Occupy the MTA: a Proposal

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

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

--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

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

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*

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

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

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)

Occupy Wall Street, October 1st March (Pics)

For the Occupiers

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

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

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)

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

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)

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

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

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

--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)

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.”