs to Barnes and Nobles or Borders. On first hearing the cover feature "Poetry Without Walls" was edited by Kyle Schlesinger I hustled here and there to locate a copy. But no dice. Fortunately a copy arrived, somewhat mysteriously, by mail.

The issue (March/April 31: 3) is striking all around, especially as it brings into focus a community of loosely — or accidentally — connected poets that sprawl across any awkward sense of generational difference or geographical location. A round-robin circularity characterizes the feature: Rob Halpern reviews Michael Cross, Gregg Biglieri reviews Alan Bernheimer, Miles Champion reviews Tom Raworth, William Corbett reviews Michael Gizzi, Alan Davies reviews Kit Robinson, Kit Robinson reviews Anne Tardos, Elizabeth Fodaski reviews Michael Gottlieb, Michael Gottlieb reviews K. Silem Mohammad, etc.

What most connects these poets to one another is not any particular tendency or accident of circumstance beyond the incredible scope of Schlesinger's own cultural catholicity. And I sense this is a catholicity he takes from the generous and widely read poets he draws into his thinking, some of whom are peers while others first emerged out of a prior moment. Schlesinger, his introduction:

The contributors in this issue of American Book Review are largely from a school without walls, writers who have read widely and deeply, engaged with and contributed to the work of their contemporaries, yet avoided (perhaps consciously) the trappings and perks of aligning their work with any particular school of writing. They share in a community where a rigorous and productive exchange of ideas and information about the work itself is the norm.

Earlier in the intro, Schlesinger:

A few years ago I was asked to write a short article about the history of small press publishing in America. When I turned in my article, the editor told me that I needed to make a stronger correlation between presses and movements: Jargon Society is to Black Mountain as Sun & Moon is to Language or Black Sparrow is to Deep Image as United Artists is to Second Generation New York School, etc. I thought this logic was flawed and told the editor that I strongly disagreed. My conviction is even stronger today.

Several presses quickly come to mind, but so do a few anthologies — anthologies that, to my eye, seek to undo the work of tucking away, reducing and fundamentally misreading singular work or work articulated through a tendency that extends beyond the limits of movement, school, circle and coterie. Jerome Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred. Steve McCaffery and Jed Rasula's Imagining Language. Ric Caddel and Peter Quartermain's Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970. The extent to which these and any number of other carefully constructed anthologies seek to explode rather than cage is impressive — like any number of presses or little magazines that extend beyond coterie and out toward a sometimes uncomfortable but nonetheless essential conversation.

Apropos: Champion on Raworth's recent Equipage title appropriately named There Are Few People Who Put On Any Clothes:

Family members come and go, commercials interrupt the TV show ("I'm making this noise so I don't hear the advert I don't like") and blunt observations, almost shocking in their throwaway profundity, stop us dead in our tracks ("No other animal keeps a picture of another animal outside its memory").

Oddly, There Are A Few People was first written in 1972 but, according to Miles, "was only recently rediscovered by its author in a box liberated from storage." But it announces itself in the present with a clear insistence on its urgent contemporaneity.

Like most of the contributors to the ABR feature, both Miles Champion and Tom Raworth embody precisely the sort of complexity and adulterous cross-community activity Schlesinger refers to. Both are difficult to locate under the mantle of any normative category, whether geography, school, movement, moment or tendency. Yet each, in their work as poets and editors — and in Raworth's case, typographer, visual artist and printer — stand as an intersection that invites and troubles any attempt to rigidly map the landscape. Overall Schlesinger's feature points toward an utterly uncontainable excess that refuses the written record or the limits of normative thinking. In ABR of all places. Tactical. Like terrorists without nations.

THE FIRST EVIL | THE WALTONS

2010-05-06T06:07:00.000-07:00

Joseph Walton's Election Message from openned on Vimeo.

Like the First Evil, there are a thousand names for Joseph Walton. At bottom he is always the same: a Jungian archetype stowed safely away in the extra-fatty subcutaneous tissues of the collective catastrophe. His evil amanuensis, really the wizard behind the Union Jack and the brains behind the outfit, is a Walton not entirely dissimilar to the world's largest single employer. I recall, that is, what a red letter day it was for American soldiers when the first Wal-Mart opened in Seoul, south Korea in the late 1990s. Soldiers as far south as Pusan made holy pilgrimages all the way to Seoul by train, bus, even air to purchase gaming consoles on the cheap. Or the ideological continuities that connect land masses on either side of the Atlantic run much deeper than most first believed, like the First Evil, beneath the ocean, through the molten mass of filth that gurgles thousands of miles down.

Holly White is Acutane®, the medicinal respuesta to the First Evil, ingested orally or applied to intractable surfaces. The US prescription is expired (viz. the only ones reading the mag this side of the Pecos are either identified with the good offices of Chicago Review or the hallowed halls of Miami University; otherwise all is lost; American exceptionalism is what it always was, an utterly incurable strain of leprosy). Or may the underfunded cheese wagon take us to school before we Hummericans, aping the slogans of British conservative candidates, howl again into the wind: BRITONS know your PLACE.

Vol 1 iss 2 of Holly White. A few appropriate lines by Joel Duncan: "Heath Ledger died so I don't | finally morning | neck cracks and seagulls hurry | caw Lord caw." Broke and back. And not American at all. Nonetheless like Gibson, THE PATRIOT. The definitive.

Recent Gallop Poll results reveal that while only 9% of Americans officially identify themselves as card-carrying Tea Baggers, over 28% support them. This in our most delightful nightmares would allow Texas governor Rick Perry to pull a Bowie knife from his boot and gallop toward the presidency in 2012. To lose the Alamo over and over again, pro bono and in perpetuity. The necessary condition of epic form. Good form. An order of sacrifice like John Berryman's great leap forward, away from the messy American altar of cannibalism, or something like the shotgun salute that allowed Del Shannon to show a dunce like Kurt Cobain the way. (Shannon's shot should have been the one heard round the world, but he was shorter than heroes should be.) Can you throw them over your shoulder | like a Continental soldier? These are gods in the American imaginary. F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance:

Carlyle, who kept urging Emerson to carve an American hero out of the facts of the nineteenth century, drove through (1849) to an imaginative conception of a possible American myth of the frontier: 'How beautiful to think of lean tough Yankee settlers, tough as gutta-percha, with most occult unsubduable fire in their belly, steering over the Western Mountains, to annihilate the jungle, and bring bacon and corn out of it for the Posterity of Adam ... There is no Myth of Athene of Herakles equal to this fact.

The fresh facts. Was it Jim Bridger, the mountain man that played cards on the back of a dead man freshly frozen on all fours? Or the outlaw Josie Wales. The unilateral action of the Unibomber. Who isn't tired of invoking the Founding Fathers, instrumentalizing the past, mourning the dead or ringing the bells of doom when it serves one's career. Paul Metcalf from a review of Frederick Turner's Beyond Geography:

History has in fact become two properties -- one in the hands of the academic historians, and the other belonging to the poets. Child psychologists have a term to describe the behavior of small children, when they play side by side, but not together: "parallel play". It may be the same set of toys, but they are not shared; there is a gap.

A fair enough statement. What Metcalf misses here is the deeper continuity, the fresh fact that these toys are often viewed in almost precisely the same way by both historians (academics) and poets (non-academics). That a deeper continuity cuts across the gap. I mean, when a labor historian, Fox News and a poet mourn the deaths of 28 West Virginia miners they mourn a different loss, not death but the economic base that once was (mining accounts for just over 1% of labor in the US, is not the true face of labor and these deaths are but a fraction of the nearly 6,000 job-related fatalities that occur each year; like appeals to the Founding Fathers, the work of mourning these deaths masks a deeper horror). And we all support the troops. Don't shoot the messenger. And fault no mourners; they're only following orders. Like the Waltons. Vote conservative.