http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090601/chomsky?rel=emailNation
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/20/torture
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Bhanu Kapil interviewed by Lisa Birman
Check out this interview of Bhanu Kapil at Trickhouse.
Lisa Birman: ...In Ars Poetica in 2007, you said, “… if poetry is written in a third space, some place less obvious than the colours blue or red, then where is that space?” You do posit that space, in Ars Poetics, but now is a different time and space. So, where is that space?
Bhanu Kapil: It’s the darkest space possible. I wait until the garden has gone dark, for example, before throwing a book into it, and sometimes, the whole day passes without writing or thinking but with the intense longing to do those things. When I was a child, for example, I forced my parents, and the Manders, the elderly couple whose car it was – we were all squashed in on a drive around Lake Coniston – to pull over next to a cobblestone bridge. Mrs. Manders had already pointed it out as the bridge Wordsworth sat beneath to write poems. I was thirteen or fourteen, and clearly, already, unmarriageable, as I demanded that they stop the car and let me out. As I recall, they waited in the car as darkness and a light rain fell, while I sat, knees up, hunched, under that bridge, writing a poem. But it wasn’t a poem. I was writing nonsense. I was making what I would now call notes. Curved space, rural space, British space. But what triples a space? What makes a space trans-generational, so that it triplicates the problem, just as sexual and relational dysfunction are the particulate trace of a disjunctive event far preceding them? A cube of dark space, bounded by Plexiglas…ideally, I’d write my first sentence in that room. The darkness, as I think of it now, is Pakistan. Because the third space, like Heidegger’s borderline, can’t be brought into language unless it’s after the fact. And so, I want that to open up when someone opens the book I haven’t written yet…the immensity and ephemerality of border space. I want to trans-sect it, enter it, lie down in it, at the same instant that language does. Building that vibration has meant preventing language from coming. It’s meant that 80 per cent of my time, at least for this current project, has been spent on site-specific concerns, you could say. I go to India, for example, to scrape the darkness into a jar. Darkness, and a kind of blazing white fog.
Lisa Birman: ...In Ars Poetica in 2007, you said, “… if poetry is written in a third space, some place less obvious than the colours blue or red, then where is that space?” You do posit that space, in Ars Poetics, but now is a different time and space. So, where is that space?
Bhanu Kapil: It’s the darkest space possible. I wait until the garden has gone dark, for example, before throwing a book into it, and sometimes, the whole day passes without writing or thinking but with the intense longing to do those things. When I was a child, for example, I forced my parents, and the Manders, the elderly couple whose car it was – we were all squashed in on a drive around Lake Coniston – to pull over next to a cobblestone bridge. Mrs. Manders had already pointed it out as the bridge Wordsworth sat beneath to write poems. I was thirteen or fourteen, and clearly, already, unmarriageable, as I demanded that they stop the car and let me out. As I recall, they waited in the car as darkness and a light rain fell, while I sat, knees up, hunched, under that bridge, writing a poem. But it wasn’t a poem. I was writing nonsense. I was making what I would now call notes. Curved space, rural space, British space. But what triples a space? What makes a space trans-generational, so that it triplicates the problem, just as sexual and relational dysfunction are the particulate trace of a disjunctive event far preceding them? A cube of dark space, bounded by Plexiglas…ideally, I’d write my first sentence in that room. The darkness, as I think of it now, is Pakistan. Because the third space, like Heidegger’s borderline, can’t be brought into language unless it’s after the fact. And so, I want that to open up when someone opens the book I haven’t written yet…the immensity and ephemerality of border space. I want to trans-sect it, enter it, lie down in it, at the same instant that language does. Building that vibration has meant preventing language from coming. It’s meant that 80 per cent of my time, at least for this current project, has been spent on site-specific concerns, you could say. I go to India, for example, to scrape the darkness into a jar. Darkness, and a kind of blazing white fog.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Vulva Speaking* (Into Bride)
Having Santa Claus in my body
The simultaneity of its contradictions
Where to go between steps (the first declivity)
Bewilderment of weight and displacement
Cezanne’s unhappiness at his roses dying too soon
As part of my being unteachable
Muscle memory--I imagined it effortlessly
The lover animal, the human animal
As if questioning if the act is virtual
Most of the work is lost
To extensivity (movement, projection, mobility)
No constancy to the momentum in space.
*all language taken from Carolee Schneemann's 5/18/2009 talk at St. Mark's Church
The simultaneity of its contradictions
Where to go between steps (the first declivity)
Bewilderment of weight and displacement
Cezanne’s unhappiness at his roses dying too soon
As part of my being unteachable
Muscle memory--I imagined it effortlessly
The lover animal, the human animal
As if questioning if the act is virtual
Most of the work is lost
To extensivity (movement, projection, mobility)
No constancy to the momentum in space.
*all language taken from Carolee Schneemann's 5/18/2009 talk at St. Mark's Church
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Jane Sprague's Apache Roadkill
This little book packs a wallop. So much has been said by our parents/parent generation about Vietnam. Now the child tells the tale through the filter of adulthood. The effect is affecting--evoking the stuttering wail of Susan Howe's poetics or the telepathic syntactical jumble of one of Hannah Weiner's ms pages. Removed generationally from the event, do we as the (American) children of the event have a need to mourn and process? Yes! This book is a pitch perfect negotiation of the right (read "rite") of autobiography to work-through while resisting the deadening symbolization of collective memory (local, national, tribal, or otherwise). Read it and weep (literally).
"In 1969 all the children were killers and we weren't one of them eating paper, Kimmy and where were you I did not then and do not now know how to talk my father BULTACO and I remember the dirty flying that dirt track the way the pebbles felt flying up and hit you the smell slightly metal diesel some strong fuel mix which makes motorcycles go and I know or think we must've crawled skinny wrists and chubby while our fathers watched us I don't know where the women went but we would have been small enough to listen under trees and crawl just shy of the image"
--from Apache Roadkill
I am reading this Sunday...
at HomeBase IV with Dorothea Lasky and Katy Lederer. See the ad below. Thanks to Stuart Krimko and Christopher Stackhouse for inviting me:
Dear friends of Readings at Max Protetch,
Chris and I have put together a reading in conjunction with HomeBase IV for next Sunday, May 24, at 2:00pm. Perfect pre-bbq fare.
HomeBase is a roving public art project currently in its fourth incarnation at 232 East Broadway; the reading will be held there. Directions and further information here.
We're quite happy to have Thom, Dorothea, and Katy reading:
Thom Donovan edits the weblog Wild Horses of Fire (whof.blogspot.com), coedits ON Contemporary Practice, and is an ongoing participant in the Nonsite Collective. Since 2006 he has curated PEACE events series in New York City and he is also a curator for the SEGUE reading series. His recent poetry, essays, and reviews have been published by War and Peace vol. 4 (O Books), The Brooklyn Rail, MUSEO, and Vigilance Society. He currently teaches at Bard College and Baruch College.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of AWE (Wave Books, 2007) and Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), as well as several chapbooks. Currently, she studies creativity and 21st Century Learning at the University of Pennsylvania. Videos of her reading poems with other poets can be found on www.birdinsnow.com.
Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008), as well as the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003). She lives in Brooklyn.
Hope to see you!
Reading info:
Thom Donovan, Dorothea Lasky, Katy Lederer
Sunday, May 24, 2:00pm
at HomeBase IV
232 East Broadway
curated by Stuart Krimko and Christopher Stackhouse of Readings at Max Protetch
Dear friends of Readings at Max Protetch,
Chris and I have put together a reading in conjunction with HomeBase IV for next Sunday, May 24, at 2:00pm. Perfect pre-bbq fare.
HomeBase is a roving public art project currently in its fourth incarnation at 232 East Broadway; the reading will be held there. Directions and further information here.
We're quite happy to have Thom, Dorothea, and Katy reading:
Thom Donovan edits the weblog Wild Horses of Fire (whof.blogspot.com), coedits ON Contemporary Practice, and is an ongoing participant in the Nonsite Collective. Since 2006 he has curated PEACE events series in New York City and he is also a curator for the SEGUE reading series. His recent poetry, essays, and reviews have been published by War and Peace vol. 4 (O Books), The Brooklyn Rail, MUSEO, and Vigilance Society. He currently teaches at Bard College and Baruch College.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of AWE (Wave Books, 2007) and Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), as well as several chapbooks. Currently, she studies creativity and 21st Century Learning at the University of Pennsylvania. Videos of her reading poems with other poets can be found on www.birdinsnow.com.
Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008), as well as the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003). She lives in Brooklyn.
Hope to see you!
Reading info:
Thom Donovan, Dorothea Lasky, Katy Lederer
Sunday, May 24, 2:00pm
at HomeBase IV
232 East Broadway
curated by Stuart Krimko and Christopher Stackhouse of Readings at Max Protetch
Sunday, May 17, 2009
We Did It
And we are still doing it
We is still doing it
We and our allies
And the friends of we
We is powerful if only
In this that
It can make a policy
Of burying
The evidence of its crimes in
The wide open it has
Excuse upon excuse for this
It (the we) laughs
It off with a shrug
We points the finger at
Everyone else
Except itself
Or the market or
Geopolitical strategies
Or the military industrial
Complex which
Must be assuaged
And so the world
Is threatened
By we's example
And so we
Is threatened
By other we's
Would Kissinger survive
A minute before
An international court
Of justice not swayed
By the sovereignty
Of we would the Bushes?
The answer seems obvious
We is terrified
To account for its
Process of election
What is it about we that
Wants to make a man with brown
Skin detained sit naked
With a Playboy while
We takes pictures of him?
What perversity of we
Permits simulated drowning?
When will we finally feel
Some culpability in its we-ness?
We is still doing it
We and our allies
And the friends of we
We is powerful if only
In this that
It can make a policy
Of burying
The evidence of its crimes in
The wide open it has
Excuse upon excuse for this
It (the we) laughs
It off with a shrug
We points the finger at
Everyone else
Except itself
Or the market or
Geopolitical strategies
Or the military industrial
Complex which
Must be assuaged
And so the world
Is threatened
By we's example
And so we
Is threatened
By other we's
Would Kissinger survive
A minute before
An international court
Of justice not swayed
By the sovereignty
Of we would the Bushes?
The answer seems obvious
We is terrified
To account for its
Process of election
What is it about we that
Wants to make a man with brown
Skin detained sit naked
With a Playboy while
We takes pictures of him?
What perversity of we
Permits simulated drowning?
When will we finally feel
Some culpability in its we-ness?