Call For Critical Writing on John Taggart's Poetics

The following is a call C.J. Martin and I are making for work regarding John Taggart's poetics. The call is one part of the feature we recently curated together at Little Red Leaves vol. 4:

"When C.J. Martin and I originally put out a call for the works collected in this feature, we had intended not only to include poetry ‘after’ Taggart, but also to gather critical responses to Taggart’s body of work thus far. For a future print volume, Martin and I would like to publish works having to do with the critical reception of Taggart’s work. These works may proffer scholarship about Taggart’s various sources, which derive from visual art, literature, theology, philosophy, music, and natural history. They may also address Taggart’s work through approaches in art history, cultural studies, political economy, ethnomusicology, literary theory, comparative religion, and gender studies (in other words “across fields”). While Taggart’s project continues to be served by festschrifts, Martin and I believe it all the more important that more criticism and scholarship be generated about the work itself. Robert J. Bertholf has compiled a comprehensive bibliography of critical responses to Taggart’s work, which we include here in the interest of soliciting submissions for the projected print volume. Bertholf’s contribution is an excerpt from his full Taggart bibliography—to be featured in its entirety in that volume—which includes (among other things) an exhaustive (and fascinating) record of Taggart’s journal publications. To be in touch with us with submissions and inquiries please contact tadonovan [at] hotmail [dot] com and littleredleaves [at] gmail [dot] com."

Travis Nichols is in The Huffington Post

writing about Eric Baus, Christian Bok, Grand Piano, Bhanu Kapil, and Gertrude Stein:
This is Your Brain on Poetry!

All Small Caps vol. 3

In the mail today I received Jess Mynes' wonderful All Small Caps reading series anthology. The third volume of this series features work by John Coletti, Arlo Quint, Frank Sherlock, Geoffrey Olsen, Alan Davies, Patricia Pruitt, Peter Gizzi, Lori Shine, Betsy Wheeler, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, Ed Foster, Thom Donovan, Dorothea Lasky, Joseph Torra, Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey.
To get your own write allsmallcaps [at] gmail [dot] com.

Dorothea Lasky on Object-Based Learning

Here is a wonderfully informative article by Dorothea Lasky on object-based learning for 21st century art education.

Copp and Reines at SEGUE series

SEGUE READING SERIES: Ariana Reines + Corina Copp
Saturday, December 5, 2009
4:00pm - 6:00pm
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY

Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow and Coeur de Lion. Her first play, Telelphone, ran last February at the Cherry Lane Theatre.

Corina Copp is the author of the e-book Carpeted, and chapbooks Play Air and Sometimes Inspired by Marguerite. A staged reading of her performance text, “OK” was produced in 2008 by Theatreworks, and her play “A Week of Kindness” appeared in the 2007 Tiny Theater Festival. She is the editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

Entangled Activisms at Vera List Center (NYC)

STREAMING CULTURE / ART AND POLITICS
Entangled Activisms: Emergence, Betrayal and the Possibility of Rethinking the Possible / Iain Kerr in Conversation with Brian McGrath, Petia Morozov and Nato Thompson
Tuesday, December 8, 2009 – 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
Parsons The New School for Design
Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
66 Fifth Avenue at 12th Street, New York City
Admission: Free

"We still do not know what a body can do." (Spinoza/Deleuze)

The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously claimed, "You can never step in the same river twice." Comically, one of the rebuttals to this observation was, "You can never step in the same river once." The logics of activism invariably relate to ideas of how change happens – how we step in this seemingly paradoxical river. This discussion is an attempt to test and experiment with the linkages between activist practices, ideas of change, and theories of time.

Arguing that theories of activism need to frame activism as essentially a theory of time, the presenters propose that the time of change not be defined chronologically but qualitatively. Rather than sequential time, they propose measureless time. But how can we think and experimentally work with qualitative time today? How do we take into account the ruptures, swerves, emergences, and folds of becoming that sweep us far beyond identity, being, and the logics of critique? What are the new possibilities and techniques of activism and activist art that develop out of these logics of the event? This is an evening to debate and develop new models of time, and in so doing to rethink and propose new ideas of artistic practice.

A presentation by Iain Kerr, artist, theorist and founding member of the research collective spurse, is followed by discussion with respondents Brian McGrath, architect, writer and Associate Professor of Urban Design at Parsons The New School for Design; Petia Morozov, architect, writer, educator and urban explorer; and Nato Thompson, writer and Chief Curator of Creative Time.

Presented as part of "Streaming Culture / Art and Politics," a new interdivisional initiative organized by Victoria Vesna, Visiting Professor (UCLA) and Director of Research, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School of Design, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, on occasion of its 2009/2010 program cycle on "Speculating on Change."

LRL4 with John Taggart Feature

C.J. Martin and I coedited a feature for the new Little Red Leaves, a gallery of poets writing in relation to John Taggart. The feature also includes an introduction I wrote for the gallery, a new long poem by Taggart, "Kitaj Angels," and a selected bibliography of John Taggart criticism and scholarship compiled by Robert J. Bertholf. More details below!

Announcing the newest issue of Little Red Leaves!

Featured in this issue is a festschrift for John Taggart, edited by Thom Donovan and C.J. Martin, with poems from Theodore Enslin, Pam Rehm, Eléna Rivera, Joel Chace, Kevin Holden, Frank Sherlock, C.J. Martin, and Thom Donovan. Also in this section is a new long poem from John Taggart, "Kitaj Angels," as well as a selected bibliography of works by and about John Taggart, compiled by Robert J. Bertholf.

This issue also includes new video from Jesse Seldess, a pamphlet by David Brazil, and extended selections of new work from Tyrone Williams, Maryrose Larkin, and erica lewis, as well as poetry from Nathan Austin, Tamiko Beyer, Sarah Mangold, Elizabeth Zuba, Carter Smith, Carol Guess, Britta Kallevang, Rob Halpern, Kate Schapira, Lauren Ireland, Margaret Konkol, David Wolach, Anna Elena Eyre, Kate Colby, Alexander Dickow, dawn lonsinger, Richard Owens, Laura Goldstein, JenMarie Davis, and Felicia Shenker.

LRL4 sees the complete redesign of the LRL website, as well as the launch of three new books in our LRL e-editions series:
Tina Darragh's & Marcella Durand's collaboration, Deep eco pré
Divya Victor's first long player, SUTURES
Norma Cole's Do the Monkey
*See the ebooks page for further details: http://www.littleredleaves.com/ebooks/