Meta/discourse syllabus

Visual Poetics

Meta/discourse

Thom Donovan

wildhorsesoffire [at] gmail [dot] com

Course Description

In this class I would like to foreground poetic writing as a social phenomena, especially with regards to technological trends (from cinema to sampling techniques to social media) and with regards to questions of how art is conditioned by the event of community, friendship, and encounter. In the first weeks of the class we will take up a few theoretical and non-literary texts that will help us ground what I am calling “metadiscourse,” by which I mean any mode of communication (aesthetic or otherwise) concerned with examining its own reason for being. We will look at a series of poems from the 1930s until the present, which incorporate correspondence (epistolary) and other forms of direct communication with an addressee/interlocutor. We will also spend some time thinking about recent poetries that have laid bare their own discursive frameworks through the use of the space of the page, typography and other design elements, and through the provision of certain paratexts, by which I mean texts supplementary to the primary content of a particular work (bibliography, index, footnotes/endnotes, etc.). Whether it be rap, or Internet poetry, or poetry that draws upon social networks and community participation for its content, I am primarily interested in examining the ramifications of how writers make visible their apparatus, whether that be the page, screen, online platform, or physical (‘real life’) milieu. How does this ‘making visible’ produce authenticity—a feeling that something is being immediately communicated—through what would seem a paradoxical means: the artful display of a work’s technical mediation? To what extent is metadiscourse ethical inasmuch as it prioritizes forms of intimacy, friendship, and relationships that sustain and nourish community? Can we also consider a politics of metadiscourse, if only a micropolitics—a politics practiced on the scale of localized, particular relationships among individuals and groups?

Required Texts

The Yale Anthology of Rap (ed. Bradley and DuBois)

Etel Adnan’s Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz) 

Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton 

Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too 

Dana Ward’s The Crisis of Infinite Worlds 

Stephanie Young’s Ursula or University 

Schedule

January 16^th    Introduction

--What is metadiscourse? Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera with Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik and Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (excerpts)

Readings: M.M. Bakhtin’s “The Problems of Speech Genres” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Quotation and Originality” (http://www.emersoncentral.com/quotations.htm)

Janaury 23rd   What is Metadiscourse? cont’d

Readings: Kristin Ross’s The Emergence of Social Space (excerpts) and Arthur Rimbaud poems (TBA)

January 30^th     Language and the Creation of Social Space (I)

Readings: Excerpts from Louis Zukosfky’s “A”, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems, Langston Hughson’s “Theme for English B,” and selections from Frank O’Hara’s work (TBA)

Recommended:

The Letters of Emily Dickinson (ed. Johnson)

Viktor Shklovsky’s Third Factory

Viktor Shklovsky’s Zoo, or Letters Not About Love

Jack Spicer's "After Lorca" from The Collected Books of Jack Spicer
Ted Berrigan’s Dear Sandy, Hello

Arakawa & Gins’ Making Dying Illegal

Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters

Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy

Charles Bernstein’s “Dear Mr. Fanelli” (from All the Whiskey in Heaven)

Eileen Myles’ “An American Poem” (from Not Me)

Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker

Julia Bloch’s Letters to Kelly Clarkson

Dana Ward’s “Between Here & There” (from This Can’t Be Life)

Karen Weiser's Dear Pierre
Esther Lee’s The Blank Missives (http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/blank_missives/)

Joseph Mosconi’s Tender Comrade

February 6^th    Composition Through Epistolary (I)

Readings: Susan Howe’s “Eikon Basilike: a Bibliography of the King’s Book” with Rachel Tzivia Back’s Led by Language (excerpt)

February 13^th  “Small trespas to misprison”: Mis/quotation and Meta/discourse

Readings: Tyrone Williams’ “I am not proud to be black”

February 20^th  Citationality and Social Space

Readings: The Yale Anthology of Rap and Rap Genius (http://rapgenius.com).

Recommended:

Tricia Rose’s Black Noise

Jospeh G. Schloss’ Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop

Adam Krims’ Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity

Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (http://cantstopwontstop.com)

Josh Kun’s Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America

February 27^th  Rap as Metadiscourse

Readings: Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton and Dan Thomas-Glass’ The Great American Beat Jack

Recommended:

T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

John Taggart’s Loop

Tan Lin’s “Disco as Operating System” (http://www.aphasic-letters.com/heath/Lin-Tan_Disco-as-Operating-System_Criticism_2008.pdf)

Rodrigo Toscano’s “Transitions of Capitalist Hyperspace (shake your booty) [part 5 of 5]” (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/toscano/Toscano_CPPR_Part_5.pdf)

Latasha N. Nevada Diggs’ TwERK

Judith Goldman’s l.b.; or, catenaries

Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts: the Remix
Dana Ward’s “Poppy” (http://theclaudiusapp.com/5-ward.html)

Paolo Javier’s 60 lv bo(e)mbs

March 6^th        SPRING BREAK

March 13^th      DJ Poetics

(visit from Jamie Kelly)

Readings: Etel Adnan’s Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz)

Recommended:

Etel Adnan’s To Look At The Sea Is To Become What One Is: an Etel Adnan Reader

Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture

Jalal Toufic’s Vampires (2^nd ed.)

March 20^th      Composition Through Epistolary (II)

Readings: Jack Frost’s The Antidote, “Poetry During OWS” feature at Rethinking Marxism (http://www.wildhorsesoffire.org/files/poetry-during-ows.pdf), and other Occupy materials TBA

March 27^th      Language and the Creation of Social Space (II)

(visit from David Buuck)

Readings: Dana Ward’s The Crisis of Infinite Worlds

Recommended:

Jack Spicer’s The Collected Books of Jack Spicer

Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You”

Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds

Robert Gluck’s Elements

Eileen Myles’ The Importance of Being Iceland

Tyrone Williams’ Pink Tie

Fred Moten’s B Jenkins

CA Conrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon

Julian T. Brolaski’s Gowanus Atropolis

Brandon Brown’s The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus

David Wolach’s Hospitalogy

April 3^rd          Poetics of Friendship

Readings: Excerpts from Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social (http://dss-edit.com/plu/Latour_Reassembling.pdf)

April 10^th        Network Poetics (I)

Readings: Tan Lin’s HEATH (http://aphasic-letters.com/heath/)

Recommended:

Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry By Other Means in the New Century

Tan Lin’s Tumblr site (http://tanlin.tumblr.com)

Craig Dworkin’s No Medium

Brian Reed’s Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics

Christopher Alexander’s Panda and interview with Kristen Gallagher (https://jacket2.org/commentary/how-it-works-i-technical-supports)

Cory Arcangel’s “A couple of thousand short films about Glenn Gould” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89ZueN7Szy0) and website (http://www.coryarcangel.com)

Danny Snelson’s Heath, prelude to tracing the actor as network (http://aphasic-letters.com/heath/)

Rhizome (https://www.google.com/#q=rhizome.org)

Gauss PDF (http://www.gauss-pdf.com)

Dexter Sinister’s Dot Dot Dot and Bulletins of the Serving Library (http://www.dextersinister.org)

April 17^th        Network Poetics (II)

Readings: Stephanie Young’s Ursula or University

Recommended:

Samuel R. Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Suzanne Lacy’s Leaving Art

Tom Finkelperl’s What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation

Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation

Life as Form (ed. Nato Thompson)

Renee Gladman’s Newcomer Can’t Swim

A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (ed. Rosenthal)

Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (ed. Peterson and Tolbert)

Thom Donovan’s The Hole

April 24^th        Writing as Community Practice

Readings: Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too

Recommended:

Andy Warhol’s A: a Novel

Ray Johnson’s Correspondence School

Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journals (in draft form: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/m504/index.html)

Ed Friedman’s Telephone Book

Kevin Killian’s Amazon reviews

Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick

Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt

Rob Fitterman Now We Are Friends (http://truckbooks.org/pdfs/Fitterman_NWAF.pdf)

Flarf Collective (http://jacketmagazine.com/30/fl-intro.html)

Anselm Berrigan's & Jonathan Allen's Loading
Kristen Gallagher's We Are Here (http://truckbooks.org/pdfs/Gallagher_WAH.pdf)
Anne Boyer’s “The Day Steve Jobs Died”

Sue Landers’ What I Was Tweeting While You Were on Facebook

Joseph Bradshaw’s “Of Being Numerous” and “The New York School” (http://electiveaffinitiesusa.blogspot.com/2013/02/joseph-bradshaw.html)

Jackqueline Frost’s The Soft Appeal

Kate Durbin's "Tumblr is the only place I don't pretend I'm okay" (http://vimeo.com/36453047)
Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge

Sophia Le Fraga’s I DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET and I RL, YOU RL

May 1^st           Poetry after Social Media

            (Final work due)

Woolsey Heights reading at A Voice Box

Here is a reading I gave this past spring at Woolsey Heights in Berkeley, recorded and mixed by Andrew Kenower and posted to his website, A Voice Box.