David Buuck's "Exercises in Seeing"

"Audio guide for one night only exhibition 'Exercises in Seeing' at Queen's Nails Projects in San Francisco, held entirely in the dark. The guide to the works in the show was written by poet/artist David Buuck, without having seen any of the artworks. The exhibition was curated by Post Brothers." [...]

from "None of us have rules, none of us have scripture": CA Conrad’s Advanced Elvis Course and the Politics of Spirit

I have been trying to write an essay on CA Conrad's poetics via his recent Soft Skull book, Advanced Elvis Course. Here is a selection from the essay destined for publication in Paolo Javier's 2nd Avenue Poetry:

"Conrad’s work puts forth a genealogy of morals in the spirit of Spinoza’s ethics and Nietzsche’s evaluative philosophy. This genealogy, like Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s, radically calls into question the relationship between morality and law. Elvis, like a certain Jesus of recent liberation theologies, is that which permits, and he whose only law is love. Not “love thy neighbor” or “turn the other cheek,” but love for the body as that which grounds a just and reasonable society—Spinoza’s socius or Nitezsche’s active affects which overcome that which is resentful, disaggregating, and reactionary. One overcomes (or over-cums) because they are bursting with love for multitudes. As in Melville’s homoerotic law of sea articulated in “The Squeezing of the Sperm” chapter of Moby Dick, singularities “splice” singularities—affect-to-affect, man-to-man. Material bodies are plastic/synthetic; all flesh is just flesh as though related by a blank before or beyond social discursion. Melville makes an appearance in Advanced Elvis Course through reference to a concert Elvis gave in which he shouted the words “Moby Dick” during the break between “Jailhouse Rock” and “Don’t Be Cruel.” Conrad reads this eruption as having to do with American barbarism: “Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.” (43) Yet Advanced Elvis Course, like Moby Dick, takes one figure as its central fact, and from this figure spins an allegorical compendium of socio-political consequence. Elvis, like the Whale, is in all of us. One becomes paranoid to seeing Him everywhere the more one looks."

Corina Copp: SEGUE introduction

I have a strong impression of first hearing Corina Copp read her work. It was at the bar on 11th Street between Avenues A and B in the spring of 2006. What left a strong impression was a sense that her language was doing something—that it was having an effect on me—and yet I could not tell where it was coming from, what was holding it down so too speak. The language was like pure performance—a gestural language seeking a referent.

Or seeking characters? Four years later Copp now pursues an MFA in play writing at Brooklyn College, studying under the play write Mac Wellman. Reading her plays “Office Killer” and “Manon Maria Braun,” I am struck by how suited her playful language work is to the theater, and specifically a theater that prioritizes action and gesture over plot or character development per se. Characters are ciphers for what can or cannot be said. Fairly routine dialogue will suddenly kick into language acrobatics. I like this about Copp’s plays. I like the sense that a language for the theater becomes possible again. Conditions of possibility lurk in the leveling of character and dialogue through gestural lyric. The problem goes back to Stein, and continues in Copp’s other mentor, Fiona Templeton, whose recent "Medead" (or “me dead” as I prefer to call it)—a phonemic based representation of the intercultural figure of Medea—resembles Copp’s own concerns with sonic, rhythmic, and metonymic language values.

There is content of course to Copp’s work. And it has to do with being a woman, and the violence that is enacted against women. It also has to do with sex, and identity and many other recurrent concerns of any theater. These concerns, evoked through schizophrenic speech, evoke what Copp calls a “deep threat” in an essay she has written about Poets Theater and Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater for the 2nd issue of ON Contemporary Practice:

“What’s incredible is that Poets Theater is a threat to order, and that entities are threats to equilibrium. Threat is deep; even multiplicity is still threatening. Polyvocal pieces are more and more prevalent among poets and play writes, hinting at our effort to equalize (provoking discomfort with lack of distinction), create cacophonies of sound, resist traditional structural modes, etc. What follows from an effort to equalize is the dissolving of individual character traits. In much current writing, for instance, characters A, B, and C might variantly have nervous legs, low IQs, or violet auras or not—but often they are types who witness strangeness in a place (the theater) meant to show something.”

I like this phenomenological description of what Poets Theater might contribute to theater at large. A leveling of hierachies between the essential elements of theater, which are obviously not just plot, setting, character, and psychological motivation, but language as a form of action and the expression of embodied affect among interchangeable bodies—the chain of substitution of post-industrial serialization comprised by “types.” Theater then becomes, as Copp tells us, more like an equilibrium of forces. By writing poems as plays or plays as poems (I can’t which) Copp is channeling the forces which inhere in language and make up our lives.

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."