Prosodic Body Website

Daria Fain and Robert Kocik now have a website for their ongoing project, The Prosodic Body:
www.prosodicbody.org

O Coevals (II)

So that all that gets rem
embered is "hate" and "them"
*This* is what he got
Abandoned consignment

Steeped in a sense of loss
Perfectly still with
Your bow between
The things you have been

Having been witnessed
Having witnessed
Me in the exited
Air you make me think

Of other way stations
Of possibility which
Won't suffice for nothing
Other than what's left

Over toxins trash exists
Until they erect condos
And no longer represent
Our entropy in double

Voids sustained blanks
Lyric won't admit
Some use in poetry
Except to appropriate

A general intellect
Predicts your shipwreck
Forthcoming waits in lyric
Sings and doesn't

Fulfill what is linked but
Not here like an instruction
To vanish in music
Every time we listen.

2nd (Soma)tic Exercise Workshop

Today CA Conrad will present his second ever (Soma)tic Exercises wkshop in Philadelphia. Below are the exercises he will present. Having participated in the first of four workshops that will take place in Philadelphia this month last weekend, I can attest to the originality and value of these workshops, which seek to relocate the composing subject by injecting disequilibrium into familiar habits of attention and (un)awareness during different moments of a composing process.

The term for this process of disequilibrium Conrad coins I LOVE, and find immensely productive for thinking thru a pedagogy for (poetic) composition, THE FILTER; where to "put" a filter on experience is to enable different modes of information and attractions to permeate the site of composition.

Like Jack Spicer before him, as well as the Bernstein/Mayer of their 70s Poetry Project workshops, Conrad proves the site of composition a site of "outside," where to deliberately mediate the "self" as an intention of writing may perhaps seek what a (compositional) body *does*. That is, what a poem *can do*, and so the "person" as an extension of the poem's intuitions, desires, vicissitudes, whims, swerves...

Check-out the ongoing (Soma)tic Exercises project at: http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com


1: TIME TRAVEL NOTES: At a street corner pause to see how sunlight comes down to enter the landscape just as it has for millions of years. After a little while imagine the fern or blackberries from before the buildings and sidewalks. Was there a nest of squirrels? The death of a snake? Where are you in time? As you time travel WRITE WRITE WRITE! Take notes about what you’re seeing. PLEASE take time out to just WRITE as fast as you can after you have been absorbing your time travel. JUST WRITE, and WRITE FAST no matter if you think it looks like nonsense or not, there’s so much that wants to be revealed.

2: FOOD IS YOUR BODY IS YOUR POEMS: We will go to Whole Foods Market. Once we get into the store we will split up. Take time looking at the foods, smelling the foods, tasting samples. The cells of our bodies, and our muscles, bones, brain cells, EVERY SINGLE PART OF US is created by the food we eat. Imagine your body when looking at a piece of fruit, or a box of something frozen or in a jar. SEE yourself in this. SEE who you are in this. How do you feel when you eat certain foods? Take notes. Then find one food YOU LOVE! Instead of notes, stand in front of this food and WRITE quickly and without thinking. Find a food YOU HATE and do the very same thing. Think of food that doesn’t exist, like a piece of fruit. Invent it. Is it from a tree, a bush, or other kind of plant or vine? What does this fruit taste like and look like? Where would you find it in the store? Go to where it would be if it existed and SEE IT THERE. Does this fruit have special powers when you eat it, like the power of invisibility? Take notes.

3: STATE OF THE STATUES : There are no less than 16 statues in the Logan Circle Fountain area, such as Rodin’s THINKER, Shakespeare, famous revolutionaries, dinosaurs, Jesus, etc. Imagine these statues have been wanting to converse with one another for decades but are too spread out to do so. Choose two, or three on the map provided and go to them, spending time thinking what they would have to say and share with the others you choose. Take notes on the statues, take some time after you have absorbed the statue and write whatever you want and as fast as you can. Suppose that one of the statues tells you that there is a MISSING statue, a statue which has been removed many years ago before you were born. What was it? Take notes and write as much as you can.

THE FILTERS
In (Soma)tic Poetry THE FILTERS function as the focal point of the information gained through the exercises to shape the poem. For this second day of 3 maneuvers FILTER with the two words: FORSEE (or FORSEEABLE or any other form of this word), and NAKED. With THE FILTERS you take all of your notes and begin to write poetry about or through these two words, shaping and editing as you go. But it’s important to note that THE FILTERS are only guides, and to help you shape the poem.

YOUR TAKE-HOME EXERCISE
What poem by someone else is your favorite poem? Copy it out by hand (please do not type it) on unlined paper. I ask that you use unlined paper so as not to limit the FEELINGS you may have when copying it out. Once you have finished copying the poem go to the blank spaces in the margins or bottom, or wherever on THAT page and write VERY QUICKLY AND WITHOUT THINKING notes about HOW YOU FEEL AT THAT MOMENT. Later that same day eat some dark chocolate and immediately begin copying the same poem again on another piece of unlined, clean paper. Take MORE notes, and WRITE AS FAST AS YOU CAN ABOUT HOW YOU ARE FEELING AT THAT MOMENT. The next morning get in the shower, scrubbing well, then end the shower with COLD WATER, then get out, quickly dry off, and immediately begin the process again of copying the poem by hand and making note of HOW YOU ARE FEELING. After this take all the notes you have made and pull words out of those notes to form a poem FILTERED through the words MAUL and MEASURE.

Being Arthur Russell

My percept a feeling divides
Like cells divide the eye
And sunset this and clouds that

Point to which drums shoot
The air up shake their fists
In the air some meaning of

Us was in your airs drip
ping down from the present
A series of strings verbs


Spiraling down from which
Identification is not your
Eyes seeing the wind skim

Across what iteration and
Irritants nearly touch
An idea of skin our image-

Forming suffused by music
Imagine a night-light’s
Inner life imagine forgetting


The meaning of all those
Little words like a conse
quence this breath burdened

By a bow and what the voice
Can do articulation folded
The air around in the event

Of this note duree betrayed
My heart of Avenue A in
The rain pigeons seemed to


Circle the sun so this was us
Their wings creased like
Gold leaf on a knife that is

The matting of our days
A way their simultaneity was
Not entirely in synch with

Anything one of them did
Or made social by a sing
ular turn of their wings.

A (Soma)tic Exercise

So rows vanish
Points me wood
Does this circle

End what the
Fuck is going
On these are

Just some notes
Among the muggy
Cars and flag

Torn filters throw
The wreck off
Wherever we go

Statues mark this
Place tho nothing
Happens seasons reverse

On opposite days
I'm not sorry
For being a

Discourse connect the
Lines in gasoline
It is summer

In the snow
A public space
Seems to float

Through me there's
A street above
Those open leaves.

At Long Beach Notebook

I will be reading next week in Long Beach, CA with Rob Halpern and Amanda Ackerman for Jane Sprague's seminal events series, Long Beach Notebook. Here is the ad for the event:

Dear Friends,

Please join us next Saturday, July 12 2008 in Long Beach, California to hear the work of Amanda Ackerman, Thom Donovan and Rob Halpern.

Long Beach Notebook begins at 8:00 pm. The event takes place at the home office of Palm Press: 143 Ravenna Drive, Long Beach, CA 90803 (use Mapquest or Google Maps for directions).

***
Amanda Ackerman lives in Los Angeles where she writes and teaches. She is co-editor of the press eohippus labs. She is a member of UNFO (The Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization) and writes as part of Sam or Samantha Yams. She is also a member of the event space Betalevel. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in flim forum; String of Small Machines; The Physical Poets; WOMB; and the Encyclopedia Project, Volume F-K. With Harold Abramowitz, she is also co-author of the book Sin is to Celebration, soon to be published by House Press in the fall.

Thom Donovan lives and works in Manhattan, where he edits Wild Horses of Fire blog (whof.blogspot.com), curates the events series Peace On A, and coedits ON, a new magazine for contemporary practice. He attended the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo and is an ongoing participant in the Nonsite Collective.

Rob Halpern is the author of Rumored Place, Imaginary Politics, and Snow Sensitive Skin (co-authored with Taylor Brady). Disaster Suites will be published this Summer by Palm Press. He's currently co-editing the writings of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the first of which, "For a Realist Literature," can be found in the recent issue of Chicago Review. He lives in San Francisco.

***
From Disaster Suites by Rob Halpern:

This war
Of want
Says what

I want
To say
To you

Of dreams
Or need
We need

Not speak
To speak
Of wars

Of want
I come
To love

So late
To you
My lost

- marine.

***
from O Coevals by Thom Donovan

We witness bells that this was theirs
That shade equals sun in exquisiteness

Non-identities piling up like pylons
A physics without cars beings without

Impact move to what here to what
Their equated it I feel so much pressure

Around you to burn a discourse and not
Touch any time we were or event

Living us so live my life will never finish
What my death leaves unfinished this

Town never seems to work those sovereign
Stumps sing us into battle effects

Of power fires hymns even the sun
Forgot to burn so sing patiency which

Organs won't be consumed what ex
change won't always be sung for being

Too far from off-shore what bodies we
Haven't won't account for limbs little

Substances Nature complicit with who
Gets to live grieves its contrivance.

***
from Amanda Ackerman:

Here on fire we remove the husk of the seed with the aching to peel back with the aching to hear; to touch is to look, the seed looks like and says this:
It is spring, but my corn does not want to sell her rooster. If I wait another year, the rooster will be considered old, quite old, very old. And having been an upright and tireless citizen his whole life, always dressed in devoted red, always smelling like humid, dank gems and unbottled musk, the rooster will start to make up stories about how he fought in the war, welded the sides of tanker ships, wore a shattered, sandy green army helmet. Then no one will want to buy him, it's just a matter of timing. Let him stay and my lips will keep moving, turn the shapes of fortified roots, and I can stay forever awake in the dark folds of nucleotides, always siding with what is right, always siding.

***
See you then...
www.palmpress.org

People Are Strange (When You're a Stranger)

Presented by Marisa Olson

Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 8pm
55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY
Ticket Price - $6

"People Are Strange" will be a night of multimedia performance and projections revolving around the release of Marisa Olson's new artist book, Poems I Wrote While Listening to the Doors, 1992-1994 (Before I found the internet). Written by the artist in high school "while burning incense and listening to the Doors," whose lead singer she then perceived as an "under-appreciated poetic genius," they are now a record of an active artist's earliest creative efforts and they provide evidence of an obsession with music, genre, psychology, and personal narrative that shines through in her more recent artworks. The title and form of the writings refers to a previous obliviousness to the internet, despite the fact that network culture (and particularly blogging or online diarism) have ultimately had a huge impact upon her practice. This evening will continue Olson's ongoing interest in public humiliation and the aesthetics of failure, from which she believes we can learn more, politically and personally, than from success. A handful of distinguished poets will read short excerpts from the book, a few experimental musicians will turn her words into lyrics, and of course Olson will do some singing and reading of her own. All of this will be mediated by live visual projections and recorded music videos created by the artist in an effort to reconcile past and present, word and image. Participating poets and musicians include Thom Donovan, Stephanie Gray, Christian Hawkey, Dorothea Laskey, and members of the bands Professor Murder, Aa, and Taigaa.

About Marisa Olson

Marisa Olson's work combines performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation to address intersections of pop culture and the cultural history of technology, as they effect the voice, power, and persona. Her work has recently been presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou-Paris, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the 52nd International Biennale di Venezia, the Edith Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst/Montevideo, the British Film Institute, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Glowlab, and Free103Point9. She is also a founding member of the Nasty Nets "internet surfing club" whose new DVD recently premiered at the New York Underground Film Festival. Her work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, Folha de Sao Paolo, Liberation, the Village Voice, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. While Wired has called her both funny and humorous, the New York Times has called her "anything but stupid." Marisa studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College-London, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

About Light Industry

Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project has begun as a series of weekly events at Industry City in Sunset Park, each organized by a different artist, critic, or curator. Conceptually, Light Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative art spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and other intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings, performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the presentation of time-based media and foster a complex dialogue amongst a wide range of artists and audiences within the city.

Black Field II

What I forgets to leave
Here and what I forgets
It is here not home to itself

Like bodies the fan whirs
In the room a metaphor
Or something for conscious

ness this voice around
The air is something you
Swear to this that you will

Be you to me so this darkness
Where I must imagine your
Touch is more than me

Or you this discourse of
The senses more than any
thing one amounts to.

Julie Patton's Hear In (Ad)

Julie Patton's "Hear in: A walk and talk about the East Village (above/beyond the usual rhythms, lines of sight)" will kick off at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, Parish Hall/West Yard, Monday, June 30 at 1:00 pm. The event is free and open to the public. Children and animals welcome.

Julie patton is a 2007 Artists' Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is co-sponosred by Artists & Audiences Exchange, a public program of NYFA.

Discourse as Muse (Note)

Last night I presented to Andrew Levy's class at NYU, "Writing that Matters," along with Julie Patton and Brenda Iijima. Among the materials I read aloud included a forthcoming editorial for ON, a publication I am coediting with Kyle Schlesinger & Michael Cross for emergent critical discourse about poetics, and a statement regarding "discourse as muse" which I include here.

A lengthier consideration of the notion of discourse as muse would make case studies from poets and artists who have made of their work allegories of social exchange and movement such as Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Hannah Weiner (tho, arguably, every writer or artist's work, if only in negative, presents such an allegory)...

***

Discourse As Muse

I have been thinking about the old idea of poetry and “the muse”. If the muse is no longer a figure of divine inspiration, nor one figured by Romantic love—the love of a man for an indealized woman, in particular—than what could it be? What is a contemporary muse, if not such things? In this presentation, I would like to think about the figure of muse through a different set of terms and assumptions concerning where poetry comes from, and how it operates and subsists in the world. I will do this by claiming “discourse” as the contemporary poet’s muse, and my muse in particular.

Discourse, literally, refers to a site of articulation or locution that is more or less continuous and shared. It is perhaps what is held in common without being completely shareable. In this way it does not represent a fantasy of pure communion, or transubstantiation (father, son, holy spirit stuff, etc.)

To discourse, in common speak, is to exchange words, or hold conversation. In the work of late 20th century French literary philosophers like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault the term discourse usually accompanies what Barthes has referred to as “the death of the author” and Foucault the "author function". Where an old idea of the author has the author as a figure of isolated genius and radical individuality, Foucault, Barthes and a host of other writers in the 20th century show any author to in fact comprise a network of other individuals, technologies, institutions, and economic exchanges. Likewise, an author does not make but one text, but a text that is many in being singular, and in being attributed to one author in name.

Whereas detractors of this notion of discourse have lamented the loss of the author as the central character in the drama of literary exchange (making and reception), and others celebrated it, I and many of my contemporaries see it as a place for productive exchange, and for making work that matters for community building and towards the nourishment of a larger social sphere. To claim discourse as muse, I believe, is to cast the old figure of the muse with a renewed character. Whereas before an ethereal spirit and equally ethereal object of desire embodied muse, where discourse become muse the poem reveals itself as a site of social exchange within a network of other sites.

PhillySound at FANZINE

check out PhillySound poets at FANZINE
with an editorial by CAConrad

http://thefanzine.com/articles/poetry/254/phillysound_poets

The Children

check out this amazing project by Aram Saroyan and Philip Whalen at Big Bridge:
http://www.bigbridge.org/AS-CH.HTM

"That summer my father took my sister Lucy and me to Europe and Dick gave me a box of film as a going away gift. My father encouraged me to photograph street kids, and I came home from the trip with many rolls of exposures. The art director Marvin Israel accepted eight photographs for a spread in Seventeen, for which we each won an Art Directors award. Years later, now a writer, I published a book that included many of those photographs, Words & Photographs (Big Table, 1970). During the late sixties, I also did a mock-up of a second book of (mostly) different photographs from the same visit to Europe and sent it to Philip Whalen in Kyoto to write something on the page opposite each photograph. As I sensed he might, Phil turned the request around quickly. I received the marvelous text here virtually by return mail.

When I approached the European and American children in these photographs, I was still a child myself, and I think the transparent parity in some of the images is due to my being more an accessory of the camera than the other way around. Un-intimidated by the photographer, kids seemed to engage the medium with a straightforward sense of its potential, and I was on hand to make the picture.

Then, as I see it, a miracle accrued. Well-nigh half a century went by, and I discovered again these images and fell in love with some of these subjects whom I knew only for an anonymous moment and who have long since ceased to be children. It's not unlikely that some of them have ceased to be, period."
~ from *The Children*, intro and photos by Aram Saroyan, poems by Philip Whalen

Kristin Prevallet responds to Power and Performance

Kristin Prevallet generously provided the following reflection after I solicited her and others to respond in writing to performances by David Buuck, Julie Patton and Chen Tamir at Peace On A the Sunday before last...

***

Many layers of reflection happening after The Event.

1st thought: Performance Art - even in its non-site ambitions - does not level race and class. None of the examples presented level race and class. Race and class may be confronted, boundaries may temporarily be re-drawn, questions and reflections may happen in the condensed space of the performance, and maybe the edge of race and class is revealed. But it's still sharp. It's not leveled.

How I came into the space: I was already thick-thinking about Laura Elrick's brilliant essay about poetry and ecology. I have also been reading "Ecology against Capitalism" by John Bellamy Foster. I came to the space with recurring thoughts about the ways that the morality of production needs to be challenged / changed in this production-based country. (Foster gets into this.) Why is it ok for me as an artist and writer to produce, produce, produce, but it is not ok for logging companies to cut drown trees in order that products can be invented that allow me to produce produce produce? It's what Foster calls "The Treadmill of Production." I'm practicing non-production at the moment, trying to figure all this out in terms of my own psyche and reliance on production as the key to happiness.

However, because I can't help producing (ideas, images, words) I have been working with performance which as David and Julie manifested and Chen demonstrated, allows for what Laura Elrick states as her priority as a poet at this moment: "Recognizing our collective participation in this extension might bring about new ways of engaging in the practice of poetry, a poetics, in short, that points less toward a fetishistic valorization of “the text” as object (form & content) and more toward an investigation of mediated textualities that intervene in (and experiment through) the mode of production, circulation and exchange." I'm located here in this moment of thinking.

Here's where I'm at, for the archives:
http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_2/performance/prevallet-cruelpoemperf.html

Julie, spontaneous, talks poems. She tries to initiate immediate audience responses. It doesn't quite work - but it does bring me (maybe us?) to the edge - the edge of a confort zone. Should I start singing? I couldn't at that moment. But I did leave a softer person in the sense that after I left the event, I practiced loosening the boundaries between myself and passers-by (by smiling, saying "hi!" to whoever caught my eye.) Just a little gesture, but a homage to the energy-transference that occurred.

David shows slides, but is conscious (and says so) about the conflict between showing slides to document an event and the immediacy of the event itself. Were the slides necessary? Could he have just rubbed the poison dirt in his face and spoke spontaneously for 20 minutes, ending in his amazing chant to resurrect the dead, become the earth? Would that have been even more powerful? Was the hyper-self consciousness of the slide-show necessary?

I am moved in the direction of performance by deep conversations with my engaged contemporaries - Peace on A, Laura Elrick, the WACK! show at PS1 (and the catalogue), Julie, David, Rodrigo. All working to transmute the form of the poem into live space / action. Change the nature of poem-production and poem-reception. (Sure - it's all been done before. But it's being done again, NOW. Locating non-site in this very particular and charged moment - trying it out at Peace-on-A.)

Black Field I

~ for Dottie and Conrad

I have been thinking about you
As a kind of goo
For the mind to have visions
That are only of the mind
Or like that sliver
We enter when we write
And it is as though
Ideas had to come from some place
And there are words for those places
Or rather those places are
A kind of fundamental syntax
For the world and we need only
Pluck them from the air
We need only pluck them
From under your shallowest
Surface to say anything we want
Is it true you are the future in fact
The thinnest future we have
When we attend each other
The mind of each other as a delay
How patiently we must
Await each one each other's

Power comes...

to those who (don’t)
wait--language an in
equality what you l

end and what I actu
ally take--privilege
and what I discard I

abandon in principle
and yet know--that I
do this complicity p

okes out the old su
n’s eyes--makes some
verbs from what nou

ns controlled--pinpo
inting the voice li
ke an arrow rhetoric

silver-tongued pois
on-tipped angel--bin
ging on dominion so

ul saver and sovere
ign--must I speak to
an object appreciat

es shit--zealous cont
agion, zealous anti
thesis the undead,

unmourned, unliberat
ed, disavowed as a
kind of third sex--

seducing us back from
that bad fantasy of
ways we have chosen.

Poem for Social Practice

Distillation a matter
of feeling *against
one’s self* to make a
mark don’t connect

the dots stars didn’t
make us we made them
when we read their
pretensions of wisdom

a kind of seduction
the phatic validates
the rest is rent and
money for gas so sings

complicity always the
place the emotion
of being among so many
makes one get over

themself the things
we are not for their own
sake this room large
and ever ambivalent

I was with her deixis
a tale of survival
the survival of her
milk is memory wood

darkening that shade
no longer human with
witness you begin to
cry something will eat

the cancer that idea
must not get cut-out
you are here I don’t want
to be anything if

it takes that much
loss to be I don’t want
to have to participate
with a voice

the cracks public
makes in social space
filled by greedy
imperative spreads

cancer to what we
would otherwise
communicate be with
me make a sign to

change their signs
true leveler *an in
equality* information
like a corpse went

forth dragging its
body in the aether
where to put the
body Modernity while

we were gone value
labored *Bodies: can’t
live with them, can’t
live without them*

Rob Halpern's *Imaginary Politics*

Attending the George Oppen Centennial Symposium this past April at SUNY-Buffalo with Rob, I was reminded of many affinities between Rob and the figure of poet George Oppen. While the affinities between these two exemplary poets are too many to think about adequately here, one way to think their works in relation is through the terms “guilt” (Oppen) and “shame” (Halpern) as the recognition of guilt and shame may be constitutive of a certain form of responsible (i.e. ethical) subjectivity, and not merely a shibboleth for bad forms of liberalism and religious morality.

For there to be “shame in simply being here” I do not read negatively, that is I don’t read it in terms of a damaged or pathetic subjectivity (a figure of trauma per se), but as one of the most fundamental propositions of ethical subjectivity. Not unlike Emmanuel Levinas, who in his '61 work *Totality and Infinity* recognized “I” not to begin in Being (capital B), but in an inexhaustible and unpayable debt to other beings, nearly every sentence and line of Rob’s work articulates a subjectivity completely related by others, and committed to an acknowledgement of complicity with violences major, minor and in between. So that to “simply be here”—that is to simply exist in relation to other beings and objects—is to be hailed by power itself, whether, and however inadvertently, we heed that call or not.

Rob’s newest chapbook, *Imaginary Politics*, clause after clause responds to the calls of this hailing through critical investigation, emotional interjections and addresses, and autobiographical modes too allegorical to ever be called confessional, that don’t resort to narcissism as such. And yet *Imaginary Politics*, like much of Rob’s work and as the work’s title suggests, not only concerns things as they are, but things as we imagine them and would like them to be. Whereas the goal of Lacanian psychoanalysis specifically is to bring the subject from an imaginary position wherein a navigation of the real (small “r”) is tenable, to one in which the illusory subject breaks upon the rocks of the Real (capital “R”) and can thusly be transformed thru psychic disillusionment, Rob’s work enacts thinking towards a place that is possible inasmuch as it is unthinkable—a non-place (i.e., utopia), or place of the imaginary unidentifiable with the psychoanalytical type.

The place of this imaginary I identify principally with thinking as an action in itself, as thinking may begin in using and being used by language. I believe Leslie Scalapino may articulate such a notion of thinking where she writes: "Movement (or shape in writing) is a knowledge that isn’t one’s thinking per se. One’s thinking by itself is movement that is knowledge." When I think of Rob’s work in general, beyond any concrete detail, thematic concern, or subject it is this essential movement of thinking that I recall, and which makes me want to return to the work. While certain terms from Rob’s poetics may point at this movement of thought—“event”, “situation”, “withdrawal," “disaster”—the one I think most of is “blank,” a term that recurs again and again.

Never knowing quite how to take this term, it would seem to indicate a limit of sorts in substance which provides for new psychic configurations and interpellative circumstances: “you no longer being, my abundance, a blank the world keeps repeating, such pure situation.” Insofar as “blank” evidences the sublime, it also challenges one to act before a real too large to be encompassed by the understanding: “—yr role in something boundless makes me impotent, a blank the war keeps repeating, a bad infinity gone sublime” and “such clean subordination. broken subjects, surface areas and coastlines now contiguous with the vastness of that blank, repeating what won’t go down.”

I bring up Rob’s *blank* because I think blank is meant, in some way, to indicate a space of potentia, if only in negative, and it is such spaces that Rob’s work is principally concerned with. By taking the high-road of the negational, abstract, erased, absent, and occulted Rob constantly brings us back to our senses. To an actual commons, a common sense, where one might gather again, feel, touch, commune and coappear. Somehow through distance we have closeness, sense thru nonsense, sound through inarticulation, silence. “Now undo this habit. It won’t take long, and then we’ll emerge, together, in a hole blast thru the audio feed, our ears, at last prepared to hear, discovered in the mud…”

Deadpan at Weird Deer

here is a link to Dorothea Lasky and I reading a selection of our collaboration, Deadpan, at Travis Nichols' Weird Deer:

http://weirddeermedia.com/2008/06/deadpan-collaborative-poems-by-dorothea-lasky-thom-donovan

Braille Eyes

Dreamt I was evicted
from my house so
there would be no

more home for my
tears to dwell in but
in you I called

to you in some way
like one does in
dreams fact of tele

pathy but you were
already there that
is you are always

already here with me
who keeps an image
of the loved con

stantly before them
loves truly so there
will always be a place

to dwell hearts ears
seek braille eyes
what touch owes you.

Peace On A presents: Power & Performance

Despite my affinity for the term relationality, we may need other language to approach the issue that concerns us, a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well.
~ Judith Butler

Peace On A

presents

Power & Performance
featuring presentations by David Buuck, Julie Patton, and Chen Tamir

Sunday, June 8th 2008 6PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

David Buuck lives in Oakland, where he organizes BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. He is a contributing editor for Artweek, and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.

I had disembarked at the Embarcadero, platforming myself into some semblance of public figuration. The bay area rapidly tranced it, from the resident base camps to the clamor and throng. Up and out into the punctuated street-sprawl, shadowed by the public directives. Heaved out then into the scablands, street-rocks popping against the undercarriage of the survival carts. Billboards tower as trees might shadow that. The turn lanes apropos of the new gold rush. Steetside is saddle leather, limbered for the pickets. 425,258 a day, fro and bending to it.
~ from Electricworks


Julie Patton extends her pulpoethic strategies into collaborative spaces via anyone willing to hand-dance—recent activities include stirring up an ArtScience mecca in Cleveland's inner city, "A Roon for Opal" art installation as part of the Olin Art Museum's (Lewiston, Maine) "Green Horizons" exhibition. "Using Blue to Get Black," an extended argument about the color blue forthcoming in Crayon Magazine. The rest is herstory.

riff off of
"Using Blue to Get Black"
(for my mo' there mudder)

blah blah blew light
be lack beat subject
leadible huge margins
lake back eerie bl accents
reeking scalp blue hung
er un
speak a bruised surf
faces mean blood ism
cl...oud braille lean
read
conscious pilots (heavenly friction)
hum blue staff
road read stratejeans
bic hus blind air
high hand le soluablu sex pack
14 ml tube b lousy pinkablue
sigh sing argue a pale smiles
be lie a blue lip fast
(as you write for days
vary a ble tongue brash
dis as stern pen onyx drink text
siccative blind
azurite for days
terre blue ish cast
boon flower b light
belie s can vast memory
ig blue not house a b...loa
ice, water, oil, wind
con vert sable skin c lash
crop then go after value
ire my bluest I
pearl pliant
goo out
b rain b light
tinktured, wheight bl+ u…
more than you can thank
heaven
flat to be tied re
touching orange
cut off your risk so
bleu to feel raw skies
scrump back ground
pain t hang
soul solvent
gesso so yes so blue
tellin’ me making do
with all that
blue


Chen Tamir is an independent writer and curator based in New York, Toronto, and Tel Aviv. She holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College. She is also a curator at Flux Factory in Queens. Her most recent curatorial efforts are on view in Toronto at the Barnicke Gallery with a show called "Stutter and Twitch": http://www.jmbgallery.ca/exhibitions.html

In “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” art historian and theorist Claire Bishop called Bourriaud up Relational Aesthetics’ cliquishness. She advocated instead for what I’m calling “Social Practice.” Social Practice is not reactionary to Relational Aesthetics: They run parallel. Their distinctions may sound benign, but it’s important to differentiate between artwork that reinforces a closed system, and one that challenges it. Although it’s really nice to hang out in galleries and feel cool, what we (and I mean a very broad “we”) need is art that takes us beyond that, or at least makes us question what that means. Sometimes that can be uncomfortable, forcing us to deal with issues we’d rather not face, or people we’d rather not associate with, but that discomfort is productive.
~ from “Social Practice”

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers, activists and scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.