from Teaching Poems

As if it was, and often it was, the only cultural capital we had

the present but fugitive body

iconicity is a form of make-over

a void we inhabit

see how really caught they are

the emptying out of self as a strategy

an autistic contiguous mode of thinking

the cuts are felt like characters

the cut (human sampling) is psychotic

—with language from Glenn Ligon

*

The brick nature of it

the inherently unforgiving footprint for natural light

sunlight is directional

is it a point in motion?

find a way to break the system

the real townhouse problem

space itself is moving

when they connect they make something new, a new pose

*

A whiff of what life may be

we’ve not yet seen what a collective body can do

and we don’t even run away

that’s when we discovered tear gas doesn’t kill you

it’s not a weekend

I’ll step up this wreck

a sense of care for the social body in the moment after the crest

—with language from David Buuck

*

Very very very felt

sense of the simultaneous vacancy and presence

weightless/absence/words with ‘less’

a delineated presence that describes his absence

a lack/a half-desire

landscape-wise and temporally

when something becomes legible it becomes real

the language of the destroyer

stardescent soul

piles-up into thresholds

how you can talk about the scope of the universe

sort of God but really vague

paradoxes that are always present

*

An essence of movement

to make the rich think

dead ducks don’t need duck calls

being surrounded by human terms

pressing the leaf and the sound

gives the vegetable a voice

demanding that truth comes from context

this is a really sad poem

a remnant of the somatic

*

Not a person but a collection

collective thread not by race, gender

we are all… we are responsible for our actions

poetry as crystallization of time and place

architecture as crystallization of culture

what is movement

To see crisis not as a great hill…

We are concerned with movement / and stealing a little bit of life / in the metropolis

going into battle

            sounded like a dance when the police were tossing that woman

sort of like melodramatic

            describing it in the true form of what was happening

the art of rebellion is strange to me

            rebellion is awkward violence is awkward

the artistic remediation changes the reality

            just before the battle starts, the music

—with language from Jackqueline Frost’s The Antidote

*

Replace the word ‘write’ with ‘dance’

            you are collaborating with time

—with language from CA Conrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon

*

Stalking what people want us to see

            we want our names to last forever

the sass given back to people

            the kitschy items make up her personality

dresses like the Internet 

            the Internet persona before the Internet persona came about

over culture

*

Soft-eyed asshole

            soaking up my blue

breathe into a fire and it grows

            sounds that were sort of like words

music has a way of demanding space

            to divorce from the analytical

how expressive his whole being is

            words and languages being a civilization of sound

tone worlds

            a place is not made of its component parts… but sound

coming from silence and being born

            what does it mean to write down and print one of his poems?

the lyric is a sign that speaking is taking place

*

Wedded to this order and sequencing

            it’s a little alone

—with language from Fred Moten’s B Jenkins

*

Recognition, recognition of misrecognition, misrecognition of misrecognition

Dirty Flows

—for David Buuck 

What buries us

And what we buried

Hearing at the limits

Of what we will have

Heard

Any body

Hold me like a

Sound over the water

Of history dirt doesn’t

Bother to write

When what we can’t

See kills me

I can’t see the

Bottom of the words

What will have been

The price we paid

Another amusement

Enacting afterglow

Cross-breeze and

Dirty flows

*

The battlefield air

The battlefield water

Someone said Canada

Is the Saudi Arabia

Of water

If what we do

Is a project

I am the rejectamenta

Of what sounds

The marching armies

Made

I am that army

Of effects before

Their causes made

A sound

I am form

And I am wave

*

What will have been

Green the soldiers

Shepherd common being

In a future we

Can’t perceive

In a past

We don’t depend

On when

Where doesn’t matter

Repeat the dirt

In your veins

The fire in the voyage.

Notebook fragment ("Dear Julie")

I asked my students to write letters and to make those letters into poems. This was a letter I wrote, after seeing Julie Ault's Macho Man, Tell it to My Heart at Artists Space this past winter.

Dear Julie,

I keep thinking about your show at Artists Space, Macho Man, Tell it to My Heart, which closed this past Friday, sadly. I wanted all my students to see it, all of New York really. Because it was transformative in a way that art is rarely transformative. All of those objects together, hung salon-style on the walls of the space, without plaque or caption. Without names art is leveled. We see truly the work itself—the pleasure it gives us—and its place within a larger ensemble. I went to the show with my friend Arnold. And between the two of us we could piece together who did most of the works. But then there were pieces we also loved and couldn’t attribute, like the painting of a girl washing the floor, all that water represented in bold, athletic strokes of green paint. The way her labor was desultory, joyous. We were left wondering who nailed a bag of marbles to the wall and placed one playing card beside it, a magical pairing of objects. Arnold said, why don’t more artists do that? I couldn’t believe you had two Paul Thek newspaper paintings. And I loved the Felix Gonzalez-Torres light bulbs, which I would have missed had Arnold not pointed them out. Often I wonder what our relationship to art should be. Your show illuminates this question. To acquire works as an act of friendship; to have all of these precious objects together as a reminder of what gives (and gives and gives) your life meaning. To mourn the dead because the objects—their physical proximity and placement among each other—make us feel that they are present again. 

2nd Edition of Jackqueline Frost's The Antidote

order here

Parsons MFA Thesis Symposium

VIDA feature on The Claudius App

A handful of friends asked me what was going on after I spoke up at Facebook against the vile editorial practices of the The Claudius App. So quickly did the editors, Jeff Nagy and Eric Linsker (who never issued an explanation, let alone an apology for their misogynist editorial) take down the offending content, that there was nothing to point those friends to. VIDA just posted a feature, with statements from Eileen Myles and Dorothea Lasky, and screen captures of the content in question: http://www.vidaweb.org/reports-from-the-field/

THEK

Here is a poem The Academy of American Poets ran today, written after Paul Thek. Happy May Day!

Fiona Templeton's MEDEAD

"I've been listening to Fiona Templeton and her collaborators read this choric poem/drama for over a decade. In it I hear all of contemporary English open to a force of collective enunciation (nation language, idiolect) against 'standard' English and the economic and gender-based violence it has facilitated from its inception into our present. Superseding all instrumental violence in this long poem/drama is a sustained attention to language not so much as nonsensical or semiotic as widening into larger ambivalences, potential, and subtle vocalizations (phonemics, neologism, homophony)--an anti-epic border song marking the shifting and thus precarious territorial claims of an Anglophone geopolitical unconscious."

Nick Sturm on "the critical performance of translation" in The Sonnets

http://isaidokwow.tumblr.com/post/83715594859/the-critical-performance-of-translation-in-the

Interview with Brazil, Frost, and Kennedy at BOMB

From October 2013 until February 2014 I conducted this interview with David Brazil, Jackqueline Frost, and Evan Kennedy for BOMB. There are so many highlights I don't really know where to begin excerpting. It is pretty much all excerptible, in fact. Too sublime to excerpt. I feel so honored to have been able to suss out  how their 2012 books came about in relation to Occupy Oakland, the East Bay poetry community, and their friendships with one another.

6 Morning Talks @ The Kitchen

Andy Fitch edited this great book of interviews, 60 Morning Talks, which I will be reading from with Shanna Compton, Dorothea Lasky, Tan Lin, Christopher Schmidt, and Jenny Zhang this Wednesday at The Kitchen.

The Sensation Feelings Journal

A poem that I wrote after Michael Clark's incredible dance film, Hail the New Puritan, is up at the inaugural issue of Connie Mae Oliver's web zine, The Sensation Feelings Journal, which includes work from CAConrad, Christina Drill, Sarah Feeley, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, Gracie Leavitt, and others.

TO LOOK AT THE SEA IS TO BECOME WHAT ONE IS

Wednesday night at the Poetry Project myself and others will be celebrating the launch of the Etel Adnan Reader, which I edited with Brandon Shimoda for Nightboat Books. Please come hear folks read from the book and celebrate Etel's incredible life's work in words.

Left Melancholy in LIT 25

A big chunk of Left Melancholy appears in LIT 25, along with work by Jackqueline Frost, Harold Abramowitz, Franklin Bruno and other favorites. Thanks to Jeff T. Johnson, editor extraordinaire.

Maggy 5

I have some poems in Maggy 5. "Blood Mooon," for Etel Adnan. "Sublime Anger," after David Wojnarowicz. "Lit," for Marissa Perel. And "Impassed," for Beth Murray.

Thank you to Adam Fitzgerald!

Forthcoming 2014

UnAmerican Activities (reading)

Interview with Ben Kinmont in Whitney Biennial 2014 catalogue

I have a brief interview here with my friend Ben Kinmont, whose work is featured in this year's biennial.

New PDFs at ON: Buuck, Collis, Webb, Workman

ON Contemporary Practice is pleased to announce that we have added four new PDFs to our website:

 

David Buuck on cris cheek

Stephen Collis on "poetry in protest"

Jeanine Webb on "weak intimacy, celebrity, and Bay Area poetics"

Elisabeth Workman "towards a bardo poetics"

To contribute to ON’s PDF Archive Series please check-out our submission guidelines.

To order the first book in our Monograph Series, SUPPLE SCIENCE: a Robert Kocik Primer, click here. 

 

oncontemporarypractice@gmail.com
on-contemporarypractice.squarespace.com

 

Meta/discourse syllabus

Visual Poetics

Meta/discourse

Thom Donovan

wildhorsesoffire [at] gmail [dot] com

Course Description

In this class I would like to foreground poetic writing as a social phenomena, especially with regards to technological trends (from cinema to sampling techniques to social media) and with regards to questions of how art is conditioned by the event of community, friendship, and encounter. In the first weeks of the class we will take up a few theoretical and non-literary texts that will help us ground what I am calling “metadiscourse,” by which I mean any mode of communication (aesthetic or otherwise) concerned with examining its own reason for being. We will look at a series of poems from the 1930s until the present, which incorporate correspondence (epistolary) and other forms of direct communication with an addressee/interlocutor. We will also spend some time thinking about recent poetries that have laid bare their own discursive frameworks through the use of the space of the page, typography and other design elements, and through the provision of certain paratexts, by which I mean texts supplementary to the primary content of a particular work (bibliography, index, footnotes/endnotes, etc.). Whether it be rap, or Internet poetry, or poetry that draws upon social networks and community participation for its content, I am primarily interested in examining the ramifications of how writers make visible their apparatus, whether that be the page, screen, online platform, or physical (‘real life’) milieu. How does this ‘making visible’ produce authenticity—a feeling that something is being immediately communicated—through what would seem a paradoxical means: the artful display of a work’s technical mediation? To what extent is metadiscourse ethical inasmuch as it prioritizes forms of intimacy, friendship, and relationships that sustain and nourish community? Can we also consider a politics of metadiscourse, if only a micropolitics—a politics practiced on the scale of localized, particular relationships among individuals and groups?

Required Texts

The Yale Anthology of Rap (ed. Bradley and DuBois)

Etel Adnan’s Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz) 

Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton 

Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too 

Dana Ward’s The Crisis of Infinite Worlds 

Stephanie Young’s Ursula or University 

Schedule

January 16^th    Introduction

--What is metadiscourse? Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera with Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik and Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (excerpts)

Readings: M.M. Bakhtin’s “The Problems of Speech Genres” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Quotation and Originality” (http://www.emersoncentral.com/quotations.htm)

Janaury 23rd   What is Metadiscourse? cont’d

Readings: Kristin Ross’s The Emergence of Social Space (excerpts) and Arthur Rimbaud poems (TBA)

January 30^th     Language and the Creation of Social Space (I)

Readings: Excerpts from Louis Zukosfky’s “A”, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems, Langston Hughson’s “Theme for English B,” and selections from Frank O’Hara’s work (TBA)

Recommended:

The Letters of Emily Dickinson (ed. Johnson)

Viktor Shklovsky’s Third Factory

Viktor Shklovsky’s Zoo, or Letters Not About Love

Jack Spicer's "After Lorca" from The Collected Books of Jack Spicer
Ted Berrigan’s Dear Sandy, Hello

Arakawa & Gins’ Making Dying Illegal

Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters

Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy

Charles Bernstein’s “Dear Mr. Fanelli” (from All the Whiskey in Heaven)

Eileen Myles’ “An American Poem” (from Not Me)

Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker

Julia Bloch’s Letters to Kelly Clarkson

Dana Ward’s “Between Here & There” (from This Can’t Be Life)

Karen Weiser's Dear Pierre
Esther Lee’s The Blank Missives (http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/blank_missives/)

Joseph Mosconi’s Tender Comrade

February 6^th    Composition Through Epistolary (I)

Readings: Susan Howe’s “Eikon Basilike: a Bibliography of the King’s Book” with Rachel Tzivia Back’s Led by Language (excerpt)

February 13^th  “Small trespas to misprison”: Mis/quotation and Meta/discourse

Readings: Tyrone Williams’ “I am not proud to be black”

February 20^th  Citationality and Social Space

Readings: The Yale Anthology of Rap and Rap Genius (http://rapgenius.com).

Recommended:

Tricia Rose’s Black Noise

Jospeh G. Schloss’ Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop

Adam Krims’ Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity

Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (http://cantstopwontstop.com)

Josh Kun’s Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America

February 27^th  Rap as Metadiscourse

Readings: Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton and Dan Thomas-Glass’ The Great American Beat Jack

Recommended:

T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

John Taggart’s Loop

Tan Lin’s “Disco as Operating System” (http://www.aphasic-letters.com/heath/Lin-Tan_Disco-as-Operating-System_Criticism_2008.pdf)

Rodrigo Toscano’s “Transitions of Capitalist Hyperspace (shake your booty) [part 5 of 5]” (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/toscano/Toscano_CPPR_Part_5.pdf)

Latasha N. Nevada Diggs’ TwERK

Judith Goldman’s l.b.; or, catenaries

Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts: the Remix
Dana Ward’s “Poppy” (http://theclaudiusapp.com/5-ward.html)

Paolo Javier’s 60 lv bo(e)mbs

March 6^th        SPRING BREAK

March 13^th      DJ Poetics

(visit from Jamie Kelly)

Readings: Etel Adnan’s Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz)

Recommended:

Etel Adnan’s To Look At The Sea Is To Become What One Is: an Etel Adnan Reader

Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture

Jalal Toufic’s Vampires (2^nd ed.)

March 20^th      Composition Through Epistolary (II)

Readings: Jack Frost’s The Antidote, “Poetry During OWS” feature at Rethinking Marxism (http://www.wildhorsesoffire.org/files/poetry-during-ows.pdf), and other Occupy materials TBA

March 27^th      Language and the Creation of Social Space (II)

(visit from David Buuck)

Readings: Dana Ward’s The Crisis of Infinite Worlds

Recommended:

Jack Spicer’s The Collected Books of Jack Spicer

Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You”

Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds

Robert Gluck’s Elements

Eileen Myles’ The Importance of Being Iceland

Tyrone Williams’ Pink Tie

Fred Moten’s B Jenkins

CA Conrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon

Julian T. Brolaski’s Gowanus Atropolis

Brandon Brown’s The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus

David Wolach’s Hospitalogy

April 3^rd          Poetics of Friendship

Readings: Excerpts from Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social (http://dss-edit.com/plu/Latour_Reassembling.pdf)

April 10^th        Network Poetics (I)

Readings: Tan Lin’s HEATH (http://aphasic-letters.com/heath/)

Recommended:

Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry By Other Means in the New Century

Tan Lin’s Tumblr site (http://tanlin.tumblr.com)

Craig Dworkin’s No Medium

Brian Reed’s Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics

Christopher Alexander’s Panda and interview with Kristen Gallagher (https://jacket2.org/commentary/how-it-works-i-technical-supports)

Cory Arcangel’s “A couple of thousand short films about Glenn Gould” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89ZueN7Szy0) and website (http://www.coryarcangel.com)

Danny Snelson’s Heath, prelude to tracing the actor as network (http://aphasic-letters.com/heath/)

Rhizome (https://www.google.com/#q=rhizome.org)

Gauss PDF (http://www.gauss-pdf.com)

Dexter Sinister’s Dot Dot Dot and Bulletins of the Serving Library (http://www.dextersinister.org)

April 17^th        Network Poetics (II)

Readings: Stephanie Young’s Ursula or University

Recommended:

Samuel R. Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Suzanne Lacy’s Leaving Art

Tom Finkelperl’s What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation

Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation

Life as Form (ed. Nato Thompson)

Renee Gladman’s Newcomer Can’t Swim

A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (ed. Rosenthal)

Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (ed. Peterson and Tolbert)

Thom Donovan’s The Hole

April 24^th        Writing as Community Practice

Readings: Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too

Recommended:

Andy Warhol’s A: a Novel

Ray Johnson’s Correspondence School

Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journals (in draft form: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/m504/index.html)

Ed Friedman’s Telephone Book

Kevin Killian’s Amazon reviews

Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick

Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt

Rob Fitterman Now We Are Friends (http://truckbooks.org/pdfs/Fitterman_NWAF.pdf)

Flarf Collective (http://jacketmagazine.com/30/fl-intro.html)

Anselm Berrigan's & Jonathan Allen's Loading
Kristen Gallagher's We Are Here (http://truckbooks.org/pdfs/Gallagher_WAH.pdf)
Anne Boyer’s “The Day Steve Jobs Died”

Sue Landers’ What I Was Tweeting While You Were on Facebook

Joseph Bradshaw’s “Of Being Numerous” and “The New York School” (http://electiveaffinitiesusa.blogspot.com/2013/02/joseph-bradshaw.html)

Jackqueline Frost’s The Soft Appeal

Kate Durbin's "Tumblr is the only place I don't pretend I'm okay" (http://vimeo.com/36453047)
Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge

Sophia Le Fraga’s I DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET and I RL, YOU RL

May 1^st           Poetry after Social Media

            (Final work due)