Notebook 3/2012

Exercise for a disabled practice

1.     Imagine your daily routine. What is something you do everyday that you take for granted? A movement? A way of interacting with others in space? How is the world around you constructed to accommodate this way of being in the world? How does language facilitate this experience?

4.     Design an exercise based on your daily routines—movement, language use, ways that you engage your senses, etc. Instruct yourself (or a body similar to yours) on how to make your environment unfamiliar. What constraints or procedures could estrange the daily rhythms of how you interact with the world? How can you use language to record or mediate this experience?

5.     Alternately, imagine a way that your body/person is already constrained or disabled by your environment. Design an exercise by which you (or one with a body similar to yourself) can use this constraint to make art or writing. How can writing/art accurately record/mediate/respond to ways you feel constrained by your social environment? Physically, mentally, and otherwise.

Projectivism and Disability Poetics

Charles Olson, in “Projective Verse,” calls for poets to attend the particularity of their own embodiment (breath, heartbeat, etc.) as source for the poem—its form. This is one way to look at “P.V.”; Olson naturalizes the poem as a site of extended embodiment. The poem is a measure of the person. He doesn’t mention whose body would be measured, though we can assume it is a normative one.

What happens when we look at Larry Eigner? [...] Eigner radicalizes Olson’s observation/injunction that the poet is one who dances in their chair; in other words, in place. That mobility (the dance) is an activity one performs on and through the page.

As [Michael] Davidson points out, Eigner’s work is intensely mobile (the grammar constantly shifts, suggesting multiple pivots or possibilities in which to move through the poem); whereas he spent much of his adult life confined to a wheelchair as a result of cerebral palsy, contracted at birth.

Eigner is often seen as a Projectivist poet, but what does his perceived projectivism mean in relation to Olson? How does his work, as a work of a disabled embodiment, radicalize Olson’s compositional prescriptions to extend content through form (where we may take the person’s difficulties with an ablest environment as the content in need/search of proper form).

My symptoms control the discourse.

--Jordan Scott

My body is the problem.

--Amber Di Pietra

Jordan Scott and Amber Di Pietra are two poets who radicalize Olsonian-Eignerian projectivism, where the poem becomes a site where their specific bodies extend themselves linguistically/performatively in relation to a/an (ableist) built/social environment.

Scott says in an interview that he never writes about his stutter, opting instead to write poems/scripts that will serve to enact speech dysfluency as a condition or symptom of his specific embodiment.

Using language that is difficult for him (and most people, for that matter) to pronounce, the stutter becomes a constraint providing that language with a new social value. As if a ‘failed’ virtuosity/elocution—or simply a non-absorbing one—becomes virtuosic. If in sound poetry historically one attends the voice alone—the voice as transmitter of an estranging content—Scott gives the voice back to a body. The voice becomes body again. Not logocentric, but the materialization of an irreducible presence.

[…]

Spontaneity: The difficulty of the script/poem—as something recitable (customized, as such) for Scott’s condition—enables spontaneity, surprise, suspense.  A difference between Scott and, say, Dada or Cage: that a physical condition is the source of the aleatory (chance operations, etc.). Not the imposition of a procedure. Discursion feeding back with the non-discursive (embodiment). Not a gestus, because Scott is not speaking through a set of cultural codes per se. Gestus can only be under (or over) determined. Is his an unalienated form of gestus? [Like all things involuntary.]

Di Pietra/Leto’s Waveform: A book of correspondence, poems/writings in process, found texts, texts about [their] medical conditions, theory…

What strikes me is how both writers are seeking language forms appropriate to their conditions—in Di Pietra case severe rheumatoid arthritis; in Leto’s, Parkinson’s.

[…]

Through their correspondence they are able to explore how their conditions necessitate different definitions of the writer. The writer, in Di Pietra's case, who cannot spend a lot of time in place, dancing in their chair, as it were.

Or, as Di Pietra asks in Waveform [to paraphrase]: What does it mean to insert one’s self in a genealogy of writers who have rigorously questioned and mistrusted identity (“experimental writing,” the avant-garde) when disability/activism often demands that one identify themselves?

Pain as constraint: Whereas Scott writes through speech dysfluency, Di Pietra and Leto write through pain as (a visceral form of) constraint. It is what forces them to write through a non-normative (non-ableist) set of circumstances; it also becomes that which they are trying to not merely describe or narrate, but essentialize through language (syntax, grammar). [Their work asks] [w]hat is a language form for the often unnameable/undescribeable experience of pain?

Constraint of the social/built environment: Di Pietra/Leto are also searching for forms that might accurately document and perform their experience of social environments and institutions unaccommodating to their specific bodies. How to foreground the language of these environments [which often involve legal and social institutions]?

Not struggling – improving poetry through the stutter – every mouth affected by limitations – limitation becomes useful, beautiful – “what is the utterance?” – how is it arrived at (not just what he’s saying) – the words he chose – [?] to pronouns – radical when read with such particularity – “what a poor, crawling thing you are” – “it is part of my existence to be a parasite to metaphors” – illogical, based on sound – each word evokes the next – showing that each word controls the next – “we will meet on the tongue” – philobytes – against communication – expressive code – lack of articles : creates a rhythm – “it is free but not without limitations” – drugs – makes you stutter – stutter as an undergoing – the reader undergoes the stutter as a discipline[ed] force – mouth-writing – not hand-writing – how deformalization can subject the poet to growth – the anatomy of a stutter

embracing a perceived disadvantage – what is utterance? – foregrounds stutter – stuttering, to go through it – to be forced to perform it – poked fun: “what a poor crawling thing you are” – a lot of the words used purely to draw-out his stutter 

[…]

Mis/hearing Poems:

1.     Listen to an album or multiple albums with notoriously difficult to discern lyrics. Transcribe the lyrics as you hear them. Fashion these misheard lyrics into a poem.

2.     

      Go to a busy intersection or place where you will hear multiple conversations occurring simultaneously. Record what you hear, fashioning it into a poem.

3.     

      With the volume off on a television set, attempt to provide speech for the characters. Doing this with a familiar soundtrack, invent new narrative possibilities.

[Taxonomy] of criticism

Anti-criticism: Criticism of criticism which functions against the typical uses of criticism for legitimation.

Motivated: A criticism of desire. Situated through desire, passion, intense autobiography.

For a discourse: Without ads. Magazines should serve as conversation. Magazines as archives of the present.

[Andrea] Fraser: A more honest criticism. One that does not make claims for art that can’t live up to them.

[Claire] Bishop: Resistance. Finding points of tension, places of antagonism. Doing the difficult thing, the wrong thing. Speaking truth to… power?

Exodus (I): Taking the conversation elsewhere. Outside the enclosures of art and performance institutions. Negation. [Withdrawal] Creating spaces that      will have been vital—abandoning them.

Recovery: To bring something out of submergence.

Exodus (II): Stop writing criticism. Put this energy (of critical reflection) elsewhere. Apply it somewhere else, as creative pressure.

Not me: ‘Crowdsourcing’ criticism. Publishing email (of others)/social media. Anything not me/’original’.

With: To make work as the criticism. A critical hybrid. Demonstration, gesture. Composition as explanation. To involve one’s self with the energies of it.

Slow (I): Not feeling the need to ‘keep up.’ With a processing. Feeling one can withdraw. (Walter Benjamin wrote that he would read the books that were out-of- fashion, that none of his contemporaries were reading.) The need to withdraw into a reading practice. Other sources of stimulation.

Slow (II): To keep writing about the same thing, same work. To see how your reaction to it changes. Time as a factor in any critical writing.

Enactment: To undergo the object/work. To do it. To undergo from a position of practice. To experience as a necessity—something to help you live.

Fiona Templeton visit:

            What if sound determines content?

           

            What if sound is content?

           

            Does the voice have a body?

            “while to abandon is all my babe”

            “that’s us that’s one interfacing myself with salt”

            “speech that imitates writing is papery”

            “thinking through speech” rather than “enactment of speech”

            use of tape recorder (like a countenance)—in O’Hara the use of telephony

            “both language and thought seemed to be inventing themselves and each other”      

            silence—use of silence

            birds of Scottish mouth music

            Aaron Williamson—Hearing Things

[…]

            Somatically more truthful – mostly we don’t hear ourselves speak

            To have space, to have importance

[…]

Dana Ward visit:

nothing/silence productive for poetry; “all poetry is language in time” – technology of verse – enabling relational encounters that allow verse – corrupting verse – “time is a made thing” – “time is constructed through capitalism” – Bordieu: “dead time” – become an engineer – exercises that everyone can do – Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” – imagined his life through a grammatical structure – “how capacious can we make poetry?” – past a place where something isn’t allowed – collectively write a work together – the work can have a social life

[…]

“the thing about a voice…” in Notley – “voice” in creative writing classrooms – Notley: to reclaim the idea of voice – voice is a thing with a recognizable set of tendencies – Fred M.: “it admits of characterization” – yourself or sing it yourself – music has a viral life – like a pop song, like obsession, became obsessed with Fred’s voice – homage: to modulate a voice of another – Moxley’s Clampdown – “when voice is appropriated and comes to live in our bodies it changes” – my love song to Fred’s poem – “like the old world is dying; the near past is in flames” – Myles: “I want to return words to the mouth” – “ the glory of loving someone in that way” – “I don’t have God so I have this thing about friendship” – Nina: “Is your ideal reader someone who knows Zizek and Jay Z?” – “I think about them [friends] because the feeling I get from thinking about them improves my writing” – “It’s more insulting to assume that people don’t get contextual clues” – “You become a repertoire of others” – The dead… we’ve internalized them… we’re performing a self through them – the way art leverages us toward each other – “Am I making this art as a way to inflame these discourses?” “the erotics of self-branding” – “the world is such an unusual world” – “proximity is ruthless (I’ll put it in there if it’s close to me)” – “qualitative disequilibrium”

[…]

The [transcriptive] Uncanny

The difference between unheimlich/heimlich where they converge etymologically in what has become “secret” or “hidden” by its very familiarity, that it would seem of the home.

Uncanny, what is uncanny relates a set of repressions, that which is sublimated in order for subjection or civilization to take place. Related through the maternal body and infantile processes.

What is uncanny is that through which the repressed returns. Reminding us of our primitive origins, but also that which we repress in order to survive. Reminders of our mortality.

What is the relationship of writing to speech [if] not an uncanny one?

Writing, which is a kind of dead or inanimate speech, awaiting resurrection, surprising us when it comes (back) to life, like a doll or automaton opening its eyes.

Transcription reminds me of this relationship. The recurrence of words/language once familiar to us become unfamiliar set down in arbitrary symbols. Encrypted as such.

By something being torn from a continuum of living speech, it becomes familiar and unfamiliar simultaneously, hidden (allegorical?) and yet something we have encountered before.