If you were pointing here
To this histrionics in my
Hand blood ruptures esse
nce and sound erupts all
Around as witness is not
What we understand or a
Theory under seeing’s th
umbs I heard your screa
ming move left to right in
My ears and be of neither
Hemisphere of the brain
Since chiasmus is always
Elsewhere a pinch of the
Bruise or a squatting for
The bowels points to this
Legal sense we must all
Be heard that this hearing
Must become us I taste
Your blood as singly as I
Hear that there is singing.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Saturday, December 20, 2008
To John and Taylor
There are walls that
Do fall because in
That falling we are
A community without
Disposable wings
Or limbs like a mon
ster we must carry
With us everywhere
A protuberance this
Remaining which
Was never the given
ness of form or in
novation our various
complicities with the
Real a sky for your
Crying a hell for your
Song but as you also
Say birdsong some
where in between
Falling and rising in
Its different motions
We live & die by this.
Do fall because in
That falling we are
A community without
Disposable wings
Or limbs like a mon
ster we must carry
With us everywhere
A protuberance this
Remaining which
Was never the given
ness of form or in
novation our various
complicities with the
Real a sky for your
Crying a hell for your
Song but as you also
Say birdsong some
where in between
Falling and rising in
Its different motions
We live & die by this.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Suzanne's Reply to My Meme
Suzanne Stein has replied to a meme I sent to her about a month ago after a reading she gave at St. Mark's:
http://i-caved.blogspot.com/2008/12/hi-thom-today-is-dec-17-exactly-month.html
My response is pending due to end of the year business, but thank you Suzanne!
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Dawn Lundy Martin SEGUE intro
A couple summers ago, teaching a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone at Bard College’s Language and Thinking workshop, instead of reading the play linearly, I circled every instance of negation in Antigone’s speeches. From these moments of Sophocles’ text—no doubt a translation of a translation of a translation—was born a new text distilled from the force of Antigone’s famous refusal. Approcahing Dawn Lundy Martin’s work I also want to highlight the moments of negation, which are many, and which cumulatively effect a power of refusal comparable to Antigone’s own:
“…an unforgiving, inchoate world.”
“No mold to make…”
“…I cannot tell you because it is not known.”
“But the body will not be buried there”
“Hands are scarred, almost dead.”
“You write “grandmother” and cross it out.”
“Finger pointed at the body and then at the sun, realized nothing and fell again taciturn”
“…as if I could, but could not”.*
Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to situate Lundy Martin’s negativity in writers closer to our own era, however no less mythical. In a tradition after the Negritude of Aime Cesaire, for instance, Lundy Martin’s work also journalizes her seasons in hell, making them literal joyrides, where to “go down” evokes literal encounter with one's lovers (women, in Lundy Martin’s case), and with the facts of one’s own gendered-racialized body.
Likewise, after poets as diverse as Myung Mi Kim, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Susan Howe and Audre Lorde, Lundy Martin dramatizes voices becoming articulate, wresting articulation from an empire of signs:
“All that has been spoken. All that threatens the legitimacy of that which is attempting to be said. Phonemic struggle—I’ll call it a precursor to blathering. Scintilla. Something dragged in the sand.”
“The fit is tight. Splitting into? Stiff cup. A dark mouth moves, enters the tremor of a voiced, Uh. But, all this is not love, not love in the way one milks the center. Instead, chronic terror stripped to bone grating upon bone. Of down home, twang twang, and promise. My knees pressed behind ears.”
And as in Kim, Howe, Cha, and Lorde, in Lundy Martin’s work any coming into voice presents many difficulties, as it involves the presencing of irreconcilable social antagonisms and considerable personal suffering. But whereas Kim et al broach despair through the voices they undertake and inform through their writing, Lundy Martin’s writing winks at its reader knowingly, as though having already passed through affirmation, or being upon a threshold of that moment so central to overcoming—a conversion where “a no becomes a yes,” as Wallace Stevens might have it. That in her poem “Negrotizing in Five or How to Write a Black Poem,” Lundy Martin references the Negritude and Black Arts movements, Third Wave Feminism, femme ecriture, LANGUAGE writing and Susan Bee’s and Mira Schor’s arts journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G, pays homage to a continuum of radical arts communities while working in relation to these cultural formations from a revisionary distance.
What, in turn, rears its head necessarily in Lundy Martin’s writing is the specter of various struggles for recognition and liberation as they are given form by singularities—by the particular experiences and percepts of one’s autobiography, their life. Through Lundy Martin’s work, a work that can neither be said to be merely “experimental” or concerned with identity politics per se (though experimentalism and a politics of identity both inform that work’s authority), a culture work concerned to presence the stakes of particular identities within larger cultural formations becomes simultaneously legible and ambivalent.
*all quotations taken from Lundy Martin’s poems “Negrotizing in Five or How to Write a Black Poem” and “Unspeaking”.
“…an unforgiving, inchoate world.”
“No mold to make…”
“…I cannot tell you because it is not known.”
“But the body will not be buried there”
“Hands are scarred, almost dead.”
“You write “grandmother” and cross it out.”
“Finger pointed at the body and then at the sun, realized nothing and fell again taciturn”
“…as if I could, but could not”.*
Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to situate Lundy Martin’s negativity in writers closer to our own era, however no less mythical. In a tradition after the Negritude of Aime Cesaire, for instance, Lundy Martin’s work also journalizes her seasons in hell, making them literal joyrides, where to “go down” evokes literal encounter with one's lovers (women, in Lundy Martin’s case), and with the facts of one’s own gendered-racialized body.
Likewise, after poets as diverse as Myung Mi Kim, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Susan Howe and Audre Lorde, Lundy Martin dramatizes voices becoming articulate, wresting articulation from an empire of signs:
“All that has been spoken. All that threatens the legitimacy of that which is attempting to be said. Phonemic struggle—I’ll call it a precursor to blathering. Scintilla. Something dragged in the sand.”
“The fit is tight. Splitting into? Stiff cup. A dark mouth moves, enters the tremor of a voiced, Uh. But, all this is not love, not love in the way one milks the center. Instead, chronic terror stripped to bone grating upon bone. Of down home, twang twang, and promise. My knees pressed behind ears.”
And as in Kim, Howe, Cha, and Lorde, in Lundy Martin’s work any coming into voice presents many difficulties, as it involves the presencing of irreconcilable social antagonisms and considerable personal suffering. But whereas Kim et al broach despair through the voices they undertake and inform through their writing, Lundy Martin’s writing winks at its reader knowingly, as though having already passed through affirmation, or being upon a threshold of that moment so central to overcoming—a conversion where “a no becomes a yes,” as Wallace Stevens might have it. That in her poem “Negrotizing in Five or How to Write a Black Poem,” Lundy Martin references the Negritude and Black Arts movements, Third Wave Feminism, femme ecriture, LANGUAGE writing and Susan Bee’s and Mira Schor’s arts journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G, pays homage to a continuum of radical arts communities while working in relation to these cultural formations from a revisionary distance.
What, in turn, rears its head necessarily in Lundy Martin’s writing is the specter of various struggles for recognition and liberation as they are given form by singularities—by the particular experiences and percepts of one’s autobiography, their life. Through Lundy Martin’s work, a work that can neither be said to be merely “experimental” or concerned with identity politics per se (though experimentalism and a politics of identity both inform that work’s authority), a culture work concerned to presence the stakes of particular identities within larger cultural formations becomes simultaneously legible and ambivalent.
*all quotations taken from Lundy Martin’s poems “Negrotizing in Five or How to Write a Black Poem” and “Unspeaking”.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
After Bhanu Kapil
There is nothing safe
In migrating or maki
ng a hole where you
Should be given birth
To a bardo a monster
Of the bardo Frapuch
ino products combu
stible and red blood
lusting which is us in
A wilderness the wild
Ocean becoming us
As we don't seem co
mpletely to cross its
Thresholds distracted
By the sentences in
Your skin space rese
mbles everything it is
Not so we become sp
ace travel in our name
A kind of occulted
Name we wouldn't wi
sh upon anyone no
Longer any land beyo
nd the sea just these
Points in real space
We dissemble heart
beats spotting sites.
In migrating or maki
ng a hole where you
Should be given birth
To a bardo a monster
Of the bardo Frapuch
ino products combu
stible and red blood
lusting which is us in
A wilderness the wild
Ocean becoming us
As we don't seem co
mpletely to cross its
Thresholds distracted
By the sentences in
Your skin space rese
mbles everything it is
Not so we become sp
ace travel in our name
A kind of occulted
Name we wouldn't wi
sh upon anyone no
Longer any land beyo
nd the sea just these
Points in real space
We dissemble heart
beats spotting sites.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Poem for Immediacy
So in its mediated way
Of that windshield
It is the fact that no
Glass obstructs which
Bothers us proves some
thing surprising for
The eye entranced the
Hand reaching through
It to that beer can
History race class an
tagonism inversion of
This obvious trope lost
In the missing glare.
Monday, December 08, 2008
The Extent to Which
here is the official press release and some rehearsal pics for Daria Fain's and Robert Kocik's collaboration The Extent To Which, which opens this Wednesday, December 10th.
"…some of the most innovative movement around."
The New York Press
A Danspace Project Commission
Presented by Danspace Project & the Center for Performance Research--CPR
Tuesday, December 9 at 7 pm (Gala Evening Honoring Pauline Oliveros--please note correct start time)
Wednesday, December 10 - Saturday, December 13 at 7 & 9 pm
Sunday, December 14 at 3 pm
All performances at the
Center for Performance Research--CPR
361 Manhattan Avenue (between Jackson and Withers, L train to Graham Avenue)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Tickets: $20/$15 Danspace Project members
"…some of the most innovative movement around."
The New York Press
A Danspace Project Commission
Presented by Danspace Project & the Center for Performance Research--CPR
Tuesday, December 9 at 7 pm (Gala Evening Honoring Pauline Oliveros--please note correct start time)
Wednesday, December 10 - Saturday, December 13 at 7 & 9 pm
Sunday, December 14 at 3 pm
All performances at the
Center for Performance Research--CPR
361 Manhattan Avenue (between Jackson and Withers, L train to Graham Avenue)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Tickets: $20/$15 Danspace Project members
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Leslie Scalapino intro for Segue
The next couple months thru January I will host the Segue reading series with Evelyn Reilly. The following is my first introduction for the series, which I read last night to introduce Leslie Scalapino:
In a letter to Charles Bernstein dated May 25th, 1989, Hannah Weiner writes:
"I think there are four ways the poet of the future can work, and you can combine them also. One is to work politically, ecologically, whatever work that needs to be done in the world, one is to raise the level of as I explained consciousness (this I think is done by like us language some other poets of course using disjunctive, non-sequential techniques) one is to work with power, and disguise yourself that quits keep clear about writing new poetry. Meaning grounds you in every day speaking consciousness and cannot alter the mind by technique. Alter the mind and you work politically with greater effect […] The mind obeys unconsciously giving strict orders that are agreed upon by someone who twice dying explains without clear motive like once clairvoyant journal explained." (163)
When I read this letter, excerpted by Patrick Durgin in the collection of Weiner’s writing, Hannah Weiner’s Open House, I cannot help but think of Leslie Scalapino, who for the past thirty-five some odd years has fulfilled all four of Weiner’s "ways," combining them with dedication and passion through writing, teaching and her Bay Area based press, O Books—a press which continues to publish new writing, and organize a discourse about language, politics, and social responsibility. What’s more, Scalapino makes Weiner’s four ways seamless by discovering a writing radically hybrid and anti-categorical that abolishes traditionalist distinctions between poetry and philosophy opting instead to activate thinking through acts of composition. The proof is in the gerund (think-ing) as Scalapino advances many of the problems most famously articulated by Stein, whereby writing must continually enact meaning and not merely describe it. Composition as explanation; but also composition as that which charges experience with meaning.
To immerse one’s self in Scalapino’s work, and track its evolution (and to do so is now made a little bit easier for many of us by the recent publication of Scalapino’s selected poems, It’s go in horizontal) is to also witness one of the most rigorous practitioners of what Weiner calls “twice dying”. As I understand it, to “twice die” is to undergo thinking as that which interrupts a psychological “stream of consciousness,” and thus presents the otherwise within eidetic experience (ideation, perception, memory). This, of course, is not achieved by thinking alone, but by thinking as it is mediated and made possible though writing. Like the yoga master or Sufi, the thing is (lifting a term from Jalal Toufic’s work) to die before dying; that is, to experience living itself as a discontinuous condition. It is an interruptive dialogism (or dialogic interlocution) which perhaps describes Scalapino’s writing most succinctly, as one is not only never in the same syntactical stream twice, but neither before nor after a nexus of subjects and objects determined by event (what occurs, and what happens as what is). To twice die, as Weiner’s statement insists to me, is to give shape to new thought-forms which themselves may raise consciousness, in tandem affecting the political and social as those realms wherein the struggle for a new subject, and therefore new actualities, are born. More than ever we need these emergent thought-forms, and it is with great pleasure and a deep admiration that I often look for them in Leslie Scalapino’s ongoing work.
In a letter to Charles Bernstein dated May 25th, 1989, Hannah Weiner writes:
"I think there are four ways the poet of the future can work, and you can combine them also. One is to work politically, ecologically, whatever work that needs to be done in the world, one is to raise the level of as I explained consciousness (this I think is done by like us language some other poets of course using disjunctive, non-sequential techniques) one is to work with power, and disguise yourself that quits keep clear about writing new poetry. Meaning grounds you in every day speaking consciousness and cannot alter the mind by technique. Alter the mind and you work politically with greater effect […] The mind obeys unconsciously giving strict orders that are agreed upon by someone who twice dying explains without clear motive like once clairvoyant journal explained." (163)
When I read this letter, excerpted by Patrick Durgin in the collection of Weiner’s writing, Hannah Weiner’s Open House, I cannot help but think of Leslie Scalapino, who for the past thirty-five some odd years has fulfilled all four of Weiner’s "ways," combining them with dedication and passion through writing, teaching and her Bay Area based press, O Books—a press which continues to publish new writing, and organize a discourse about language, politics, and social responsibility. What’s more, Scalapino makes Weiner’s four ways seamless by discovering a writing radically hybrid and anti-categorical that abolishes traditionalist distinctions between poetry and philosophy opting instead to activate thinking through acts of composition. The proof is in the gerund (think-ing) as Scalapino advances many of the problems most famously articulated by Stein, whereby writing must continually enact meaning and not merely describe it. Composition as explanation; but also composition as that which charges experience with meaning.
To immerse one’s self in Scalapino’s work, and track its evolution (and to do so is now made a little bit easier for many of us by the recent publication of Scalapino’s selected poems, It’s go in horizontal) is to also witness one of the most rigorous practitioners of what Weiner calls “twice dying”. As I understand it, to “twice die” is to undergo thinking as that which interrupts a psychological “stream of consciousness,” and thus presents the otherwise within eidetic experience (ideation, perception, memory). This, of course, is not achieved by thinking alone, but by thinking as it is mediated and made possible though writing. Like the yoga master or Sufi, the thing is (lifting a term from Jalal Toufic’s work) to die before dying; that is, to experience living itself as a discontinuous condition. It is an interruptive dialogism (or dialogic interlocution) which perhaps describes Scalapino’s writing most succinctly, as one is not only never in the same syntactical stream twice, but neither before nor after a nexus of subjects and objects determined by event (what occurs, and what happens as what is). To twice die, as Weiner’s statement insists to me, is to give shape to new thought-forms which themselves may raise consciousness, in tandem affecting the political and social as those realms wherein the struggle for a new subject, and therefore new actualities, are born. More than ever we need these emergent thought-forms, and it is with great pleasure and a deep admiration that I often look for them in Leslie Scalapino’s ongoing work.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Kevin Killian is my hero...
...because he can write things like the following, from his book *Action Kylie*:
"But what does one do with one's enthusiams? Where do they keep? There's an anxiety in declaring oneself a Kylie fan--similar to how coming out used to feel. (Nowadays it's the same exact thing I suppose.) Dennis Cooper can say, "Oh, I'm influenced by Bresson," and people will nod with approbation, even if they're thinking of *Cartier*-Bresson. I suffered some credibility loss while under the spell of Dario Argento, but nothing like the waves of shame and misery that engulf me when people say, "Kylie who? That girl who did "the Lo-comotion"?" I think I like her because she reminds me of myself, I don't have Dennis' genius, not to mention Bresson's, but like Kylie I can stretch out a second or third rate talent and make it mean something by a) insisting on its smallness; b) attempting to push the envelope, usually by collaboration with others and c) feeling no guilt when, in a corner, at the end of my tether, or upset by something in my personal life, I retreat to my roots and produce XYZ of the thing I know you'll like from me."
...a testimony to Kevin's critical genius, and hilarious self-reflexivity.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Kocik in ACTS Eigner Issue (The Extent To Which)
John Sakkis just sent me a photocopy of ACTS magazine's Eigner issue, which contains a feature by Robert Kocik. Here are two of my favorite consecutive paragraphs from the 3 page, typewritten feature:
If lines roughly the same length all share a left margin, one rectangle (the poem) has been placed onto another rectangle (the page). In L.E.'s early work, this page-bound "deadset" appearance was broken up by leaving blanks at the beginnings of lines where words had been deleted to gain immediacy. Interior and end-line lacunas were developed by dropping commas. Erasure such as this is now a matter of habit--the revision, initial. [my italics]
The question 'how much can things go together?' is asked along with questioning the extent to which poems can be made to cohere.
If lines roughly the same length all share a left margin, one rectangle (the poem) has been placed onto another rectangle (the page). In L.E.'s early work, this page-bound "deadset" appearance was broken up by leaving blanks at the beginnings of lines where words had been deleted to gain immediacy. Interior and end-line lacunas were developed by dropping commas. Erasure such as this is now a matter of habit--the revision, initial. [my italics]
The question 'how much can things go together?' is asked along with questioning the extent to which poems can be made to cohere.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Sovereignty and Us: Eleni Stecopoulos' Autoimmunity (Review)
Here is a review of Eleni Stecopoulos' Autoimmunity (TAXT, 2006) that I wrote for Jacket magazine: http://jacketmagazine.com/36/r-stecopoulos-rb-donovan.shtml.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Holes in Space
-for Suzanne
If I were here and you weren’t there
In a portal in the air fighting this
Virtual feeling of there being people
On the other side of that screen and
If we were those people milling about
Briefly fascinated by the storefront
Window nearly a reflection of shadows
Of us so a window opens in the actual
World where you ask a question or
There in posing one breathe meaning
Beyond whatever was supposed to be
An art for us or poetry is a fantasy
Of poetry when to most words only
Mean what they say not what they undo
Lapses in the reenactment those holes
Being wherever we’ve really been.
A Meme for Suzanne Stein
...after her reading at St. Mark’s, 11/17/2008
1. What is communication?
2. What is the relationship shared between communication and art?
3. What is the relationship shared between your work and 70s “Live Art” (or performance-based art)? Participatory art? Tactical Media? Procedure-based art and writing? Land Art?
4. To what extent do you feel you are extending the problems of New York poets such as Vito Acconci, Bernadette Mayer and Hannah Weiner? To what extent would you like to or feel you do complicate these practices?
5. Where does poetry currently stand in relation to visual art?
6. With the rise of “social networking” tools such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as life-simulators such as Second Life, how should or could we, as culture workers/artists/thinkers, reenvision communication and participation as problems for our work?
7. You have referred to both TAXT books and your reading performances as "site-specific". How do you understand the term "site-specific" in relation to your work?
8. What (if anything) do the terms “virtual” and “actual” mean to you? "Possibility"? "Potential"?
9. In what ways do you imagine any current artistic practices to be effectively social and/or political?
10. In what ways can participatory and extemporaneous performance practices be considered more ethical/emancipatory than object-based ones?
11. Why, in the past decade, do you think (re)enactment has become such a popular art form across the arts, but especially in visual art? Why not so much in poetry/conceptual writing (Kenneth Goldsmith's Day and Rob Fitterman's reenactments of the Grand Piano project aside)?
1. What is communication?
2. What is the relationship shared between communication and art?
3. What is the relationship shared between your work and 70s “Live Art” (or performance-based art)? Participatory art? Tactical Media? Procedure-based art and writing? Land Art?
4. To what extent do you feel you are extending the problems of New York poets such as Vito Acconci, Bernadette Mayer and Hannah Weiner? To what extent would you like to or feel you do complicate these practices?
5. Where does poetry currently stand in relation to visual art?
6. With the rise of “social networking” tools such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as life-simulators such as Second Life, how should or could we, as culture workers/artists/thinkers, reenvision communication and participation as problems for our work?
7. You have referred to both TAXT books and your reading performances as "site-specific". How do you understand the term "site-specific" in relation to your work?
8. What (if anything) do the terms “virtual” and “actual” mean to you? "Possibility"? "Potential"?
9. In what ways do you imagine any current artistic practices to be effectively social and/or political?
10. In what ways can participatory and extemporaneous performance practices be considered more ethical/emancipatory than object-based ones?
11. Why, in the past decade, do you think (re)enactment has become such a popular art form across the arts, but especially in visual art? Why not so much in poetry/conceptual writing (Kenneth Goldsmith's Day and Rob Fitterman's reenactments of the Grand Piano project aside)?
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Poetry "After Katrina" in the Newsletter
In addition to some wonderful book reviews by Paul Foster Johnson, Carol Mirakove and others, the December/January 2008 issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter (available online in a PDF format) includes a double review I wrote for Brett Evans' and Frank Sherlock's *Ready-To-Eat Individual* (Lavendar Ink, 2008), and Rob Halpern's *Disaster Suites* (Palm Press, 2008). The review addresses poetry after Katrina, and contemporary "disaster lyric" more generally.
Friday, November 07, 2008
announcing ON 1
ONContemporary Practice 1
edited by Michael Cross, Thom Donovan & Kyle Schlesinger
contents:
Taylor Brady, Brandon Brown, CAConrad, Jason Christie, Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, Eli Drabman, Rob Halpern, Jen Hofer, Alan Gilbert, Brenda Iijima, Andrew Levy, Edric Mesmer, Sawako Nakayasu, Tenney Nathanson, Richard Owens, Tim Peterson, Andrew Rippeon, Kyle Schlesinger, Jonathan Skinner, Dale Smith, Suzanne Stein, Ali Warren, Katie Yeats
on
Arakawa/Gins, Taylor Brady, CAConrad, Michael Cross, Beverly Dahlen, Michael deBeyer, Mark Dickinson, kari edwards, DJ/Rupture, Thom Donovan, Belle Gironda, Brenda Iijima, CJ Martin, Emily McVarish, Yedda Morrison, Hoa Nguyen, Sawako Nakayasu, Julie Patton, Lauren Shufran, Suzanne Stein, Dana Ward, Ali Warren
purport:
ON Contemporary Practice gathers writing about the practices or poetics of one’s contemporaries. While these writings may be highly anti-categorical or “hybrid,” they are ultimately for the cultivation and extension of critical discourse. If you would like to submit to ON please write the editors at oncontemporaries@gmail.com, or michaelthomascross at hotmail dot com, thom_donovan at yahoo dot com, and kyleschlesinger at gmail dot com. ON welcomes all unsolicited materials which pursue the below guidelines. For more about ON’s editorial positions, please see the first issue’s editorial, “For a Discourse”.
guidelines:
ON primarily publishes essays on contemporaries that investigate a poetics or practice. It does not publish reviews of individual poems, chapbooks, performances, etc. It also does not publish poems. ON’s editors will consider all submissions but will not provide extensive editorial feedback toward publication.
purchasing:
Small Press Distribution
1341 Seventh Street
Berkeley, CA 94710-1409
Tel. (800) 869-7553
www.spdbooks.org
published by:
Cuneiform Press
214 N. Henry Street
Brooklyn, NY 11222
www.cuneiformpress.com
Copies are available for $12.00. Free shipping in the US for all orders placed through the publisher. Send checks to Kyle Schlesinger at the address above, or paypal kyleschlesinger at gmail dot com.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Gore Memorial
-for Jane
I want to make a
memorial that is
not mythical to
bones and falling
bridges a gore
memorial a memorial
to gore and not
make reference to
any real thing
or place and pre
tend it is like
any other place
in time putting
history in the use
of mythology like
losing one's way
in a dark woods
that is ourselves
in that time with
out time when all
I wanted was to
make a gore memo
rial with you a
memorial to gore
and soldiers and
bones and bridges
real falling brid
ges because you are
here with me the
se facts are facts
and not mere ima
ges these images
won't be how they
wanted them shored.
I want to make a
memorial that is
not mythical to
bones and falling
bridges a gore
memorial a memorial
to gore and not
make reference to
any real thing
or place and pre
tend it is like
any other place
in time putting
history in the use
of mythology like
losing one's way
in a dark woods
that is ourselves
in that time with
out time when all
I wanted was to
make a gore memo
rial with you a
memorial to gore
and soldiers and
bones and bridges
real falling brid
ges because you are
here with me the
se facts are facts
and not mere ima
ges these images
won't be how they
wanted them shored.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
David Levi Strauss' 15 Dispatches
Check out David Levi Strauss' blog entries on the presidential campaign at Aperture magazine, 15 Dispatches.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Peace Events presents Taylor Brady and Jennifer Scappettone (Ad)*
Peace Events & The Prosodic Body
present
Taylor Brady & Jennifer Scappettone
Saturday, November 1st 2008 8PM
BYOB & donation: $5
hosted by Thom Donovan & Robert Kocik at:
340 Morgan Avenue ("MEBLE" building)
E. Williamsburg (Graham Ave. L stop), Brooklyn
((PLEASE SEE DIRECTIONS BELOW))
about the readers:
Taylor Brady lives in San Francisco where he is active in the Nonsite Collective (www.nonsitecollective.org). His recent publications include *Yesterday's News*, *Occupational Treatment*, and *Snow Sensitive Skin*, written in collaboration with Rob Halpern.
from Occupational Treatment:
Perhaps I write to you in order to create delicious misunderstandings that will render me edible. I hope to settle your own digestion of my own erring analysis. Many of the campers are clothed in the gnawed remains of just such a meal. At one time they even produced its refreshments, but that was before the brewery started outsourcing beer. In the photos I've enclosed the effect is one of unfortunate fatigue. But you must remember that this nation is so young it has not yet discovered its youth. It only appears wreathed in tatters and strips of the outmoded or attenuated. Passing by way of sartorial falsehood, you must come to imagine the truth of a new collective body still barely veiled within it. Then distance comes and spills into its folds.
Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly, forthcoming shortly from Litmus Press, and of several chapbooks: Beauty [Is the New Absurdity] (dusi/e kollectiv, 2007, now available at www.dusie.org/BeautyIsTheNewAbsurdiD2.pdf); Err-Residence (Bronze Skull, 2007); and Ode oggettuale, a bilingual "poemetto" translated in conversation with Marco Giovenale (La Camera Verde, Rome, 2008). She guest-edited Aufgabe 7, which features a section devoted to contemporary Italian poetry of research. She is now at work on Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups, for Atelos, and is also writing a book on the amphibious city. She teaches at the University of Chicago.
EXIT 43
So here we are?
Exitable—architectural—girlish—hackquiescent.
Omoshirosoudeyone?
The chessboard has left and its dada with it.
What’s left is private.
About this—err—residence.
All mirrors noted. All windows. And all-breakable.
One ration under Bigus.
Still full of collector’s pieces.
Glass over glass. Dustiny, jurisdictionless.
Doug & Midge invite you off the page.
Into more issues than tissues.
Into La Salle. Into the Love Canal.
Scabie boomers:
Are you clean inside?
Here in the middle-of-center.
Death begins in the colon. Find out now!
Find 42 million pounds—
Moshi moshi. Supertrunk?
As one sterilizes her fen—
I wrote your copy inside the bubble
Find out why every second American is chronically ill.
& would now like to know what you are.
Two-way voice. In-only voice.
Lire desukeredomo!
Of Hooker Chemicals.
Out-only voice. Miroloyia
Littered with PCs. Rider B
Is Lyre, however, and yet—
Chorus!
Long-winged thrushes, or doves, making their way into
Engineering, termination, client service user training, where applicable,
Master Snare set in a thicket—
The rights and remedies for ST Service Service included in Table B…
So too these women, their heads hanging in a row….
………………………………………………………
They gasped with their feet for a very short while, not for long at all.
No use for civic grief: I Homer have hereby censored this account
& *anyway it was a long time ago.*
__________________________________
Directions to 340 Morgan Ave:
Take L to Graham Ave. Walk 4 blocks north on Metropolitan (past White Castle). Take a left on Morgan. Look out for a yellow awning that reads "MEBLE". You are there! Here is Mapquest, just in case:
http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Brooklyn&state=NY&address=340+Morgan+Ave
Peace Events (formerly 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.
Peace Events & The Prosodic Body
*photo courtesies Erica Kaufman, Dorothea Lasky, Jennifer Scappettone, and Stacy Szymaszek.
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