Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Holes in Space


-for Suzanne

If I were here and you weren’t there
In a portal in the air fighting this
Virtual feeling of there being people
On the other side of that screen and

If we were those people milling about
Briefly fascinated by the storefront
Window nearly a reflection of shadows
Of us so a window opens in the actual

World where you ask a question or
There in posing one breathe meaning
Beyond whatever was supposed to be
An art for us or poetry is a fantasy

Of poetry when to most words only
Mean what they say not what they undo
Lapses in the reenactment those holes
Being wherever we’ve really been.

A Meme for Suzanne Stein

...after her reading at St. Mark’s, 11/17/2008

1. What is communication?
2. What is the relationship shared between communication and art?
3. What is the relationship shared between your work and 70s “Live Art” (or performance-based art)? Participatory art? Tactical Media? Procedure-based art and writing? Land Art?
4. To what extent do you feel you are extending the problems of New York poets such as Vito Acconci, Bernadette Mayer and Hannah Weiner? To what extent would you like to or feel you do complicate these practices?
5. Where does poetry currently stand in relation to visual art?
6. With the rise of “social networking” tools such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as life-simulators such as Second Life, how should or could we, as culture workers/artists/thinkers, reenvision communication and participation as problems for our work?
7. You have referred to both TAXT books and your reading performances as "site-specific". How do you understand the term "site-specific" in relation to your work?
8. What (if anything) do the terms “virtual” and “actual” mean to you? "Possibility"? "Potential"?
9. In what ways do you imagine any current artistic practices to be effectively social and/or political?
10. In what ways can participatory and extemporaneous performance practices be considered more ethical/emancipatory than object-based ones?
11. Why, in the past decade, do you think (re)enactment has become such a popular art form across the arts, but especially in visual art? Why not so much in poetry/conceptual writing (Kenneth Goldsmith's Day and Rob Fitterman's reenactments of the Grand Piano project aside)?

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Poetry "After Katrina" in the Newsletter


In addition to some wonderful book reviews by Paul Foster Johnson, Carol Mirakove and others, the December/January 2008 issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter (available online in a PDF format) includes a double review I wrote for Brett Evans' and Frank Sherlock's *Ready-To-Eat Individual* (Lavendar Ink, 2008), and Rob Halpern's *Disaster Suites* (Palm Press, 2008). The review addresses poetry after Katrina, and contemporary "disaster lyric" more generally.