Towards Exterior formatted

Fictions of Surveillance

For Harun Farocki

I.
If a tree falls
and the only witness
is the image
of the tree…

If the image
itself is rootless
where fantasy doubles
and emerges…

II.
Disaster mark
The lip of mouths unseen
Shed not light but shed
Light ideally

In idols the trains of doing
And the trains of fate, the trains of not
Doing, that the little oar blade
Is there, and there in the

Big wake
Of time that is us, we are the question
What the mouth discovers and
The eyes cover, what the veils eye

This distance our blade knife
Blade night
What occasional claims in idols
Occident and gas shed

Not light but shed
Visions a glass to stimulate
Flight simulator of proven movements
War exercises are practical truths

Perspective doesn’t complain
Of camouflage and the false
Cross red
Illusions of truer

Trees house gods men
See from space nightmarish
Project measuring man
To man.

III.
If a tree falls or night
Falls on eyes shades
Dark shades a wake falls awake

If a tree falls like the
Solipsist’s body a common
Sense that each picture pictures

If we sing ourselves we must
Sing of other men this too
Must be a picture

What light breaking into song...

IV.
Not on
my life

the cross
is born

of night
and night

not dark
separated

by a whim
of creation

an image
after

ascension
descending

V.
For the eyes too are products of light
Made of beams if you will
And human beings a research into
The sound of waves the wood pushing
A lapping furthermore and whereof

One image arrives without explanation
And another its shadow, and sanest
Words the shadowless discovering
Of veils and veils for veils sans eyes
A cropped mouth identifying the police

VI.
This too the world’s invention
This inversion, this Roman pack
This peace without peace.

Images outnumbering the soldiers
Bodies outnumbering measure
Photographs outnumbering the real.

VII.
Burnt as eyes withdraw from eyes
Sense grace withdrawing
Eyes from eyes graves burnt

As eyes withdraw from eyes
Sense grace withdrawing
Eyes from eyes graves

Abby Walton's "Cook Book" (Blurb)*

This little book, a book without a title and comprised “merely” of 30 digital reproductions of Polaroid photographs taken of table settings, embodies much of what I find beautiful and important about Abby Walton’s art: an art of true grace, of daily devotions and meditations, and of an insistent practice of what, for lack of better term, I must call an “art of living.” Insofar as each Polaroid is wrest from the context of a familiar dinner gathering or elaborate party, together they are a document of a total care for the daily and a reminder of the ever-kindled hearth. That a commons should be beautiful, attended, loved. And in this last sense especially, the Polaroids and the book containing them are essential. Not a fashion-shoot for food, but indicative of a life that may be worth living.

*The "Cook Book" can be purchased at Printed Matter, NYC: http://printedmatter.org/catalogue.

Peace on A presents: Alan Gilbert & Cathy Park Hong (Events Series)*

“A divergence without combat, or a peace with neither conquered or conquerors.”
--Emmanuel Levinas

*Peace On A* series

presents

Alan Gilbert & Cathy Park Hong

Friday May 12th, 8PM

hosted by Thom Donovan at

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

Alan Gilbert’s poems have appeared in various magazines and journals including The Baffler, Chicago Review, and First Intensity; in the anthology *Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books*; and online at The Poetry Project website. His writings on poetry, art, culture, and politics have appeared in publications such as Artforum, Bomb, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, and the website Jacket. A collection of critical writings entitled *Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight* was recently published by Wesleyan University Press. He has a Ph.D. in English literature from the University at Buffalo, and has worked as an art editor for the New York Foundation for the Arts and the College Art Association. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Cathy Hong’s *Translating Mo'um* was published in 2002. Her second book, *Dance Dance Revolution*, has been chosen for the Barnard New Women's Poetry Series and will be published by WW Norton in 2007. She is the recipient of NEA and NYFA grants, and spent last year in South Korea on a Fulbright Grant. Her poems have appeared in Volt, Denver Quarterly, Chain, American Letters, Commentary, and other journals. Currently, she lives in New York City, splitting time teaching at Eugene Lang college and working as a freelance journalist.

Peace On A intends an events series for work by emergent writers, artists, performers and scholars.

for inquiries and feedback please write:
thom_donovan@yahoo.com


Introductions

Alan Gilbert:
*Form is never more than an extension of culture*. So goes Alan Gilbert’s telling play on Robert Creeley and Charles Olson’s famous proclamation: *Form is never more than an extension of content*. Reading Gilbert’s *Another Future: poetry and art in a postmodern twilight* the past few weeks has made me more hopeful about the future of poetry and art criticism in general, and proved to me that this future is far from foreclosed or prescribed. Perhaps the most sizeable aporia Gilbert has found his way out of with grace and reasonability through his collection of essays, addresses, and scholarly meditations is that after Language Writing -- what may remain the single most important literary generation prceding Gilbert’s and my own. If Language has made a thorough, if not effective, assault on linguistic representation what is left having faced this central dillemma? Beyond polysemy, transcendentalist "active reader" theories, beyond an ecstasy of (non-)communication Gilbert returns us to various sense-makings of context, history, agency, discourse, cultural and economic analysis too often lost in the projects of many writers associated with Language -- projects Gilbert has sited as self-assured in their "assured sense[s] of not making sense." If not making sense alone will not suffice for another future what will? For Gilbert we have acts of witness and a recuperation of the subject, however abject, in Benjamin Friedlander’s verse; we have micro-historical emergencies in the post-Olsonian work of G.S. Giscombe, Susan Howe, and Mark Nowak; we have an original way of writing history through a poetics of archivalism by way of Ed Sanders’ verse experiments. The list of important names, works of art, and ideas Gilbert has redirected our attention goes on… I look forward to listening to him read tonight to hear how his critical work translates into that other praxis: poetry.

Cathy Park Hong:
Part ethnography, part philological science fiction, largely a tour de force of witz… Cathy Park Hong’s forthcoming *Dance Dance Revolution*, from which I hope she will read tonight, imagines a future or ”alternative universe” through the soliloquies of a tour guide whose *lingua franca* encompasses Korean, German, West Indian, “Spanglish,” “Black English” and the English of Geoffrey Chaucer – the problems of whose work perhaps most resemble Park Hong’s own, however across the centuries. To read the work aloud, which I have had the pleasure of doing the past few months, is to sound what I believe Robert Duncan called “muthos” (of course punning on myth and mouth), and Nathaniel Mackey after Duncan language’s “discrepant engagement". In such engagements, it is language itself -- language as a multiplicitous expression of cultural desire -- which is ultimate master over the speaker/author. The singular voice we hear in *Dance Dance Revolution*, beyond Park Hong’s capacious imagination, is a voice of present necessity as cultural confluences and conflict become articulate in an uncanny glossolalia ventriloquizing us –- the reader! -- to make us mouthpieces for histories micro and macro, disastrous and joyful, wondrous and all-too-familiar. If the language of *Dance Dance Revolution* also risks hyper-codification or an elaborate language game it does so in a spirit of experiment and inquiry which can only benefit its eventual readers and critics, not to mention a larger poetic discourse addressing cultural forces at large.

--Thom Donovan


DIGITAL CAUSEWAY

Every window contains
the memory of a body
seen through it,
along with a shadow that momentarily
erases its reflection,
because there are no
universal symbols,
such as sun and moon,
or loving the landlubbers,
and it’s hard not to take pleasure
in witnessing authority disgraced,
even if we internalize punishment
long before doing
anything wrong,
or are fearful of loss
and lacquer everything
with an opaque coat,
then tie it all down
as if it were a portable shelter
that might blow
from its rocky ledge
in the middle of the night,
which is why “sometimes”
is as close as it gets to “absolute.”
And so I’m not nostalgic
for Jimmy Carter;
I’m not nostalgic
for TV dinners
while watching allegories
unravel over a lifetime
in a staggered parabola,
asking: “Where’s mama?”
“Where’s papa?”
since there’s not just one
language to contest,
and the word “poetry”
is the lightest of beach balls
and the heaviest of boulders;
it’s running a standing start mile
with hurdles, high jump,
and a whole floor routine thrown in.
Therefore, I don’t mind
if you go ahead and shrug
your shoulders and smile
in that endearing way;
for a while I was addicted
to no longer being lonely;
in other words, I knew then
what I don’t know now:
Wings separate from the bodies
of most creatures,
and I’m burnt at the root
picking one small blueberry
staining the teeth scraping
the inside of a bowl,
similar to filling empty boxes
with more empty boxes
—all ones and zeroes—
and then pretending
it got lost in the mail.

--Alan Gilbert


1. Services

See radish turrets stuck wit tumor lights around de hotel
like glassblown Russki kestle wit’out Pinko plight,
only Epsolute voodka fountains. Gaggle for drink?

Twenty rooboolas, kesh only . Step up y molest
Hammer y chicklets studded in ruby y seppire almost
bling badda bling. Question? No question! Prick ear.

Coroner diagnose hotel as king of hotels ‘cos
luxury es eberyting. Hear da sound speaker sing ‘I get laid in
me Escalade/but I first sip gless of Crystal/den I whip out me pistol.’

No worry. No pistol in hotel, only best surgeon feesh y beluga
bedtime special. Deelicious. But before you tuck in king o’
water bed, befo you watch papa-view,

Be peripatetic y see snow bears merry on a ball or go
Be roused by molten sauna where Babushkas bap your tush
wit boar bristle switch. No childs allowed here. Mo mo?

De blood rust hes been Windexed to amber shine,
de insurrecta's marauding soul wetted into papa-machetes,
de looted radio back in de propa municipal hands.

Here be city of ebening calm, da fire-rilers gone.
If you want true heestory, go watch tailor
maki magic. He more revolutionary den artist.

If you dream only for Paris, dat is right outside de
atrium, beyond de sand dunes, which form y disappear
like mekkinations of human digestion. Sand swirl

to otherworld land where blankets da weight of human
bodies tatter y pill. No tatting, no pilling here. Da sand will
be in your eye, only sometime.

--Cathy Park Hong

* The above image is a detail from Anton Van Dalen's *81 Birds*.

Poesis (Splitting)*

Restore form for the undead hover craft
Light is a fullness of exposure
Photography ensures a future for these words names
Remain in light drift to icy lines distant
Crystallize for all time a demolished name Niagra
Fight art with art unseen time is this other
This other of unfolding experience relation the fullness of exposure
Split the house and lift this unworked town craft like water falling unfailingly light
This is a magic of interruption
The crystal incompossibilty of all structure
A politics powers factor
The fullness of exposure

*composed Spring '05. Forthcoming in P-Queue.

Towards Exterior (Splitting)*

to Gordon Hadfield

TO H OVER
F OUR CORNERS CAP
A PAST OF HOUSING
SPL AY SP Y THE D I FFERENCE
DWELLING I N
W IN DOWS EYEBEAMS
EACH TO ITS D I VERGENCE
THIS GL I MPSE SUDDENLY
FULL OF US
TO HOVER SPL I T
F ILL US WITH THE WORLD


AGAIN TO MATTER
AGAIN ON THE MAKE
TO RAT TLE SPACE
A RESTING PLACE
IN THE DRAGS OF DAY TIME
THE ACCOM PAN I MENTS
OF A SAW


TO HOVER S PL IT
F I L L
US WITH THE WORLD
PON DERABLE
TO D I S COVER
THE PRE SENT
PRIVATE TO OPEN
THIS PUBLIC UP
AND FOR THAT MATTER
U TT ERLY ABEYANT
TO FI LL SP LIT H OVER
IMPON DERABLE
MY COVER


U P U TT ERLY ABEYEN T
N OO N N OO N FI LL S
THIS M ID NIGHT TO
AN ALCHEM Y A C OO L
WATCH OF SAW S
SEE W IS TFUL GRAF ITTI
WHAT CH ARMS WOULD
GRA TI FY S Y NCH
S TREET AN ALTER NATIVE O PEN


GRAFFI TI O F AN A
GRAFF IT I OF A N O


D ON’T RETREAT REC OIL FROM
A C O LD O F LAN GUAGE
DEM O LITION EV O LVES
BY SP O RES OF FIRST
INTERR UP TING STR UC TURE
LIKE THAT HI CC UP S Y STEM
WHICH SM O THERS S OO N
DI F FUSE F-ST OPS
DURATION DILATE SPECTACLE


AN ARC HE A N A RK
WE M A KE THE BEST IND EX
F IN GER T IM E’S FULLNESS
FIG UR ING A SL I VER
ST OR M OF NOON-TIDE DIAPHRAM V I B E
F O L D S I N T I M E


SEPT E MBER 11TH CHIL E
FOR VI CIO US HIS TORY
EX CAV ATION
I MAG I NES THE SK Y
A DIS ASTER WITH OUT TH E GRAV ITY


GRAFFITI RUNS ON TIME
PRO PHE SY ING A NO IS Y E YE
THE SEE ING EAR EVER IN P LIGHT


SHADE FLIGHT SPECTRAL
M O NEY M OO N ACR O SS O LD
SEE W O RTHY VE SS LES
P O WER IN A N EW F OR M
D O Y O U RE MEMBER
WHAT THE C O L D WAS LIKE
CR O SS ING SYN C O PES OF
AN EN LARG ING S LIVE R
SU F F E R ING
WHAT D O ES TIME KN O W
THAT SPACE CAN’T DO
CAN YOU REMEMBER A WAY ABOVE
SAVE THE DATE PARADISE
INDEED SPIRAL WITH Y OUR DEAD


KNOTS O N THE WAY T O HEAVEN
O THERS D ATES AN D TIME S
D O Y O U R EMEMBE R
BEATING WITH AN OTHER’S BLOOD
ABANDONED TO AN A BAND ONED BUILD ING

*composed Spring '05. Forthcoming in P-Queue.