Black Field II

What I forgets to leave
Here and what I forgets
It is here not home to itself

Like bodies the fan whirs
In the room a metaphor
Or something for conscious

ness this voice around
The air is something you
Swear to this that you will

Be you to me so this darkness
Where I must imagine your
Touch is more than me

Or you this discourse of
The senses more than any
thing one amounts to.

Julie Patton's Hear In (Ad)

Julie Patton's "Hear in: A walk and talk about the East Village (above/beyond the usual rhythms, lines of sight)" will kick off at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, Parish Hall/West Yard, Monday, June 30 at 1:00 pm. The event is free and open to the public. Children and animals welcome.

Julie patton is a 2007 Artists' Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is co-sponosred by Artists & Audiences Exchange, a public program of NYFA.

Discourse as Muse

Last night I presented to Andrew Levy's class at NYU, "Writing that Matters," along with Julie Patton and Brenda Iijima. Among the materials I read aloud included a forthcoming editorial for ON, a publication I am coediting with Kyle Schlesinger & Michael Cross for emergent critical discourse about poetics, and a statement regarding "discourse as muse" which I include here.

A lengthier consideration of the notion of discourse as muse would make case studies from poets and artists who have made of their work allegories of social exchange and movement such as Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Hannah Weiner (tho, arguably, every writer or artist's work, if only in negative, presents such an allegory)...

***

Discourse As Muse

I have been thinking about the old idea of poetry and “the muse”. If the muse is no longer a figure of divine inspiration, nor one figured by Romantic love—the love of a man for an indealized woman, in particular—than what could it be? What is a contemporary muse, if not such things? In this presentation, I would like to think about the figure of muse through a different set of terms and assumptions concerning where poetry comes from, and how it operates and subsists in the world. I will do this by claiming “discourse” as the contemporary poet’s muse, and my muse in particular.

Discourse, literally, refers to a site of articulation or locution that is more or less continuous and shared. It is perhaps what is held in common without being completely shareable. In this way it does not represent a fantasy of pure communion, or transubstantiation (father, son, holy spirit stuff, etc.)

To discourse, in common speak, is to exchange words, or hold conversation. In the work of late 20th century French literary philosophers like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault the term discourse usually accompanies what Barthes has referred to as “the death of the author” and Foucault the "author function". Where an old idea of the author has the author as a figure of isolated genius and radical individuality, Foucault, Barthes and a host of other writers in the 20th century show any author to in fact comprise a network of other individuals, technologies, institutions, and economic exchanges. Likewise, an author does not make but one text, but a text that is many in being singular, and in being attributed to one author in name.

Whereas detractors of this notion of discourse have lamented the loss of the author as the central character in the drama of literary exchange (making and reception), and others celebrated it, I and many of my contemporaries see it as a place for productive exchange, and for making work that matters for community building and towards the nourishment of a larger social sphere. To claim discourse as muse, I believe, is to cast the old figure of the muse with a renewed character. Whereas before an ethereal spirit and equally ethereal object of desire embodied muse, where discourse become muse the poem reveals itself as a site of social exchange within a network of other sites.

PhillySound at FANZINE

check out PhillySound poets at FANZINE
with an editorial by CAConrad

http://thefanzine.com/articles/poetry/254/phillysound_poets

The Children

check out this amazing project by Aram Saroyan and Philip Whalen at Big Bridge:
http://www.bigbridge.org/AS-CH.HTM

"That summer my father took my sister Lucy and me to Europe and Dick gave me a box of film as a going away gift. My father encouraged me to photograph street kids, and I came home from the trip with many rolls of exposures. The art director Marvin Israel accepted eight photographs for a spread in Seventeen, for which we each won an Art Directors award. Years later, now a writer, I published a book that included many of those photographs, Words & Photographs (Big Table, 1970). During the late sixties, I also did a mock-up of a second book of (mostly) different photographs from the same visit to Europe and sent it to Philip Whalen in Kyoto to write something on the page opposite each photograph. As I sensed he might, Phil turned the request around quickly. I received the marvelous text here virtually by return mail.

When I approached the European and American children in these photographs, I was still a child myself, and I think the transparent parity in some of the images is due to my being more an accessory of the camera than the other way around. Un-intimidated by the photographer, kids seemed to engage the medium with a straightforward sense of its potential, and I was on hand to make the picture.

Then, as I see it, a miracle accrued. Well-nigh half a century went by, and I discovered again these images and fell in love with some of these subjects whom I knew only for an anonymous moment and who have long since ceased to be children. It's not unlikely that some of them have ceased to be, period."
~ from *The Children*, intro and photos by Aram Saroyan, poems by Philip Whalen

Kristin Prevallet responds to Power and Performance

Kristin Prevallet generously provided the following reflection after I solicited her and others to respond in writing to performances by David Buuck, Julie Patton and Chen Tamir at Peace On A the Sunday before last...

***

Many layers of reflection happening after The Event.

1st thought: Performance Art - even in its non-site ambitions - does not level race and class. None of the examples presented level race and class. Race and class may be confronted, boundaries may temporarily be re-drawn, questions and reflections may happen in the condensed space of the performance, and maybe the edge of race and class is revealed. But it's still sharp. It's not leveled.

How I came into the space: I was already thick-thinking about Laura Elrick's brilliant essay about poetry and ecology. I have also been reading "Ecology against Capitalism" by John Bellamy Foster. I came to the space with recurring thoughts about the ways that the morality of production needs to be challenged / changed in this production-based country. (Foster gets into this.) Why is it ok for me as an artist and writer to produce, produce, produce, but it is not ok for logging companies to cut drown trees in order that products can be invented that allow me to produce produce produce? It's what Foster calls "The Treadmill of Production." I'm practicing non-production at the moment, trying to figure all this out in terms of my own psyche and reliance on production as the key to happiness.

However, because I can't help producing (ideas, images, words) I have been working with performance which as David and Julie manifested and Chen demonstrated, allows for what Laura Elrick states as her priority as a poet at this moment: "Recognizing our collective participation in this extension might bring about new ways of engaging in the practice of poetry, a poetics, in short, that points less toward a fetishistic valorization of “the text” as object (form & content) and more toward an investigation of mediated textualities that intervene in (and experiment through) the mode of production, circulation and exchange." I'm located here in this moment of thinking.

Here's where I'm at, for the archives:
http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_2/performance/prevallet-cruelpoemperf.html

Julie, spontaneous, talks poems. She tries to initiate immediate audience responses. It doesn't quite work - but it does bring me (maybe us?) to the edge - the edge of a confort zone. Should I start singing? I couldn't at that moment. But I did leave a softer person in the sense that after I left the event, I practiced loosening the boundaries between myself and passers-by (by smiling, saying "hi!" to whoever caught my eye.) Just a little gesture, but a homage to the energy-transference that occurred.

David shows slides, but is conscious (and says so) about the conflict between showing slides to document an event and the immediacy of the event itself. Were the slides necessary? Could he have just rubbed the poison dirt in his face and spoke spontaneously for 20 minutes, ending in his amazing chant to resurrect the dead, become the earth? Would that have been even more powerful? Was the hyper-self consciousness of the slide-show necessary?

I am moved in the direction of performance by deep conversations with my engaged contemporaries - Peace on A, Laura Elrick, the WACK! show at PS1 (and the catalogue), Julie, David, Rodrigo. All working to transmute the form of the poem into live space / action. Change the nature of poem-production and poem-reception. (Sure - it's all been done before. But it's being done again, NOW. Locating non-site in this very particular and charged moment - trying it out at Peace-on-A.)

Black Field I

~ for Dottie and Conrad

I have been thinking about you
As a kind of goo
For the mind to have visions
That are only of the mind
Or like that sliver
We enter when we write
And it is as though
Ideas had to come from some place
And there are words for those places
Or rather those places are
A kind of fundamental syntax
For the world and we need only
Pluck them from the air
We need only pluck them
From under your shallowest
Surface to say anything we want
Is it true you are the future in fact
The thinnest future we have
When we attend each other
The mind of each other as a delay
How patiently we must
Await each one each other's

Power comes...

to those who (don’t)
wait--language an in
equality what you l

end and what I actu
ally take--privilege
and what I discard I

abandon in principle
and yet know--that I
do this complicity p

okes out the old su
n’s eyes--makes some
verbs from what nou

ns controlled--pinpo
inting the voice li
ke an arrow rhetoric

silver-tongued pois
on-tipped angel--bin
ging on dominion so

ul saver and sovere
ign--must I speak to
an object appreciat

es shit--zealous cont
agion, zealous anti
thesis the undead,

unmourned, unliberat
ed, disavowed as a
kind of third sex--

seducing us back from
that bad fantasy of
ways we have chosen.

Poem for Social Practice

Distillation a matter
of feeling *against
one’s self* to make a
mark don’t connect

the dots stars didn’t
make us we made them
when we read their
pretensions of wisdom

a kind of seduction
the phatic validates
the rest is rent and
money for gas so sings

complicity always the
place the emotion
of being among so many
makes one get over

themself the things
we are not for their own
sake this room large
and ever ambivalent

I was with her deixis
a tale of survival
the survival of her
milk is memory wood

darkening that shade
no longer human with
witness you begin to
cry something will eat

the cancer that idea
must not get cut-out
you are here I don’t want
to be anything if

it takes that much
loss to be I don’t want
to have to participate
with a voice

the cracks public
makes in social space
filled by greedy
imperative spreads

cancer to what we
would otherwise
communicate be with
me make a sign to

change their signs
true leveler *an in
equality* information
like a corpse went

forth dragging its
body in the aether
where to put the
body Modernity while

we were gone value
labored *Bodies: can’t
live with them, can’t
live without them*

Freeing Phoneme

~ for Robert, Daria, and Andrew

Freely phonemes sing
Instead of us until our
History is cured we are

Utterly headless that
Village is still on fire
In our language stranded

Here strange form of
Conquest stranger form
Of lights which warn us

Their within their with
Out which the products
Kissed us and were on

Fire with what we weren’t
The busted fridge as all
Its produce also rots.

Rob Halpern's *Imaginary Politics*

Attending the George Oppen Centennial Symposium this past April at SUNY-Buffalo with Rob, I was reminded of many affinities between Rob and the figure of poet George Oppen. While the affinities between these two exemplary poets are too many to think about adequately here, one way to think their works in relation is through the terms “guilt” (Oppen) and “shame” (Halpern) as the recognition of guilt and shame may be constitutive of a certain form of responsible (i.e. ethical) subjectivity, and not merely a shibboleth for bad forms of liberalism and religious morality.

For there to be “shame in simply being here” I do not read negatively, that is I don’t read it in terms of a damaged or pathetic subjectivity (a figure of trauma per se), but as one of the most fundamental propositions of ethical subjectivity. Not unlike Emmanuel Levinas, who in his '61 work *Totality and Infinity* recognized “I” not to begin in Being (capital B), but in an inexhaustible and unpayable debt to other beings, nearly every sentence and line of Rob’s work articulates a subjectivity completely related by others, and committed to an acknowledgement of complicity with violences major, minor and in between. So that to “simply be here”—that is to simply exist in relation to other beings and objects—is to be hailed by power itself, whether, and however inadvertently, we heed that call or not.

Rob’s newest chapbook, *Imaginary Politics*, clause after clause responds to the calls of this hailing through critical investigation, emotional interjections and addresses, and autobiographical modes too allegorical to ever be called confessional, that don’t resort to narcissism as such. And yet *Imaginary Politics*, like much of Rob’s work and as the work’s title suggests, not only concerns things as they are, but things as we imagine them and would like them to be. Whereas the goal of Lacanian psychoanalysis specifically is to bring the subject from an imaginary position wherein a navigation of the real (small “r”) is tenable, to one in which the illusory subject breaks upon the rocks of the Real (capital “R”) and can thusly be transformed thru psychic disillusionment, Rob’s work enacts thinking towards a place that is possible inasmuch as it is unthinkable—a non-place (i.e., utopia), or place of the imaginary unidentifiable with the psychoanalytical type.

The place of this imaginary I identify principally with thinking as an action in itself, as thinking may begin in using and being used by language. I believe Leslie Scalapino may articulate such a notion of thinking where she writes: "Movement (or shape in writing) is a knowledge that isn’t one’s thinking per se. One’s thinking by itself is movement that is knowledge." When I think of Rob’s work in general, beyond any concrete detail, thematic concern, or subject it is this essential movement of thinking that I recall, and which makes me want to return to the work. While certain terms from Rob’s poetics may point at this movement of thought—“event”, “situation”, “withdrawal," “disaster”—the one I think most of is “blank,” a term that recurs again and again.

Never knowing quite how to take this term, it would seem to indicate a limit of sorts in substance which provides for new psychic configurations and interpellative circumstances: “you no longer being, my abundance, a blank the world keeps repeating, such pure situation.” Insofar as “blank” evidences the sublime, it also challenges one to act before a real too large to be encompassed by the understanding: “—yr role in something boundless makes me impotent, a blank the war keeps repeating, a bad infinity gone sublime” and “such clean subordination. broken subjects, surface areas and coastlines now contiguous with the vastness of that blank, repeating what won’t go down.”

I bring up Rob’s *blank* because I think blank is meant, in some way, to indicate a space of potentia, if only in negative, and it is such spaces that Rob’s work is principally concerned with. By taking the high-road of the negational, abstract, erased, absent, and occulted Rob constantly brings us back to our senses. To an actual commons, a common sense, where one might gather again, feel, touch, commune and coappear. Somehow through distance we have closeness, sense thru nonsense, sound through inarticulation, silence. “Now undo this habit. It won’t take long, and then we’ll emerge, together, in a hole blast thru the audio feed, our ears, at last prepared to hear, discovered in the mud…”

Deadpan at Weird Deer

here is a link to Dorothea Lasky and I reading a selection of our collaboration, Deadpan, at Travis Nichols' Weird Deer:

http://weirddeermedia.com/2008/06/deadpan-collaborative-poems-by-dorothea-lasky-thom-donovan

Braille Eyes

Dreamt I was evicted
from my house so
there would be no

more home for my
tears to dwell in but
in you I called

to you in some way
like one does in
dreams fact of tele

pathy but you were
already there that
is you are always

already here with me
who keeps an image
of the loved con

stantly before them
loves truly so there
will always be a place

to dwell hearts ears
seek braille eyes
what touch owes you.

Peace On A presents: Power & Performance

Despite my affinity for the term relationality, we may need other language to approach the issue that concerns us, a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well.
~ Judith Butler

Peace On A

presents

Power & Performance
featuring presentations by David Buuck, Julie Patton, and Chen Tamir

Sunday, June 8th 2008 6PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

David Buuck lives in Oakland, where he organizes BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. He is a contributing editor for Artweek, and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.

I had disembarked at the Embarcadero, platforming myself into some semblance of public figuration. The bay area rapidly tranced it, from the resident base camps to the clamor and throng. Up and out into the punctuated street-sprawl, shadowed by the public directives. Heaved out then into the scablands, street-rocks popping against the undercarriage of the survival carts. Billboards tower as trees might shadow that. The turn lanes apropos of the new gold rush. Steetside is saddle leather, limbered for the pickets. 425,258 a day, fro and bending to it.
~ from Electricworks


Julie Patton extends her pulpoethic strategies into collaborative spaces via anyone willing to hand-dance—recent activities include stirring up an ArtScience mecca in Cleveland's inner city, "A Roon for Opal" art installation as part of the Olin Art Museum's (Lewiston, Maine) "Green Horizons" exhibition. "Using Blue to Get Black," an extended argument about the color blue forthcoming in Crayon Magazine. The rest is herstory.

riff off of
"Using Blue to Get Black"
(for my mo' there mudder)

blah blah blew light
be lack beat subject
leadible huge margins
lake back eerie bl accents
reeking scalp blue hung
er un
speak a bruised surf
faces mean blood ism
cl...oud braille lean
read
conscious pilots (heavenly friction)
hum blue staff
road read stratejeans
bic hus blind air
high hand le soluablu sex pack
14 ml tube b lousy pinkablue
sigh sing argue a pale smiles
be lie a blue lip fast
(as you write for days
vary a ble tongue brash
dis as stern pen onyx drink text
siccative blind
azurite for days
terre blue ish cast
boon flower b light
belie s can vast memory
ig blue not house a b...loa
ice, water, oil, wind
con vert sable skin c lash
crop then go after value
ire my bluest I
pearl pliant
goo out
b rain b light
tinktured, wheight bl+ u…
more than you can thank
heaven
flat to be tied re
touching orange
cut off your risk so
bleu to feel raw skies
scrump back ground
pain t hang
soul solvent
gesso so yes so blue
tellin’ me making do
with all that
blue


Chen Tamir is an independent writer and curator based in New York, Toronto, and Tel Aviv. She holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College. She is also a curator at Flux Factory in Queens. Her most recent curatorial efforts are on view in Toronto at the Barnicke Gallery with a show called "Stutter and Twitch": http://www.jmbgallery.ca/exhibitions.html

In “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” art historian and theorist Claire Bishop called Bourriaud up Relational Aesthetics’ cliquishness. She advocated instead for what I’m calling “Social Practice.” Social Practice is not reactionary to Relational Aesthetics: They run parallel. Their distinctions may sound benign, but it’s important to differentiate between artwork that reinforces a closed system, and one that challenges it. Although it’s really nice to hang out in galleries and feel cool, what we (and I mean a very broad “we”) need is art that takes us beyond that, or at least makes us question what that means. Sometimes that can be uncomfortable, forcing us to deal with issues we’d rather not face, or people we’d rather not associate with, but that discomfort is productive.
~ from “Social Practice”

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers, activists and scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

Peace On A presents Rob Halpern & Eleni Stecopoulos

Movement (or shape in writing) is a knowledge that isn’t one’s thinking per se. One’s thinking by itself is movement that is knowledge.
~ Leslie Scalapino

Peace On A

presents

Rob Halpern & Eleni Stecopoulos

Thursday, June 5th 2008 8PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Rob Halpern is the author of Rumored Place and Snow Sensitive Skin (co-authored with Taylor Brady). Two collections of poems, Disaster Suites and Music for Porn, are forthcoming this year, and a little chap called "Imaginary Politics" will be out from TapRoot Editions this month. He's currently co-editing the writings of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the first of which, "For a Realist Literature," can be found in the current issue of Chicago Review. He lives in San Francisco.


from MUSIC FOR PORN

Like yr body’s inner edge I feel things everywhere this pure circum
— schisms surround me but whatever happened in the car my
Social vacancy fills with random abductions stories extending

Lonely from the day’s bleak tone rows a landscape or whatever de
— scending points in space can’t see how we’ve been thrown
Out of the thing’s now blank interior it’s always a gamble trade

Being no event no self-evidence inside the dispersion affects
You boy how yr organs go on finding me here as one who might
Still feel a distance even when living in the other room strung

Out between their cries and the inner heat yr body leaves rim
— ming images lips limits what these circumcisions sing around
Me no more optical effects now pure pictures eyeing this — heaven.


Eleni Stecopoulos was born in New York, NY and currently lives in San Francisco. She has published a chapbook, Autoimmunity (Taxt, 2006), and her first book, Armies of Compassion, will be published by Palm Press in 2009. She is at work on Earth Also is a Private Language, a book-length poem that takes place via the island of Evvia (Euboea): its geothermal springs and hydrotherapy traditions, ancient cults, and family stories that involve escape. In 2007 she guest-co-organized the Paros Symposium on Poetry and Translation in Greece. This spring she curated an event on poetics and healing, featuring psychologist Eric Greenleaf and poet/design/builder Robert Kocik, for the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.


we have been made into
immovables domestic warp
the sacrum into acquisition
at the expense of the people the real people the principal
line that cuts us phoneme that articulates
my pursed fingering air as the instrumental
difference plays . the feeling
for people whose names we can barely
pronounce those names amnesty delivers
when I see human on a soup can
administer the homonym before
english can attack

from “Sacral Thought,” Armies of Compassion



Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers, activists and scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

The Phoneme Choir (ad)

MOVEMENT RESEARCH FESTIVAL SRING 2008
SOMEWHERE OUT THERE
Thursday May 29th - 10 pm
THE PHONEME CHOIR
Judson Memorial Church Gym, $5
243 Thompson St, just off Washington Square South
R. Steiner wrote: “The entire universe is expressed when the alphabet is repeated from beginning to end.” Join us for an orchestrated performance of the forty phonemes which are the English language's most basic structural units. The Phoneme Choir is part of The Prosodic Body, an ongoing collaboration between choreographer Daria Fain and architect/poet Robert Kocik based on their exploration of language as a somatic practice.

4 Songs for Governmentability

Who decides
who gets to live and

who gets to die
and who misses them

and who mourns eventually
that our science can

only keep
some of us alive and

them not even for ve
ry long

may be the w
orst

fact of all that
‘keeping alive’ shou

ld be the problem of
all science and medi

cal practices
to stay alive to

relieve pain
to die comfortably honorably

represents the
limited extent

of our creativity
and thinking.


So the prisoner
sings and is his body
tho he is
in prison and the state thusly
courses through
him a ‘capillary funct
ioning’
of power thusly
through us in that
song of some
immanence open and
ungovernmentable which
unsentimentally
will see
the walls of sovereignty fall
in a way unlike the way
they were built.


Wearing your ‘war hair’ in the rain
please let your enemies deserve you.


Too much governmentability
not enough desire

for the good we are not good
or just without which law

sustains us lawless except
we won’t pretend some sovereignty

wasn’t the word pretend these
prisons were good

for the soul 'infinitely detained'
by no due process what rogue

state was ‘we’ unmourned
or ‘they’ far away like bodies

we can’t see they see us
down into a Roman thing

incision of the ‘two bodies’
burnt by what remains.

Felt Sculptures

here are some felt sculptures!

http://feltproductions.wordpress.com/felt-sculptures/

Deadpan Audio at Eric Baus' To the Sound

Here is a 50 min. audio track of Dorothea Lasky and I reading our collaboration Deadpan.

http://baustralia.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/dorothea-lasky-thom-donovan-read-deadpan/

Shabbat Selectives

~ for Kyle, after his 1st St. Marx reading

If and when you flipped your shit
A lot a mode of interrupt

That shows the senses a way out
Of sense demonstrates a parity

Of insight the printed word
And word spoken in the air

Like it were printed a kind of hall
ucination what “fuckery” would

Reveal context wherever we go
Hell opter literalism folds

The world so we are in it
Like a wreck of print lends eyes ears

Ears eyes touches these distances
Song adjusts your mind is on

My mind again its different
Colors of the sky today none

theless irradiating a common sense
The lower cases too equivocate.