Damn the Caesars round-up

I'm thrilled to be included here among such esteemed company in Rich Owens' 2009 round-up.

Poesis as Ecological Remediation

"C. Part Three: Earth Maintenance

Everyday, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered to the Museum:

-the contents of one sanitation truck;

-a container of polluted air;

-a container of polluted Hudson River;

-a container of ravaged land.

Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced:

purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical (and / or pseudo-technical) procedures either by myself or scientists.

These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the exhibition."
--from Mierle Ukeles' Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969

"To become worthy..."*

"Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us . . . Nothing more can be said and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event . . . and to become the offspring of one's events and not of one's actions."

*from Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense quoted in Robert Dewhurst's "The
 Repetitious
 Soul 
of 
CA Conrad's 
Frank
" (unpublished)

Ordering for Sovereignty and Us: Critical Objects 2005-2010

One of my many new year's resolutions is to collate and revise a manuscript of essay, reviews, and statements about poetics and cultural politics. Here is what I've got so far in case any have suggestions about a possible architecture/order/design/publisher.

Sovereignty and Us: Critical Objects 2005-2010

Sovereignty and Us:

Splitting: after a photo-document by Gordon Matta-Clark
Call Backs: on Tyrone Williams
Aporia and Progress: Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure
Every Name In History Is hannah
Hannah’s Bifuraction
Into Bride (Army of Rose)
Every Name In History Is I: on Catherine Sullivan’s Effusions of Meaning
Kyle Schlesinger: Insofar As a Metapolitics of Sense
Entrance Wounds: Richard Foreman’s Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land
Undeserving Lebanon by Jalal Toufic
Sovereignty and Us: Eleni Stecopoulos’ Autoimmunity (TAXT, 2006)
Bare Life: Taylor Brady’s and Rob Halpern’s Snow Sensitive Skin
Love Among the Ruins (3 A.K.): on Brett Evans’ and Frank Sherlock’s Ready-to-Eat Individual (Lavender Ink, 2008) and Rob Halpern’s Disaster Suites (Palm Press, 2008)
Lawrence Giffin’s Get the Fuck Back Into That Burning Plane
On Judith Goldman’s The Dispossessions
Paul Chan's "Sade for Sade's Sake" at Greene Naftali Gallery, NYC
Reading Martha Rosler Reading
In the Open: John Taggart’s Susan Howe
On Vision in Make Believe
A Work of the Actual: on Brenda Iijima
“In the dirt of the line”: on Bhanu Kapil’s intense autobiography
Doing the Twist: notes on Modern American poetry and vitalism
Robert Kocik (introduction for Peace On A)
Choir Praxis: on Daria Fain’s and Robert Kocik’s Phoneme Choir at Movement Research festival, May 4th 2009
Are We Human, or Are We Dancer?: on Daria Fain’s and Robert Kocik’s The Extent to Which
WIlliam Forsythe's Decreation at BAM
George Oppen’s Inoperative Poetics
Presencing the Disaster: recent poetry and art after George Oppen
Allegories of Disablement: some consequences of form towards potential bodies
Open Letter to Patrick Durgin on Disability Theory
“None of us have rules, none of us have scripture”: CA Conrad’s Advanced Elvis Course and the Politics of Spirit

Devotions:

Myung Mi Kim’s River Antes
The Course of Particulars: on Terry Cuddy
David Levi Strauss: A Poetics of Fact
Michael Cross (intro for Just Buffalo series)
“how real or imagined it was real”: E. Tracy Grinnell (Peace on A)
Paolo Javier (Peace on A)
Eléna Rivera’s Unknowne Land (Peace on A)
Wayne Koestenbaum (Peace on A)
Rob Halpern’s Disaster Suites
Rob Halpern’s Imginary Politics (Peace on A)
Lola Ridge’s The Ghetto
Activist Presses in the '00s
CANNOT EXIST #4 (Segue)
Leslie Scalapino (Segue)
M. Mara Ann (Segue)
Erica Hunt (Segue)
Dawn Lundy Martin (Segue)
Stephanie Gray (Segue)
Tony Conrad (Segue)
Corina Copp (Segue)
Propositions After Talking to Robert Fitterman Before Reading Notes on Conceptualisms
Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place’s Notes On Conceptualisms
To See 360 Degrees: Elka Krajewska and Alan Licht’s Plany Mela
Magdalena Zurawski’s The Bruise
CA Conrad’s The Book of Frank
George Oppen’s Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers
What We Do When We Believe: 8 Poets Discoursing After John Taggart
Arthur Russell Revived: Tim Lawrence's Hold On To Your Dreams

For a Discourse:

ON Contemporary Practice 1 editorial (with Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger)
Statement for ON1 launch
A Meme For Suzanne Stein
On Certainty
On Negative Criticism
On Stephen Burt’s “The New Thing”
ON Contemporary Practice 2 editorial (with Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger)

Blogging at Harriet January-March

I feel honored to be invited by Poetry Foundation to blog at Harriet with Sina Queras (of Lemon Hound), Bhanu Kapil (of Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? and her many wonderful books), and Fred Moten, who will coincidentally be reading for SEGUE with Mónica de la Torre later on this January. It is difficult to imagine a better company. For my contributions, I am planning to interview different writers and artists, generate questionnaires, write brief reviews and essays, generate curriculum/exercises, and engage with fellow bloggers/commentors. Please feel free to join the conversation via comments boxes and/or by being in touch directly with me: tadonovan [at] hotmail [dot] com.

Iijima's If Not Metamorphic in Publisher's Weekly

Publisher's Weekly has the following to say about Brenda Iijima's new book, If Not Metamorphic:

In Iijima's fourth collection, shifts and spaces on the page animate the messy and glorious process of making meaning. As suggested by “metamorphic” in the title (meaning a change in a rock's physical form or substance, usually as a result of heat or pressure), geological metaphors are essential to these four long poems. The stunning title piece, composed entirely of questions, sifts and settles across its pages like sediment, both moving (in every sense) and unwaveringly direct. “Tertium Organum” has a noisier geologic structure, suggesting the violence of human intervention: “Twisted corset the tectonic plates make/ when crassness butts up against steel.” This collision of registers and the resulting dissonance is much of the point. Language, here, “encroaches,” “is engorged,” and “is hit by passing vehicles.” Often, it moves metonymically, leading us from idea to idea by way of sound: from “loan” to “lone,” “suffer” to “sulfur,” “sees” to “siege,” and “sunder” to “tundra.” Sometimes Iijima jumps between registers via overt protest, as in “song birds gave way to acid rain.” At her most self-reflexive, she describes her “affection for/ provocative contrasts.” The experience of following these contrasts is thrilling; as Iijima writes, “In a manner of speaking we flew.”

Tears Are These Veils at tumblr.

I started a new blog today, mainly for links and photos: http://tearsaretheseveils.tumblr.com/

Will be tweaking it and adding pics when I can. I like the simultaneous slide-shows so far.

Reading Martha Rosler Reading at MUSEOXIII

The following is from an essay I wrote about Martha Rosler's reading practice in her 1975-1985 video works, now up at MUSEO XIII online. Thanks to Martha Rosler for allowing me to interview her, and to David Shapiro who edited the essay extensively.

"In three videos from the late 70s and early 80s—Domination and the Everyday (1978), A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night, and If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION (1985)—Rosler elaborates her reading practice as a means of encountering the United States’ geopolitical involvement with Latin America. These works pose questions about how one reads video intertextually, how the medium can be used as a vehicle for counter-hegemonic strategy, analysis, and critical reflection, and perhaps most importantly, how to read the United States’ unofficial wars and conflicts. Given the strategies of blackout, disinformation, and distraction enacted by popular media outlets, how is it possible to redirect a viewer’s reading process and critically navigate a terrain of signs intended to draw attention away from the culpability of the state? How is this a matter of “bringing the war home”—a popular slogan from the 60s which Rosler borrows for her mash-up collage works treating the Vietnam and Iraq wars?"

Tears Are These Veils