Sorry not to write you back sooner...

Sorry not to write you back sooner

I have been a bit spaced-out

I saw a picture of you and Marianne on FB recently—

You look great together!

Ugh, not looking forward to breaking this news to a triple Scorpio

At the castle now it is weird to have time to do anything I want

Sort of freaks me out, though I guess I should enjoy it

How is everyone? Are we still feeling this?

Just wanted to make sure I didn't lose track of you

I have been in Europe and not in New York

Lovely picture of the girls

Let's take a walk when I get back... long overdue! 

Glad you are finding a little time to relax with Mel,

And hopefully some poetry

This looks great!

I can't believe my time is already up at the castle

I think this will definitely up the ante...

I hope the holidays have been grand in Greece!

Things were pretty quiet here.

A bunch of us cooked followed by karaoke.

I can't remember the last time I karaoked.

We will Skype

Just in case you were wondering what you missed while you were

Away from the castle... 

I was using the site in English and also using Google

Maps with the address you gave

Me, so I really don't know what

I could have been doing wrong

It is a missed opportunity for sure

Send word from the motherland when you can...

I hope you guys won't hate me

I have been completely out-to-lunch

Holed up in the castle. Take a bus? A cab?

I'm looking forward to seeing you

And to having a little adventure...

Late to rise this dreariest of mornings...

Great moves on the dance floor last night!

I would happily attempt to produce my famous chowder

If everyone contributes a bottle of wine and a dessert

Fruit and a flight of cheeses for hors d'oeuvres

And maybe a single malt for aperitif

I will bring the hip-hop mix...

However quahogs may be difficult to come by 

Sorry for being 'complicated'!

Just wanted to check in about plans to visit

I'm sorry for my ambivalence; I bend too easily sometimes

I thought I would wake up and regret what I wrote

In fact, I woke up feeling less angry

But still a little angry at what he wrote

Today's a day I have been putting off for awhile

Wishing it was colder and snowier here

Not the weather I was expecting

Really could use an ocean right now

A forest just isn’t the same

Last night I wrote a poem about seeing The Hunger Games

In German… how that felt.

I just took a big fat shit

I hope this is OK

Typical manager...

Sometimes I feel that if I never hear another word

In German it will be too soon

I tend to agree with you

That we shouldn't let these works go so easily

I want to respect her input.

I am going to follow your lead,

which is basically what I just did in an email

I am a little frustrated that we cannot talk

At this point all I can do is point to the fact

That I feel totally in the dark

All I can do not to lose my temper 

I'm sorry, my brain is warped

I am, in a word, cranky

Will write you a real letter soon

Just had to withdraw from all communication

You will have to tell me about it in person

Regardless, the book will be grand!

Is there something I missed? In understanding,

Got momentarily swallowed up by the castle!

I think this would be a better way to proceed

Everything is very murky right now 

Maybe subtlizing 

I feel really out of the loop

It is totally abstract to me

I just tried calling but your mailbox is full 

I'm very sorry I couldn't visit

A missed opportunity!

I would like to donate

I am in the castle, yes!

Listening to Chopin's Nocturnes and drinking coffee

While I try to write this poem

Which I don't like writing

I started sharing some of these on Facebook

Working through the complicated feelings

I'm attaching that, in case you are interested

I wrote it in like two hours

I also really love the forest

Where I have been jogging

God, every track is so good!

Thinking of you guys from afar

Gosh, I hope it is not too soon to send you this

Since you expressed a curiosity in how I might start

I feel compelled to share

I hope I have not wrongfully depicted you!

I have some notes for how it might continue and expand

I'm home for the evening and will have Skype

Quasi-slavery and male pregnancy—perfect combo!

I had forgotten that he connects us

Very rare in my current life

I can't believe that much time has passed

I also would love to read more

If there is any you'd be willing to to share

The reading you gave at the Poetry Project was extraordinarily moving! 

I have a lot to say,

But am holding my tongue

That a place be reserved for them

As a kind of placeholder

If only their names suspended over a blank page

Here is the initial letter

Hope all is going well with life

I'm quite happy to not be working

I wanted to run an idea past you

Which I hope you will feel

Especially around ideas of "friendship" and "community,"

To play with the idea of how the book emerges

What I would like to do is invite nearly everyone

I've always wanted to collaborate on something

I miss our conversation!

Never mind that last email

Uploading to Facebook

It was super depressing the last time I popped in there

Very few books on the shelf

I actually don't know a word of German

(imagine a lot of pointing and apologizing)

Good to talk about vintage clothing, I Love Dick, teaching, and other

Subjects tonight... I hope you are surviving the endless party!

I let a few things go to waste

I also really would prefer apples, pears, grapes, and bananas

I hope I am not being too picky!

If there is any way to also get something leafy, like some spinach or lettuce, I would really 

Appreciate that

I hope I am not making too many demands on you!

Thank you for your many efforts.

Contingencies

--after Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno

All these penguins just chilling out

It’s so dark and all the ice is melting under our feet

The feet of the transcendental subject

Now that there is only horizon and inside and outside this drone

In my ear not even mine, but not yours either

What they are gathered for, the penguins

They love being together and warm each other

While another world ends, the world that is our only one

Machines talk to one another, adjust the thermostat

Inside this earth

A moon rises but it is not the moon after all,

Nor is it the sun either, this light source

But a suddenness of places we can’t gather

Far away the birds dream a fog machine in Central Park

The anti-moonlight of their minds eye teleporting damp

Light sources that are only lights, glissando lights

Dry ice communicated between objects

As if just any moon could rise.

*

The wall moves without you

But this isn’t so strange,

And the lights flicker and go out

But this isn’t so strange,

And the posters on the wall glow in the dark

But this isn’t so strange,

And there are robots which

Reproduce Marilyn Monroe’s

Handwriting on hotel stationary,

But this isn’t so strange either

And it isn’t so strange that the sound

Of a dog rustling in the grass

Or of insects buzzing is amplified,

Or that an anime character is speaking to me

And that she has a live body double

Played by a teenage girl,

Nor that a balloon rises over the houses

And looks like a moon at this scale,

Nor that the room can contain a microclimate

Or that penguins gather around a light source,

Or that a piano plays by itself while an

Ash-like substance falls to it

Dusting its lacquered surfaces—no

What is strange is that we are here at all

And that your face is lit-up suddenly

In a building that seems like a ruin but

Has recently been renovated,

And this feeling of having lost you

While we wait for the orgy scene

And that the cops have to break up the marching

Band as they play “Hava Nagila” in tandem with

A-ha’s “Take on Me,” the crowd booing the police

As we queue up outside the Centre Pompidou,

And that your Paris apartment is so similar to

Your New York apartment, and that one would

Eat a plank of cheeses for dessert.

*

And then we realize that we were the aliens

And then we realize that we are the monsters

And we never did understand why they created us

And we never will understand why they want to destroy us

And so it must be something that we didn’t know we did

How would we ever even know the intentions of an alien?

If a machine could talk what would it say

I don’t think these pianos are playing for us

I’m pretty sure this wall wouldn’t care if it crushed us

When we lose our faith in Marilyn we have lost our faith of humanity

Listening to the world like I was Christopher Knowles

They were building an arsenal against their only world

They were tracking a message because they didn’t know who sent it

Buffy’s Two Bodies

What to do with the bodies of a girl

I wonder, how the girl

Becomes an idea

Of power and dispossession

Simultaneously, like in Spring

Breakers when they stick

Two guns in Franco’s mouth

And he starts sucking on

The barrels (double penetration?)

How the ski masks anticipate

Pussy Riot, and how Pussy

Riot antecedes all martyrs,

Every concept of the messianic

Because there is really only one

So that when they dance

To Britney this is an ironic

Choreography of (female) power

Two remain as if

To evoke the doubleness

Of (feminine) violence

The girl’s two bodies

As they lay waste to the world

I heard Pussy Riot is being freed

And watched videos

Of Voina today, whose art

Pranks landed them in prison,

The video where they shoplift

By secreting poultry

In their vaginas, the video

Where they pretend to

Hang immigrants in a

Department store.

Machine Writing Questionnaire Part II at TCR

Here is the second part of my "machine writing" questionnaire, posted at The Capilano Review's blog.

I also think that the idea of ‘the body’ being a negative limitation is ableist, in the sense that disability reveals absolutely the limits of what a body can do determined within a social field. Something I will often do in my classes is ask the students to first identify a way that they feel “enabled” by their environment, then to produce an exercise that will intentionally defacilitate them in relation to this environment. Conversely, I ask them to identify a way that they feel “disabled,” and to attempt to use this disability to make art. In other versions of the exercise I also ask them to use art and/or writing to frame ways that their environment is disabling, or the source of a disability they have identified. Many of CA Conrad’s Somatic Exercises are good to assign in this context; because they are so much about mediating ourselves and our writing practices in relation to larger social and political problems. I also look at writers who identify with disability communities or as disabled, such as Jordan Scott, David Buuck, Robert Kocik, Amber Di Pietra, and Denise Leto. It is especially useful to think of the ways all of these writers respond to disability with new forms, no doubt because their experiences of embodiment demand this. In some cases, living with disability in a world inhospitable to people with disabilities seems the most profound art, an art that puts most other performance practices to shame, because what is at stake is so much more—sometimes it is a matter of life and death and always it is a matter of quality of life. As Eleni Stecopoulos has noted: “disability founds aesthetics.”

"Did the Lights Just Go Out?" PoemTalk

Tyrone Williams, Patrick Durgin, and I did a PoemTalk with Al Filreis about Steve Benson's poem, "Did the Lights Just Go Out," as performed by Benson at the SEGUE series and Kelly Writers House in February, 2003.

Power List

Or by hugging the cops

Or by posing with them in photos

Or by cooking them a hot meal

Or by standing beside them and farting

Or by pining away for W. Bush publicly

Or by kissing a bust of him and serenading him with a guitar

Or by blocking the way of traffic

Or by standing in front of the cops hurling insults, maybe bottles, maybe rocks, maybe Molotov cocktails

Or by wearing a handkerchief for the tear gas and throwing the canisters back at the cops

Or by writing a song and playing it for the others

Or by writing a poem and reading it for the others

Or by dancing with or for others 

Or by linking arms and marching (as though this were a dance you had choreographed)

Or by holding meetings, studying together, discussing strategy

Or by starting to plan

Or by stockpiling arms

Or by forming an alliance

Or by splintering into sects

Or by branching into affinity groups

Or by exposing your own body to harm in hopes that this will produce an image of unjustified cruelty, of the law not acting as it should

Or by inspiring pathos and empathy in whoever may see the photograph or the video of your body being harmed

Or by touching another’s body, a body the larger society would not like you to touch in that way

Or by refusing to work

Or in the body itself refusing to work

Or by going to work but destroying the tools

Or by going to work but not doing the things you’re supposed to, instead maybe writing a poem

Or by going to work and writing email and chating on Gchat and reposting links on Facebook

Or by disseminating internal memos among your friends

Or by leaking sensitive information

Or by finding out everyone’s email passwords and reading their email

Or by napping

Or by taking drugs while on the clock

Or by changing the structure form ‘within’ laying claim to power so as to alter its expression

Or by trying to gain a position in government

Or by having a town hall meeting 

Or by starting a petition

Or by writing a letter

Or by starting a blog

Or by placing an ad

Or by calling a referendum

Or by assembling a team of lawyers

Or by finding a loophole in the law

Or by making art that tries to dramatize a legal anomaly or capitalizes upon a legal anomaly

Or by manufacturing passports

Or by founding a charity

Or by chanting a slogan

Or by marching

Or by beating a drum

Or by giving a free concert

Or by fundraising

Or by performing charitable acts

Or by working on behalf of the disenfranchised or an oppressed minority

Or by working pro bono for a legal cause

Or by occupying buildings

Or by taking over the entire city, erecting barricades around the perimeter

Or by raising a militia

Or by publicly shaming one’s leaders when they have committed crimes against humanity

Or by hacking an organization’s or a private individual’s source of funding

Or by stealing from the rich or well-off

Or by robbing a bank

Or by taking from what is commonly shared

Or by squatting

Or by refusing to use one’s legal name

Or by avoiding all use of credit cards or other means by which the state and corporations might track one

Or by replacing the name given to your ancestors when they were slaves with another

Or by boycotting the businesses that would not serve your people, the people with your same identifying features

Or by refusing to leave when they tell you to leave

Or by not resisting when they attempt to move your body

Or by packing a weapon

Or through assassination

Or through bombing

Or through car bombing

Or through suicide bombing

Or by organizing a union

Or by forming a network among global laborers and labor organizations

Or by refusing to sign a contract

Or through contractual ownership asserting the rights to how your music is distributed

Or by owning the masters

Or through conspicuous consumption

Or by rearranging those works of art on display

Or through reformatting

Or by removing a work outside the museum or other sanctioned cultural location

Or by defacing or erasing a work of art representing a cultural regime currently in power

Or by toppling a statue

Or through looting

Or by refusing to show

Or by refusing to play

Or by refusing to read

Or by only making your art with others and never giving your name to it

Or by refusing to take credit

Or through plagiarism

Or through reappropriation

Or through sampling

Or through detournement

Or through the derive

Or through intertextuality

Or through preservation

Or through the creation of an archive

Or by regulating access

Or by interacting with an audience differently

Or by reading your poem or playing your song in the street

Or through street theatre

Or by organizing an event

Or by creating a carnivalesque atmosphere

Or by making people feel they can speak or move more freely

Or by reminding everyone of those who are not free to speak or move

Or by caricaturing a political leader or someone else in a position of power

Or by ‘roasting’ the president

Or by speaking ‘truth to power’

Or by laying claim to the popular media

Or by making information more widely available

Or through education

Or by making sure there is wider access

Or by being willing to go to jail

Or by providing prisoners with educational resources and other basic human rights

Or by breaking out of prison

Or by breaking out others from prison

Or by enacting legislation

Or by making sure a neighborhood is protected from gentrification

Or by holding out

Or by creating strong community networks

Or by appropriating agency for one’s community or for communities in need of resources

Or by opposing developers legally and extra-legally

Or by boycotting strike breakers

Or by not eating meat produced by the industrial-agricultural complex

Or by not eating meat that is produced inhumanely

Or by not eating meat

Or by not using certain gender pronouns

Or replacing certain gender pronouns with others

Or by giving a stranger a swipe

Or by refusing to specialize

Or by giving up art

Or by refusing to show one’s work in certain institutions

Or by constructing the built environment differently

Or by founding the institutions you would want to be a part of, the businesses you

would want to participate in

Or by dropping out

Or by committing suicide

Or by committing Facebook suicide

Or by holding hands in public

Or by kissing in public

Or by baring one’s breasts in public

Or by loving too intensely

Or by stealing

Or by being lazy

Or by refusing to produce any art this year

Or by refusing to consume

Or by volunteering to distribute food and medicine and rebuild homes

Or by refusing to vote

Or by voting

Or by not paying your taxes

Or by dumping one’s trash in public

Or by appearing naked in public

Or by performing bodily functions in public

Or by just showing up

Or by pitching a tent

Or by refusing to act violently no matter what

Or by refusing to attend the popular media

Or by recycling or composting

Or through the avoidance of nouns

Or through the use of heteronyms and collective names

Or by refusing to participate in certain representation practices

Or by organizing a revolt

Or by storming the palaces

Or by breaking through the phalanx of cops

Or by saying what you shouldn’t

Or by throwing a party

Or by taking drugs

Or by presenting your work publicly

Or by making public statements

Or by filling your purse with ketchup

Or by chaining one’s self to a bank vault, or an old growth tree, or a building slated

for demolitions

Or through infiltration

Or through spying

Or by refusing to invest in oil and coal

Or through divestment

Or by sharing a meal

Or through a hunger-strike

Or by embracing another culture, taking on their customs and habits

Or by posing questions

Or by talking back

Or by paying attention

Or through devotion

Or by considering everything in relation

Or by not paying attention

Or by shifting the balance of power

Or by parenting differently

Or by forming alternative affiliations

Or through the withdrawal of tradition

Or through the embrace of traditions

Or in allowing others to make decisions

Or by giving up power

Or by stepping down

Or by building consensus

Or through the establishment of solidarity

Or through the elimination of the ego

Or through a de-emphasis or displacement of 'the self'

Or through depersonalization

Or through collectivization

Or through participation

Or by refusing to participate

Or through skepticism

Or through dissensus

Or through reprinting

Or through diplomacy

Or by staying alive

Or by reproducing

Or through the transmitting of cultural memory

Or through comedy

Or by becoming vulnerable

Or through the providing of care

Or through the forgiving of debt

Or through donation

Or by setting up a trust

Or by preventing further exploitation

Or through fucking

Or through reparation

Or through forgiveness

Or through forgetting

Or through reciprocation

Or through symbolization

Or through patience

Or through anger

Or through sorrow

Or through joy

...