Aspect Blindness: Arnold Kemp and Sreshta Rit Premnath (@ Art21)

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As with Kemp’s artist’s book, Spirit and Image, Premnath’s Zero Knot presents a series of frames for historical and political realities which a reader/viewer must hold in their attention, where some frames negate or simply block out others. Much like Wittgenstein’s own rigorous linguistic-philosophical investigations, I encounter through Kemp and Premnath a discourse pragmatics in which what can’t be seen (or resolved) is as important as what is known through an enumeration of the facts. In the work of Kemp and Premnath, facts become only as good as their display and our position towards their display, and this prevents a kind of solipsism that art might otherwise induce. Skepticism overshadows solipsism, becoming a force for critical thinking and renewed reflection upon aporetic cultural encounter.

R.I.P. Mark Linenthal

Michael Cross has a nice write-up in remembrance of Mark Linenthal, a San Francicso State University professor, former director of the university's Poetry Center, and mentor to many a Bay Area poet, who recently passed away. Cross's write-up includes an extensive introduction which Rob Halpern read for Mark's reading at the Last Laugh Cafe on January 12, 2008, a portion of which I include below.

I was fortunate enough to visit with Mark on two occasions when I visited San Francisco in the summers of 2007 and 2008. What stood-out to me about Mark were his irreverent yet good natured sense of humor, as well as his enthusiasm about poetry, and especially the poetries of George and Mary Oppen, who were his close friends.

Rob Halpern on Mark Linenthal's poetry:
At a time when the idea of experience has come under siege, Mark’s poems score, with uncompromised lucidity, the movement of their own attention making contact with a world where experience is still possible. In this sense, the poems are instructive: they prepare, in language, the presencing of an “experience” that remains outside language. For Mark, small acts of attention become consequential for locating one’s place in a world where “place” goes on eroding. Rather than giving into the force of that erosion and the rule of words, the poems bear witness to the fragility of location where a concern with “what can be said” becomes the most serious of all concerns. “What can be said”—as both direct question and relative statement—conditions the poems’ formal possibility while delimiting their content. It’s in their faithfulness to “what can be said” that Mark’s poems enact the values of clarity and precision, against injudicious obscurity and vague impressionism. But to measure one’s sense of measure—honestly and accurately—by “what can be said” requires a certain lightness of touch, and like Lester Young, after whom he wrote a great poem called “Listening to Lester,” we can hear Mark in his poems, “learning to play so lightly / he could believe it.”

The mind steeped in ash
Where does one go to forget it
To move earth and be moved

By earth, the mind steeped in
What we could not know, these fringes
Of this we where I sleep

Where one declares themselves burnt
Moulds or analytics of movement
Like men who like to dig holes

A Wildness

-for Michael and Robert

Nearly in the sea like "water is in water,"
Land within land, dreams with dreams

But then there are things we see with our desire
The deaths we are also with, apart inside us

Swell sometimes, speak to me a barometric
Of address and the consequences of not speaking

Of withdrawing from what we say, to another
Wilderness the dark will not pray for us

The dark will be a ground we recover in the night
Illegitimate, turning to those other bodies

Those others who are the only spirit, the only health
We will have known, going to them like conditions

To imbibe the harm that also involves us
Like forms for an approaching wreck.

The forest / trees / together / how?