Friday, February 10, 2012
10:00 pm
Reframing the “book launch,” Thom Donovan and Brett Price offer a night of consumption, conversation, reflection, and performance around Donovan’s book, The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012). As Donovan has written to participants about the event: “I would not like to read from the book, so much as I would use the book’s appearance as an occasion for conversation around its contents, as well as an opportunity for friends, colleagues, and loved ones to gather.” Participants include Melissa Buzzeo, CAConrad, Rob Halpern, Brenda Iijima, Madhu Kaza, Robert Kocik, Dorothea Lasky, Andrew Levy, C.J. Martin, ElĂ©na Rivera, Eleni Stecopoulos, Brian Whitener, Tyrone Williams, and others.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Saturday, December 31, 2011
In Actu
--for Daria Fain, composed 11/2011
1.
So expressed was a lung inside your throat
The way it microphoned the world
Like blood cleansed, leavened into dirt
The holocausts inside us, the heat on the air
No metaphors here but things seen
See us for what we are, we sing, we sing
Into the microphone called throat
Called air, another blue song
You put into a horizon note,
Splits where your dress was a difference
Where your hands splay the air
There is an animal poise
Called verse notwithstanding
Actual amplification,
Notwithstanding the world
Illuminated until it disappears.
2.
Who will the living be
In robes of white terrycloth
And ribs like wings
Billow when breath
Is obscenely material?
Captioned like our angel names
Don’t become truly like
Our names until we’ve been
Will you be
In this robe with me
Incubating?
Will you be in this skin with me
Flawed, not a metaphor for things seen?
What will we be in talking, in walking?
What will we be in pointing?
The extent to which a world is formed.
1.
So expressed was a lung inside your throat
The way it microphoned the world
Like blood cleansed, leavened into dirt
The holocausts inside us, the heat on the air
No metaphors here but things seen
See us for what we are, we sing, we sing
Into the microphone called throat
Called air, another blue song
You put into a horizon note,
Splits where your dress was a difference
Where your hands splay the air
There is an animal poise
Called verse notwithstanding
Actual amplification,
Notwithstanding the world
Illuminated until it disappears.
2.
Who will the living be
In robes of white terrycloth
And ribs like wings
Billow when breath
Is obscenely material?
Captioned like our angel names
Don’t become truly like
Our names until we’ve been
Will you be
In this robe with me
Incubating?
Will you be in this skin with me
Flawed, not a metaphor for things seen?
What will we be in talking, in walking?
What will we be in pointing?
The extent to which a world is formed.
Revenants, Remains
--for Rob Halpern, composed 8/2011
The history of this movement
Like soldiers on spec
Don’t know they are dead
Fucked by a global content
No one wants, abjected in-
sight of things, eyes that would
Make a difference if not for
Disaster’s sense, I feel it in
My veins this blood being spilt
Far away, while violent mourning
Transfigures our present
Coverts thanatos to eros
Almost becomes a public
I could kiss because it can’t
Come back this broken
Revenant moment
Only silence comes back
What it touches we call
A demilitarized music
Who sings a blocked world?
The history of this movement
Like soldiers on spec
Don’t know they are dead
Fucked by a global content
No one wants, abjected in-
sight of things, eyes that would
Make a difference if not for
Disaster’s sense, I feel it in
My veins this blood being spilt
Far away, while violent mourning
Transfigures our present
Coverts thanatos to eros
Almost becomes a public
I could kiss because it can’t
Come back this broken
Revenant moment
Only silence comes back
What it touches we call
A demilitarized music
Who sings a blocked world?
A Thousand Levels
Like sites write
‘Me’ little micro
-cosm this body renders
A thousand levels, boundaries
Where toxins structure us
Is ‘holy’?, of milk
Winds steady in this
Breast remembrance
Through daylight the rap
Song of our lives and life
Escapes, no allegory,
No metaphor, just allergy
Just conviviality in lyric
Rhythm samples my heart
Thresholds where earth dreams
Mind into cognizance
Awake to this scented
Word called “cell,” called
“Pathogen,” a book
We will be buried in.
--composed 8/2011
‘Me’ little micro
-cosm this body renders
A thousand levels, boundaries
Where toxins structure us
Is ‘holy’?, of milk
Winds steady in this
Breast remembrance
Through daylight the rap
Song of our lives and life
Escapes, no allegory,
No metaphor, just allergy
Just conviviality in lyric
Rhythm samples my heart
Thresholds where earth dreams
Mind into cognizance
Awake to this scented
Word called “cell,” called
“Pathogen,” a book
We will be buried in.
--composed 8/2011
Thursday, December 29, 2011
CA Conrad's 2011 Sexiest Poem Award

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

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

The latest 5 Questions for Contemporary Practice is with Sreshta Rit Premnath.
"2. Do you feel there is a need for the work that you are doing given the larger field of visual art and the ways that aesthetic practices may be able to shape public space, civic responsibility, and political action? Why or why not?
No, I do not feel that there is a need for the work I do. Rather, to restate myself, I feel the need to do my work. If I respond to an external need, then it is the result of internalizing it, and once it is internalized it is felt as an impulse rather than a need. Although my sense of civic responsibility and my political motivations are reflected in my artwork, I do not see my artwork as a means of political action. Politics as a means of social change is fully grounded in the ontic register. It requires an ethical clarity and a contingent certainty. However, to apply Wittgenstein’s words on philosophy to art, “Lack of clarity in [art] is tormenting. It is felt as shameful. We feel: we do not know our way about where we should know our way about. And nevertheless it isn’t so. We can get along very well without… knowing our way about here.”
However, every human being is a political being and how we act in the world is the embodiment of our politics. Although in this sense all our actions in the world are political, they are in most cases not particularly good politics or effective politics. While we could expand the word art to include politics or conversely expand the notion of politics to talk about its aesthetics, I find the two categories to function in different modalities within my practice. When the political enters my artwork it becomes the ontic ground for various formal procedures as well as the concrete ground for philosophical speculation.
There are crucial political imperatives grounded in the ethical urgency of what ought to be done that cannot be effectively dealt with in my art practice. However, I don’t think this makes my artwork less important, rather it reveals that there are multiple modes of discourse and some are more effective in “shaping public space, civic responsibility, and political action” than others."
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Where it proceeds to the rupture
--after some phrases from Brian Holmes
1.
Is ‘experimental’ where it proceeds to the rupture
of the cultural model, lights were struck
and bitter coffee served, interrupted
every half hour for feedback how to share
an experience that produced
such profound changes in one’s self?
Art making, an ambiguous expression
of personal and collective desires
A glance or tear, a media intervention,
the modulation of affect in the face of that threat
Seattle happened here then was foreclosed
What’s the use of aesthetics if you don’t have eyes to see?
They drank the bitter coffee, interrupted the projections to bear witness
The affective modulations that won’t be represented
without eyes to see them with
Who drank out of empathy the affective modulation
Of our ambiguous desires, neither personal nor collective,
Yet political all of them before any of this was subjective
Or in a white cube
Because these tears turn to ______ no one will see
Things you heard, you are trying to remember them hard
No one will know the things you heard
When what we remain are powers
2.
Post-expectant, the heart at work,
what should we name its book, lovingly?
Messianic aspect of a place from which to begin,
actual birds drenched, withdrawn from post-expectant
springtimes somewhere else there are worlds,
somewhere other than ______
Which like William James’ polyhedral turns
thousands of miles above our infancy, blue and rarefied
Subtle like a conversation, the world does not
actually begin, it begins and ends suspended
by friendship, by enmity announcing the proximity
of end times, where it proceeds to the rupture of the cultural model
1.
Is ‘experimental’ where it proceeds to the rupture
of the cultural model, lights were struck
and bitter coffee served, interrupted
every half hour for feedback how to share
an experience that produced
such profound changes in one’s self?
Art making, an ambiguous expression
of personal and collective desires
A glance or tear, a media intervention,
the modulation of affect in the face of that threat
Seattle happened here then was foreclosed
What’s the use of aesthetics if you don’t have eyes to see?
They drank the bitter coffee, interrupted the projections to bear witness
The affective modulations that won’t be represented
without eyes to see them with
Who drank out of empathy the affective modulation
Of our ambiguous desires, neither personal nor collective,
Yet political all of them before any of this was subjective
Or in a white cube
Because these tears turn to ______ no one will see
Things you heard, you are trying to remember them hard
No one will know the things you heard
When what we remain are powers
2.
Post-expectant, the heart at work,
what should we name its book, lovingly?
Messianic aspect of a place from which to begin,
actual birds drenched, withdrawn from post-expectant
springtimes somewhere else there are worlds,
somewhere other than ______
Which like William James’ polyhedral turns
thousands of miles above our infancy, blue and rarefied
Subtle like a conversation, the world does not
actually begin, it begins and ends suspended
by friendship, by enmity announcing the proximity
of end times, where it proceeds to the rupture of the cultural model
Friday, December 23, 2011
Debt
The cray ‘s'mas lights
All come greet me
Cape Cod all come what
Beacons X-mas taps
Thee out when
Light is about returning
Not just birthing
“It is a cold world”
The cab driver says
While I tip him, “have
A good life if
I don’t see you again”
His repartee is
Good natured
But rehearsed, nights
On Cape Cod in the winter
Some places are pitch-
Black the highway
Like the sea undulates
They are foreclosing,
He tells me, on all the
Houses the greedy
Got greedier
The wicked wickeder
This year you can’t
Convince me after 40 years
Of this shit that it can’t
Get worse but I swear
I love the Cape
Without people
David Graeber’s Debt
Is on the kitchen table
Of my parents’ house
I haven’t read it
Yet it has the seduction
Already of something
One should read to feel
They are part of their
Generation, this poem
Is for all my friends
December 22nd,
2011 I don’t want
Any of you to die,
I want us to live
The best we can,
Let the (living) dead
Consume themselves
I believe
In interruptions,
Not endings.
All come greet me
Cape Cod all come what
Beacons X-mas taps
Thee out when
Light is about returning
Not just birthing
“It is a cold world”
The cab driver says
While I tip him, “have
A good life if
I don’t see you again”
His repartee is
Good natured
But rehearsed, nights
On Cape Cod in the winter
Some places are pitch-
Black the highway
Like the sea undulates
They are foreclosing,
He tells me, on all the
Houses the greedy
Got greedier
The wicked wickeder
This year you can’t
Convince me after 40 years
Of this shit that it can’t
Get worse but I swear
I love the Cape
Without people
David Graeber’s Debt
Is on the kitchen table
Of my parents’ house
I haven’t read it
Yet it has the seduction
Already of something
One should read to feel
They are part of their
Generation, this poem
Is for all my friends
December 22nd,
2011 I don’t want
Any of you to die,
I want us to live
The best we can,
Let the (living) dead
Consume themselves
I believe
In interruptions,
Not endings.
Monday, December 12, 2011
The Hole "Feedback" section excerpts

My "first book," The Hole, just dropped at SPD.
But it is really not my book. Or it is only nominally "my book." Because I was so very fortunate to be able to include many incredible contributions from others, solicited responses to an earlier version of the book. And these responses issue from a spirit of collaboration and community endeavor and friendship, which I consider to be the condition of the book's making, from start to finish.
Here are some excerpts:
25 hedge fund managers
are worth 658,000 teachers.
This is just minutes before
totality occurred.
--Andrew Levy
What comes out is an idiolect. When one has an intimate (perhaps ‘intrinsic’) relationship to language the first thing that becomes apparent is our inseparability. It’s not even a paradox. Particularly when the dominant language is hegemonic or oppressive, we need to break from the connectivity and open into the one subsistence we are. We recognize each other because we share recognition (and because “our suffering is beyond conceptualization”). The initial state of language (which, like eternity, if it is not ‘now’, it is not) is first-person-plural. We need a science of the first person plural and it’s only fair that the first discussions for such a science would be ‘lyric’. The Hole. The hoax being accomplished against us (well-described in Thom’s manuscript) is happening by means of language. We need a hole dug as big as the world. It really is the original story: to salvage the world with that with which we screw it up.
--Robert Kocik
Thom Donovan’s The Hole is a protest song, an unmuffled cry. His caring is a direct response to the glaring irony of ablest-fatalism. “How are you I’m tortured.” Pain is the body’s form of protest. Pain sends messengers to the site of trauma in order for healing to occur. No recourse or healing until pain is felt (especially so in fucked-up scenarios—no acknowledgement of suffering: sociopathy as societal norm). […] The Hole turbulently narrates and embodies localized and social pain as it endeavors to exit out of the critique of what remains.
--Brenda Iijima
[…] being at the joint of flex. More than. Once with you at poetry's I mean Poetry's admission of guilt for having been.
--CA Conrad
Skin so thin with armor
Past and future are only distensions (Augustine)
but being immune to time creates
a metrical need
what prosody can sustain
--Eleni Stecopoulos
this poem and a few maybe with it […] must be read in streets, in public gatherings, pubs and cafĂ©s, on t.v. […] it's up to us to bring words to those to whom they belong
--Etel Adnan
what of ourselves we put in
the possible
remains of democracy
Athenian re-imagining
a once that never was
--Jane Sprague
The words invite that gift of night. We move in tandem at times, we who say no, the aversive, a kindred ally, the stubborn immobility, silent potent, an obstinate night’s nothing, whose no unites, disrobes, finds flesh, interrogates the state, of language, of making, and of war, unmakes and disarticulates night’s night, all that everyone has worked for, forces, to which we say no, the subjects who say no, made visible in your ongoing engagement within space.
--Jocelyn Saidenberg
Within the measures of Thom’s project, disaster can’t be seen, nor can it be experienced, and yet disaster hails the lyric subject into social being, commanding the ear, while enjoining the poem to bear witness to that which can’t be witnessed. The disaster can be thought of here as a kind of event: like a hole shot thru perception and around which feeling struggles to hear itself as thought, or a void where a social situation’s structuring antagonisms concentrate invisibly. This triangulation with the eventful disaster threatens to render the poem impossible, but what makes Thom’s writing critical is the way it refuses the convenient alibi that the poem’s disastrous impossibility is a fateful condition of language itself (as Blanchot might think). The poem rather risks its impossibility on social catastrophes where it is unbearably implicated.
--Rob Halpern
Forgotten common
poetry should
understand blankness
radical ‘experiment’
the social
those earth-bound
prisons effervesce
and erode
encrusted capital
--Stephen Collis
Epigraph
and/or
citation
upload a text into a virtual community of intellectual propriety. Elsewhere—not “here”—is confusion. E-volition as a peculiar instantiation of cultural labor apes evolution, expels, from a deflated coterie, product by-product toward a putative public.
--Tyrone Williams
What wind blows through me
Oh that it might carry me
Not I, Not I
But an us
In peril, fatherless and worn
In danger, because I have given everything up
--Dorothea Lasky
I also started to think a lot about scandal in relation to your writing, & draw up some warp & woof in my mind between the word 'scandal' & 'disaster', words just so electrified in this moment, & 'scandal' you know, it has this air of sexiness about it, it implies a secret carnality somewhere out of sight, & I think you[r] book enacts that heat, that sort of starvation, against & through the actual processes of depravation that order the figures of our despair; ecological disaster, political aporia, the half-heartedness that meets them, the bodies & speech both effaced & replenished in prosodic attention, The Hole became for me something scandalous, a rumor (like Rob's Rumored Place), something repellent & absorbing that's transmitted through the glamour of our being together, like the world as it is the dirty non-secret we keep passing off to one another […]
--Dana Ward
Friday, December 09, 2011
So we were the police...
So we were the police a sign of dissensus
Decry force little anthems we tell ourselves
Little voices we were bright curve
Of the object we were when we learned
To frame no one labor caved for no one
Because equality rests on process no politics
Without poetics says you Plato was wrong
About a lot of things get over your philosophy
This is an interruption of philosophy
For ethics or simply the way things should work
When we don’t how we get down like that
In the early streets in the swarming streets
Abandoned by the national discourse
Sunset of that discourse this is dawn
At least police if you won’t come to our side
Spray your own eyes out so you might see.
Decry force little anthems we tell ourselves
Little voices we were bright curve
Of the object we were when we learned
To frame no one labor caved for no one
Because equality rests on process no politics
Without poetics says you Plato was wrong
About a lot of things get over your philosophy
This is an interruption of philosophy
For ethics or simply the way things should work
When we don’t how we get down like that
In the early streets in the swarming streets
Abandoned by the national discourse
Sunset of that discourse this is dawn
At least police if you won’t come to our side
Spray your own eyes out so you might see.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Matt Mullican's Bulletin Boards (at SFMOMA blog)

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

The Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior
Interview with Catherine Sullivan
Friday, December 9th, 6:30 - 8:30pm
CUE Art Foundation
511 West 25th Street
New York, New York 10001
The evening will begin with a presentation by Chicago-based artist Catherine Sullivan, who will show excerpts from her video works and documentation of her performances. Following the artist’s presentation, she will be interviewed by Thom Donovan and Sreshta Rit Premnath of the Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior.
About Catherine Sullivan:
Catherine Sullivan's works engage a variety of media - theater, film, video, photography, writing and sculpture. She has produced several performances and theater works wherein the performers are often coping with written texts, stylistic economies, reenactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies. The works address a broad spectrum of historical reference and often involve multiple collaborators including composer Sean Griffin. Her work is often staged and shot on sets for unrelated productions and in settings that project social function beyond the mise en scène Sullivan builds within them. What emerges from the numerous layers of collaboration and reference is an anxious and unresolved political and social sensibility.
Sullivan received a CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts (2004) and a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Fellowship (2004–05). She has had major exhibitions at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007); Tate Modern, London (2005); Vienna Secession, Austria (2005); Kunsthalle Zurich (2005); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2003); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2002); and the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2002). She has participated in the Prague Biennial (2005), the Whitney Biennial (2004), and the Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2003).
About The Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior:
The tense of the future anterior (French: Future auxiliary verb + past participle) is one of potentiality. Within any given present, it images "what will have been" before an event actually comes to pass. To return to the moments of bifurcation is an objective of the Archive of the Future Anterior. An archive which wishes to serve less as a time-capsule than a provisional index of loss or misplaced futures; where future has not yet become past and multiple futures remain compossible within a single present.
Initiated by Thom Donovan and Sreshta Rit Premnath this project is a video archive of interviews in which artists, writers, scientists and colleagues from various disciplines discuss their work in relation to this future conditional tense. The interviews will present futures which never came to pass, but may still hold the potential to be realized in the present. We hope that by producing an archive of futures which have yet to come to pass we may be able to alter the course of the future, as well as change the way we narrate and remember the past. Putting artists, writers, historians, scientists and other culture workers in
dialogue with each other will be a crucial aspect of this project, inasmuch as we believe that in our present epoch fields of knowledge should communicate and synthesize to both recall and imagine a future we would want to create.
Through our collaboration, we also wish to destabilize the simple dichotomies of personal and social, interior and exterior, memory and history by triggering the future anterior tense wherein the stimulation of memory produces action, and imagination produces possible worlds of experience. Participants will likewise be encouraged to draw upon their somatic experiences as catalysts for potential futures. To what extent can our bodily memory (muscle memory, genetic code, anamnesis) germinate possible futures?
Friday, November 25, 2011
5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Ben Kinmont (@Art21)

Here is a feature I did for Art21 with Ben Kinmont, a visual artist who also trades in books and culinary marvels.
"At one point, in the late 1990s, I had to decide whether to continue participating in the art world or to become an antiquarian book dealer who devoted 100% of his time to working with rare books. I decided to continue as an artist and bookseller. I stayed in both worlds because I realized that I was from the art world, that its history was my point of reference, and that its community was something to which I felt responsible, even if I was disappointed in it somehow. But to try and go on, I had to focus on connections to things outside of the art world, whether they were notions of social responsibility or exchanges with other disciplines. I was trying to broaden the range of what could be considered art and to open it up to questions from new audiences and participants. The art world was not enough on its own."
Friday, November 18, 2011
Frank Sherlock's Love Letter November 15
Wonderful to receive this poem from Frank Sherlock last night. In response to the raid of Zuccotti Park.
Books
gone
Shelter
gone
I've been
screaming
out of key
all day
for you to
cover
the promise
hole
in the wall w/
a horizontal
picture or
something
that looks
like joy
I've been waiting
Ah this
sunrise
again on
a failed
paradigm
this stare
too far
into space
for too long
to remember
the name of
this city
Here is
a hammer
Here is
a bulb
A number
of things can
happen like
building in
light
killing in
darkness
or touching
each other
during
our magic
hour
I trade
news links
through
militarized
playspace
to keep
witnessing
fresh
to stay out
of the back
catalogue
while
looking to
not be
abandoned
Take a sip
of war
commodity
from my
bottle when
you get here
I know you
get thirsty
You might
taste traces
of blood but
this is what
I have
to offer
The sound
you might
hear is
quiet running
counter to
anticipations
seizing on
conservation
as if shorter
showers matter
Pardon
my reach
to be
respirited
filching a cup
of memory
as memory
Are you there
This company's
the worst
The trapdoor
spiders' prey
lines up
in the web
in perfect
single file
I hate them
& I'm not
talking about
the spiders
Feed on
a symbol if
it's helpful
This phone
has hit
the wall
It still
works as
a transmitter
Call me
Where does
the exile
end & the
life begin
Your now is
three hours
before my
now & your
now is six
hours after
my now &
where in
this hell is
our future
but so far
ahead it'll be
unrecognizable
upon arrival
Not to
get all
necrocentric
but there's no
contradiction
between
the love of
flowers &
hatred of
floral
wallpaper
This was
real this is
real since
nothing
can be
destroyed
even when
pushed
into fire
I take
the cremains
to the Risk &
Disaster
Studies
section to
Poetry
(of course)
to the bridge
between
the smart
side of
the river &
mine to
the cafe for
conversation
Part funeral
Part miracle
The miracle
can no longer
be buried
There is
a difference
between death
by despot &
natural death
but neither's
truly painless
Pretending
there is no
loss foretells
more loss
than I could
ever shoulder
I've waited so long
Living through
catastrophe due
to no fault
of our own we
feel around
in this blackout
for everything
unseen
Yes we're
engaged
No we never
dated I
swear it's
really not
that weird
Before I woke
I banged
piano out
in a field
the floodrotten
shed in
the distance
I composed
for you w/
ham & wire
It sounded
good at
the time so
what if it
came out
sloppy it was
Peace Be
With You
sang so far
away from
church
That was nice
but we are
awake now
captured
while viewers
haven't
discovered
that craters
seen from
a distance
render these
wounds less
than their
actual size
I despise
missionaries
& their boring
positions
I'm tired of
lying on my
back just so I
can be taken
This interest
rate this
jobless stat
this market
demographic
has gotten
up to stay
human
I have almost
died again
to prove I
am a person
The library
starts over
You are
what I've
waited for
& finally
we're here
Books
gone
Shelter
gone
I've been
screaming
out of key
all day
for you to
cover
the promise
hole
in the wall w/
a horizontal
picture or
something
that looks
like joy
I've been waiting
Ah this
sunrise
again on
a failed
paradigm
this stare
too far
into space
for too long
to remember
the name of
this city
Here is
a hammer
Here is
a bulb
A number
of things can
happen like
building in
light
killing in
darkness
or touching
each other
during
our magic
hour
I trade
news links
through
militarized
playspace
to keep
witnessing
fresh
to stay out
of the back
catalogue
while
looking to
not be
abandoned
Take a sip
of war
commodity
from my
bottle when
you get here
I know you
get thirsty
You might
taste traces
of blood but
this is what
I have
to offer
The sound
you might
hear is
quiet running
counter to
anticipations
seizing on
conservation
as if shorter
showers matter
Pardon
my reach
to be
respirited
filching a cup
of memory
as memory
Are you there
This company's
the worst
The trapdoor
spiders' prey
lines up
in the web
in perfect
single file
I hate them
& I'm not
talking about
the spiders
Feed on
a symbol if
it's helpful
This phone
has hit
the wall
It still
works as
a transmitter
Call me
Where does
the exile
end & the
life begin
Your now is
three hours
before my
now & your
now is six
hours after
my now &
where in
this hell is
our future
but so far
ahead it'll be
unrecognizable
upon arrival
Not to
get all
necrocentric
but there's no
contradiction
between
the love of
flowers &
hatred of
floral
wallpaper
This was
real this is
real since
nothing
can be
destroyed
even when
pushed
into fire
I take
the cremains
to the Risk &
Disaster
Studies
section to
Poetry
(of course)
to the bridge
between
the smart
side of
the river &
mine to
the cafe for
conversation
Part funeral
Part miracle
The miracle
can no longer
be buried
There is
a difference
between death
by despot &
natural death
but neither's
truly painless
Pretending
there is no
loss foretells
more loss
than I could
ever shoulder
I've waited so long
Living through
catastrophe due
to no fault
of our own we
feel around
in this blackout
for everything
unseen
Yes we're
engaged
No we never
dated I
swear it's
really not
that weird
Before I woke
I banged
piano out
in a field
the floodrotten
shed in
the distance
I composed
for you w/
ham & wire
It sounded
good at
the time so
what if it
came out
sloppy it was
Peace Be
With You
sang so far
away from
church
That was nice
but we are
awake now
captured
while viewers
haven't
discovered
that craters
seen from
a distance
render these
wounds less
than their
actual size
I despise
missionaries
& their boring
positions
I'm tired of
lying on my
back just so I
can be taken
This interest
rate this
jobless stat
this market
demographic
has gotten
up to stay
human
I have almost
died again
to prove I
am a person
The library
starts over
You are
what I've
waited for
& finally
we're here
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Two paragraphs on "intense autobiography"
From the talk I gave at Regina Rex gallery last wkend:
Basically, I want to use intense autobiography to describe self-life-writing practices (the literal translation of auto-bio-graphy) that stray from the genre of autobiography, in which one provides the facts of their life, from birth until present, usually late in life. While intense autobiography exists in relation to these forms of self- or person- writing, it is different. And where it differs largely are in two respects: 1. That writing is not a transparent, narrative means of making self or person appear retroactively, but the very means through which the person/self comes into being in relation to a social milieu; 2. Through intense autobiography the “body”–that container demarcating human personhood and rights—becomes a site of experience and experimentation where the limits of the self are related, if not often contested, in relation to a public, community, and/or socius.
Intense autobiography can also refer to a series of practices upon the body, much as Foucault spoke of disciplinary practices in terms of a “technology” or “care” of the self. The body-self is a site where subjecthood is negotiated and contracted; where disciplinary boundaries and biological essences are tested; where the body as a territory is both mapped and deterritorialized, as in the many famous cases outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. What I want to talk about when I talk about intense autobiography is how self-life-writing demarcates social, biopolitical, and geocultural thresholds. Through forms, and not simply a received narrative writing which blandly insists on a continuous definition of self as a contained or enclosed interior, I believe writing and aesthetic forms may present the movement and passage of person/self/subject through a duration (where intensity refers to movements in time, and extension may relate movement in space). This writing is about becoming; it is about movement and undergoing; it is also about undertaking a radical empathy by which “self” and “other” and milieu and environment inform one another, as much of the most remarkable poetry and art of the 20th century has ventured. Form is necessary to the prospect of a radical autobiographical writing practice, because it is through the discovery and invention of forms that the subject becomes observable as a series a thresholds relating inter-subjective, psychosocial, and biopolitical exigency—the very urgencies that autobiography, as a genre, normally excludes.
Basically, I want to use intense autobiography to describe self-life-writing practices (the literal translation of auto-bio-graphy) that stray from the genre of autobiography, in which one provides the facts of their life, from birth until present, usually late in life. While intense autobiography exists in relation to these forms of self- or person- writing, it is different. And where it differs largely are in two respects: 1. That writing is not a transparent, narrative means of making self or person appear retroactively, but the very means through which the person/self comes into being in relation to a social milieu; 2. Through intense autobiography the “body”–that container demarcating human personhood and rights—becomes a site of experience and experimentation where the limits of the self are related, if not often contested, in relation to a public, community, and/or socius.
Intense autobiography can also refer to a series of practices upon the body, much as Foucault spoke of disciplinary practices in terms of a “technology” or “care” of the self. The body-self is a site where subjecthood is negotiated and contracted; where disciplinary boundaries and biological essences are tested; where the body as a territory is both mapped and deterritorialized, as in the many famous cases outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. What I want to talk about when I talk about intense autobiography is how self-life-writing demarcates social, biopolitical, and geocultural thresholds. Through forms, and not simply a received narrative writing which blandly insists on a continuous definition of self as a contained or enclosed interior, I believe writing and aesthetic forms may present the movement and passage of person/self/subject through a duration (where intensity refers to movements in time, and extension may relate movement in space). This writing is about becoming; it is about movement and undergoing; it is also about undertaking a radical empathy by which “self” and “other” and milieu and environment inform one another, as much of the most remarkable poetry and art of the 20th century has ventured. Form is necessary to the prospect of a radical autobiographical writing practice, because it is through the discovery and invention of forms that the subject becomes observable as a series a thresholds relating inter-subjective, psychosocial, and biopolitical exigency—the very urgencies that autobiography, as a genre, normally excludes.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
N
E
W
Y
O
R
K
(A
P)
—
N
e
w
Y
o
r
k
C
i
t
y
M
a
y
o
r
M
i
c
h
a
e
l
B
l
o
o
m
b
e
r
g
s
a
y
s
Z
u
c
c
o
t
t
i
P
a
r
k
w
a
s
e
v
a
c
u
a
t
e
d
i
n
t
h
e
m
i
d
d
l
e
o
f
t
h
e
n
i
g
h
t
"to reduce the risk of confrontation."
H
e
s
a
i
d
i
n
a
s
t
a
t
e
m
e
n
t
e
a
r
l
y
T
u
e
s
d
a
y
m
o
r
n
i
n
g
t
h
a
t
i
t
w
a
s
a
l
s
o
c
o
n
d
u
c
t
e
d
o
v
e
r
n
i
g
h
t
"to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighborhood."
B
l
o
o
m
b
e
r
g
s
a
y
s
p
r
o
t
e
s
t
e
r
s
w
i
l
l
b
e
a
l
l
o
w
e
d
b
a
c
k
i
n
t
h
e
p
a
r
k
a
f
t
e
r
i
t
i
s
c
l
e
a
n
e
d
.
B
u
t
h
e
s
a
y
s
p
r
o
t
e
s
t
e
r
s
w
i
l
l
n
o
t
b
e
a
l
l
o
w
e
d
t
o
u
s
e
t
e
n
t
s
,
s
l
e
e
p
i
n
g
b
a
g
s,
o
r
t
a
r
p
s
a
n
d
w
i
l
l
h
a
v
e
t
o
f
o
l
l
o
w
a
l
l
p
a
r
k
r
u
l
e
s.
H
e
s
a
y
s
the law
t
h
a
t
c
r
e
a
t
e
d
Z
u
c
c
o
t
t
i
P
a
r
k
r
e
q
u
i
r
e
d
t
h
a
t
i
t
b
e
o
p
e
n
f
o
r
t
h
e
p
u
b
l
i
c
t
o
e
n
j
o
y
f
o
r
passive recreation
2
4
h
o
u
r
s
a
d
a
y.
S
i
n
c
e
t
h
e
O
c
c
u
p
y
W
a
l
l
S
t
r
e
e
t
p
r
o
t
e
s
t
e
r
s
t
o
o
k
i
t
o
v
e
r
a
l
m
o
s
t
t
w
o
m
o
n
t
h
s
a
g
o,
h
e
s
a
y
s
i
t
h
a
s
n
o
t
been available to anyone else.
E
W
Y
O
R
K
(A
P)
—
N
e
w
Y
o
r
k
C
i
t
y
M
a
y
o
r
M
i
c
h
a
e
l
B
l
o
o
m
b
e
r
g
s
a
y
s
Z
u
c
c
o
t
t
i
P
a
r
k
w
a
s
e
v
a
c
u
a
t
e
d
i
n
t
h
e
m
i
d
d
l
e
o
f
t
h
e
n
i
g
h
t
"to reduce the risk of confrontation."
H
e
s
a
i
d
i
n
a
s
t
a
t
e
m
e
n
t
e
a
r
l
y
T
u
e
s
d
a
y
m
o
r
n
i
n
g
t
h
a
t
i
t
w
a
s
a
l
s
o
c
o
n
d
u
c
t
e
d
o
v
e
r
n
i
g
h
t
"to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighborhood."
B
l
o
o
m
b
e
r
g
s
a
y
s
p
r
o
t
e
s
t
e
r
s
w
i
l
l
b
e
a
l
l
o
w
e
d
b
a
c
k
i
n
t
h
e
p
a
r
k
a
f
t
e
r
i
t
i
s
c
l
e
a
n
e
d
.
B
u
t
h
e
s
a
y
s
p
r
o
t
e
s
t
e
r
s
w
i
l
l
n
o
t
b
e
a
l
l
o
w
e
d
t
o
u
s
e
t
e
n
t
s
,
s
l
e
e
p
i
n
g
b
a
g
s,
o
r
t
a
r
p
s
a
n
d
w
i
l
l
h
a
v
e
t
o
f
o
l
l
o
w
a
l
l
p
a
r
k
r
u
l
e
s.
H
e
s
a
y
s
the law
t
h
a
t
c
r
e
a
t
e
d
Z
u
c
c
o
t
t
i
P
a
r
k
r
e
q
u
i
r
e
d
t
h
a
t
i
t
b
e
o
p
e
n
f
o
r
t
h
e
p
u
b
l
i
c
t
o
e
n
j
o
y
f
o
r
passive recreation
2
4
h
o
u
r
s
a
d
a
y.
S
i
n
c
e
t
h
e
O
c
c
u
p
y
W
a
l
l
S
t
r
e
e
t
p
r
o
t
e
s
t
e
r
s
t
o
o
k
i
t
o
v
e
r
a
l
m
o
s
t
t
w
o
m
o
n
t
h
s
a
g
o,
h
e
s
a
y
s
i
t
h
a
s
n
o
t
been available to anyone else.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Until time and justice are one
Or we are forgiven
Movement heals our wounds while
It opens a million more
While you opened, while
Your mouth opened, I heard
The throat do its thing.
I heard the song express
A million things about
What we are here for,
Thinking about the generations
We turn around them
While they turn around us,
To assemble those burdens
The dance called out,
Into the heat of air
That leavens, leaves us burned.
Or we are forgiven
Movement heals our wounds while
It opens a million more
While you opened, while
Your mouth opened, I heard
The throat do its thing.
I heard the song express
A million things about
What we are here for,
Thinking about the generations
We turn around them
While they turn around us,
To assemble those burdens
The dance called out,
Into the heat of air
That leavens, leaves us burned.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Chase Granoff's intuition is preceding over my understanding. (@ The Chocolate Factory)
intuition is preceding over my understanding.
by CHASE GRANOFF
Collaborators and contributors:
Megan Byrne
Jon Moniaci
F.P. Boué
Thom Donovan
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
November 16-19, 2011
8 o'clock pm
tickets $15
Chase Granoff’s intuition is preceding over my understanding. is a solo performance of a landscape exploring an expression of time and place, present and past. Interested in the movements of sustainability, slow and local and how they can be applicable to choreographic thought as expressed through improvisation and score, this choreographic exhibition will unfold through a multitude of expressions in hopes of offering various perspectives of the questions that created it - grounded in the honesty and transparency of the bread that will be offered.
Considering the Steve Paxton quote "researched the fiction of cultured dance and the 'truth' of improvisation" – is choreography an aesthetics of change? How is my interest in bread making part of a dance (life) practice? Is dance a politics? This solo has something to do with becoming a father. Re-becoming a dancer.
For tickets, please visit www.chocolatefactorytheater.org or call (212) 352-3101.
Post-show drink specials courtesy of Dominie's Hoek, El Ay Si, The Creek & Cave.
by CHASE GRANOFF
Collaborators and contributors:
Megan Byrne
Jon Moniaci
F.P. Boué
Thom Donovan
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
November 16-19, 2011
8 o'clock pm
tickets $15
Chase Granoff’s intuition is preceding over my understanding. is a solo performance of a landscape exploring an expression of time and place, present and past. Interested in the movements of sustainability, slow and local and how they can be applicable to choreographic thought as expressed through improvisation and score, this choreographic exhibition will unfold through a multitude of expressions in hopes of offering various perspectives of the questions that created it - grounded in the honesty and transparency of the bread that will be offered.
Considering the Steve Paxton quote "researched the fiction of cultured dance and the 'truth' of improvisation" – is choreography an aesthetics of change? How is my interest in bread making part of a dance (life) practice? Is dance a politics? This solo has something to do with becoming a father. Re-becoming a dancer.
For tickets, please visit www.chocolatefactorytheater.org or call (212) 352-3101.
Post-show drink specials courtesy of Dominie's Hoek, El Ay Si, The Creek & Cave.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
On Hannah Weiner and Intense Autobiography (at Regina Rex gallery)
Lectures by Thom Donovan and Melissa Scherrer
accompany the current exhibition DÉJÀ VU
Saturday, November 12 @ 1pm
Regina Rex
17-17 Troutman, #329, Queens, NY 11385
Hours Sat & Sun 12-6pm and by appointment
Contact: info@reginarex.org or 646.467.2232
IMAGES: (left) Hannah Weiner (photo c. Tom Ahern 1978), (right) The Predictive Almanac of 2009
Thom Donovan
Thom Donovan will discuss the concept of "intense autobiography" found in the work of poet Hannah Weiner (1928-1997) whose life and writings were so inextricably linked. Weiner perceived innovation as both performance and survival tool, and her embodied condition as clairvoyant journalist/schizophrenic led to some of the most personal and psychologically complex texts of her time. Donovan is a poet, essayist, art writer, curator, teacher, editor and archivist. He edits Wild Horses Of Fire weblog, ON Contemporary Practice, and writes regularly for Art21 and The Brooklyn Rail. His first book, The Hole, will be out later this fall with Displaced Press.
Melissa Scherrer
In 2008, Scherrer made an artist book with her artist/husband Mike Pare called the 2009 Predictive Almanac. Now out of print, the golden booklet was a self-help guide containing home remedies to deal with astrological predictions for the following year. Scherrer will tell us about this book and offer us predictions for 2012. The audience will also be invited to participate in an interactive personal development session. Scherrer resides in New Mexico with her husband and daughter, where she makes paintings, photographs and paintings on photographs and teaches at the University of New Mexico.
DÉJÀ VU includes artists Ivin Ballen, Tatiana Berg, Lisa Sigal, Frank Trankina and Selina Trepp. The exhibition is up until November 20th and was recently reviewed in WagMag.
-------------
Regina Rex is an artist-run exhibition space located at 1717 Troutman, in Ridgewood, Queens. We are open on Saturdays and Sundays, 12-6pm.
Directions: L train to Jefferson, exit, walking along Wyckoff to Troutman. Walk up (north) on Troutman two blocks, passing St. Nicholas and Cypress, to a large brick building on the left. Regina Rex is in suite #329.
If you would like more information, or an appointment outside of gallery hours, please email info@reginarex.org or call 646-467-2232.
accompany the current exhibition DÉJÀ VU
Saturday, November 12 @ 1pm
Regina Rex
17-17 Troutman, #329, Queens, NY 11385
Hours Sat & Sun 12-6pm and by appointment
Contact: info@reginarex.org or 646.467.2232

Thom Donovan
Thom Donovan will discuss the concept of "intense autobiography" found in the work of poet Hannah Weiner (1928-1997) whose life and writings were so inextricably linked. Weiner perceived innovation as both performance and survival tool, and her embodied condition as clairvoyant journalist/schizophrenic led to some of the most personal and psychologically complex texts of her time. Donovan is a poet, essayist, art writer, curator, teacher, editor and archivist. He edits Wild Horses Of Fire weblog, ON Contemporary Practice, and writes regularly for Art21 and The Brooklyn Rail. His first book, The Hole, will be out later this fall with Displaced Press.
Melissa Scherrer
In 2008, Scherrer made an artist book with her artist/husband Mike Pare called the 2009 Predictive Almanac. Now out of print, the golden booklet was a self-help guide containing home remedies to deal with astrological predictions for the following year. Scherrer will tell us about this book and offer us predictions for 2012. The audience will also be invited to participate in an interactive personal development session. Scherrer resides in New Mexico with her husband and daughter, where she makes paintings, photographs and paintings on photographs and teaches at the University of New Mexico.
DÉJÀ VU includes artists Ivin Ballen, Tatiana Berg, Lisa Sigal, Frank Trankina and Selina Trepp. The exhibition is up until November 20th and was recently reviewed in WagMag.
-------------
Regina Rex is an artist-run exhibition space located at 1717 Troutman, in Ridgewood, Queens. We are open on Saturdays and Sundays, 12-6pm.
Directions: L train to Jefferson, exit, walking along Wyckoff to Troutman. Walk up (north) on Troutman two blocks, passing St. Nicholas and Cypress, to a large brick building on the left. Regina Rex is in suite #329.
If you would like more information, or an appointment outside of gallery hours, please email info@reginarex.org or call 646-467-2232.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)