Wild Horses Of Fire

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Claire Pentecost

2012-02-01T16:48:00.002-05:00

Five questions with the heroic Claire Pentecost...

"In many ways my need to know and explore how the world works is my art. I think this is partly why I have developed the idea of the public amateur: the artist as someone who learns in public, putting the production of knowledge itself up for scrutiny. Why is the production of knowledge so important? It’s not only because knowledge is partly what determines one’s position in relation to risk, but... also because the expertise of authorities has for the most part failed to manage the risks of a technological society (part of the Occupy movement derives from this recognition). It becomes increasingly clear that no one is going to save us and we have to work together to experiment with new ways of being in the world. For this we have to return knowledge to the realm of the social by producing knowledge collectively. We have to start with 'I don’t know,' and proceed to think across disciplines to propose alternatives to a system founded on violence against life."

Talking with Tyrone Williams (at Flying Object)

2012-02-01T15:53:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Nathaniel Otting I will be talking with Tyrone Williams at Flying Object in a couple weeks (Sunday, February 12th).

Really excited to discuss Tyrone's Howell, which is a dense and demanding book, and to my mind his opus.

Creative Speaking (Syllabus)

2012-01-24T22:23:00.007-05:00

Course description

The following course is intended to present a variety of ways of thinking about the relationship between writing and orality, with special attention to composition methods generated through (constrained) embodiment, conversation, performance, and extemporization (improvised speech and utterance). As will be discussed at length throughout the class, the relationship of speech to writing is by no means simple, mediated as it is by technologies of technical reproduction (typewriter and tape recorder in particular, but more recently text messaging, Skype, and other technologies that extend from Web 2.0). My hope is that by the end of the semester you may be able to see the problem through a variety of aspects. It is also my hope that you may find your own entry point into the problem as artists, writers, critics, scholars, and citizens. This means exploring and extending the techniques of composition presented by the texts we encounter in class. It also means trying to form a critical vocabulary through which we may approach a common set of texts.

Required texts

-- Course packet

-- Books*

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life

*I recommend you purchase books online via Bookfinder (www.bookfinder.com) or Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org).

--Some recommendations for further reading:

Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida
Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong
Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler
The Muse Learns to Write, Eric A. Havelock
Close Listening, ed. Charles Bernstein
The Visible Word, Johanna Drucker
Black Riders, Jerome McGann
Sound States, ed. Adelaide Morris
My Way, Charles Bernstein
Uncreative Writing, Kenneth Goldsmith
Before Meaning, Steve McCaffrey
Imagining Language, ed. McCaffery and Rasula
Discrepant Engagement, Nathaniel Mackey
In the Break, Fred Moten
The Birthmark, Susan Howe
A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar
Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, Michel Chion
The Queen's Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum
Concerto for the Left Hand, Michael Davidson
Bottom: on Shakespeare, Louis Zukofsky
Writing the Illegible, Craig Dworkin
On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, Hollis Frampton
HEATH (Plagiarism/Outsource), Tan Lin
Frank O’Hara: the Poetics of Coterie, Lytle Shaw
UbuWeb: www.ubuweb.com
PennSound: writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/

Schedule

January 12 Introductions; creative speaking gallery

--Assignment: Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” Frank O’Hara’s "Personism," a page from Louis Zukofsky’s “A”, selected poems

--Links:

"Personism"
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20421

"Projective Verse"
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237880

Emily Dickinson’s “We don’t cry – Tim and I”
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/we-don-t-cry-tim-and-i/

William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say”
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15535
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Williams-WC/07_Van-Nuys_11-16-50/Williams-WC_07_This-is-Just_Van-Nuys_11-16-50.mp3

“Tract”
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Williams-WC/01_Columbia-Univ_01-09-42/Williams-WC_02_Tract_Columbia-Univ_01-09-42.mp3

Robert Creeley’s “I Know a Man”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171564
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Creeley/Vancouver_8-12-63/Creeley-Robert_09_I-Know-a-Man_Vancouver_8-12-63.mp3

Charles Olson’s “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176950
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Olson.php

Frank O’Hara’s “Metaphysical Poem”
http://www.frankohara.org/fohaudio01/metaphysicalpoem.html

“Having a Coke With You”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDLwivcpFe8

Amiri Baraka’s “Low Coups”
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Baraka.php

“Dope”
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Baraka/Buffalo-78/Baraka-Amiri_05_Dope_Buffalo_12-8-78.mp3

Bernadette Mayer’s “Sonnet” [“You jerk you didn’t call me”]
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179918

Fred Moten'a “Here It Is”
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Moten/KWH_02-28-08/Moten-Fred_15_Here-It-Is_KWH-UPenn_02-28-08.mp3

Tracie Morris’ “Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful”
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Morris/Morris-Tracie_From-Slave-Sho-to-Video-aka-Black-but-Beautiful_2002.mp3

19 “A Voice Blown from Print”: Projective Poetics & Personism
--Assignment: Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony selection and Langston Hughes' "Montage of a Dream Deferred," selection from Lorenzo Thomas’ Don't Deny My Name

26 Witnessing Speech
--Assignment: Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journals selection (http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/m504/5/index.html), with Michael Davidson’s “Technologies of Presence” (from Sound States, ed. A. Morris)

February 2 Radical Journalism
--Assignment: Gertrude Stein’s “Portraits and Repetition,” David Antin’s “how long is the present” (from Tunings), and John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” (from Silence)

--1-2 page midterm abstracts to be submitted

9 The Lecture as Compositional Practice & Performance
--Assignment: Gallery of New York poets TBA

16 Composition as Conversation part 1
--Assignment: Kamau Brathwaite’s “History of the Voice” (from Roots), Brathwaite’s “Letter Sycorax” (from Middle Passages), The Anthology of Rap selection (ed. Bradley & Dubois), Dub Reggae gallery TBA

23 midterms due; Auritures
--Assignment: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Susan Howe’s “The Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” selection, Myung Mi Kim’s Dura selection, Robert Kocik’s Re-English selection

March 1 Re-Speaking
--Assignment: Steve Benson’s “Views of Communist China” (from The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theatre) with Suzanne Stein’s “A Hole in Space”

8 Spring Break

15 Composition as Conversation part II
--Assignment: Jordan Scott’s Blert selection, Larry Eigner selection TBA, Michael Davidson on Larry Eigner from Concerto for the Left Hand

22 Embodiment, Speech Disfluency, Disability, Built Environment
--Assignment: Fiona Templeton’s ME DEAD and “Speaking For Performance / Writing With the Voice”

29 Creative Speaking: A Visit with Fiona Templeton
--Assignment: Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life

April 5 This Can’t Be Life: A Visit with Dana Ward
--Assignment: TBA

12 last class; final work due; The Acoustic Uncanny, Transcriptions (from Analogue to Digital)

Does the Document Promise?

2012-01-21T20:55:00.004-05:00

-for Steve Siegel, in remembrance

Crying onto the documents doesn’t make for very good metadata

Do you believe me when I tell you I am crying while I type this poem?

"The introduction of writing does not teach us how to remember better, just gives us an excuse to forget," said the Pharoah to his scribe upon presentation of the new invention

All the tenses of this earth are wrong today

Wondering if everything in heaven will be searchable or whether it will be like totality

No need to search because everything is known instantly, all good and cruel deeds like angels on the head of a pin, even stupidity, because it is part of knowing

Crying into the file folders, documents remind us everything will one day be lost or ruined or totally without context

What will become of promises, and do things also make promises?

Does the document promise?

I would like the tense of the promise to be the tense of the poem I am dedicating to you, just as soon as I’ve written it

For, as the artist Jerome Caja says in reference to his many friends and lovers who died of AIDS: “I don’t do stuff for the dead. I keep promises.”

Now that everything becomes retrievable—notwithstanding totality—I am crying into the index, soaking it with tears

I am crying into a pattern of search and retrieval and losing everything because you are not with me.

Marathon reading of The Making of Americans (at Triple Canopy)

2012-01-18T16:11:00.001-05:00

In celebration of the opening of 155 Freeman, Triple Canopy is pleased to present a marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s enormously long and allegedly unreadable novel The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. This weekend, starting on Friday at 7 p.m., an invited list of New York–based artists, writers, publishers, scholars, and other collaborators will gather in Greenpoint to perform the entirety of Stein’s text in a continuous read-in, expected to last 48 hours, more or less.

Multifarious Array Winter/Spring Schedule

2012-01-18T16:02:00.002-05:00

Winter/Spring 2012 line-up

@Pete's Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
http://multifariousarray.blogspot.com/

_______________________

1/6-Noah Eli Gordon, Sommer Browning, Harmony Holiday, and Steven Zultanski
1/20-Josef Kaplan, Brian Ang, Laura Elrick
2/3-Kendra Grant Malone, Matthew Savoca, Brett Price
2/17-Timothy Donnelly, Anselm Berrigan, Camille Roy
3/16-Michael Robins, Adam Clay, Ada Limon
3/23-Anelise Chen, Andrew Levy, Ken Walker
4/6-Michael Robbins, Angelo Nikolopoulos, Carley Moore
4/20-Todd Colby, Kate Schapira, Leigh Stein
5/4-Sam Truitt, Carter Edwards, Frank Sherlock
5/11-Eric Baus, Cynthia Sailers, Stacy Szymaszek
5/18-Shonni Enelow, Sasha Fletcher, Joseph Bradshaw
5/25-No, Dear Magazine Reading
6/1-David Brazil, Sara Larsen, Robert Kocik

THE HOLE, a Gathering (at St. Mark's Poetry Project)

2012-01-13T10:09:00.001-05:00

Friday, February 10, 2012
10:00 pm

Reframing the “book launch,” Thom Donovan and Brett Price offer a night of consumption, conversation, reflection, and performance around Donovan’s book, The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012). As Donovan has written to participants about the event: “I would not like to read from the book, so much as I would use the book’s appearance as an occasion for conversation around its contents, as well as an opportunity for friends, colleagues, and loved ones to gather.” Participants include Melissa Buzzeo, CAConrad, Rob Halpern, Brenda Iijima, Madhu Kaza, Robert Kocik, Dorothea Lasky, Andrew Levy, C.J. Martin, Eléna Rivera, Eleni Stecopoulos, Brian Whitener, Tyrone Williams, and others.

In Actu

2011-12-31T22:31:00.003-05:00

--for Daria Fain, composed 11/2011

1.
So expressed was a lung inside your throat
The way it microphoned the world

Like blood cleansed, leavened into dirt
The holocausts inside us, the heat on the air

No metaphors here but things seen
See us for what we are, we sing, we sing

Into the microphone called throat
Called air, another blue song

You put into a horizon note,
Splits where your dress was a difference

Where your hands splay the air
There is an animal poise

Called verse notwithstanding
Actual amplification,

Notwithstanding the world
Illuminated until it disappears.

2.
Who will the living be
In robes of white terrycloth
And ribs like wings
Billow when breath
Is obscenely material?

Captioned like our angel names
Don’t become truly like
Our names until we’ve been
Will you be
In this robe with me
Incubating?

Will you be in this skin with me
Flawed, not a metaphor for things seen?
What will we be in talking, in walking?
What will we be in pointing?
The extent to which a world is formed.

Revenants, Remains

2011-12-31T12:33:00.001-05:00

--for Rob Halpern, composed 8/2011

The history of this movement
Like soldiers on spec
Don’t know they are dead
Fucked by a global content

No one wants, abjected in-
sight of things, eyes that would
Make a difference if not for
Disaster’s sense, I feel it in

My veins this blood being spilt
Far away, while violent mourning
Transfigures our present
Coverts thanatos to eros

Almost becomes a public
I could kiss because it can’t
Come back this broken
Revenant moment

Only silence comes back
What it touches we call
A demilitarized music
Who sings a blocked world?

A Thousand Levels

2011-12-31T12:22:00.003-05:00

Like sites write
‘Me’ little micro

-cosm this body renders
A thousand levels, boundaries

Where toxins structure us
Is ‘holy’?, of milk

Winds steady in this
Breast remembrance

Through daylight the rap
Song of our lives and life

Escapes, no allegory,
No metaphor, just allergy

Just conviviality in lyric
Rhythm samples my heart

Thresholds where earth dreams
Mind into cognizance

Awake to this scented
Word called “cell,” called

“Pathogen,” a book
We will be buried in.

--composed 8/2011

After Dark Matter

2011-12-30T17:01:00.010-05:00

--for Gregory Sholette, composed 8/2011

You put the dark back in 'dark matter'

Sweet corporate window that closes when we don’t participate,
Take up the pixels code of a different world

Miniatures make their mark and so do stencils
Mimesis of a digital commons just out of view

Like the way we feel controlled even when we make
Something new, express ourselves into freedom’s semblance.

Chris Marker says in Sans Soleil (Sunless), “If they don't see happiness, at least they will see the black”

Which I take to mean that blindness becomes a condition of possibility
For seeing historically,

Like moles borrow in unredeemed soil, that "black leader"
Seeks a prophylactic to the appropriating powers
Which have led to our subterranean despair
At the failure of images to produce totality

Now we quote thought balloons in caves
Now insight becomes its antithesis unawares

Dreaming when we cannot sleep
Waking from the archive again.

CA Conrad's 2011 Sexiest Poem Award

2011-12-29T17:28:00.008-05:00

I couldn't be any more pleased than to share this year's "Sexiest Poem of the Year" prize with Samantha Giles, awarded annually by CA Conrad. Thank you, Conrad! "2011 was an impossible year for keeping up with the amazing poetry being published. To those studying the dead 'masters,' oh how will you ever catch up to the present?" You took the words right out of my mouth!

Live interview with Catherine Sullivan (Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior)

2011-12-29T17:20:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago I interviewed the artist Catherine Sullivan for the video archive I curate with Sreshta Rit Premnath, Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior. Here is the video of Sullivan presenting clips from her work, followed by the interview and Q&A with audience.

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Sreshta Rit Premnath

2011-12-29T17:14:00.003-05:00

The latest 5 Questions for Contemporary Practice is with Sreshta Rit Premnath.

"2. Do you feel there is a need for the work that you are doing given the larger field of visual art and the ways that aesthetic practices may be able to shape public space, civic responsibility, and political action? Why or why not?

No, I do not feel that there is a need for the work I do. Rather, to restate myself, I feel the need to do my work. If I respond to an external need, then it is the result of internalizing it, and once it is internalized it is felt as an impulse rather than a need. Although my sense of civic responsibility and my political motivations are reflected in my artwork, I do not see my artwork as a means of political action. Politics as a means of social change is fully grounded in the ontic register. It requires an ethical clarity and a contingent certainty. However, to apply Wittgenstein’s words on philosophy to art, “Lack of clarity in [art] is tormenting. It is felt as shameful. We feel: we do not know our way about where we should know our way about. And nevertheless it isn’t so. We can get along very well without… knowing our way about here.”

However, every human being is a political being and how we act in the world is the embodiment of our politics. Although in this sense all our actions in the world are political, they are in most cases not particularly good politics or effective politics. While we could expand the word art to include politics or conversely expand the notion of politics to talk about its aesthetics, I find the two categories to function in different modalities within my practice. When the political enters my artwork it becomes the ontic ground for various formal procedures as well as the concrete ground for philosophical speculation.

There are crucial political imperatives grounded in the ethical urgency of what ought to be done that cannot be effectively dealt with in my art practice. However, I don’t think this makes my artwork less important, rather it reveals that there are multiple modes of discourse and some are more effective in “shaping public space, civic responsibility, and political action” than others."

Where it proceeds to the rupture

2011-12-28T17:30:00.009-05:00

--after some phrases from Brian Holmes

1.
Is ‘experimental’ where it proceeds to the rupture

of the cultural model, lights were struck
and bitter coffee served, interrupted

every half hour for feedback how to share
an experience that produced

such profound changes in one’s self?
Art making, an ambiguous expression

of personal and collective desires
A glance or tear, a media intervention,

the modulation of affect in the face of that threat

Seattle happened here then was foreclosed
What’s the use of aesthetics if you don’t have eyes to see?

They drank the bitter coffee, interrupted the projections to bear witness
The affective modulations that won’t be represented

without eyes to see them with

Who drank out of empathy the affective modulation
Of our ambiguous desires, neither personal nor collective,

Yet political all of them before any of this was subjective
Or in a white cube

Because these tears turn to ______ no one will see

Things you heard, you are trying to remember them hard
No one will know the things you heard

When what we remain are powers

2.
Post-expectant, the heart at work,
what should we name its book, lovingly?

Messianic aspect of a place from which to begin,
actual birds drenched, withdrawn from post-expectant

springtimes somewhere else there are worlds,
somewhere other than ______

Which like William James’ polyhedral turns
thousands of miles above our infancy, blue and rarefied

Subtle like a conversation, the world does not
actually begin, it begins and ends suspended

by friendship, by enmity announcing the proximity
of end times, where it proceeds to the rupture of the cultural model

Debt

2011-12-23T14:54:00.005-05:00

The cray ‘s'mas lights
All come greet me

Cape Cod all come what
Beacons X-mas taps

Thee out when
Light is about returning

Not just birthing
“It is a cold world”

The cab driver says
While I tip him, “have

A good life if
I don’t see you again”

His repartee is
Good natured

But rehearsed, nights
On Cape Cod in the winter

Some places are pitch-
Black the highway

Like the sea undulates
They are foreclosing,

He tells me, on all the
Houses the greedy

Got greedier
The wicked wickeder

This year you can’t
Convince me after 40 years

Of this shit that it can’t
Get worse but I swear

I love the Cape
Without people

David Graeber’s Debt
Is on the kitchen table

Of my parents’ house
I haven’t read it

Yet it has the seduction
Already of something

One should read to feel
They are part of their

Generation, this poem
Is for all my friends

December 22nd,
2011 I don’t want

Any of you to die,
I want us to live

The best we can,
Let the (living) dead

Consume themselves
I believe

In interruptions,
Not endings.

The Hole "Feedback" section excerpts

2011-12-12T21:14:00.005-05:00

My "first book," The Hole, just dropped at SPD.

But it is really not my book. Or it is only nominally "my book." Because I was so very fortunate to be able to include many incredible contributions from others, solicited responses to an earlier version of the book. And these responses issue from a spirit of collaboration and community endeavor and friendship, which I consider to be the condition of the book's making, from start to finish.

Here are some excerpts:

25 hedge fund managers
are worth 658,000 teachers.
This is just minutes before
totality occurred.
--Andrew Levy

What comes out is an idiolect. When one has an intimate (perhaps ‘intrinsic’) relationship to language the first thing that becomes apparent is our inseparability. It’s not even a paradox. Particularly when the dominant language is hegemonic or oppressive, we need to break from the connectivity and open into the one subsistence we are. We recognize each other because we share recognition (and because “our suffering is beyond conceptualization”). The initial state of language (which, like eternity, if it is not ‘now’, it is not) is first-person-plural. We need a science of the first person plural and it’s only fair that the first discussions for such a science would be ‘lyric’. The Hole. The hoax being accomplished against us (well-described in Thom’s manuscript) is happening by means of language. We need a hole dug as big as the world. It really is the original story: to salvage the world with that with which we screw it up.
--Robert Kocik

Thom Donovan’s The Hole is a protest song, an unmuffled cry. His caring is a direct response to the glaring irony of ablest-fatalism. “How are you I’m tortured.” Pain is the body’s form of protest. Pain sends messengers to the site of trauma in order for healing to occur. No recourse or healing until pain is felt (especially so in fucked-up scenarios—no acknowledgement of suffering: sociopathy as societal norm). […] The Hole turbulently narrates and embodies localized and social pain as it endeavors to exit out of the critique of what remains.
--Brenda Iijima

[…] being at the joint of flex. More than. Once with you at poetry's I mean Poetry's admission of guilt for having been.
--CA Conrad

Skin so thin with armor
Past and future are only distensions (Augustine)
but being immune to time creates
a metrical need
what prosody can sustain
--Eleni Stecopoulos

this poem and a few maybe with it […] must be read in streets, in public gatherings, pubs and cafés, on t.v. […] it's up to us to bring words to those to whom they belong
--Etel Adnan

what of ourselves we put in
the possible

remains of democracy
Athenian re-imagining

a once that never was
--Jane Sprague

The words invite that gift of night. We move in tandem at times, we who say no, the aversive, a kindred ally, the stubborn immobility, silent potent, an obstinate night’s nothing, whose no unites, disrobes, finds flesh, interrogates the state, of language, of making, and of war, unmakes and disarticulates night’s night, all that everyone has worked for, forces, to which we say no, the subjects who say no, made visible in your ongoing engagement within space.
--Jocelyn Saidenberg

Within the measures of Thom’s project, disaster can’t be seen, nor can it be experienced, and yet disaster hails the lyric subject into social being, commanding the ear, while enjoining the poem to bear witness to that which can’t be witnessed. The disaster can be thought of here as a kind of event: like a hole shot thru perception and around which feeling struggles to hear itself as thought, or a void where a social situation’s structuring antagonisms concentrate invisibly. This triangulation with the eventful disaster threatens to render the poem impossible, but what makes Thom’s writing critical is the way it refuses the convenient alibi that the poem’s disastrous impossibility is a fateful condition of language itself (as Blanchot might think). The poem rather risks its impossibility on social catastrophes where it is unbearably implicated.
--Rob Halpern

Forgotten common
poetry should
understand blankness
radical ‘experiment’
the social
those earth-bound
prisons effervesce
and erode
encrusted capital
--Stephen Collis

Epigraph
and/or
citation
upload a text into a virtual community of intellectual propriety. Elsewhere—not “here”—is confusion. E-volition as a peculiar instantiation of cultural labor apes evolution, expels, from a deflated coterie, product by-product toward a putative public.
--Tyrone Williams

What wind blows through me
Oh that it might carry me

Not I, Not I
But an us

In peril, fatherless and worn
In danger, because I have given everything up
--Dorothea Lasky

I also started to think a lot about scandal in relation to your writing, & draw up some warp & woof in my mind between the word 'scandal' & 'disaster', words just so electrified in this moment, & 'scandal' you know, it has this air of sexiness about it, it implies a secret carnality somewhere out of sight, & I think you[r] book enacts that heat, that sort of starvation, against & through the actual processes of depravation that order the figures of our despair; ecological disaster, political aporia, the half-heartedness that meets them, the bodies & speech both effaced & replenished in prosodic attention, The Hole became for me something scandalous, a rumor (like Rob's Rumored Place), something repellent & absorbing that's transmitted through the glamour of our being together, like the world as it is the dirty non-secret we keep passing off to one another […]
--Dana Ward

So we were the police...

2011-12-09T00:02:00.006-05:00

So we were the police a sign of dissensus
Decry force little anthems we tell ourselves
Little voices we were bright curve
Of the object we were when we learned

To frame no one labor caved for no one
Because equality rests on process no politics
Without poetics says you Plato was wrong
About a lot of things get over your philosophy

This is an interruption of philosophy
For ethics or simply the way things should work
When we don’t how we get down like that
In the early streets in the swarming streets

Abandoned by the national discourse
Sunset of that discourse this is dawn
At least police if you won’t come to our side
Spray your own eyes out so you might see.

Matt Mullican's Bulletin Boards (at SFMOMA blog)

2011-12-04T21:25:00.003-05:00

Here is a little piece I wrote about Matt Mullican's bulletin boards, for SFMOMA blog. Thanks to Suzanne Stein for inviting me to contribute!

The photographs gathered and pinned here project a time in the future when we will seem even more strange to ourselves. Like a time capsule, hieroglyphs, artifacts — not just cosmology, but the future conditional tense of a speculative anthropology. The “self” or “I” or “That Person” or “Mullican” acting, at different points, as both the object and the subject of a cottage anthropological project.

Live Interview with Catherine Sullivan (The Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior)

2011-12-04T14:17:00.004-05:00

The Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior

Interview with Catherine Sullivan

Friday, December 9th, 6:30 - 8:30pm

CUE Art Foundation
511 West 25th Street
New York, New York 10001

The evening will begin with a presentation by Chicago-based artist Catherine Sullivan, who will show excerpts from her video works and documentation of her performances. Following the artist’s presentation, she will be interviewed by Thom Donovan and Sreshta Rit Premnath of the Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior.

About Catherine Sullivan:

Catherine Sullivan's works engage a variety of media - theater, film, video, photography, writing and sculpture. She has produced several performances and theater works wherein the performers are often coping with written texts, stylistic economies, reenactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies. The works address a broad spectrum of historical reference and often involve multiple collaborators including composer Sean Griffin. Her work is often staged and shot on sets for unrelated productions and in settings that project social function beyond the mise en scène Sullivan builds within them. What emerges from the numerous layers of collaboration and reference is an anxious and unresolved political and social sensibility.

Sullivan received a CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts (2004) and a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Fellowship (2004–05). She has had major exhibitions at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007); Tate Modern, London (2005); Vienna Secession, Austria (2005); Kunsthalle Zurich (2005); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2003); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2002); and the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2002). She has participated in the Prague Biennial (2005), the Whitney Biennial (2004), and the Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2003).

About The Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior:

The tense of the future anterior (French: Future auxiliary verb + past participle) is one of potentiality. Within any given present, it images "what will have been" before an event actually comes to pass. To return to the moments of bifurcation is an objective of the Archive of the Future Anterior. An archive which wishes to serve less as a time-capsule than a provisional index of loss or misplaced futures; where future has not yet become past and multiple futures remain compossible within a single present.

Initiated by Thom Donovan and Sreshta Rit Premnath this project is a video archive of interviews in which artists, writers, scientists and colleagues from various disciplines discuss their work in relation to this future conditional tense. The interviews will present futures which never came to pass, but may still hold the potential to be realized in the present. We hope that by producing an archive of futures which have yet to come to pass we may be able to alter the course of the future, as well as change the way we narrate and remember the past. Putting artists, writers, historians, scientists and other culture workers in
dialogue with each other will be a crucial aspect of this project, inasmuch as we believe that in our present epoch fields of knowledge should communicate and synthesize to both recall and imagine a future we would want to create.

Through our collaboration, we also wish to destabilize the simple dichotomies of personal and social, interior and exterior, memory and history by triggering the future anterior tense wherein the stimulation of memory produces action, and imagination produces possible worlds of experience. Participants will likewise be encouraged to draw upon their somatic experiences as catalysts for potential futures. To what extent can our bodily memory (muscle memory, genetic code, anamnesis) germinate possible futures?

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Ben Kinmont (@Art21)

2011-11-25T15:38:00.002-05:00

Here is a feature I did for Art21 with Ben Kinmont, a visual artist who also trades in books and culinary marvels.

"At one point, in the late 1990s, I had to decide whether to continue participating in the art world or to become an antiquarian book dealer who devoted 100% of his time to working with rare books. I decided to continue as an artist and bookseller. I stayed in both worlds because I realized that I was from the art world, that its history was my point of reference, and that its community was something to which I felt responsible, even if I was disappointed in it somehow. But to try and go on, I had to focus on connections to things outside of the art world, whether they were notions of social responsibility or exchanges with other disciplines. I was trying to broaden the range of what could be considered art and to open it up to questions from new audiences and participants. The art world was not enough on its own."

Frank Sherlock's Love Letter November 15

2011-11-18T08:02:00.002-05:00

Wonderful to receive this poem from Frank Sherlock last night. In response to the raid of Zuccotti Park.

Books

gone

Shelter

gone

I've been

screaming

out of key

all day

for you to

cover

the promise

hole

in the wall w/

a horizontal

picture or

something

that looks

like joy

I've been waiting

Ah this

sunrise

again on

a failed

paradigm

this stare

too far

into space

for too long

to remember

the name of

this city

Here is

a hammer

Here is

a bulb

A number

of things can

happen like

building in

light

killing in

darkness

or touching

each other

during

our magic

hour

I trade

news links

through

militarized

playspace

to keep

witnessing

fresh

to stay out

of the back

catalogue

while

looking to

not be

abandoned

Take a sip

of war

commodity

from my

bottle when

you get here

I know you

get thirsty

You might

taste traces

of blood but

this is what

I have

to offer

The sound

you might

hear is

quiet running

counter to

anticipations

seizing on

conservation

as if shorter

showers matter

Pardon

my reach

to be

respirited

filching a cup

of memory

as memory

Are you there

This company's

the worst

The trapdoor

spiders' prey

lines up

in the web

in perfect

single file

I hate them

& I'm not

talking about

the spiders

Feed on

a symbol if

it's helpful

This phone

has hit

the wall

It still

works as

a transmitter

Call me

Where does

the exile

end & the

life begin

Your now is

three hours

before my

now & your

now is six

hours after

my now &

where in

this hell is

our future

but so far

ahead it'll be

unrecognizable

upon arrival

Not to

get all

necrocentric

but there's no

contradiction

between

the love of

flowers &

hatred of

floral

wallpaper

This was

real this is

real since

nothing

can be

destroyed

even when

pushed

into fire

I take

the cremains

to the Risk &

Disaster

Studies

section to

Poetry

(of course)

to the bridge

between

the smart

side of

the river &

mine to

the cafe for

conversation

Part funeral

Part miracle

The miracle

can no longer

be buried

There is

a difference

between death

by despot &

natural death

but neither's

truly painless

Pretending

there is no

loss foretells

more loss

than I could

ever shoulder

I've waited so long

Living through

catastrophe due

to no fault

of our own we

feel around

in this blackout

for everything

unseen

Yes we're

engaged

No we never

dated I

swear it's

really not

that weird

Before I woke

I banged

piano out

in a field

the floodrotten

shed in

the distance

I composed

for you w/

ham & wire

It sounded

good at

the time so

what if it

came out

sloppy it was

Peace Be

With You

sang so far

away from

church

That was nice

but we are

awake now

captured

while viewers

haven't

discovered

that craters

seen from

a distance

render these

wounds less

than their

actual size

I despise

missionaries

& their boring

positions

I'm tired of

lying on my

back just so I

can be taken

This interest

rate this

jobless stat

this market

demographic

has gotten

up to stay

human

I have almost

died again

to prove I

am a person

The library

starts over

You are

what I've

waited for

& finally

we're here

Two paragraphs on "intense autobiography"

2011-11-17T22:48:00.002-05:00

From the talk I gave at Regina Rex gallery last wkend:

Basically, I want to use intense autobiography to describe self-life-writing practices (the literal translation of auto-bio-graphy) that stray from the genre of autobiography, in which one provides the facts of their life, from birth until present, usually late in life. While intense autobiography exists in relation to these forms of self- or person- writing, it is different. And where it differs largely are in two respects: 1. That writing is not a transparent, narrative means of making self or person appear retroactively, but the very means through which the person/self comes into being in relation to a social milieu; 2. Through intense autobiography the “body”–that container demarcating human personhood and rights—becomes a site of experience and experimentation where the limits of the self are related, if not often contested, in relation to a public, community, and/or socius.

Intense autobiography can also refer to a series of practices upon the body, much as Foucault spoke of disciplinary practices in terms of a “technology” or “care” of the self. The body-self is a site where subjecthood is negotiated and contracted; where disciplinary boundaries and biological essences are tested; where the body as a territory is both mapped and deterritorialized, as in the many famous cases outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. What I want to talk about when I talk about intense autobiography is how self-life-writing demarcates social, biopolitical, and geocultural thresholds. Through forms, and not simply a received narrative writing which blandly insists on a continuous definition of self as a contained or enclosed interior, I believe writing and aesthetic forms may present the movement and passage of person/self/subject through a duration (where intensity refers to movements in time, and extension may relate movement in space). This writing is about becoming; it is about movement and undergoing; it is also about undertaking a radical empathy by which “self” and “other” and milieu and environment inform one another, as much of the most remarkable poetry and art of the 20th century has ventured. Form is necessary to the prospect of a radical autobiographical writing practice, because it is through the discovery and invention of forms that the subject becomes observable as a series a thresholds relating inter-subjective, psychosocial, and biopolitical exigency—the very urgencies that autobiography, as a genre, normally excludes.

2011-11-15T22:10:00.002-05:00

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2011-11-13T12:39:00.001-05:00

Until time and justice are one
Or we are forgiven
Movement heals our wounds while
It opens a million more

While you opened, while
Your mouth opened, I heard
The throat do its thing.
I heard the song express

A million things about
What we are here for,
Thinking about the generations
We turn around them

While they turn around us,
To assemble those burdens
The dance called out,
Into the heat of air

That leavens, leaves us burned.

Chase Granoff's intuition is preceding over my understanding. (@ The Chocolate Factory)

2011-11-11T20:11:00.002-05:00

intuition is preceding over my understanding.

by CHASE GRANOFF

Collaborators and contributors:

Megan Byrne
Jon Moniaci
F.P. Boué
Thom Donovan
Paul Mpagi Sepuya

November 16-19, 2011
8 o'clock pm
tickets $15

Chase Granoff’s intuition is preceding over my understanding. is a solo performance of a landscape exploring an expression of time and place, present and past. Interested in the movements of sustainability, slow and local and how they can be applicable to choreographic thought as expressed through improvisation and score, this choreographic exhibition will unfold through a multitude of expressions in hopes of offering various perspectives of the questions that created it - grounded in the honesty and transparency of the bread that will be offered.

Considering the Steve Paxton quote "researched the fiction of cultured dance and the 'truth' of improvisation" – is choreography an aesthetics of change? How is my interest in bread making part of a dance (life) practice? Is dance a politics? This solo has something to do with becoming a father. Re-becoming a dancer.

For tickets, please visit www.chocolatefactorytheater.org or call (212) 352-3101.

Post-show drink specials courtesy of Dominie's Hoek, El Ay Si, The Creek & Cave.

On Hannah Weiner and Intense Autobiography (at Regina Rex gallery)

2011-11-08T21:41:00.002-05:00

Lectures by Thom Donovan and Melissa Scherrer
accompany the current exhibition DÉJÀ VU

Saturday, November 12 @ 1pm

Regina Rex
17-17 Troutman, #329, Queens, NY 11385
Hours Sat & Sun 12-6pm and by appointment
Contact: info@reginarex.org or 646.467.2232

IMAGES: (left) Hannah Weiner (photo c. Tom Ahern 1978), (right) The Predictive Almanac of 2009

Thom Donovan
Thom Donovan will discuss the concept of "intense autobiography" found in the work of poet Hannah Weiner (1928-1997) whose life and writings were so inextricably linked. Weiner perceived innovation as both performance and survival tool, and her embodied condition as clairvoyant journalist/schizophrenic led to some of the most personal and psychologically complex texts of her time. Donovan is a poet, essayist, art writer, curator, teacher, editor and archivist. He edits Wild Horses Of Fire weblog, ON Contemporary Practice, and writes regularly for Art21 and The Brooklyn Rail. His first book, The Hole, will be out later this fall with Displaced Press.

Melissa Scherrer
In 2008, Scherrer made an artist book with her artist/husband Mike Pare called the 2009 Predictive Almanac. Now out of print, the golden booklet was a self-help guide containing home remedies to deal with astrological predictions for the following year. Scherrer will tell us about this book and offer us predictions for 2012. The audience will also be invited to participate in an interactive personal development session. Scherrer resides in New Mexico with her husband and daughter, where she makes paintings, photographs and paintings on photographs and teaches at the University of New Mexico.

DÉJÀ VU includes artists Ivin Ballen, Tatiana Berg, Lisa Sigal, Frank Trankina and Selina Trepp. The exhibition is up until November 20th and was recently reviewed in WagMag.

-------------

Regina Rex is an artist-run exhibition space located at 1717 Troutman, in Ridgewood, Queens. We are open on Saturdays and Sundays, 12-6pm.

Directions: L train to Jefferson, exit, walking along Wyckoff to Troutman. Walk up (north) on Troutman two blocks, passing St. Nicholas and Cypress, to a large brick building on the left. Regina Rex is in suite #329.

If you would like more information, or an appointment outside of gallery hours, please email info@reginarex.org or call 646-467-2232.

Hannah Weiner and "intense autobiography"

2011-11-03T23:36:00.002-04:00

Help me write a talk for next wkend, on Hannah Weiner and what I'm calling "intense autobiography." How does autobiography figure in your own writing and/or art practice? How specifically in ways that may be considered counterintuitive to or innovating upon the genre of autobiography? How, likewise, someone who you admire, or with whom you share affinities? Email me at wildhorsesoffire [at] gmail [dot] com.

Two Dances for Leavening

2011-11-03T20:28:00.002-04:00

--for Chase Granoff

1.

Your mention of making bread
Makes me think of leavening
A leavening for change is a leaving
It takes time and is kneaded

And is needed this is a pre-
political thing, this is a post-
political thing, this is most of all
A political thing, this ingestion

Through the mouth or the hearth
That surrounds the mouth makes us
A domestic scene whose worth is
Measured by the public, floating

Upon the heat of the air, in this sense
Of seeing or being in the dance
For a polis we can partake of
We are down below, all, we are all

Animal down here, and this con-
sumption is too large to fit coffinlike
In the tomb our planet has become
Conviviality and nourishing substance

Must do their work that surrounds
That surrounds the mouth a res
Publica so-called this bread
Until it is held in common, until

Sense levels us we are left to leaven
The leave-taking of our senses
Must be plain, made by dance
So becoming becomes a heaven

Presupposing time and justice are one.

2.

The ingestion of one substance
We are making
That we are making
The world up as we are also
Movement and we are built
To move in waste our ways otherwise
Than being what you have to say
When breath becomes bread
And there seems no other way
But in this dance other forces sway us
We are persuaded like the world twists
The way it depends on bread
Everyday to sustain
The simplest things
It is the simplest things that are
Easiest to forget
If we ever remembered them at all
I am using the line as a continuous breath
Not a metaphor for things seen
Like we can breathe our way out of this immiseration
Pivot and pirouette our way out of debt
Out of the pollution of everything
To assert the fourth dimension
Betrays our sympathy
And not merely our power over, as Pound claimed,
Every being
To leaven this sense of awe again
The power of things over words, that would
Be bread
Making the world up as we move
These built lines of song
These step-like tones
When time and justice should be one.

Review of Rachid Ouramdane's Ordinary Witnesses (@ The Brooklyn Rail)

2011-11-02T15:15:00.003-04:00

Here is a review I wrote of Rachid Ouramdane's incredible Ordinary Witnesses.

"In this place—zero or nil—the dancers move low to the floor. They are grounded—literally. And it is from the floor that they will rise, and writhe, and continually fall again. As if gravity itself were complicit with the violence committed against them. As if it were also a force of resistance embodying the harm that had been done to the violated and tortured. Gravity becomes an active and visible material through Ouramdane’s choreograph[y], propelling the body/subject (back) into being."

OccupyLanguage (@Facebook)

2011-10-29T17:46:00.002-04:00

Writers stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street

OccupyLanguage is a working group that encourages the staging of readings in public spaces, and especially via public transportation.

What works/text would you wish a public to hear read aloud? Which may overturn or redistribute a common sense? Which may lead to argument, debate, provocation?

OccupyLanguage meetings are held Sunday evenings at 8pm at 60 Wall St., after the Poetry Assembly general meeting. Each week, a new project proposed by a member of the collective will be performed based on a set of guidelines.

We will reconvene weekly to consider the effectiveness of the texts read aloud, and the kinds of interactions the readings open up in different public spaces. Treat it like a workshop. What worked and what didn’t? What did people find interesting, and why? What led to dialogue, emotional response, enjoyment? We want to invite a certain kind of cooperation in "reading," avoiding traditional styles of unidirectional address which lead to distracted listening and/or echolalia. We might also consider if the readings act as a kind of public service announcement. Not soapbox-style diatribe, but the limited broadcasting of texts that have been carefully considered in advance as something you would want a stranger to attend.

The committed citizens occupying Zuccotti have made us believe again that public space so-called is worth occupying: putting our bodies into it, holding conversation and symposia there. And that such gatherings in the spirit of commons—to be among one another in debate, discourse, and struggle—are a good unto themselves.

Dumps

2011-10-25T21:40:00.003-04:00

--after Jennifer Scappettone

There are dumps
And then there are dumps
Violent like sunlight
Hides in methane
Like a heathen/eden of capital
Literally farting up a storm
Of paradise, a kind of last frontier
Of our thingness
Last men do it all night long
Until we all become subject

Methane, last bastion
Of property relations
Called pollution erstwhile
Profitability is our fatal
Enclosure threats of extinction
Literally fart carbon
Cash rules nothing moves
But the money
Out of the island Staten
Home of the Wu Tang Clan
And retired police of course
They closed the schools around
The dump for capital

For methane, the most absurd
Thing was these dumps were made
At all, now a profitable farting
Shitting us our common fiction
Of ecology & capital
Coexist these are the levels
We are dealing with
The unthinkability of waste
While endgames take place.

Shadow speaks with me

2011-10-25T20:51:00.005-04:00

Shadow speaks with me
Is this the scarcity
We were dreaming of
The people we were
Inside the people
Light outside
In the trees no repeat
Performance is this singing
Like praise they rise
Up singing
Speaking not knowing
Where body ends pre-dawn
In the park somnolence
Gives us reason.

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Maureen Connor (@Art21)

2011-10-19T19:10:00.004-04:00

Check out my 5 Questions for Contemporary Practice feature with CUNY Queens professor, artist, and activist, Maureen Connor.

In the works of Personnel Connor explores a tension between the work environment as a kind of ruin—a place inhabited by future’s past—and as a site begging for revivification, to which one can give new life while not abandoning its history. Working with limited means, Connor has been resourceful in exploring these problems, which anticipate her most extensive project to date. The Institute for Wishful Thinking, which she founded with Gregory Sholette and others in 2008 and discusses below, moves beyond the criticism and practical design problems of her former projects into problems of legal and non-governmental mediation. Soliciting proposals from individuals, and making possible residencies for artists and art groups, IWT attempts to mediate between governmental and non-governmental sectors on behalf of artists who believe their work can benefit the public good.

LRL's zero profit model

2011-10-18T22:33:00.002-04:00

The editors of LRL e-editions are thrilled to announce the launch of SIX new books! This time around, we’re changing things up a bit:

In the past, we’ve only ever charged $2-3 over cost for our print-on-demand books. We’re now ready to commit to making exactly $0 from this series: FROM NOW ON, ALL PROFITS FROM THE SALE OF PRINT-ON-DEMAND BOOKS IN THIS SERIES WILL BE DONATED TO A DIFFERENT SMALL PRESS EACH YEAR. First up: Chax Press. So, any purchase of a print-on-demand title from this series during 2011-2012 will have the added benefit of helping to support the efforts of Chax!

Over the next few weeks, we’ll launch one or two titles at a time, beginning with a book-length review of Michael Cross’s Haecceities (Cuneiform, 2010), which is now available for download/purchase.

Please stay tuned for new books from David Brazil, Sarah Mangold, Hugo García Manríquez, and Pattie McCarthy–as well as one monumental reprint from Beverly Dahlen!

Find out more on our newly redesigned e-editions site: www.littleredleaves.com/ebooks/.

Somatic Poetics

2011-10-18T19:13:00.003-04:00

The following is part essay, part proposition, part thinking in motion (provisional, unfinished, disruptive). It is a response to Patrick Durgin’s generous invitation in spring 2010 to address “somatics” in regards to recent writing practices and poetics. Through the following text I take excursions with various contemporaries. These excursions are not meant to be representative by any means (the following is not meant to be a definitive mapping of a field, manifesto, polemic, or ‘last word’) but the continuation of a discourse that has become visible to me in the past few years. All the propositions here are hopefully extendable. To many of them I owe my conversations with the Nonsite Collective — and to Rob Halpern, Eleni Stecopoulos, Amber DiPietra, David Wolach, Taylor Brady, and Robert Kocik in particular. And also to Daria Fain, CAConrad, Dorothea Lasky, Brenda Iijima, David Buuck, and Bhanu Kapil.

I dreamt we were susceptive to language

that care might be agency’s complement

and form never more than condition
passing as body

— Eleni Stecopoulos

Etel Adnan Tribute at Small Press Traffic

2011-10-17T16:20:00.006-04:00

Lindsey Boldt and Small Press Traffic have put together a tribute to the contemporary Lebanese-American poet and artist, Etel Adnan. Thanks to Lindsey in particular for inviting me to participate in this incredible bouquet of writings.

Contributors include Ammiel Alcalay, Anne Waldman, Ben Hollander, Robert Grenier, Brandon Shimoda, Cole Swenson, Csaba Polony, David Buuck, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Jen Benka, Joanne Kyger, Lynne Tillman, Megan Pruiett, Michael McClure, Nancy Peters, Roger Snell, Sharon Doubiago, Simone Fattal, Stacy Szymaszek, Stephen Motika, Steve Dickison, and Thom Donovan.

There Is a World

2011-10-16T13:18:00.005-04:00

--after Rachid Ouramdane's Ordinary Witnesses

The hum our only is ripped any body
Out of time what was after that that is
Like joints attain the new was used as crutches
Was grace in bodies gymnastic to modulate
Musculature cruel art that is because our
Because after this modulation building it
There is a world.

Our ear for hearing to hear to shred time
Out of after we denied them mundane violence
Our bearing out of time center the as Sexton
Once everything was but there is this coming down
To control of this witness spirit modulate skin
To introject why our bearings identity we have seen
Of the soul world viviparous there is a world
There is a world.

Witness starts with not to see before there was
Ever joint or joints have heard we violence the world
Of worlds that ordinary everything was gravity
Place where a shoulder wrote their names
Before there was no grace here except the floor
Rising within the hum lights modulate building body
Harmed figures forged with displacement
Feel wordlessly the recognition there is a world
There is a world there is a world.

Occupy the MTA: a Proposal

2011-10-13T23:11:00.004-04:00

The struggle to claim Zuccotti park as strategic and symbolic ground for the commons is not over yet, but one can imagine that Bloomberg will be successful in forcibly removing the occupiers. The committed citizens occupying Zuccotti have made us believe again that public space so-called is worth occupying: putting our bodies into it, holding conversation and symposia there. And that such gatherings in the spirit of commons—to be among one another in debate, discourse, and struggle—are a good unto themselves. Poetry and art have played a role in this, however minor, inasmuch as the “human microphone” reading format may revivify the poetry reading as a democratic and dialogic mode of assembly. To repeat someone else’s words not only bears a religious function, but is a way of feeling words move within you, to make others’ words inhabit your own vocal chords and nervous system. It is in other words to incorporate and understand. That names were drawn from a hat—no curation, no hierarchy—was also remarkable and unlike most poetry readings, with the exception of that most humiliated of formats, the “open mic.”

The events of Zuccotti Park this past month have set the practical imagination ablaze, and made us imagine anew what is possible in public space supplemented by social media, video, digital photography, etc. I propose that a working group form to consider giving readings in public spaces, and especially via public transportation. What works/text would you wish a public to hear read aloud? Which stand out as revolutionary? Which may overturn or redistribute a common sense? Which may lead to argument, debate, provocation? Groups of 5 or more may board trains and buses to read agreed upon texts aloud. 5 or more so as to bear witness in the case of police intervention, but also so that the readers will feel supported, not alone in their deliberate action. Read a text and then disperse. Or remain if the public engages the reader and wants to discuss. Reconvene regularly to consider the effectiveness of the texts read aloud, and what texts to read in the future. Treat it like a workshop. What worked and what didn’t? What did people find interesting, and why? What led to dialogue, emotional response, enjoyment? If the human megaphone/microphone amplifies cooperatively we might think of the MTA occupation similarly. As inviting a certain kind of cooperation, if only through distracted listening and not echolalia. We might also consider if the readings act as a kind of public service announcement. Not soapbox-style diatribe, but the limited broadcasting of texts that have been carefully considered in advance as something you would want a stranger to attend.

Talk at CRS with Jenn Joy

2011-10-11T22:51:00.004-04:00

This Saturday, at the invitation of choreographer Daria Fain, I will be giving a talk with Jenn Joy about my experiences as a dance writer, with special attention to confluences between poetry and movement-based practices. Please join us!

October 15 10:00am to 1:00pm
DONATION SUGGESTED $5
@Center for Remembering and Sharing
123 4th Ave. At Union Square

People are Making Shitloads

2011-10-10T14:04:00.005-04:00

--after phrases by Ben Kinmont

People are making shitloads
This disconnect
The advantage of the absorption
Making shitloads
To close the system
To close the system not
To open, disclose
Shitloads, people are making
Is a service
Is a service when this not being
It is clearly an invitation
This sense of loss
To close the system
Is towards the beginning of ideas
People making shitloads
Devastate quality
As a response to absorption
Is a service
This disconnect
Is a service
This sense of loss less as ephemeral
Than a failure
To close the system
The people make
Making shitloads
To open, to disclose

But it is not 2008
That constitutes a lag
In advance of witnessing
The system collapse
Of witnessing
The system from within
This sense of loss
People are making unamplified
Inside the people
Less as an ephemera than
A need to surround buildings
Produces the world one
Is hearing beyond control

Give me a mic check and
I'll give you the world
People being made the
People being made
While the mic's not on
Are you hearing the sound
Of the world
Surrounding buildings
Whose murmurs were control

Up in this city finally plausible
Beyond control
Give us the world
And we won't divide it
Like the pie divides what
Do you hear
People making shitloads
Now they are heard
Pie charts now they are
Ripples in the middle of
The people
Intoning the air inside me

So what we simulate
Is indivisible
From the sounds we make
Like Stein
Says explanation people making
Shitloads
What do you hear
The people being made
While we hear
Where a process begins
Beyond control
A people swells
Inside the ear.

New PennSound recordings

2011-10-05T20:57:00.003-04:00

PennSound just put up quite a few new materials at my page there, including readings with CA Conrad at Zebulon Cafe, Joseph Bradshaw and Dana Ward at Con/Crescent in Philly, Steve Farmer for Poetic Research Bureau in LA, Catherine Meng for 21 Grand, and at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver.

16 Beaver on Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-04T19:14:00.002-04:00

Tuesday -- 10.04.11 Ð Liberty Plaza and its Conflicts
CONTENTS:
1. About this Tuesday
2. Some questions on the General Assembly
3. Questions on Conflict
4. Suggested Readings
5. Links
__________________________________________________
1. About this Tuesday

What: Discussion
When: Tuesday -- 10.04.11 @ 7:00PM
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
Who: Free and open to all

A discussion on the "Occupy Wall Street" action, which has resulted in the occupation of nearby Zuccotti Park since Saturday September 17th, andcongoing.

We would like to ask those who receive our emails, attend events, or will attend this one, whether or not you've been to the park and assemblies, what you think is missing, what you would like to add to the process, how this could be done, and explore any critiques of tactics, attitudes, dispositions, and politics you've seen thus far.

The composition and dynamic of the park changes week to week, even day to day. From the 80 arrests on September 24th to the 700 arrests of October 1st, things are escalating at a rate in which neither the media nor manipulators nor bureaucrats can make any sense, create any narrative, or stabilize any position. A march has been called for Wednesday October 5th at 4:30 outside City Hall (260 Broadway) featuring organized labor, community organizations, and in connection with a call for a national student walkout.

__________________________________________________
2. Some questions on the General Assembly

What is the General Assembly? What should a New York General Assembly look like? How can there be not one but many assemblies? How can outside assemblies, borough or neighborhood assemblies, relate to the occupation? What was the need for Adbusters’ call? What is the process of the General Assembly, its working and thematic groups? Is the General Assembly itself an action, by simply being in the square, and activating our relationships and ways of living together? What effect will the union has on the General Assembly and Occupation?

__________________________________________________
3. Questions on Conflict

How does a General Assembly, its constituents parts, working and thematic groups, dialog with conflict? Conflict maybe described as an animus, or drive to utter and engender a hostility which results from the contradictions waged in everyday life. When prioritizing scheduling, messages, and social media, how do the groups relate to internal and external conflict? Is it amplified or dissipated? What and who gets excluded by the new vocabularies and modes of communication within the assembly? Does a simplistic affirmation of pacifism, for instance, overrule discussions on non-violence in a society grounded on violence? When we hear “respect the process”, what assumptions are made, and how does the process become a means of control or self censorship? How can our tactics subvert modes of representation that do not affirm uncompromising disobedience to authority in its open and subtle forms?

__________________________________________________
4. Suggested Readings

--Principles of Solidarity (working draft):
http://nycga.cc/2011/09/24/principles-of-solidarity-working-draft/
--Declaration of the Occupation of New York City:
http://nycga.cc/2011/09/30/declaration-of-the-occupation-of-new-york-city/

--The Carcass in Our Heads: A Mic Check - More of the Same, September
2011:
http://confusingsigns.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/the-carcass-in-our-heads-a-mic-check/
--Preliminary Notes Towards an Account of the "Movement of Popular
Assemblies" - TPTG, July 2011:
http://www.tapaidiatisgalarias.org/?page_id=105
--Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters: Anarchist Interventions in the
#Spanish Revolution - CWC, June 2011:
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/barc.php
--Early Spring for the Badger - Politics is Not a Banana, May 2011:
http://www.politicsisnotabanana.com/2011/05/new-pamphlet-about-struggle-in.html
--Against Pacifist Linearity - Tom Nomad, 2009:
http://zinelibrary.info/against-pacifist-linearity
--How Nonviolence Protects the State - Peter Gelderloos, 2005:
http://zinelibrary.info/how-nonviolence-protects-state-peter-gelderloos
--Neither Democrats, nor Dictators: Anarchists - Errico Malatesta, 1926:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1926/05/neither.htm

__________________________________________________
5. Links

This follows a few recent discussions we’ve hosted in the last months:
--August 18th-20th: Beyond Good and Evil Commons: Debt, Economic Crisis
and the Production of Commons:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/silvia_george_david/
--July 31st: For General Assemblies in Every Part of the World:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/07.31.11.htm
--April 13th: From Wisconsin to New York: Crisis, Austerity and
Resistance: http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/003274.php

Global Revolution: http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution
NYC General Assembly: http://nycga.cc/
NYC People’s Law Collective: http://nycplc.wordpress.com/
Occupy Wall Street: https://occupywallst.org/
The Wall Street Occupennial: http://wallstreetoccupennial.tumblr.com/

__________________________________________________
16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City*

2011-10-03T23:23:00.001-04:00

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.

They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.

They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

*Drafted and published originally by the New York City General Assembly.

Three for Austerity

2011-10-02T18:20:00.005-04:00

Peopleless I didn't want
Of anything but freedom ripped

From life after austerity policed
Full employment Whitman

Never predicated this synthesis
Yet for a different kind

Of totality do we spray
The will within population

Saying what won't be defended
Because natural rights aren't given

We risk losing the whole periphery
To be in this sea writing

*

Hedges grow like deficits
Inflation does more work breed
What you see but do not know
What you are doing and know too well
Concrete like money, like the air is heard

Abstract like a surface and
A surface just beneath
The visor called finance
Visualize a difference
These markets make on the skin
Visualize the end of the world
Then stop it since these
Distributions form a name

*

I know these waves don't shelter me
No shelter was their song
They gave to me American
A kind of islander in a divine

Wind, its exceptional breath
When we take our last whole worlds collapse
Whole markets collapse proletarianizing

What we touch, even ourselves,
Immune to this gift no longer.

--composed August, 2011

Poetry@Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-02T17:58:00.001-04:00

An update, for all who would like to organize a reading, or otherwise get involved:

Update: The protests were large and electric yesterday. We stand with all those arrested against their right of free speech and public assembly. If you were arrested, please contact Occupy Wall Street's Legal Sub-Committee through the National Lawyers Guild at 212-679-6018 ASAP. The National Lawyers Guild is a progessive alternative to the Bar. Secondly, a message from the Culture and Arts Sub-Committee to us: "We believe we are at the brink of a new art movement, a new school of thought. To catalyze that, we are creating collectives inside our Arts and Culture to advance our movement and society aesthetically, towards a new paradigm. We have already a collective on performance art, one is music, and hopefully you will join us with poetry." We have been asked by the Culture and Arts Sub-Committee to hold Poetry Assembly every Friday night. This is a leaderless event and we're looking for new organizers, facilitators, and promoters for every Poetry Assembly. If you are interested in facilitating a democratic assembly, please go on our event page at FridayNightPoetryAssembly@OccupyWallStreet and send a message to the event organizer. Finally, we have been asked to be more present on-site. We would like to be present daily at the library, including a representative/sign to let people know about poetry and the arts at Occupy Wall Street. We also need representatives of our group to attend Culture and Arts committee meetings. Can you let us know if you can help?

Creative Time, Living as Form (Pics)

2011-10-02T17:36:00.008-04:00

Occupy Wall Street, October 1st March (Pics)

2011-10-02T17:31:00.010-04:00

For the Occupiers

2011-09-28T22:48:00.006-04:00

After the polis
Before the police
The problem is that
This is a feeling,
That feeling undergirds
Any organization
Or collective action

My friend Robbie
Tells me
Chris Kraus says
That all utopian
Social movements
Matter because
Their wager is
For time and time
Can't fail

I really
Believe that
But bodies can
Be hurt, bodies can
Easily disappear
All it takes is
Some pepper spray
Or a fist misapplied

What the opposite
Of Habeas Corpus
Is dissolves with
Your hair on my face,
Your legs around
Me without demands
Agreed upon in
Advance

The problem is to
Make us an us
Without making us
An us, to keep
These pronouns
At arm's length,
Touching proper names
Like the singular becomes
Multiple

No people was ever
Separable, no dialogue
From what it intends,
The abuse of the abused
Must end, the undead
Move through these
Lines thinking the
Necropolis, thinking
The polis after it was

Not one of them
In their proper place,
Like I or you wasn't
The remnant,
Sublime kernel of
Wanting to be a citizen

Here is a list of all the things
I did while revolution was fomenting
Or while we watched something
Happen in the distance
Of Facebook

Now's your chance.

PoetryReading@OccupyWallStreet

2011-09-28T22:29:00.001-04:00

via Travis Holloway, come one come all and read a poem:

"On Friday night at 9 p.m., we'll hold the first general Poetry Reading at Occupy Wall Street. We're asking poets to come down and read a poem as a prelude to the march on Saturday. In accordance with the movement that is now called Occupy Wall Street, the reading will take the form of a direct democratic assembly. As we discussed tonight at the Culture and Arts Committee meeting, we wish to have no headliners or special privileges but rather presume the equality of each poet's voice and try to listen to one another. We ask that each poet try to keep their poems under 3 minutes at the least. And we hope that poets will select poems that they feel are relevant to the hopes and demands of the people here. See you Friday night. We're looking forward to it. *Please note that PA systems and alcohol are banned from the park, but megaphones will be available. In other words, this is no ordinary poetry reading."

Bhanu Kapil's Schizophrene

2011-09-21T19:58:00.004-04:00

Schizophrene, by Bhanu Kapil and published by Nightboat, just hit the streets. Below is a little blurb I did for the back cover. Bhanu is amazing if you didn't already know it. Check-out all her books, and especially this one!

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene cleaves the human-animal, organic-inorganic, virtual-actual, immigrant-native where “‘Reverse migration....’ is psychotic” and "‘Nobody is [emigrant].’" Wrested from states of abandonment and undeath, language flickers somewhere just beyond the sensory. This is autobiography (life writing) in enthusiastic, map-defying movement, “…a flux where the body always is.” In Schizophrene, and all of Kapil's writing for that matter, sumptuousness moves through a restless presence of mind.

The Hole: a Meta-Discourse (in P-Queue vol. 8)

2011-09-19T19:36:00.003-04:00

A version of the talk I gave in Bflo last February about The Hole is in the new P-Queue, which also features work by David Buuck, CA Conrad, Brad Flis, Lewis E. Freedman, Lawrence Giffin, Josef Kaplan, Ish Klein, Jena Osman, Chris Sylvester, Andrew Topel, Divya Victor, Anna Vitale, and David Wolach. Thanks to Joey Yearous-Algozin and Holly Melgard for their excellent work as the journal's new editors.

False Flags

2011-09-12T13:36:00.003-04:00

What is loss what we didn’t
Even know yet was in

Those others also a part
Of ourselves unknowable

I am withdrawing
Every image of the event

Now, what is left being
The remnant, hard kernel

Of how they’ve maintained
Consent, the citizen being

A fiction and the people being
A fiction, nations don’t exist

Really just this proximity,
To disaster borders determine

Who gets to feel this sense
Of tragedy, whose death matters

What comes back comes
The fuck back clutching

At a lack every image
Still tries to fill, a hole where

The truth got clipped
In the attempt to list

The names of the dead
What else is lost, displaced

By an intention to make visible,
Unaccountable though it may

Always return to the place it was
The motion of this

Withdrawal without caption,
Or negative space or silence

Surrounding it being
What is left, calls me back

From a sense of process to you
History in those arms the

Opposite of immunized would be
Secret name of God or

A negation we’ve always dreamed
Casualties of false flags

Full of grace and excepted
From witness, through peace

Do we dominate, through
The millions we’ve captioned.

Taylor Brady's and Rob Halpern's "Sensitive Correspondence" (at Others Letters)

2011-09-08T15:22:00.003-04:00

The latest post at Others Letters features Taylor Brady's and Rob Halpern's "Sensitive Correspodnece" a selection of correspondence and essay regarding their book collaboration, Snow Sensitive Skin.

"Sensitive Correspondence" offers insight into the process of the two collaborators as they reflect, via email, upon the particulars of their collaboration, with special attention to the role of time and duration in their writing, engagement with source materials, and to what Rob calls "patiency," a condition in which one becomes susceptive to the thought and affect of others, a mutual subject of prosody emerging through the work.

Storeys End

2011-09-04T15:02:00.006-04:00

My friend/collaborator Sreshta Rit Premnath's solo show opens in Berlin this week, Storeys End, featuring a little essay I wrote for the catalogue. Here in an excerpt:

The exhibition Storeys End seems a culmination of Premnath's engagement with the Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who undoubtedly acts as a kind of muse for the artist. Like Wittgenstein, Premnath relishes philosophical, linguistic, and cultural aporia. In Storeys End, named after the address where Wittgenstein composed his posthumous text, On Certainty, and died shortly thereafter, the viewer is presented with a detective plot redolent with post-modernist obsessions.

Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual Art offer Premnath an art historical language game, like so many of his generation who have returned to the "scene of the crime" of their parent and grandparent generations. But this game cum crime story also takes place between multiple media, which include photography, sculpture (the partial reconstruction of a kite designed by Wittgenstein in 1909), and painting.

Premnath's installation pushes against the limits of a particular universe of meaning, the work of art measuring the limits of a world-the personal and collective capability to understand in situ through a set of linguistic and visual propositions. By entering into the work, the viewer encounters the artifacts of the artist's research practice, which move seamlessly between philosophical speculation and humor. In the narrative tension of these objects, stories actually begin rather than end. Objects mark the mobile traces of our compulsion to make meaning faced with negation, absence, aporia, and gaps within signifying processes.

"The New Us" in BOMB 117

2011-09-02T11:10:00.005-04:00

The latest BOMB features a ton of poets on artists, poets' writing, and poets in dialogue with art, including work by Erica Hunt, Corina Copp, Danny Snelson, Mónica de la Torre, Matvei Yankelevich, and Alan Gilbert. It also includes a suite of poems I wrote last fall, "The New Us."

The new us starts from a dish
Not socialism, continues to grow
Sans system, an attention
To this consumption system, a local
Kissing of totality what will be value
And what's the use, in poking
Our heads out, food sovereignties
Produce this singularity

The new us, the new good life
Well being as muse and health
As wealth all we are saying's
The all new thing, new expression
Being shares this sense, of turning
Around a land, or land fills
Me up with emergence, political
Like a dish, we cannot help,
Gathering around, or con/tem/plating.

Rights of Participation IV: Gym Tan and Laundry

2011-08-29T11:18:00.008-04:00

--for Dottie

Life is repetition
(Gym tan and laundry)
Riding like a House beat
Over the heart, membrane of
That romantic organ,
Snooky plays dumb at another
Stupid job in another
City any shore
Of the multitude where people
Fuck, where people fuck
And cry their eyes out
The passions are in excess
To anything we mean
To discover there late
Late late in this twilight
Called credit, called brand name
Called ban, little houses
They live in and excursions
That everyone can believe,
Life is real but not recordable
This is what it means for it
To escape us.

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Gregory Sholette (@Art21)

2011-08-28T11:26:00.004-04:00

here!

Sholette’s dirty messianic approach also comes across in his appropriation of dioramas, window and museum displays, and souvenirs. Playing upon our familiarity with these 19th century formats, Sholette moves fluidly between sentimentality and criticality, ironic abandon and the recognition that, as Walter Benjamin famously wrote (and Sholette quotes through a particular work of his citing the relationship between John D. Rockefeller’s founding of the New York MoMA and management of his public image after a mining disaster): “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Moving within the flicker of “civilization” and “barbarism,” Sholette tells history slant, through the eyes of the losers, the unrecognized (and unrecognizeable), citing the places where anomalies and antagonisms crucial to history’s retelling “flash-up.”

For Will Alexander

2011-08-25T14:41:00.006-04:00

Combustible I's in our eros
In the ear of the cosmos

Imagine crimes against being
Imagine pure means

Telepathy upside the head
Occult dialect the imaginal

Blows horns in your head
Kissed into other worldings

Identity nowhere but skin
Other times send us back

To what we've never been
Into the catch of being prior

Apocalypse isn't the end
Of anything, just a deepening

Interruption, futurisms like
Infinite priors in the solar

Wind of your riffing, alchemy
Reasons with an unreasonable

World, relieving the calculable
Of its alibis, powered by

Untold combination, by
Etymology and neologism.

CJ Martin's Cosmetic Practice (Q&A)

2011-08-12T11:29:00.006-04:00

This past month I corresponded with San Marcos, TX-based poet, CJ Martin, whose book, Two Books, just came out as the first imprint on Michael Cross' new Compline press. What has always impressed me about Martin's work is its rare attention to words as built worlds, as well as its choreopoetic virtuosity (the fact that the poems never stop moving, that the mind (perception, mindfulness, cognition) dances constantly within his lines). In Martin's work one feels as though they are reading a totally new prosody, poetry in its firstness. Wanting to understand his process better, which relies heavily on note-taking and the sculpting of others' texts, I asked him to go into some detail about how the poems of Two Books were composed (posted below). To order his book, which I highly recommend, go to Compline's website.

Thom Donovan: Your description of procedures makes me want to press you to describe in more detail. I mean, is it like Google collage or more like David Antin's Meditations (or something completely different?). One “take” or heavily produced? Sculptural or improvisatory? I find your description of taking up Norma Cole’s vocabulary or wanting to repulse Whitman intriguing, the word "repulse" reminding me of the cardiac in Zukofsky and Duncan, how the line is ever this physical thing determined by encounter.

CJ Martin: In a poem called "Face Essay" that I've been returning to after a couple of years, there are a couple of lines that might be useful here. Neither's mine. The first is Norma C's, actually: "interface / interfaith"----& the other's from a church billboard somewhere near Bryan, TX: "America needs a faith lift." In part, why the term cosmetic appeals to me is that its critical edge highlights the profanity, the complete trashiness, of getting visible---the fucking faith lift is brilliant (as pun) but just completely terrifying (as principle)---dear lord, suck out the fat of my faith, lift it up & stitch me back! Suck out the nation fat (deport it, suppress it), iron any wrinkles & make me look young again. The proximity b/w faith & face is kind of astounding in its obviousness, but as anything more than proximity, I'm not entirely convinced. That interface would necessarily be interfaith is kind of a given after a certain point, but as program it's so UN ('In your faith!', might be more like it, in terms of an encounter in the world).

So, the cosmetic as practice: all surface. Not contra depth, but as against the notion that surfaces have no depth, no gravity ("wall paper"). Against the notion that the work of a poem would be to arrive at unmediated depth, and against, in particular, the benchmarks of that effort (namely the sentence, the topic, the thought). Critical of a disdain for surfaces that gets aired, say, in places like Oppen's "The Mind's Own Place," given that the preferred program's a drag, too (we've known masculinity's a drag for awhile now, but too many poets seem still not to have recognized their participation as 'put on'). Cosmetics has abstraction (of language material, from meaning) as its plastic edge, attempts to recuperate abstraction as fundamentally political.

Cosmetic reading (which is cosmetic writing) is surface reading, reading as appendage, as drawn on (rather than as responsive, engaging). The procedure involves cloud-computing a vocabulary by

1. locating a surface (a page, a spread, an arrangement of multiple spreads of same number across multiple books, a digitized text, audio,
etc.) then

2. determining/arriving at a constraint. Early on, in the first of the Two Books, this was more annotative/straightforward collage—culling notes on reading, shaping & reshaping them, restrictive, but basically as organic as constraint could be for me at the time. Beginning w/the Worship poem (2nd book), a version of the mesostic was used to collect text: I'd write 'across' a surface by doing a line reading of a page & locating the first occurrence of each letter in a word/phrase I'd chosen, then collecting the first word containing the first letter in the first line, the first word containing the 2nd letter in the second line, etc. With one caveat: the first two sections of the Worship poem were largely written while listening to some kind of audio, & the procedure allowed for borrowing from the air as from the surface. Courted the blurred line, even, as dissonance. Sometimes the faux mesostic was abandoned in favor of a vertical reading (i.e.--a quick theft of the left-hand margin of a page, usually heavily sculpted) or, when digital, a control F constraint (like, say, control F "worship" in a digital copy of the HD Book & collect words on either side of that word). My reading of Whitman was repulsed by this function (ie turned away from itself), using passages from Ngai's Ugly Feelings. Whenever a reading splayed across & out from a constraint, it was permitted the turn. The 1978 poem was a slightly different constraint, too: (almost) all vocabulary had to be suggested by Cindy Sherman's film stills from '78, w/ a conscious effort not to 'write' the photos (fails sometimes miserably, but only if you really know the images or have them in front of you). So, that poem's kind of an anti-descriptive, treating the photos as lexical & trying to pry apart some of their material. In Wardrobe there are other procedures, like for ex the 2nd to last section in that poem, which is a back-masking of Wordsworth's "Prelude."

All of which I'm telling you b/c you asked! (Sorry to ramble on.) It may be that these notes would have been helpful if they accompanied the poems, but really it's not as important to me that the concept works itself out in the practice, successfully, or that the poems are understood in that context. More & more I feel like I'm settling into being a very poem-y poet---preoccupied w/prosody to such an extent that engaging the practice itself is sufficient to make me think I've written a poem--the positioning of material, not often towards elaborating sense. I'm writing a poem now called "Rhyme Eats the Words" (a quote from Meschonnic), which maybe says it all.

After Matt Mullican

2011-08-11T18:03:00.004-04:00

We put our fingers in death’s mouth, up death’s ass
To know we are objects, to remain objective
This represents “that person,” a kind of fellowship

With the dead, mysticism is our business
Though weary with wonder, always the link
Between death and the photograph, because that

Person or thing is no longer present, mark time
Through banality, specimens pinned as
Though once lived, giving life to shade that pinning

Seems the potential for something to move
Anything that means something, no association is free
We pay for it with our lives, in dailyness the whole

World’s draft, memento mori, this recognition
That we are living in someone’s place ancient
As our sense of bad faith, ancient as any symbolism.

Arthur Echo Echo (@ Jacket2)

2011-08-08T18:09:00.003-04:00

The ever close listening Eric Baus has a nice write-up about poetry after Arthur Russell at Jacket2, featuring audio of me and CA Conrad reading our collaboration, Arthur Echo, and Kevin Killian reading his amazing poem for Russell, "Is It All Over My Face?".

Brady's and Halpern's Snow Sensitive Skin Reissued

2011-08-04T10:48:00.004-04:00

Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern's book length collaboration, originally published by Michael Cross's Atticus/Finch Press, has been reissued with Displaced Press. Below is a press release issued by Brian Whitner, the publisher of the press:

Dear Friends,

It is with great excitement that I write to announce the release of Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern’s Snow Sensitive Skin. This is an expanded edition of the original book published by Michael Cross’ Atticus/Finch and contains a new introduction by Michael, a selection of correspondence between Rob and Taylor during the writing of the project, and an extensive afterword by Taylor and Rob. The body in war-time; the time of war and of labor; “one vibration in both plane and flower”—Snow Sensitive Skin is one of the most moving and profound works ever produced out of a time of war and crisis, a must read.

…But don’t take our word for it:

“Snow Sensitive Skin is our most comprehensive document of poetics and poetry on both the 'state' and the coming-into-event of wartime since Ground Work and Trilogy, which is to say it resurrects the necessarily incomplete project of Leaves of Grass. Herein is the residue and legacy of Calamus, Drum-Taps, Driftwood, Songs of Parting and more. Herein is Halpern and Brady at their finest analytical, ethical and aesthetic pitch”—Tyrone Williams.

“If we have no other common sense it is obviously in what we share through love and other affective modalities, the sites of which are skin, but also words—language. In Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern’s Snow Sensitive Skin, lyric becomes the site of these modalities—the atopian places from which they speak—as they are constituted coevally between writer and reader, addressor and addressee, collaborator and collaborator, friend and friend, lover and beloved as an allergy or irritant to the sensibility that will not remain constant where too often constancy sounds like marching boots or machinery.”—Thom Donovan

“Inscribing the marring exposures of violence on their joint articulations, Brady and Halpern wholly refuse compliance with systems that destroy breathing presences. Instead they engender temporalities where relational empathy thrives. Snow Sensitive Skin is an incredibly moving call to embrace what “won’t exchange,” redefining “partial object”(ification) in the refracted confusion of war’s mirroring surfaces.”— Brenda Iijima

You can purchase Snow Sensitive Skin directly from SPD here: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780982212035/snow-sensitive-skin.aspx

As well, we would like to take this opportunity to extend a very special offer. For the very low price of $50USD (shipping included) Displaced will send you: Snow Sensitive Skin by Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern, Tout Va Bien by Suzanne Stein, hurdis addo by Samantha Giles, The Persians by Aeschylus by Brandon Brown, and The Hole by Thom Donovan. You can paypal us at iwaslike@hotmail.com. Your books will ship as one package (with some special surprises of course!) once all the titles are printed (mid-October-ish).

And as always, please feel free to join us on FB at
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/Displaced-Press/251206488224264

Please feel free to forward this message to your lists.

Very best,
Brian Whitener

Cheshire

2011-08-02T10:47:00.005-04:00

--for Sanford Biggers

Cheshire cat smile
Joker's smile
When you disappear
Every gleaming tooth is
Fugitive
Every lightbulb flashing your word
Every word
We'll ever say
Or write down being the same
Like a language for our disappearance
Reappears again
Queen presiding
Some other powers that be
Chop our
Motherfucking heads off
Climb up a tree
And smile your head off
Until surveillance is
Just a dream
And this mask becomes the costume
It is
Climbing trees that will never be
Just trees
Inverting Brecht's admonishment
Smiling our asses off
This is of course in reference to lynching
Not symbolism
Not the tree of life
Just signifying
All the masks we put on and
What else?
What the smile won't
Trade
Make its property
It overdoes, overcomes
Lips shine a way
Through night
Flashing light fucking with our heads.

Stacy Doris's The Cake Part (Video)

2011-07-22T11:41:00.006-04:00

Thom Donovan and Lucy "Labchow" Lasky from Stacy Doris on Vimeo.

The Poetry Foundation has a useful write-up about Stacy Doris's book project with Publication Studio, The Cake Part, which will feature "fantastic" censored literature from the era of Marie Antionette. As Doris tells PF:

The Cake Part is a fantastic redeployment of banned pamphlets from the time of the French Revolution in the form of a book-length poem. Long kept hidden because of their transgressive content, these pamphlets were stored in a secret archive at the Bibilothèque nationale called the enfer (hell). Highly pornographic and formally promiscuous, The Cake Part is an eruption of all the repressed joy and terror of that 18th century revolution, back into our time, into the 21st century. Set in the typography of Web 2.0, the design of this book searches for the modern day equivalents of these banned pamphlets in the virtual networks which aid and abet current revolutionary movements.

The project includes videos of Doris's friend and colleagues reading and performing selections from the book, including a video I shot with my dog, Lucy.

Here is some of what Poetry Foundation has to say:

In a consideration of how best to launch the book, Doris and Matthew Stadler decided to use the revolutionary potential of the internet and ask varied and friendly poets to participate in an online book launch for The Cake Part (which will take place at the Morgan Library in NYC). Doris told us that she was interested in how “online presence is central to the structure of revolutions today, and how in a sense it was in the French Revolution as well, where zines and other networks were key for circulating information and propaganda.”

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Sanford Biggers

2011-07-21T12:52:00.003-04:00

This month's 5 Questions features artist Sanford Biggers:

Time is my recent fascination. By that I mean the effect that time has on history, how past truths are debunked over time through research and new understandings. For example, the New York Times recently reported that Memorial Day actually began on May 1, 1865, when Black workmen re-buried over 250 Union Army casualties and later, with other freedpeople, White missionaries and teachers, staged a 10,000 person parade and celebration.

I’ll provide a few examples from my own work. A few years ago I made a series of chrome plated lawn jockeys based on the story of Jocko Graves. Jocko was a stable boy who sought to fight alongside George Washington. Deemed too young, Jocko was ordered to maintain the stables and keep a lantern lit to guide troops home after battle. One evening, Washington and his troops returned finding Jocko frozen to death, still clenching the lantern. Touched, Washington erected a statue at Mount Vernon honoring Jocko. Later replicas evolved/devolved into the lawn jockeys we are more familiar with before being denounced as derogatory symbols after slavery. Ironically, some lawn jockeys were reportedly used as markers along the Underground Railroad. The three sculptures in the series Jocko, are frozen in a state of emergence and dissolution, symbolizing the conflicted history of Jocko and the lawn jockeys he inspired. Similarly, my recent repurposed quilt drawings entertain the contested history of whether or not quilts were used as “signposts” along the Underground Railroad.

The Opposite of Apocalypse

2011-07-14T23:41:00.004-04:00

--after Dana Ward's "Diamond"

The beginning of worlds the diamond is
The facet is saved by space
Made coherent by all it isn’t, messianic, an epic

Paper bag over the face
Of the whole world, world-covering
This is the covering of

The world not merely its end
What you affirm by saying it isn’t
Shines radiantly like rest

Or silence when the world recedes
It resembles an ear
When we were not hearing, just listening

This was the soundtrack
To my soul
I say these things because I want to get over

My voice, do the
Voices you do
Waiting for the tape

To cut-off, the lip synch to appear
The body wholly voice
The angle of incidence it comprises

A fire so many have died for
Prismatically a universal bling
Compressed to this singular dedication

The products of culture
Form no ground
To base this love on

Yet they are all we have
Love of what is missed
In the absence of what we never had

Or could possess, this song
We just made up—here it is
The applause sign blinking soundlessly

Before the studio
Audience of our souls
The kind of participation that affect is

Crying tears on the inside
Diamond-shaped
Before they ever shone.

The Face

2011-07-03T12:00:00.001-04:00

--after C.J. Martin

This disgust that begins with us
Flesh of the wind that is between
The wind and things we are singing

Abjectly, I think that’s how you said it
Belief like a labor like an effect
Paid back to the subject in naked force

When the faces we make fuck us up
When a dress is what you address
The faces we make like sunshine

Might harden, forget our fall into
Mass like a poetry I fight against
Call this resistance, charged into

Symbolic efficacy, forgetting I am
Just flesh, the procedures of the face
Cover it so corrosively the world begins.

Rights of Participation (III)

2011-07-02T13:05:00.006-04:00

--after Ryan Trecartin

1.
What path to hell are you seeking
Participation paves it with credit
Object-relations keep saying it
What you are not prepared for and

Dying for this preparation start
Breaking shit that is all we have
Dead labor’s the thing you
Keep spraying all these ghosts

Of Warhol’s 15 minutes the gender
Of Jack Smith’s creatures when
We are not dead labor sings
A blue screen to a jump cut sings

A thousand windows open while
A million others shut
To be the cell phone singularity
To be the corporate second

While the world elapses
While it does not matter this gender
That is no one because it is
Everyone anywhere does us all in

Transcends the body at work
Equals the soul imbibing
Energy drinks, spilling fake blood on
Your friends in this three-way.

2.
This is what they drink in hell
Energy drinks and Listerine
The world shrinks to surplus
Occluded by what we see
In cell phone time in lip synch time
In matted time the teeth
Blacked-out emphasize the poverty
Of zombies, seasons in hell move me
Catastrophes of techniques
Hell of a do-over acting when no
One is listening in this chatroom
A thousand angels and a thousand devils
On the head of a pin number
Like cell phones evoke their reason to exist
When money and affect are one
Long done with the message
Voices that leave messages.

Con/Crescent reading with Joseph Bradshaw and Dana Ward

2011-06-27T11:23:00.005-04:00

On July 9th at 7PM, I look forward to reading with Joseph Bradshaw and Dana Ward as part of Jamie Townsend's and Nicholas DeBoer's Con/Crescent Reading Series. The location is Fergie's Pub at 1214 Samsom Street in Philadelphia.

With + Stand 5

2011-06-24T12:46:00.005-04:00

Thanks to Dan Thomas-Glass for his work editing the latest issue of With + Stand.

Contributors:

Lara Durback
Sam Lohmann
Erica Lewis
Brian Ang
Kristin Palm
Caroline Knapp
Barry Schwabsky
Meg Day
Bhanu Kapil
Thom Donovan
David Brazil
Evan Calder Williams
Monica Peck
Suzanne Stein
Jacqueline Frost
Seth Forrest
Lars Palm
Jennifer Karmin/David Emmanuel
Donna Stonecipher
Carol Szymanski
Cassandra Smith
Erin Wilson
Matt Longabucco
Josef Kaplan
Steven Karl
Whit Griffin
Tyler Dorholt
Jamey Jones
Fred Moten
Andrew Rippeon
Thomas Mowe
Lauren Levin
Barbara Claire Freeman
Derek Pollard
Stephen Collis
James Yeary
Caleb Puckett
Rodrigo Toscano
David Abel
Jen Hofer

Boston Poetry Marathon and BBQ

2011-06-23T11:54:00.003-04:00

The Boston Poetry Marathon and BBQ schedule is up. Thanks to Jim Behrle and Michael Carr for their work putting this together for the second year in a row. Lots of great poetry to be heard!

For Glenn Ligon

2011-06-18T17:15:00.006-04:00

I see you in silkscreen stages
The wrong nigger to fuck with
Getting beaten for what is real
Social practice and what it underlies

Immanent like paint writ over again
Or Benjamin comparing his theology to a blotter soaked with ink
Or a text all these pictures might be worth
Meted into false equivalence

Some bodies aren’t the same as others obviously
You took the black light literal that was your invention
To shine in this inversion of America like a blotter soaked with ink
Repeated until we are whole or blind with presence

Immanent like no description passes for witness
Repeated until we are one with violence
Until God is the nation no negation of negation
Or via negativa will do what we do

Just the sublime despair of cultural production
Messing with you in a white cube
Another name for this tomb
Repeated until we are resurrected or struck through

Until living labor can really live or art is allowed to die
Your own blotter shines like sunlight out of sequence
Playback of what was never felt the first time
Summoning the viewer.

An Archive

2011-06-18T13:39:00.004-04:00

--after Carlos Motta

There is an archive in the sky
Not unlike the one on this earth
Except that it doesn’t forget

Here we are forgetful
An archive, your archive, is specific not general
Because it is made of flesh and blood

And because some people can’t speak
Very loudly an archive attempts to speak
In words and pictures it is a kind of multitude

A swarm it takes to the streets and
Like events is not foreclosed
The composite of a few specific questions,

Of research, it tries to keep a promise
When the dead can’t
The person/people who organize it

Obviously matter very much
The archive being an extension of them
In its organization if not in its content

It bears the mark of their concern
Their burning regard not for a world that exists
But for what will have been

To make an archive like writing a poem
May make a living body of history transmissible
Making us bear witness—especially through what

It’s excluded or lost—to the collective struggle
To remember, the threat of disappearance
This struggle represents.

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Carlos Motta (@ Art21)

2011-06-17T14:32:00.005-04:00

The latest 5 Questions for Contemporary Practice at Art21 blog features artist, activist, and radical archivist, Carlos Motta.

One of the biggest mistakes we often make is to believe in the monolithic category “ART IS,” which I believe is at the root of the debate (and skepticism) about the political efficacy of art. I don’t think art “IS” one thing in particular. It shouldn’t be thought in the singular, but rather embraced in the plural: Art(s), rather, are, whether objective and social, symbolic and didactic, pedagogical and entertaining, etc. I don’t mean to relativize or to dichotomize these categories, but to insist that a plural frame of mind produces a positive, inclusive, and liberatory rhetoric that resists the dominant and reductive forces of the art market and art history which have through the forces of authoritarianism, paternalism, and capitalism staked their claims over art.

Review of Heather Kravas's The Green Surround (@ The Brooklyn Rail)

2011-06-04T13:59:00.002-04:00

here

Throughout the performance we witness the dancers both consenting to these regimes and resisting their situation in the performance itself. As we take our seats they face us, standing in a line across one side wall, as in one of Vanessa Beecroft’s tableaux vivants. They are wearing white smocks, kerchiefs, black bobby socks, and mirrored, panoptical sunglasses, which shield their eyes. The bright white lights that fill the black box theater only make it more difficult to tell where the dancers are looking. Counting occurs throughout the evening, starting with the nine women standing together, ticking off on their fingers while they repeat the words “boot lick.” The submission theme continues, and it is often unclear whether the viewers are dominating or being dominated, the boot lickers or the ones having their boots licked. “Boot lick boot lick boot lick” glides into “lick boot lick boot lick boot” echoing the ambiguity of subject and object.

Rights of Participation (II)

2011-05-21T16:36:00.002-04:00

If this is called inclusion
Count me out

Love absorbs an order of the cops

Patrolling their reward
In paradise purportedly

Where a billion affects have failed
There is a feeling

Of freshness for you in me

Absorbed like a dream of losing you
Or being left behind

In the messaging of our waking dream
Affection absorbs a structure

Invisibly touched, patrolling its reward

If hell is friendship where a billion
“likes” have failed

What failed regard won’t make us lose?

Coerced purposively in a perceived
Paradise to the point that I could feel

Anything, this body, I could feel,
Me in you

Absorbed like a dream of losing you
Lost in a messaging I am senseless to

The sun, like a blind-spot in reflexivity
If this is exclusion count me in

Call me your remnant patrolling
Its little reward

Redemption of the world called us
With the words struck through.

5 Questions with Not An Alternative (@ Art21)

2011-05-19T17:42:00.004-04:00

Check out my latest feature at Art21 blog, on the Wllmsbrg-based art group Not An Alternative:

Capitalism is constructed to instrumentalize any form of engagement. How can we refuse this? Can we participate productively within a context where it’s either vote, engage, participate, or you’re apathetic. Can we vote no? We were inspired to create an organization that experimented with a form of engagement that was aimed at confronting the limits of liberal capitalism.
--Not An Alternative

Poetry Dinner (@ Four & Twenty Blackbirds)

2011-05-18T18:22:00.002-04:00

It is a few weeks off, but the lovely people of Four & Twenty Blackbirds and Movement Research are putting together a dinner party/poetry reading for Sunday, June 5th.

Readers include Robert Kocik, Eva Yaa Asentawaa, Willa Carroll, and myself.

RSVP here

SPT's Reliquarium

2011-05-17T18:13:00.002-04:00

This Saturday at Small Press Traffic you can bid on small bottles in which will be contained the remains of contemporary poets...

If the end of the world is coming…Celebrate it with Small Press Traffic
at
THE RELIQUARIUM
an apocalyptic fundraiser

Join us for the end of days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_end_times_prediction) at this end of season bash featuring:

+reenactments from scenes of the end of the world
+the co-generation of a literary time capsule
+an auction of poetic reliquaries
+an end times dance party
+drinks and MORE!

May 21, 2011 at 7:30pm
California College of the Arts Graduate Writing Studio
195 deHaro at 15th
San Francisco, California

entrance a mere $10!

with reliquaries by:
Steve Benson
Charles Bernstein
Rachel Blau duPlessis
Julian Brolaski
Enrique Chagoya
Thom Donovan
Elaine Equi
Coco and Rob Fitterman and Kim Rosenfield
Kathleen Fraser
Bob Gluck
Judith Goldman
Tracy Grinnell
Nina Katchadorian
Kevin Killian
Joanne Kyger
Nathanial Mackey
Harryette Mullen
Eileen Myles
Sina Queyras
Ariana Reines
Larry Rinder
Camille Roy
Fiona Templeton
Edwin Torres
Amy Trachtenberg
Kaia Sand
Tyrone Williams
and MORE!

Can’t make it to the event? You can still bid on poet reliquaries online! Send in your absentee bids to smallpresstraffic@gmail.com

SHIFTER 17 : RE___ING launch (at Printed Matter)

2011-05-11T23:45:00.000-04:00

SHIFTER 17 : RE___ING

Book Launch at Printed Matter

Saturday May 14, 5-7pm

195 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

Editors:
Sreshta Rit Premnath & Matthew Metzger

Contributors:
Thom Donovan, Tamar Guimarães, Patricia Esquivias, Susan Jahoda, Eric Wenzel, Patrizio Di Massimo, Alicja Kwade, Adrian Williams, Mike Schuh, Lisa Zaher, Zachary Cahill, Arnold Kemp, Jean Marc Superville Sovak, Corinna Kirsch

Please join us this Saturday for the launch of Shifter Magazine's 17th issue, Re___ing at Printed Matter. We will also have back issues of Shifter on hand for purchase.

Re___ing, co-edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Matthew Metzger exists both within Rethinking Marxism's new issue (Vol. 23 No. 2)* as well as a new issue of Shifter. This folding of one identity into another, a re within a Re and the resultant destabilization of both frames of reference, is precisely the nature of Re___ing.

While re proliferates additives, doubles and fissures within the sphere of cultural production, it also implies multiple temporalities - to renew and to rewind. ing on the other hand, asserts the present continuous, it is always and already.

Paradoxically, re is also to reify. When you call me and I respond I am born. When I call you and there is no response I feel the threat of erasure. I therefore call with the strongest faith that you will respond and when you do we cement our relation. The abstract becomes concrete.

At what point does the attempt to exonerate representation from its intrusive counterpart, "the aura", become a concern around appearances rather than labor? As with Borges's Pierre Menard who rewrites Don Quixote word for word only to produce an anachronistic and inadequate adaptation, perhaps pure repetition is impossible. Therefore, although re attempts to proliferate multiples, the insistent ing, always in the present disturbs this veracity.

Here, contributors engage a variety of gestures tied to reproducing by deploying palimpsestic archives culled from historical documents, proposing morphological relations as historic fact and ultimately forcing procedures of mimicry, translation and interpretation to their limit. This limit or threshold in many instances is defined here through the body and its traces, actions, delusions and dreams which may often remain utterly irreproducible.

Re___ing is currently available for free download, online purchase as well as at Printed Matter, NYC and Motto, Berlin.

Eleni Stecopoulos: on "Somatics"

2011-04-29T15:59:00.001-04:00

For my last post at Harriet for the month, I gave Eleni Stecopoulos a questionnaire about "somatics," which she responded to most generously. So generously in fact that only her first response appears at Harriet. The others will hopefully be appearing at Wild Horses Of Fire soon.

It’s all psychosomatic. And somatopsychic. I don’t think you really escape your formation; you can only become aware of it and move towards some other understanding/practice that is remedial. I remember this New York Times article which opens with an anecdote about a medical conference on the ways those in “developing” countries somatize their depression in stomachaches, dizziness, and other mysterious physical symptoms: “Toward the end of the meeting, a doctor from India stood to speak. ‘Distinguished colleagues,’ he said, ‘have you ever considered the possibility that it is not that we in the third world somaticize depression, but rather that you in the developed world psychologize it?’” (“Mending of Hearts and Minds,” NYT 5/21/02). In the West the body is othered, but also in the sense of being displaced onto “the other,” whose labor disburdens or delivers the colonizer of his body. (And at the same time this other gets mystified as a healer who can resurrect the absent body. Think of Artaud among the Tarahumaras.)

Arthur Echo Echo (@Harriet)

2011-04-27T17:36:00.001-04:00

Here is a little write-up I did about my "incubation" session at the Movement, Somatics, and Writing symposium this past February, featuring somatic exercises by Petra Kuppers, Rob Halpern, and Bhanu Kapil:

What I wanted to do through the workshop were two things: prompt writing through a series of exercises which could enable participants to write through their distraction—distracted modes of perception, of focus, but also things one does involuntarily, when the body is indisposed with a specific set of tasks.

Rob Halpern: on "Somatics" (@ Harriet)

2011-04-26T12:06:00.002-04:00

For my last few posts at Harriet during National Poetry Month, I have asked a few different poets to respond to the term "somatics" with regards to their work. Here is Rob Halpern discussing the term.

Maybe the passively voiced question, “what is being done to bodies?”—together with our potential resistance to that—helps get at what you are referring to, Thom, as the “biopolitical” in my work? And I’m thinking here not only of incarcerated bodies, but our own bodies as well. What is being done to them? It’s a question that complements the question What is to be done? For me, to think this question requires a shift from an emphasis on an over-valued notion of agency toward a very different idea I call patiency, which has less to do with the body as the sovereign scene of its own actions, and rather with the body as scene of disabused sovereignty. Patiency refers to the suspension of our proprietary relations to our and others’ bodies and life processes, the recognition, and perhaps even the affirmation, of the corpus as open, disarmed, and vulnerable. I want to find in this figure of the patient not only passivity and submission, but the latent material—affective, erotic, and social—for movement just waiting to be aroused by uncoded sound and unanticipated touch. Maybe this is “somatics”?

To let it out

2011-04-23T20:12:00.005-04:00

--after Not An Alternative

To let it out so that [______]
Can’t use, blank that
Won’t produce, that for now
Won’t be a subject

Negates their using our
Emotions up in a public way,
Blocked by virgin forests
Participation reigns

Blocked by reified relation
Blocked by these tissues
The way this tear in the eye
Becomes commodity

An intellectual thing blocked
By the things we would share
So that [______] can’t use
So we communicate today

What images won’t remain
And names negated
By creative potential
Blocked by consuming the social

All that doesn’t remain
Will be let out,
The tear in your eye when it
Won't become.

Reenactment

2011-04-23T19:16:00.005-04:00

A blank expanse we reenact
Because there is no beginning
To this rememory, no origin of
Your crying, how any one continues

Subtracted from this feeling
Of joy another monument, runs through
Our breath like green, like a lung hasn't
Taught / any / one / to / breath / yet

Incites horizons, green of what
Hasn't been said, punctures the world
One world-sized ear or lung
Undifferentiated with witness

Creamy expanses written before
A mark was, written before
A mark was the world.

School Nite with the Commons Choir (@ Festival of Ideas)

2011-04-22T19:52:00.003-04:00

MAY 7th & 8th
COMMONING MEETING,
a FILM and a performance by THE COMMONS CHOIR

This COMMONING event is part of SCHOOL NITE: a weekend long iteration of the Future City, inspiring reforms through art exhibition, lecture, performance and/or installation. Held in conjunction with the New Museum's Festival of Ideas for a New City.

LOCATION: School Nite will inhabit five stories of the OLD SCHOOL at 233 Mott Street

SCHEDULE:

MAY 7th
10:0PM in the Courtyard of the Old School with 30 performers:

The Commons Choir (conceived and directed by choreographer Daria Fain and poet architect Robert Kocik) will perform RE-ENGLISH. By means of choreoprosodia (the fusion of movement and prosody) the Commons Choir will draw upon hormonal hymns, movement-amulets, phonic garlands, spells, the optative mood, poetry and a reparative narrative to re-tune and de-delude our language. Is English an inherently commercial, mercenary, duplicitous tongue or is that just human nature? The premise of RE-ENGLISH is that today's ecological, economic, security and equity crises are direct consequents of the sonic and connotative qualities of superpower english.

Performed by:

Hadar Ahuvia, Christina Andrea, Lorene Bouboushian, Corinne Cappelletti, Jessica Cerullo, Chun-Chen Chang, Levi Gonzalez, Mare Hieronimus, Hazuki Homma, Akira Ito, Masumi Kishimota, Athena Kokoronis, Eliza Ladd, Martin Lanz, Melanie Maar, Douglas Manson, Mina Nishimura, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Eva Perrotta, Peter Sciscioli, Larissa Sheldon, Kensaku Shinohara, Samita Sinha, Hadley Smith, Jhon Sowinski, Despina Stamos, Julia Ulehla, Larissa Velez, Ami Yamazaki and Kota Yamazaki

MAY 8th
2:00PM

COMMONING MEETING with a talks by Robert Kocik and Thom Donovan. The focus of the meeting will be money as commons: what to do about the current income disparity crisis. Dozens of countries in the Global South have begun programs that simply give money to the poor, often unconditionally. Though the emphasis in the U.S. is on work-not-welfare and privatization, social programs yet account for over 40% of federal spending. (Clearly income inequality increases social spending.) How can we re-structure income and growth so that money is not inequitably distributed to begin with? This meeting is a call for discussion, proposals, actions toward a broader, more munificent prosperity.

4:00PM

Common: Filmic interpretations of "commoning" directed by Iki Nakagawa with contributions from Caterina Verde, Douglas Manson, Mike Taylor, David Thompson, Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik.

The Phoneme Choir at St. Mark’s Poetry Project (@ Harriet)

2011-04-21T11:30:00.002-04:00

Last Friday night I attended Daria Fain's and Robert Kocik's Phoneme Choir at St. Mark's Church. Here is a link to a write-up I did about it, including extensive video footage of the performance.

Something which strikes me seeing the Phoneme Choir perform together for the fourth time, is to what extent the group has perfected their blend of movement/dance, song, and gestural/proto-semantic poetry (what Kocik refers to as “prosody,” “phonemics,” and “choreoprosodia”). At certain moments the work’s ‘development’ would seem entirely dependent on movement and choreography; or, on the other hand, some combination of recitation and song. Yet the whole piece culminates at a few different moments in a kind of controlled frenzy in which moving bodies, voices/sound, and word (loosely defined) would seem to become interdependent–coextensive, coeval. In the tradition of the “total work,” Fain’s and Kocik’s somatic opera–one I would argue approaches the scale and virtuosity of a Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, or Robert Ashley–seems something both old and new for poetry. A return to things Greek–a Dionysian atmosphere redolent with 60s theatre and intermedia performance. But also a new way to conceive of poetry through modes of collaboration and group process in the interest of mutual care, healing, and a radical re/channeling of both proprioceptive and proto-linguistic energies. For a taste of Fain’s and Kocik’s choir, I encourage you to take a look at the video footage compiled (below) from the performance at St. Mark’s Church for the Poetry Project’s Friday Night Series (currently hosted by Brett Price).

2011-04-20T17:41:00.004-04:00

Their reigns, my reigns, our reigns

When art does what they say
When art obligated them to move
When art fulfills this sense of movement
Into consent--is this a commons?

When art is a failure to move within the commons?
When the freedom drive idles?

Blamed by my sociality
This gift of war flames
Blamed by my locality
Three or four husband me

Like neighbors there is no
Connection between
Only proximity, only sounds
They make inside my insides

The scores of one displaced
Their movement there is a
Sound, of movement no one
Hears without a war

From which harsh gifts come,
That we were these gifts,
Their sharing and what
Can never be shared.

A deadened social potential
State name/shore up
The affect of “we have given up”
We are the robots and
No, no one will be given back.

We who play at waste

If at the end of this social potential, this potential of bodies in common and their common places in the language, there remained a rainbow--both covenant and broken promise.

Nothing will have been fair blow after blow. No awaiting holler inter(in)animating the time it took travel to undo. The upholstered air around our breath. The space left-over singing anything but me.

My voice like an area punctured by a wall of beats. What you can still feel as you swipe your card through the narrow slot. Feeling for the longed for beginning of feeling again. To create something other than “reaching your creative potential.”

For Dodie

No one comes back
But every one comes

Love cut-up again
Like a fantasy we project

In these states the asshole
The mouth we shared

Lips know their way only
Not where they’re going

The cunt like a fantasy
No thing returns as it was

All that was otherwise
Before our organs were.

2011-04-19T01:33:00.001-04:00

Madeline Gobeil: Did you start writing to escape from solitude?

Jean Genet: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary. No, I don’t know why I started writing. What the deeper reasons are, I don’t know. Perhaps this: the first time I became conscious of the power of writing was when I sent a postcard to a German friend who was in America at the time. I didn’t really know what to say to her. The side I was supposed to write on had a sort of white, grainy texture, a little like snow, and it was this surface that led me to speak of a snow that was of course absent from prison, to speak of Christmas, and instead of just writing anything, I wrote to her about the quality of that thick paper. That was it, the trigger that allowed me to write. This was no doubt not the real motive, but it’s what gave me the first taste of freedom.

from Somatic Poetics (@Harriet)

2011-04-19T00:06:00.002-04:00

Here

The poem has not yet determined what a body can do. Somatics? The poem sites the body’s (lack of) determination within a socio-political field. In this way is it both constructive and deconstructive. Feeling (affectivity) can over/indetermine any sense of the thing (poem) having been constructed or it having been taken apart. Lyric (what has traditionally been called lyric) is the typical mode of this over- or in- determination. Composition demonstrates (it exposits) but it is also a site where states of feeling, awarenesses, ‘being,’ and consciousness are undergone. Like a patient (or Orpheus) goes under. Eleni Stecopoulos: “Orpheus had to climb down the base of his skull because the message wasn’t getting through.”

5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Tania Bruguera (@ Art21)

2011-04-15T12:58:00.002-04:00

Check out the feature I did at Art21 blog with Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera, practitioner of Behavior Art and Useful Art and organizer of Immigrant Movement International, based in Corono, Queens:

While I practice that expanded version of aesthetics, my work is about the role of the artist in society and the possibilities for art to be directly involved in social endeavors. In order to get involved in social issues, it is important to truly commit to real action. The challenge is that artists are very often confronted with the institutional wall. So the work gets caught between a sort of hyperrealism and representationalism that affects the expectation of the artist, but also the ways in which the institutions are ready, or in some cases not, to deal with this kind of work. It is the old dilemma of responsibility in art and what the people in the institutions think the artist should be doing. Unavoidably the work starts dialoguing from an institutional critique standpoint. A new institutional critique where we do not wait for the institution, but we become “institution builders.” Sometimes within the inside of an already existing institution; other times ignoring them, so they have to catch up. It is positive institutional critique.
--Tania Bruguera

My Remains... (@Harriet)

2011-04-13T00:42:00.005-04:00

Here's a little statement I wrote for Harriet, on the "emergence of the subject" through poetry and art:

After the armor has been forcibly removed by an adversary, after one has become vulnerable to attack — this is the moment when the “real” subject would seem to emerge, or at least a subject with more reality than it previously had. This subject is both more collective and more singular paradoxically, for it having given itself to a relationship of combativeness. What remains is something between what it was before that having become vulnerable to attack, and the armor scattered around it afterwards. Perhaps the art object or poem is the residue or remains of this event? This is at least something my book-to-come is attempting to explore.

2011-04-12T14:03:00.001-04:00

If there were some rainbow at the end of a truncheon. Coerce the crowd and call it art. Call it organization, set the museum adrift. A horse shits on the shiny floor. The voice of the police forms into a voice again. Visual quotations of that commons we’ve never been. If there were some rainbow in those words "crowd control." The voice of the father like a reign machine. In the 30s in the 60s in the 90s. Before we could represent as art the things that were being done to us/that we participated in/that we were doing. Left over from some rainbow, the blood of some truncheon, some whip.

Commons questionnaire (@ Harriet)

2011-04-10T11:53:00.005-04:00

Here is a little questionnaire I generated for a collaboration I am working on with Rob Halpern, as yet untitled. On commons/commoning...

some images from Adrian Piper's Past Time: 1973-1995 (at Elizabeth Dee gallery, winter 2010)

2011-04-09T21:56:00.010-04:00

2011-04-09T12:59:00.002-04:00

The legal anomaly of smog passing for unpotentialized fog. Is our actual dream in common. Is our nightmare systems move too quickly. The ocean pumps sound the world grinds to zero sums. Not because there is no consciousness, but because there is. The passage of clouds too quickly in our despair. First they sold-off our hands (remains), now it's time for our lungs, our skin. But I don't want to be a fucking last man. Fear of amor fati when we feel fucked in a global sense. What remains from your cynicism, sloughed-off. Bad affects abound across territories no one has the guts to legislate to regulate to legislate to regulate to legislate so we are all crowned fools. And if the whole world became a grave? And if your universalism led to a little island with perfect waves, a preordained sunset, a pile of cash--would we call this Robinsade or Robincide? Climbing over whose backs to the good life. No one even wants to save the moon. If not for the view from their little windows, which open while a million others close.

2011-04-08T22:29:00.004-04:00

What remains if a commons isn’t common? A gust runs through us, an organ on the outskirts or outside this having. A specific body the real estate inside us. Sometimes the air is disguised as being shared. We have given up what has forced us to give up on history. Someone says "you are good" when what they really mean is you are easily fucked over. Docility, like a syndrome, the students respond "my education that’s what disaster surpasses me." My culture, what I have known, gives new meaning to entropy. The Dan Graham-like photo shoot of crystalline houses. Split-entry like a place where the past breaks with the present and ‘we’ becomes compossible. There is no commons, no passage yet within this interior. Except where I made the first cut the ear began its work. Of obligation, patient like the obligation to be sung into silence, the wishes of aporia. When aporia is the only passage, no return, no name across this law, no crossing out. Or erasing the face is enough, or giving back, to bring those bodies back. They want/we want their/our cut of the pie. But only get this cut. Parts of the part in blind sunlight. Shade pulled until there was no world. When what I mean is: don't get used to the night.

Almost soiled my self--is this calculable?--the retreat as ever into being, always being. I can hear their digging like Renfield in Coppola’s Dracula can hear all the insects and animal life underground. Fills me with a dread, telepathy of a thousand cranes developing, making vectors through my heart, my breath, my life, my love. Having harnessed the effort of a billion brutes where the commons is in actuality and what hasn’t been imagined yet? Compossible like gestures, gene pools, muscle memory. Compossible like an affect transmissible in collective expression. The faces reflecting me before speech became lucrative, codified as perceptible song on some retroactive-impossible barricade. There are gestures we are making unawares (true force of multitude?) and rhythms other than having (been) worked. Rimbaud imagined work as the principal source of infirmity, immiseration, anti-sociality. All the things the species has done in spite of this. All the nobility—that specific bodies persist in their dance. Inventing worlds because ‘I’ is what remains from their invention. Because, incalculable, bodies persist specific to their dysfunction. What ruptures us, a fulfillment of communitas.

A Grave In Exchange for the Commons (@ Jacket2)

2011-04-08T21:28:00.002-04:00

There is so much going on at the newly launched Jacket2, it is a little overwhelming. For my own part I contributed a piece on Fred Moten's poetics with regards to commons and the Black Radical Tradition. With much help from my wonderful editor, Julia Bloch.

Wars I Will Have Seen (Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior @ Vimeo)

2011-04-08T21:18:00.003-04:00

Here is a link to a live interview I conducted with Simon Leung, Sreshta Rit Premnath, and Warren Niesluchowski at CUE Art Foundation in Chelsea, NYC. The second event of the Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior.