Left Melancholic @ Patreon

Left Melancholic @ Patreon is an archive for writings and other materials dating back to 1999, including published and unpublished poems, essays, statements, notes, and criticism. It will also present an open notebook/studio for incubating current projects. By supporting this page you can contribute to my livelihood as a writer and independent researcher. To subscribe click on the button in the right-hand column.

Dispatches from the Institute of Incoherent Geography, Vol. 1

I have a contribution in this wonderful and curious anthology, edited by Carla Nappi and Dominic Pettman, devoted to “incoherent geography”!

OVERWRITTEN questionnaire

When in your life have you wanted to write, but couldn’t? When have you had to stop writing? How did this affect your sense of being a writer? How may it have changed your writing?

In what ways is writing separate from your other practices, and in what ways is it integrated? Do you intend writing to be separate from other things you do? If so, why? Would you like to integrate them better? If so, how might you accomplish this?

Describe a project you have abandoned, whether a writing project or something else, that you would like to return to. Why would you like to return to it? What problems do you foresee in returning to it and attempting to revisit, revise, or complete it?

In what ways is duration an active quality in your work? How does the passing of time (or the fact of time having passed) contribute to what you produce as a writer/artist?

Given the fact that under misogynist racial capitalism we all live with intermittent crises to varying degrees and in different ways (whether racial discrimination, gendered violence, the exploitation of our labor, sickness, poverty, displacement, a lack of resources, etc.), how have such crises shaped your processes as a writer/artist? With the manifestation of a work, do these crises remain present in the work? If so, how?

In the absence of such crises, how might you hope to write or make work differently?

In what ways has “failure” facilitated the making of your work? Describe a work you have made that has been a “success” insofar as it has manifested from, or managed to address, its beginnings in failure?

In what ways does “not writing” (non-productivity) constitute a rhythm/rhythms for your work (productivity)?

Have you ever stopped writing/making for an ethical and/or political reason? If so, describe. What, if anything, were the consequences of stopping? In what ways may this “stopping” have produced something of value, albeit inadvertently?

Are there certain subjects or is there certain content that you feel your work can only address negatively, through their exclusion; which is to say, by not writing about them, or by only addressing them through restraint? If so, describe.

Are there ways you feel like you cannot write? Are there genres that you feel you cannot write in, because you are barred from writing in them, or because you feel that they do not serve you or others like you? If so, describe.

What genres most serve you and others like you? What genres do you feel you need to invent, because they may be able to serve yourself and others like you? What, if any, genres should be abandoned, avoided, or abolished?

COUNTER-DESECRATION: Collective Remedying // Launch

On Earth Day, The Poetry Project will host the East Coast launch of Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed and published by Wesleyan University Press. Join editor Linda Russo and contributors Thom Donovan, Marcella Durand, Brenda Iijima, E.J. McAdams, Evelyn Reilly, and Asiya Wadud as they share their terms, repurposed words, and neologisms from the collective glossary that map approaches to the interlinked social, economic, and environmental forces that shape relations between places, individuals, and other species imperiled in the Anthropocene. Event will include contributor readings/performances and a roundtable.

OVERWRITTEN Seminar at Wendy's Subway

1. 
2. PUBLISHER-IN-RESIDENCE: unbag
   March-April 2019
   
   Wendy's Subway is pleased to announce unbag as Publisher-in-Residence in March and April 2019. Join unbag and Wendy’s Subway for a series of workshops, seminars, and walking tours centered around discussions of politics, place, and entropy. Featuring contributions from Thom Donovan, Xavier Acarin, Zahra Patterson, and J Olson, the programs are part of unbag’s forthcoming issue, set for release in Summer 2019.
   
   Books selected by unbag contributors will be on view at Wendy's Subway through April. 
   About unbag
   unbag is a New York City-based community arts organization that produces a digital and print publication promoting critical engagement with contemporary art and politics.
   Visit the unbag website here.
3. OVERWRITTEN: Writing the failure, impossibility, and resurrection of the book
   Seminar led by Thom Donovan
   Saturday, March 23, 2-5pm
   Capacity: 12 participants
   Cost: $20-50 (sliding scale)
   Register here.
   
   This seminar will look at four seminal ante-generic texts, all of which address the book as an objectification of failure, impasse, impossibility, crisis, and/or withdrawal: Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women, Renee Gladman’s To After That (TOAF), Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieu, and Stephanie Young’s Ursula or University. Pressing for our discussion will be questions and problems these books raise regarding genre, and particularly the impossibility for certain subjects to write in certain genres (e.g., memoir and the novel), as well as the necessity of the invention of new genres for impassed subjects. I also hope to discuss a question that is both practical and ontological: What happens when we return to, rewrite, and revise previous works, particularly works that, for any number of reasons, never found publication/objectification in print/as a book? Of what does this encounter consist, and what possibilities does it open up for the writer? In the case that the work’s publication was avoided, abandoned, or withdrawn, how might the work be “resurrected” (overwritten, rewritten, written-into, extended, re-contextualized, and supplemented in/for the present)?
   
   It is recommended that participants read all four books in full in advance of the seminar. Digital copies can be provided upon request.
   
   Thom Donovan is the author of numerous books, including Withdrawn (Compline, 2017), The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012) and Withdrawn: a Discourse (Shifter, 2016). He co-edits and publishes ON Contemporary Practice. He is also the editor of Occupy Poetics (Essay Press, 2015); To Look At The Sea Is To Become What One Is: an Etel Adnan Reader (with Brandon Shimoda; Nightboat Books, 2014), Supple Science: a Robert Kocik Primer (with Michael Cross; ON Contemporary Practice, 2013), and Wild Horses of Fire. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University. His current projects include a book of poems and other writings based upon the compositions of Julius Eastman, a book of critical essays regarding poetics, political practice, and the occult, and an ongoing "ante-memoir" entitled Left Melancholy.

PennSound update

The following readings and presentation have been added to my PennSound author page:

Internal Presentation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, August 2014

"Delays in Glass: Social Media Poetics" Talk at Virginia Commonwealth University, November 2014

"The Art of Withdrawal" Talk for Patrick F. Durgin's "Poetics of Agony" course, Art Institute of Chicago, October 2015

Reading with Cassandra Troyan at Sector 2337, Chicago, IL, October 28, 2015

Reading for Melissa Buzzeo's BFA Workshop, Pratt Institute, New York City, May 2, 2016

Reading with Anna Vitale at the Zinc Bar, October 30, 2016

Withdrawn: A Discourse Book Launch, Printed Matter, NYC, November 2016

Segue Series Reading at the Zinc Bar, April 15, 2017

On the Occult (Speculative Arts Research vol. 2)

Thanks to friend and artist-editor extraordinaire Max Razdow for including an essay of mine (on occult poetics) in the 2nd issue of his journal, Speculative Arts Research. "What, I wonder, becomes the sense of theory (or a theory of the senses) when one becomes synaesthesiac in the wake of the disaster; when what we see also makes us hear (or touch, or smell, or taste)? Where hearing in fact supersedes seeing, overcoming the hegemony of the ocular? [...] What, too, if our common sense involves a negation of the senses? A withdrawal into the eidetic, the subtle; into non-representational modes of meaning-making (such are sound and gesture and movement)? At what point does language, as that upon which our common sense largely depends, become non-meaningful, does it refuse the reduction of “nonmeaning” and “phonic substance” for a “universal grammar” [...]?"

On Eléna Rivera's Scaffolding

An introduction I gave for Eléna Rivera at the 92Y two springs ago has been happily archived as a micro review at Galatea Resurrects, regarding her incredible book Scaffolding.

Language as Art

Week 1 Manifestos

Recommended book: Mary Ann Caws’s Manifestos (anthology)

Exercise: With a critical sense of the manifesto as a “genre” of (art) writing, compose an original manifesto addressing your work and beliefs as an artist. To the extent that your work is collaborative/group-oriented, consider how your manifesto may also represent the interests of your collaborators/group?

Week 2 Typography

Recommended texts: An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (ed. Emmett Williams), Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma (film), Adam Pendleton’s Becoming Imperceptible, and N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix

Exercise: Using any medium/format, compose an original work of art that uses typography in a significant way. How may your use of typography draw attention to current conditions of print technologies (online and off)? How might it also investigate how typography has been used historically in advertising, printed matter, signage, fashion, and/or other works of art? What do your choices of font and design values intend?

Week 3 Artists’ Books

Recommended books: Johanna Drucker’s A Century of Artists’ Books and Artists’ Books: Visual Studies Workshop Press 1971-2008

Exercise: Produce an original artists’ book. How may your own book extend, critique, and/or revisit a previous discourse of artists’ books? In what ways may your book not be merely a vessel for other works of art, but a work of art in itself? To what extent can the book’s construction and choices of materials (physical or digital) inflect certain aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political values? To what extent may your book function performatively, gesturally, and/or theatrically?

Week 4 Feminisms

Recommended books: M/E/A/N/I/N/G (ed. Susan Bee & Mira Schor); We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-1985 A Sourcebook.

Exercise: Consider the historical use of language/text by various feminist-identified artists. Create an original work of art that mediates your “feminism” through the use of language. To what extent are particular uses of language gendered? What is the relationship between language and embodiment (a principal concern of many feminist artists)? How, too, may language express a content specific to women (whether cis-identified, trans, or otherwise)?  

Week 5 Performance Writing + Screenplay

Recommended texts: Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama (Whitney Museum catalogue), PAJ Journal (ed. Bonnie Marranca)

Recommended artists: Trisha Baga, Guy Ben Ner, Sadie Benning, Gregg Bordowitz, Mark Bradford, Janet Cardiff, Omer Fast, Richard Foreman, Coco Fusco, General Idea, Melanie Gilligan, Sharon Hayes, Adam Pendleton, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Mike Kelley, Kalup Linzy, Shana Moulton, Adam Pendleton, Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler, Hito Steyerl, Catherine Sullivan, Ryan Trecartin, Kara Walker, Robert Wilson.

Exercise: Compose a script for film, video, the stage, or public space. How does language function gesturally and/or via a set of theatrical and/or cinematic conventions (cf. Catherine Sullivan)? To what extent is your use of language a function of genre (cf. Sullivan and Melanie Gilligan)? How can you produce comedy and pathos in your work (cf. Robert Wilson, Kalup Linzy, Yvonne Rainer, Guy Ben Ner, Gilligan, Mark Bradford, and General Idea)? Consider how you wish your writing to be performed/staged (where? to whom? with the use of what props and/or actors?). Consider how you may involve others (actors, bystanders, an audience)? Do you wish to make interventions in a particular space or among a particular community (cf. Sharon Hayes)? How may your performance be enhanced by video post-production technologies and/or installation (cf. Shana Moulton and Ryan Trecartin)?

Week 6 Diaries and Journalism

Recommended artists: Vito Acconci, Etel Adnan, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dodie Bellamy, Cara Benedetto, Gregg Bordowitz, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Moyra Davey, Tracey Emin, Simone Forti, Juliana Huxtable, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles, Trisha Low, Lee Lozano, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Thek, Hannah Weiner, Matias Viegener, David Wojnarowicz.

Exercise: Using an existing set of journals/diaries (your own or another’s) compose an original work of art. OR: start a journal/diary that may become (part of) a work of art. Consider how journals and diaries have been used by other artists. What qualities differentiate diaristic and journalistic writing?  How do these types of writing inflect time differently? How might they create different senses of immediacy and intimacy? How may they offer a means to tell a story about yourself or others that might be impossible to tell through other forms of writing?

Week 7 Materiality

Recommended books: Liz Kotz’s Words to be Looked At, Craig Dworkin’s Reading the Illegible, Susan Howe’s The Birthmark, Jerome McGann’s The Textual Condition, Fred Moten’s In the Break, and Poetry Plastique exhibition catalogue (ed. Charles Bernstein & Jay Sanders).

Recommended artists: Ian Hamilton Finley, Susan Howe, Lev Rubinstein, Robert Smithson, Cecilia Vicuña, Lawrence Weiner.

Week 8 Artists’ Magazines

Recommended book: Gwen Allen’s Artists’ Magazines (anthology) [see appendix for a comprehensive listing of artists’ magazines].

Recommended magazines: LTTR (Ginger Brooks Takahashi et al), Dot Dot Dot (Dexter Sinister), Shifter (ed., Sreshta Rit Premnath), The Lay of the Land Newsletter (Center for Land Use Interpretation), 0 to 9 (ed. Bernadette Mayer & Vito Acconci)

Week 9 Instruction/Prompt/Questionnaire

Recommended book series: Collective Task (ed. Rob Fitterman et al)

Recommended artists: John Cage, CA Conrad, Robert Gluck, Bhanu Kapil, Ben Kinmont, Alison Knowles, Sol LeWitt, Lee Lozano, Georges Maciunus, Jackson Mac Low, Yoko Ono, Benjamin Patterson, Georges Perec.

Exercise: Compose a set of instructions or prompts for a work to be performed by yourself and/or others. In composing your instructions/prompt, consider what you would like to achieve through your own or another’s actions? Do these actions reflect critically on a state of affairs or set of relations (Ben Kinmont)? Do they intend to depersonalize the one instructed (cf. Jackson Mac Low, John Cage)? Do they allow the instructed to access desirable modes of attention (cf. Cage, Georges Perec)? Are they meant to be works of art in themselves? Do they ask one to do the impossible and as such become purely speculative and/or prefigural? To what extent may they enable alternative modes of production (cf. Collective Task)? Consider the elegance and economy of your words in composing your instructions/prompts.

Week 10 Orality/Duration/Transcription/Scoring

Recommended artists: David Antin, Amiri Baraka, Steve Benson, Kamau Braithwaite, David Buuck, John Cage, M. NourbeSe Philip, Cecil Taylor, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Andy Warhol.

Exercise: Compose an original work using any of the following methods: 1. By recording and transcribing a conversation or set of conversations (cf. Warhol); 2. By improvising and recording a talk and editing your talk for the page (cf. David Antin and Steve Benson); 3. By transcribing and scoring two minutes of audio; 4. By transcribing your own or someone else’s language phonetically (cf. Kamau Braithwaite).

Week 11 Detournment/Reappropriation/Tactical Art

Recommended artists: Alexandra Bell, Critical Art Ensemble, General Idea, Glenn Ligon, Not an Alternative, Pictures Generation (Jenny Holtzer, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine), Keith and Mendi Obadike, Situationist International, The Yes Men.

Exercise: In what ways are detournment, reappropriation, and tactical art still effective as means of intervening in a “society of the spectacle” (cf. Situationist International)? How can the media be “jammed” and “hacked” to create novel situations that redress social wrongs and/or create conditions of possibility for ‘another world’ (The Yes Men, Critical Art Ensemble, Not an Alternative)? How may the reappropriation of words, pictures, sounds, and media enable you to explore your identity or perform another (Glenn Ligon, Pictures Generation)? To what extent does language function through re/contextualization? Create an original work of art that addresses any or all of these concerns.

Week 12 Between Drawing, Painting, and Writing

Recommended artists: Etel Adnan, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joseph Beuys, Renee Gladman, Philip Guston, Keith Haring, Douglas Kearney, Robert Kocik, Henri Michaux, Matt Mullican, Carolee Schneemann, Cy Trombly.

Exercise: Compose an original work of art that exists between ‘drawing’/’painting’ and ‘writing’ (cf. Etel Adnan)? How do words and letters attain graphic values and vice versa? How may you use words calligraphically, ideogrammatically, hiero- or petro-glyphically? To what extent are the visual and aural senses of written language inextricable?

Week 13 Fictions

Recommended artists/groups: Etel Adnan, Arakwa Gins, Bernadette Corporation, The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Alexander Provan, Tan Lin, Jalal Toufic.

Exercise: Consider the adoption of fiction by artists historically. How have artists used the genre to create stories and narratives about their cultural and/or society? To what extent is fiction adopted to challenge narrative conventions and official notions of ‘truth’? How might fictions be employed as a response to personal and widespread cultural trauma (cf. The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic)? In what ways does fiction challenge dominant epistemes and technological paradigms (Alexander Provan)? How might fiction allow the artist a means to play with notions of self and/or cultural identity (cf. Tan Lin, Jalal Toufic)?

Week 14 Poetry and Art

Recommended artists/groups: Cara Benedetto, Bernadette Corporation, Gregg Bordowitz, Paul Chan, Dada, Jimmie Durham, Juliana Huxtable, Steffani Jemison, Arnold J. Kemp, Ralph Lemon, Claire Pentecost, Isaac Pool, William Pope.L, Dmitry Prigov, Bunny Rodgers, Yvonne Rainer

Exercise: Historically, artists and visual artists have been in conversation and collaboration with one another. Oftentimes artists have trespassed into poetry and vice versa. Sometimes artists start out as poets; less frequently, poets start as visual artists. How might you use poetry as a mode or medium for your art? To what extent are you in dialogue with poets—do you read them and take something vital from their ways of working? Do you consider yourself to have a ‘practice’ as a poet, and if so do you differentiate this from your practice as an artist? Inasmuch as contemporary poets and visual artists exist in very different economies, if not communities, how does ‘value’ affect the choices you make to be an artist, a poet, or both? Compose a poem or series of poems that inflect any or all of the problems I have outlined here.