Love and Criticism (@ Harriet)

here

"In terms of ‘negative criticism’ (so called), I rarely see the use of it. If it is to dismiss a work of literature/art as unvaluable/irrelevant, don’t we already do this by not attending it, or by not investing our desires and passions in it? It is so much work just to understand poetry/art (for works of art and poetry to become legible to one’s self) I have never understood why people would want to waste their energy on what does not interest them (what, that is, they do not love or desire). This problem goes back to Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book where Duncan reiterates that the poet “goes where they are loved.” I think there is a lot of wisdom in this mantra of Duncan’s, and in the ways Duncan practiced criticism and scholarship besides his poetry."

NPP at BPC

come hear the NPP (New Philadelphia Poets) strut their stuff tomorrow following SEGUE series at the Bowery Poetry Club.

New Philadelphia Poets to NYC: A Redemptive Strike: Reckoning The Decade

At the beginning of the century, we found ourselves in a dark wood. The past ten years saw the collapse of the Twin Towers, the marriage of religious fundamentalism and global politics, and the rise of digital communities. With this in mind, The New Philadelphia Poets launch a redemptive strike on the past decade. Join us for a reconsideration of this yet unnamed era.

Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery)
Saturday, Jan. 16, 2010
6:00 pm, $6.00

Featuring: Gregory Bem, Sarah Heady, Debrah Morkun, Patrick Lucy, Angel Hogan, Matthew Landis, Carlos Soto Román, and Jamie Townsend.

Celebrate with Nightboat 4 amazing books!

You're invited to the

Nightboat Books Winter Release Party
on Friday, January 22, 2010, from 6:30-8:30pm
at Metro Pictures Gallery, 519 West 24th Street, New York City

Brief readings by authors, editors, and contributors.

Free and Open to All

Help us celebrate these new titles:

Century of Clouds by Bruce Boone, with a preface by Rob Halpern

In the Function of External Circumstances by Edwin Torres

Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman, edited by Stephen Motika. Preface by Dennis Phillips; Afterword by Bill Mohr. (Published with Otis Books/Seismicity Editions.)

eco language reader, edited by Brenda Iijima, featuring essays by
Karen Leona Anderson, Jack Collom, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Laura Elrick, Peter Larkin, Jill Magi, Tracie Morris, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Julie Patton, Jed Rasula, Evelyn Reilly, Leslie Scalapino, James Sherry, Jonathan Skinner & Tyrone Williams. (Published with Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs.)

For Haiti

Disaster's the national pastime
Shame's the natural course
Of hegemony sovereignty equals
Its weight in force

Disaster knows no limit
Limited only by the eyes
That see it not the decibels
Charged by their screaming

Rubble sees in retrospect
From the distance of their failed
Infrastructure from the distance
Of dispossession a kind of curse

Of progress what dispenses
With the ego society no force
Of nature accomplished this
Because we've gone global.

SEGUE series presents Mónica de la Torre & Fred Moten

Saturday, January 16, 2010
4:00pm - 6:00pm
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY

Mónica de la Torre is the author of the poetry books Talk Shows, Acúfenos, and Public Do-main. She is co-author of the artist book Appendices, Illustrations & Notes. She is a translator and senior editor at BOMB Magazine and a 2009 NYFA fellow in poetry.

Fred Moten’s most recent books are Hughson’s Tavern and the forthcoming B Jenkins. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

American Longing and James Dean in Last Meadow (@ Harriet)

here

"The word that kept runnning through my head throughout Last Meadow was “cinematicalness.” There is a feeling for the cinema, and almost everything about Last Meadow evokes this feeling. Another extraordinary technique that Gutierrez used was an interlocution between himself and the other two dancers in which he would say their lines with/over them, timing this “voice over” precisely. Reciting a scene from Elia Kazan’s East of Eden in which Dean (as Cal) is about to leave his house and Julie Harris (as Abra) adjusts his tie, the scene is first played between Hallaby (as Harris playing Abra) and Boullé (as Dean playing Cal). It is played again with Gutierrez saying their lines over them in the Fender amp, and for a third time with Boullé absented from the scene, looking at herself in the mirror as Dean playing Cal."

SEGUE intro for Adam Pendleton (@ Harriet)

here

"That Pendleton’s recent solo-exhibition “EL T D K” pays tribute to Amiri Baraka’s 1964 poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” seems a perfectly logical step in Pendleton’s practice. Listening to Baraka read his poem tonight repeatedly at PennSound, from a 1964 reading at the Asilomar Negro Writers Conference in Pacific Grove, California, I could hear in Baraka’s reading echoes of the ambivalence that Pendleton himself brings to the performance of his work—an ever-shifting blend of irony and sincerity, affirmation and negation, caveat and invitation. Through his identification with a white, European avant garde movement—Dada—Baraka gives voice to a genealogy of violent struggle against a society of white masters. Given the content of Pendleton’s exhibition—a set of paintings with only phonemes painted on them, a long row of boxy lithographs reproducing widely known photo-documents from canonical 60s and 70s art performances, and a Sol LeWitt-like installation of black cubes entitled “Black Dada”—like Baraka before him Pendleton would seem to recover a white-identified art tradition for Black and Gay liberation struggles while calling into question the perceived reduction such reappropriative gestures can perform."

Withdrawals (II)

It is easy not to sing
The face withdrawn from smoke
Different than a soundtrack
Which never was of us

Expressing this limit that face
Makes signals in the air
Only that face understands
Because it can't stop remembering

The total catastrophe that was the line
Or the face wishing this
Wishes invisibly
In a language of these days

We became crossed-out
You burned your photographs
To remember home
A kind of body torn apart

A kind of body shared

A kind of body no one shares.

Withdrawals

-for Adrian Piper

Wishing the mind
To touch anything
But this combat

Combatting, that is,
To touch you
And touching

Only dark, a room
Full of dark
All voices eyes

All I be hushed
Sensed so striken
As of in silence blowing

Whereupon the woman
You are the man
The skin sheds us

She singles herself out
Pointing out the lack of
Forms in her self-apprehension

A failure to withdraw from
Them because every
thing is in relation.

SEGUE series presents Judith Goldman and Adam Pendleton

Saturday, January 9, 2010
4:00pm - 7:00pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY

Judith Goldman is the author of Vocoder, DeathStar/Rico-chet, and “The Dispossessions.” She co-edits War and Peace with Leslie Scalapino and teaches in the arts humanities core and in creative writing at the University of Chicago.

Adam Pendleton lives in upstate New York. His multi-disciplinary art has been widely exhibited internationally. Recent biennials and exhibitions include The Generational: Younger than Jesus (New York); Object, the Undeniable Success of Operations (Amsterdam); and Manifesto Marathon (London).

Michael Haneke: Filmmaker of Bad Faith (@ Harriet)

Here goes something I posted to Harriet blog tonight, regarding Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon:

"His films do not condescend as a von Trier or Bergman film do, but rather make one identify with the bad faith of its characters. How he does this is through the craft of a great storyteller and cinematographer. The flip-side of Haneke’s bad faith is a tenuous redemption Haneke proffers through his most humiliated characters. In The White Ribbon these characters—angels of mercy—are the pastor’s young son, who comes to his father bearing the gift of a caged bird after the pastor’s bird has been brutally executed, and in another scene bargains with his father to keep a pet frog. It is also the baron’s wife, who explains to her husband why she is leaving him: because the town over which he lords is filled with malice, and threatens the well-being of their son and the happiness of their marriage."

Santiago Sierra: Radical Cruelty and Second Reflection

I just posted my 2nd post at Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog, regarding "radical cruelty and second reflection" in the work of Santiago Sierra:

"The poems that I write (and much poetry that I find attractive) is nourished by a devotion to intermedia, and a desire to understand images by using the poem as a means of processing. In general, I am interested in these uses of the poem: the poem as intuitive plastic, as pedagogical tool, as preposterously critical, as (presencing of) second reflection. Perhaps, as Charles Bernstein suggests in his collaboration with Richard Tuttle Reading Red, one can write a poem that acts not merely ekphrastically (outside or about the image), but that somehow speaks with or from the position of the art work.* What, a la Wittgenstein, would the image say if it could speak?"

"For however long you will hide"

For however long you will hide
In those happy hour boxes making
Dissymmetry your living labor
Aporia a social process

Their faces give me the back
Living to be punished/published
Identity's wet dream
Pours polyethylene over
The place where difference would otherwise sing
Our alibis.

Damn the Caesars round-up

I'm thrilled to be included here among such esteemed company in Rich Owens' 2009 round-up.

Poesis as Ecological Remediation

"C. Part Three: Earth Maintenance

Everyday, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered to the Museum:

-the contents of one sanitation truck;

-a container of polluted air;

-a container of polluted Hudson River;

-a container of ravaged land.

Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced:

purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical (and / or pseudo-technical) procedures either by myself or scientists.

These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the exhibition."
--from Mierle Ukeles' Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969

"To become worthy..."*

"Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us . . . Nothing more can be said and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event . . . and to become the offspring of one's events and not of one's actions."

*from Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense quoted in Robert Dewhurst's "The
 Repetitious
 Soul 
of 
CA Conrad's 
Frank
" (unpublished)

Ordering for Sovereignty and Us: Critical Objects 2005-2010

One of my many new year's resolutions is to collate and revise a manuscript of essay, reviews, and statements about poetics and cultural politics. Here is what I've got so far in case any have suggestions about a possible architecture/order/design/publisher.

Sovereignty and Us: Critical Objects 2005-2010

Sovereignty and Us:

Splitting: after a photo-document by Gordon Matta-Clark
Call Backs: on Tyrone Williams
Aporia and Progress: Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure
Every Name In History Is hannah
Hannah’s Bifuraction
Into Bride (Army of Rose)
Every Name In History Is I: on Catherine Sullivan’s Effusions of Meaning
Kyle Schlesinger: Insofar As a Metapolitics of Sense
Entrance Wounds: Richard Foreman’s Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land
Undeserving Lebanon by Jalal Toufic
Sovereignty and Us: Eleni Stecopoulos’ Autoimmunity (TAXT, 2006)
Bare Life: Taylor Brady’s and Rob Halpern’s Snow Sensitive Skin
Love Among the Ruins (3 A.K.): on Brett Evans’ and Frank Sherlock’s Ready-to-Eat Individual (Lavender Ink, 2008) and Rob Halpern’s Disaster Suites (Palm Press, 2008)
Lawrence Giffin’s Get the Fuck Back Into That Burning Plane
On Judith Goldman’s The Dispossessions
Paul Chan's "Sade for Sade's Sake" at Greene Naftali Gallery, NYC
Reading Martha Rosler Reading
In the Open: John Taggart’s Susan Howe
On Vision in Make Believe
A Work of the Actual: on Brenda Iijima
“In the dirt of the line”: on Bhanu Kapil’s intense autobiography
Doing the Twist: notes on Modern American poetry and vitalism
Robert Kocik (introduction for Peace On A)
Choir Praxis: on Daria Fain’s and Robert Kocik’s Phoneme Choir at Movement Research festival, May 4th 2009
Are We Human, or Are We Dancer?: on Daria Fain’s and Robert Kocik’s The Extent to Which
WIlliam Forsythe's Decreation at BAM
George Oppen’s Inoperative Poetics
Presencing the Disaster: recent poetry and art after George Oppen
Allegories of Disablement: some consequences of form towards potential bodies
Open Letter to Patrick Durgin on Disability Theory
“None of us have rules, none of us have scripture”: CA Conrad’s Advanced Elvis Course and the Politics of Spirit

Devotions:

Myung Mi Kim’s River Antes
The Course of Particulars: on Terry Cuddy
David Levi Strauss: A Poetics of Fact
Michael Cross (intro for Just Buffalo series)
“how real or imagined it was real”: E. Tracy Grinnell (Peace on A)
Paolo Javier (Peace on A)
Eléna Rivera’s Unknowne Land (Peace on A)
Wayne Koestenbaum (Peace on A)
Rob Halpern’s Disaster Suites
Rob Halpern’s Imginary Politics (Peace on A)
Lola Ridge’s The Ghetto
Activist Presses in the '00s
CANNOT EXIST #4 (Segue)
Leslie Scalapino (Segue)
M. Mara Ann (Segue)
Erica Hunt (Segue)
Dawn Lundy Martin (Segue)
Stephanie Gray (Segue)
Tony Conrad (Segue)
Corina Copp (Segue)
Propositions After Talking to Robert Fitterman Before Reading Notes on Conceptualisms
Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place’s Notes On Conceptualisms
To See 360 Degrees: Elka Krajewska and Alan Licht’s Plany Mela
Magdalena Zurawski’s The Bruise
CA Conrad’s The Book of Frank
George Oppen’s Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers
What We Do When We Believe: 8 Poets Discoursing After John Taggart
Arthur Russell Revived: Tim Lawrence's Hold On To Your Dreams

For a Discourse:

ON Contemporary Practice 1 editorial (with Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger)
Statement for ON1 launch
A Meme For Suzanne Stein
On Certainty
On Negative Criticism
On Stephen Burt’s “The New Thing”
ON Contemporary Practice 2 editorial (with Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger)

Blogging at Harriet January-March

I feel honored to be invited by Poetry Foundation to blog at Harriet with Sina Queras (of Lemon Hound), Bhanu Kapil (of Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? and her many wonderful books), and Fred Moten, who will coincidentally be reading for SEGUE with Mónica de la Torre later on this January. It is difficult to imagine a better company. For my contributions, I am planning to interview different writers and artists, generate questionnaires, write brief reviews and essays, generate curriculum/exercises, and engage with fellow bloggers/commentors. Please feel free to join the conversation via comments boxes and/or by being in touch directly with me: tadonovan [at] hotmail [dot] com.

Iijima's If Not Metamorphic in Publisher's Weekly

Publisher's Weekly has the following to say about Brenda Iijima's new book, If Not Metamorphic:

In Iijima's fourth collection, shifts and spaces on the page animate the messy and glorious process of making meaning. As suggested by “metamorphic” in the title (meaning a change in a rock's physical form or substance, usually as a result of heat or pressure), geological metaphors are essential to these four long poems. The stunning title piece, composed entirely of questions, sifts and settles across its pages like sediment, both moving (in every sense) and unwaveringly direct. “Tertium Organum” has a noisier geologic structure, suggesting the violence of human intervention: “Twisted corset the tectonic plates make/ when crassness butts up against steel.” This collision of registers and the resulting dissonance is much of the point. Language, here, “encroaches,” “is engorged,” and “is hit by passing vehicles.” Often, it moves metonymically, leading us from idea to idea by way of sound: from “loan” to “lone,” “suffer” to “sulfur,” “sees” to “siege,” and “sunder” to “tundra.” Sometimes Iijima jumps between registers via overt protest, as in “song birds gave way to acid rain.” At her most self-reflexive, she describes her “affection for/ provocative contrasts.” The experience of following these contrasts is thrilling; as Iijima writes, “In a manner of speaking we flew.”

Tears Are These Veils at tumblr.

I started a new blog today, mainly for links and photos: http://tearsaretheseveils.tumblr.com/

Will be tweaking it and adding pics when I can. I like the simultaneous slide-shows so far.