What Came to Be Called Values

--for kari edwards after reading Bharat Jiva

I.
Since we are disciple
And we are disciplined

The sky rhymes with interpellation
And history rhymes with sorrow

I plays dead the real
Dead can't even counter-

fire or be recalled
At a speed faster
Than the speed of light

A sun without shadow
Shining in these holes
And other holy
Places of disagreement

Your shrapnel erotica
Your maze of skin
Tests living labor

Make us governable
Virtuosos yet you keep moving

A kind of angel of discourse
I.e. an instant

Messenger mediating
The memoir of our mnemotechnique

What came to be called values.

II.
Play dead no one no longer will
Will this maze of skin

Docile flesh performance who is a hostage
To their inherent values

I am listening to your time sense
To the gerunds in your breath

That won't let your body be possessed
By anything except catastrophe

And negative experience which is a mode
Of I without name or defense

Our death and their deaths become porous
Yet irreplaceable

Neither the sky or the earth are transcendent
But present a world outliving us.

OCTOBER 129: Chan and Buchloh

I don't normally read OCTOBER. And not because I don't admire it. I was raised on it, but for some reason I just forget it exists sometimes. Reading some of the current issue, I was very moved by Paul Chan's "The Spirit of Recession" and Benjamin Buchloh's "Raymond Pettibon: After Laughter." Chan is one of the most intellectual and politically minded artists I know working today, and his piece goes to show it as he takes apart the cultural politics (if not the obscure economics) of 'recession' through recourse to autobiography, essay, and polemic about the state of visual arts. Buchloh's "After Laughter" is a brilliant and clear reading of Raymond Pettibon's oeuvre situating the artist's work within a tradition of fine art and political caricature. His basic argument: that Pettibon goes beyond caricature in order to invent a rhetorically slippery drawing practice that can adequately respond to post-70s Right-wing 'spin' and (post-) Reagan-era power dynamics. Not having written (or even had an intelligent conversation) about Pettibon's drawings before, but always having admired them, I was very moved to read something that so clearly expressed my own intuitions towards Pettibon's work. Buchloh's article makes me wonder who is taking-up Pettibon's rhetorically astute caricature among a younger generation of artists. And what writers/poets have a sustained drawing practice in the service of their politics.

Twitter Crackdown

Twitter Crackdown: NYC Activist Arrested for Using Social Networking Site during G-20Protest in Pittsburgh * Elliot Madison was arrested last month during the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh when police raided his hotel room. Police say Madison and a co-defendant used computers and a radio scanner to track police movements and then passed on that information to protesters using cell phones and the social networking site Twitter. Madison is being charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime. Exactly one week later, Madison's New York home was raided by FBI agents, who conducted a sixteen-hour search. We speak to Elliot Madison and his attorney, Martin Stolar.

Listen/Watch/Readhttp://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/6/twitter_crackdown_nyc_activist_arrested_for

Books & Magazines I Received this Past Year

that I have not written anything about (yet) but enjoyed reading and would highly recommend to others:

Etel Adnan's There (Post-Apollo)
George Albon's Step (Post-Apollo)
Jose Felipe Alvergue's us look up / there red dwells (Queue Books)
Animal Shelter vol. 1 (ed. Hedi El Kholti)
Alan Bernheimer's Billionesque (The Figures)
Brandon Brown's Camels (TAXT)
David Buuck's 17 Reasons Why (Mission 17 Gallery)
David Buuck's Buried Treasure Island: a Detour of the Future (BARGE)
David Buuck's The Shunt (Palm Press)
CAConrad's Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull)
Damn the Caesars vol. 5 (ed. Rich Owens)
Marcella Durand's AREA (Belladonna)
Marcella Durand's Traffic and Weather (Futurepoem)
Rob Fitterman's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge)
Rob Fitterman's War, the Musical (Subpress)
Ted Greenwald's 3 (Cuneiform)
Ted Greenwald's In your Dreams (Blazevox)
Ted Greenwald's Two Wrongs (Cuneiform)
Rob Halpern's Weak Link (Slack Buddha)
Carla Harryman's Open Box (Belladonna)
Geof Huth's Eyechart Poems (Queue Books)
Brenda Iijima's Rabbit Lesson (Fewer & Further Press)
Lisa Jarnot's Night Scenes (Flood)
Paul Foster Johnson's Refrains | Unworkings (Apostrophe Books)
Judith Goldman's The Dispossessions (Atticus / Finch)
Erica Kaufman's Censory Impulse (Heretical Texts)
David Larsen's Names of the Lion (Atticus / Finch)
Sara Larsen's Novus (Earthworm Press)
Joel Lewis's Learning From New Jersey (Talisman)
MIMEO MIMEO vol.'s 1/2 (Cuneiform Press)
Miranda Mellis's Materialisms (Portable Press)
Geoffrey Olsen's End Notebook (Petrichord Books)
Rich Owens' Delaware Memoranda (Blazevox)
P-Queue vol. 6 (ed. Andrew Rippeon)
Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (ed. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne, Coach House)
Frances Richard's Shaved Code (Portable Press)
Andrew Rippeon's Priest (Vigilance Society)
Satellite Telephone vol. 1 (ed. Robert Dewhurst)
Jennifer Scappettone's Err-Residence (Bronze Skull)
Joshua Schuster's Theater of Public Safety (Handwritten Press)
Dale Smith's Susquehanna (Punch Press)
Joanathan Skinner's With Naked Foot (Little Scratch Pad Editions)
Sasha Steensen's The Method (Fence)
Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater (Fence)
Rachel Zolf's Human Resources (Coach House)

Two Poems For Friendship

I.
Deserve your enemies my friend
Because the world is burning
From eloquence and all the fake

Shit that is made for consequence
To hide behind supposed disparity
And pretend to be the conscience

Of the world all I really wanted
Was to have an honest conversation
All the world wants for conversation

But your flaming leaves it cold
A kind of lack for lack's sake
A flick that can't cover our larger

Insalvageables distances grow
In our breath like some possible
Community formed in what remains.

II. The Progress of Our Naïveté
-for Rachel

Or "patiency" which is not
The opposite of agency as
Rob often says but the inverse

Of willing ourselves to con-
stantly be a master over
Objects the more one knows

The more one listens to
The gaps in everything we
Do like those soldiers abroad

Firing into a daylight not
Anybody's to destroy who
Controls those docile bodies

And what will be their subject
Is not just an abomination
Of what we cannot see

But a fleeing into the holey
Spaces they have made
Despite our beautiful theories.

ECOPOETICS 6/7 Launch at Artbook/X Initiative

ECOPOETICS 06/07 at Artbook/X Initiative

A nomadic, “pop-up” launch and open house Oct. 14th, 4-6pm. Readings from 5-6pm inside Fritz Haeg’s Dome Colony space at Artbook/X Initiative 548 W 22nd St., NYC.

Readings and performances with Rodrigo Toscano, Lee Ann Brown, Thom Donovan, Julie Patton, Emily Abendroth, Jonathan Skinner and others to celebrate the release of the latest issue of ecopoetics (06/07).

The editor of the magazine will be present from 4-5pm to discuss the project. / Ecopoetics 06/07 (covering 2006-2009), packed with poetry, prose, criticism, translation, interviews and artwork from nearly eighty contributors. An Australian Eco-Poetics section, guest-edited by Michael Farrell. A Theodore Enslin feature. Interviews with Gary Snyder and mIEKAL aND. New work from Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Benjamin Friedlander, Forrest Gander, Joan Retallack, Andrew Schelling, Gary Snyder, and others. Bilingual pages from Antonio Ochoa and Angélica Tornero. Collapsible poetics by Rodrigo Toscano. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “Nanifesto.” Artwork by Christine Boileau, Justin Clemens, Ray Meeks, Isabelle Pelissier and Stephen Vincent. Ten color plates. Bark beetle translations, sound walks, field pages, slow texts, dictionaries of imagined flora, and more . . . Copies of the magazine will be available for purchase, also available through SPD.

Notes On Conceptualisms Review at BOMB

Check out my review of Rob Fitterman's and Vanessa Place's Notes on Conceptualisms currently up at BOMB's blog. Thanks to BOMB editor Mónica de la Torre for her feedback and encouragement.

"Whereas conceptual art prioritized the dematerialization of the art object as a means of overcoming art-as-commodity, conceptualist practices in recent poetry deconstruct the authority of author and text by prioritizing ideas as the principle source of a work’s authority. Doing so, conceptualist writers invite their erstwhile readership into a discourse about poetry’s function as a site of institutional, epistemic, pedagogical, and social authority (rather than into debates about how “good” or “bad” a poem may be). Economics is still a big target for poetic conceptualism, but not so much the status of the poem as commodity since poetry tends to operate in a much smaller economy than that of visual arts (the poets whom I know best, for instance, tend to subsist through a gift economy by which the poet is communally vetted, whereas visual artists tend to operate in an economy of commodity exchange even when their works are contesting the very economic system through which their works find subsistence.)"