Commoning

--for Steve Collis

Spilled in the language's veins
A militant regard
When will it be
A tool for something other

Than exchange watching us fuck
Them up in the dance with
Forces again
The city shine with it

Little estates make a little
Shit out of me
You are everything
To me dear abstractions fleeting

View of the thing from the thing
In itself trees move with us
Our disappearance
We disappear the world thus

Appears flashes with
Thoughts spreading in these leaves
Bifurcating futures
Like elements huckleberrying

Like language sometimes
Squats in us.

Three Proposals (@ Harriet)

here

“Not let this story dry” (aka “The Dolors of Glenn Beck” or “Instant Tears”), will take up a proposition from Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics: “The more an affect is known to us, then, the more it is in our power, and the less the Mind is acted on by it.” I would like to re-present Beck as a series of affects in order that the Mind (consciousness, cognition) may become less reactive, more prepared for action and reflection. Participants in the performance will be provided with a few basic instructions: the first, to watch Beck videos on YouTube and to memorize three or more of his gestures; the second, to select footage of Beck’s speech and gestures at their most pathetic/histrionic; the third, to practice these gestures and speeches together and separately (as if to separate language-track and image-track) until they feel like the gestures/speech become more of less involuntary, something they can perform without having to think about them, that their muscle memories have assimilated.

Robin Tremblay-McGaw on ON

http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/02/oncontemporary-practice-2.html

Others Letters: Dana Ward (@ Harriet)

here

"So much to say, but one thing I’m curious as to yr thinking is the sort of standardized sense of how poetry becomes public. I’ve noticed, both in listening to your reading the other morning, & then in reading some of your notes at Harriet, perhaps in some of the comment fields there, that you talk about the absence of a standard trade edition of your work, or have a sense of its belatedness/potential, depending. Very interested in you talking about how Wild Horses of Fire performed some of that work in advance of/in tandem with the absence of, a more normative mode of tech. bringing it into the world–the perfect bound book. What’s your sense of the latter’s import outside of its obvious practical use–having a physical object to put into the hands of others. Do you think/write at the scale of ‘the poetry book’ as it stands as currently administered thing 80-150 pages? As someone in a place similar to you–a lot of poetry with no real physical center of gravity–wondering what your desires are to this end? I have a nagging sense of dissatisfaction, centered primarily around the fact that the work I make rarely wants to open out over the course of 60 pgs. Shorter interrelated quasi-serial works, more like constellations really, seem for me to be the way correspondence/ togetherness exerts its magnetisms between poems. Then there’s really from there but a ’stack dump’ of shorter books into this form. Vexing! Always this beautiful problem of how to be public, my favorite problem."
--Dana Ward

Park

--after Kathy Westwater and Jennifer Scappettone

I want to make a park with you
Make a campfire in the park
Like Mylar crinkles like light is durable
The light that unmakes us

I want to make a fort where
Melody was and our voices were
Where our voices became a
Collective cry in the lost air
And yet uplifted and yet
Somehow spoken

To me not in heaven yet
Not into its hands
Nor enclosed the voices we do
The fences we tend to also a kind
Of unmaking

Bodies full of pain remake
The world because they are not just
A language never were they full
Of grace the toxins structuring us.