Eileen Myles interviews CAConrad...

about Conrad's The Book of Frank at Harriet.

Craneway Event

A crane a way down
From heaven deep in this

Dance in medias res
A way we are not in

Nature dance elaborates
The bay ways these ships

Once detached what they
Conveyed what we can't

Convey places outside
The body what we notice

What we say a fugitive
Sense a bird alone

In this space and light
That is not in the way.

Rob Halpern's Dark Zone

Here is a link to Rob's brilliant essay on Baudelaire, allegory, and commodity exchange at Modernist Culture:
http://www.js-modcult.bham.ac.uk/articles/issue7_halpern.pdf

I am what I am

-after William Cordova

Who history gets to save
A wheel rim continuously
Unrolling we powers unworked

Become different powers big
Ones go like little ones
Like a set of powers building

Against systems of sky what
Remains represents a draft
Of a draft sketched on a dirty

Napkin ephemera conveys what
Is passing what will pass
Into the night unafraid

Another name for this blank
Another name for this posse
ble pasty effacement thing.

Tomorrow I Am Teaching Amy Balkin's Work

In solidarity with those struggling to create commons for environmental sustainability and justice...
http://www.thisisthepublicdomain.org/

William Forsythe's Decreation at BAM

reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/11/dance/william-forsythes-decreation-at-bam

"Reading Simone Weil this past week before reviewing Decreation, it became clear to me just how unidimensional Forsythe’s rendering of Weil’s idea of decreation is. At times I want to cry reading Weil, whose pages offer metaphysical insights hard-won from her life of pain, deprivation, and self-elected martyrdom (Weil was born into an agnostic middle-class French Jewish family, yet throughout her life chose to live among and, perhaps more importantly, undergo the suffering of the poor—their work routines and social struggles). However painful romantic encounters can be, no romantic encounter can compare with Weil’s decreation, which refers to the struggle to overcome the creaturely within human existence in order to experience God as a feeling of eternal time and space. Weil’s seeking of conditions of poverty (material, sexual, physical, and otherwise) was no doubt her way of decreating, and thus, as Carson puts it, “telling” the eternal."

A Cut Per Border

-after Guy Ben-Ner

If your eyes will believe
And I believe they must
Believe there is no swindle
Just the proof of our being

And not being here just
The proof of this apartheid
Love is a trip that blinks
That lisps with each word

Owing to travel rhyming
Like artifice unravels like a
Plot device my life as if
Anyone could be writing this

Anyone but you anyone
But I we don't mean to be
Shakespearian we just are
Like some regret I had

Leaving this border in
The rhyme scheme in the
Splice how can we not be
Forced our comings

And goings force vanishes
Fantasy is the face we
Give it dejected never
Satisfied with movement

I don't want to reenact
This fantasy without a
Face without a mask I want
To pre-enact the way

We will have been keeping
Our promises in animal
Grace before we made
Contracts a pound of flesh

For every debt the world
Subsidizes for being 'live'
Having divine contact
We are in a time of demi-

gods of kings and queens
Lesser artists kiss their
Rings this is the thing
The night goes on

In privacy or one's
Imagined public trying
Merely to subsist on money
And power which feels

False take the piss
Out of economy by funding
Love as though in more
Feudal times shitting

I mean blooming in
Your mouth I mean this
Intense national longing
To always be doubly

Exchangeable a promise
Kept to no one a stain
On the screen of my love
My tele-present love

That perverts any notion
Of possession love
The anti-territory love
The always already disaster

We are not where we are
Displaced by wanting
Life and art to be the same
To partake of the same

Substance how to get laid
And how to get out of
This country always the
Victim never the victimizer

The mouth says distantly
Kissing any distance that
Would let it any place-
holder or whatever

Mother-tongue would
Not rhyme with history
Leaving damages unclaimed
The nowhere that is.

The Dispossessions: a Via Negativa

Last spring I received an email in my inbox asking for recipients to draw pornographic drawings for the cover of a forthcoming poetry book:

To the nitty gritty: We are looking for super dirty (even middle-school mentality) line-drawing porn, especially featuring penises and vaginas. Something small, something you'd draw on a desk in a coupla minutes. You may want to consult the attached text (of the chapbook) for "inspiration."

The images will appear on the backboard of the book, which will be covered by a dust cover using die-cut peep holes.

The book of poems by Judith Goldman, The Dispossessions (Atticus/Finch, 2009), takes as its subject the 'junk' (or, if one prefers, dispossessed) language of the internet. Throughout the book, Goldman sculpts language found from internet sources (chatrooms, websites, et al) and whittles them down, forming edgy exercises in the vulgate. What is remarkable in reading the book is how ickiness can switch to gorgeousness in a split second, and the extent to which vulgarity is spiritualized--turned into a spiritual exercise, albeit a negative one. What takes shape is a via negativa (paths paved by hell) of the virtual age--of the many ways we are mediated, and fantasize one another through this mediation. The poetry makes one feel close and then distant again. It flickers with impossible proximities. There is a mood about the poems peculiar to our age. The language is immediate, and yet prophylactic; hands-on (Goldman's method is collagist), and yet vaporous. It reminds us that in all relationship is the threat of violence, violation, humiliation, harm.

Invites rather, uh, Awkward questions
Clutching at the first thingLickety uh Do we have no other words to use?
Seeds wreaking violence
A negative dialogue between seeds
Words do not harm each other
Looking for words [that] don’t harm each other
Grammar as window,
Words as voyeurs
A word [that] does not give
Onto anything else
Voyeurism of one word giving onto another
No accumulation?
This horror will not bear my words
The words are mute

And
Wait, is it
Loud in here because

because This silence is very loud
--from The Dispossessions

The internet is both a carnival and a void into which we speak. It is a night of the world--nothing has been created yet and everything would seem possible. Goldman's language evokes sacred discourse through the backdoor--the back entrance and poop chute. Words are muted because there is nothing to hear here. "This silence is very loud." A profound negativity is of the hour. It is a negativity of words accumulating but not saying anything; of a world of appearance in which images speak mutely. The aughts are a Babylon of nonsense (degraded sensuality). Recent poetry makes present an imagination increasingly dependent on unreality. The unreality, say, of the physical distance separating those who wage war and those who are victimized by it; or, say, of those who slave for consumer values and those who consume recklesssly without a thought for others/the Other. There is a feeling of dread throughout Goldman's book--that things cannot end well. Though the language is also beautiful, and titillating, and playful. There is likewise a sense in the book that we can all see each other constantly, that as Paul Chan says we suffer from a "tyranny of connectedness," and that this connectedness only complicates our alienation. Constant connectedness does not mean contact. Nor does seeing (physical perception) equal disclosure (revelation, understanding, faith). The book cites an orgy committed at the expense of the entire world, and worlds yet to come. An orgy of perceptions, an orgy of consumptions, the orgy of total warfare perpetrated by the United States and its allies within and without its national boundaries.

from "Paul Chan My Neighbor"

"The question I kept asking myself watching Chan's video was: why Sade? The press release for the show states that for the past few years Chan has been making work exclusively after the Marquis. One reason seems obvious. It has two names: Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. The Bush administration remains Chan's central foil, and as such Chan will probably be remembered and studied as one of the most important American artists--if not the iconic American artist--of the Bush years. That the Bush administration broke with the Geneva accords, encouraging torture among its military and governmental agencies, is a source of guilt and shame that the United States has yet to properly resolve--neither through symbolic exchange or legal retribution. One can only hope an aesthetic practice like Chan's own signals the beginning of a process of desublimation which can properly deal with the United States' ongoing crimes against humanity.

But we are also living in a time of virtuality, and the pornographic is one of the predominant mediums of virtuality. Throughout his writings and interviews, Chan makes reference to the primacy of Lacanian cultural theory for the past twenty years. This primacy does not seem a coincidence given the central idea of Lacan's theory of the subject: that the subject's "reality" is a construction of what he or she "imagines," whether this imaginary take the form of a belief structure, fantasy, or ideology. Pornography has always been an exemplary scene of imaginal encounter. And so I think Chan chooses the Marquis de Sade as muse because Sade represents an age of both extreme cruelty and virtuality (the fact that what we imagine constructs what we believe rather than the reverse)."

from The Activist Press in Recent American Poetry

"Throughout modernity, there is also a vital tradition of the small press serving a politics, and doing so through formal exploration (form not given, but discovered through a situation, process, or event). The poem, I would argue, is a form of action; it does something in the world--to culture, to a readership--and is therefore active. The question of what poetry does recalls the Spinozan proposition: we have not yet determined what a body can do. That is, the limits of what the poem can do inscribe the limits of existence in its consequences. These consequences necessarily bear out a politics and a social purpose--however privately and uniquely. A press becomes activist where it cultivates political means (not ends). If I could perceive any major split within small press culture at the moment, it would be along the lines of action in the sense of how I am using the term. How can poetry support a political and social purposiveness without rendering poetry instrumental? How can an "avant garde" tradition of innovation and experiment be negotiated with real political, economic, and social struggles?"

All Their Hopes

"There is hope, but not for us."
-Franz Kafka

All their hopes to not work minimum wage jobs
All their hopes to not be victims of the housing crisis
All their hopes to not be victims of the health care crisis
All their hopes for and identifications with a distant people who have had their land their local resources taken from them by a faceless outside corporate entity
All the so-called "cliche" in this
Is not elegiac enough
Is not a requiem dire enough
To site us to cite
To take Sades
The undead so displaced were they
Who otherwise should be considered vital/viral

All their hopes to not work at Mickey D's
All their hopes to not pay additional tuition
All their hopes to not be controlled by debt to start a family not controlled by debt
All their hopes to find relationships not ruled by force and brutal circumstance
All their sorrows which will not be named will not be analyzed
All the names the hopes for names that will not be grieved
"I" will not awake to the sound of these
Within ear-shot, eye-shot, headless, heedless
All their hopes to not be a multi-national corporation
All their hopes to not be a unilateral war
All their hopes to not be tortured meat byproducts

All their hopes their shared hopes
To not hope and to actually do to accomplish to achieve something to be in relation to to hallucinate what we really want a name for "the record"
All their hopes to be plausible/possible
All their hopes to be or not to be
All their hopes to be a wreck--dashed
All their hopes to be dashing quashed by conflict scores of us are quavering/quibbling on our knees
All their hopes to enter into paradises
All their hopes to enter into promises
All their hopes to keep their promises
The oil that is not coming from anywhere not from God or from spirit or the systemic destruction of sustainable cultures
All their hopes to not be a wasteland of consumer desires
All their hopes to not be Walmart to not desire Walmart

All their hopes in China all their hopes in Iran all their hopes in Afghanistan burning like unequivocal flags
All their hopes to remember
All their hopes to remember what they must forget to survive this affirmation this burning which is not fair
Nothing is fair except when we do (struck-out)
All their hopes burn with consequence
All their hopes burn and yet it is the whole world which must change
Until they realize this there should be no hope
There should be no future in what we hope for.

Complicities

I.
-after Paul Chan

There are things we lose
We meant to have lost

Like a first remove the
Strikeout of these letters

These bodies in wartime
We can not be them

Voting with our tongues and
Moreover our dollars doing

The things we wouldn't dare
Poetry what's left of

Poetry must be an indict-
ment of war and people's

Behavior during war and
Mainly the poet's behavior

During war because all
We have are words at

Our disposal and these
Bodies are not only

Disturbed they are not
Only blown to bits by

Language something feels
Us and this is not

Just a feeling this is
Not just an idea either.

II.
-for Dottie

Our care for women
My wife I have been

Thinking about the
Violence committed every-

day against women
There is a point

I believe at which
Every man can no

Longer tolerate being
A "man" can no

Longer tolerate oc-
cupying this calcified

Subject position under-
standing how women

Struggle everyday with
Violence one doesn't

Always intend to
Be Feminist but this

Feeling for the body
At risk of being

Harmed of being
Annihilated or hum-

iliated is Feminist
This feeling for

The excuses we make
Cowardly and cruel.

Brandon Brown's Last Post of 5

is now up at the Poetry Project's blog.

Jane Sprague's The Port of Los Angeles

I recall fondly visiting Jane and her lovely family in Long Beach, CA where I read with Rob Halpern for her events series Long Beach Notebook. We drove together to LA where along the way we passed the ports of which Jane is a scholar and a dire lyricist*...

The Port of Los Angeles
by Jane Sprague
poetry
72 pages
$16
ISBN 978-0925904-77-5


from The Port of Los Angeles

I was singing with a closed mouth

singing thinking

sing no more anger between me
sing no more stillness no breakwater

sing come away slowly
sing carry me home

to no home

Reviews
In this collection of interlocking texts, Sprague adroitly intersperses the distributive dimensions of material and cultural international commerce and its strange-making effects (as on your daily donk of style, and the shine it gets from being commodity No. 1). The Port of Los Angeles has moved this reader from somewhere--to somewhere else. My bet is that many others can catch the rapid ride too. Sprague's vigorous no-bones vocability springs off of every page, and the droids are plotting to revolt!" --Rodrigo Toscano

Part post-industrial sea chantey, part epiphany against the "economies of loss" that expand exponentially with each morning's news that struggles to stay news, Jane Sprague's The Port of Los Angeles offers us a rare and varied thick description (with Whitmanesque undertows) of those moments when our living-breathing-trying-to-pay-the-bills-selves meet the vast expanse that is the seemingly boundless sea. "John Steinbeck was right," the poet writes. And Jane Sprague certainly is, too." --Mark Nowak

*dire is a term I have often heard Sprague use to designate recent lyrical poetries critical of language's complicity with "natural" and social disaster.

A Million Keys | Music Language Thought

I have been enjoying backtracking through this website devoted to cross-over between art + music, A Million Keys.

This music lecture series at NYU also looks quite promising, Music Language Thought.

Stan Mir on Francis Bacon and Rob Halpern

What a great connection! http://bestnightmareyouget.com/?p=238

After Paul Chan's Sade

Body parts without bodies
Parts without parts

Anti-gravity pulls apart
The blue windows bits

Byts silhouettes provide
Place increasingly crowded

Flicker with bodies ace-
phalics on their knees

Bleeding cubes float
At the beginning am I

At the beginning use
Of wall as cage as

Screen saver like the
Flicker like of a sudden

Shudder iconoclast Matisse
Color bars end piece

Activate constructivisms
Malevitch black squares

Fall like the sky dangles
Appears institutional

Why Sade now why
Not Marx why not

Machiavelli or Spinoza
But for torture because

We are in a time
Of cruel affect and

Virtual commandment
Pornos squares

Are flat but create
Foregrounds contexts

The figures seen sil-
houetted like a Walker

Cliché (cut-out) they
Are gestural too these

Quivers shakes diddles
There is reference to Stein

Who overcame beginning
Again and again the

Porno of all narrative
Poetry will there be

An end to this again
And again goth animation

One commands with
Penis erect another

Trembles holding a
Square over their head

This giant negativity
Of what can’t be seen

Partial objects (shit)
Fetish objects reliquary

Remains rubble debris
Something trapped inside

Anamorphosis slight
Blur every one’s penis

Suprematist episodic new
Slaveries why would I

Destroy you once when I
Could destroy you ten

Thousand times (fascist
Aristocrats in

Passolini’s Salo) crawling
Holding lifting fucking

The limits of being
Human act bestially

Crawling on their knees
They make decisions

With their dicks carry
One another on others'

Backs there is also a
Spirit of Sade in labor

There is also a spirit
Of Sade in poetry.

As Per Usual Eileen Myles

hits the nail on the head...

"It's actually a terrible sacrifice the art world demands of poets, the virgins thown into the volcano, so that the shiny painting and sculpture of their time will have its equivalent in print, sort of. The poets will have backed off from the spikiness of their perceptions for the glory of instantly appearing in print at all, and for the glamour of being associated with such state-of-the-art art as modern art and even the small sum we receive for writing the average short review. Of course we like art. But that's not the point. My notebook is filled with poems too. It hasn't been a great poetic age of late, it's been an age that's non-verbal, media-oriented, ultra-visual and naturally pro-money, so no one really understands the loss, only knows that poetry is something art writers do when they are young. Or behind the art world's back."
--from The Importance of Being Iceland

TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice: Zolf / Gluck / Salah

Trish Salah, Robert Glück & Rachel Zolf
TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice
This new series of talks by major poets, titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, will explore the intersection of contemporary poetic manifesto, practice, queer theory and pedagogy. Too often today, statements on poetics and their manifesto-like style have been moralistic or prescriptive discourses. By contrast, this series will attempt a Kinsey-like survey of actual poetic practice--what writers actually do, in the writers' own words--in the process queering the manifesto, inventing new terms for poetics discourse, and emphasizing queer writing and poetics.

The first event features talks by:
Trish Salah, Robert Glück, & Rachel Zolf
...followed by a discussion/Q&A session.

on Thursday, October 29
at 6:30 PM
FREE

at CUNY Graduate Center
(in the Skylight Room)
365 Fifth Avenue, NYC

Born in Halifax, Trish Salah is a Montreal-based writer, activist and teacher at Concordia and Bishop's Universities. Her first book of poetry, Wanting in Arabic, was published in 2002 and her recent writing appears in the journals Open Letter, EOAGH, No More Potlucks, Aufgabe, West Coast Line. Her new manuscript, Lyric Sexology, is near completion.

Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist and a book of stories, Denny Smith. Gluck edited, along with Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück was Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, Co-director of Small Press Traffic, and Associate Editor at Lapis Press. His poetry and fiction have been published in the New Directions Anthology, City Lights Anthologies, Best New Gay Fiction 1988 and 1996, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Best American Erotica 1996 and 2005, and The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction.

Rachel Zolf's most recent book of poetry, Human Resources (Coach House, 2007), won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award. Previous collections include Shoot and Weep (Nomados, 2008), from Human Resources (Belladonna, 2005) and Masque (Mercury, 2004). Her poetry and essays have appeared in journals such as Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics and Open Letter and in the anthologies Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (Coach House, 2009) and Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. She was the founding poetry editor of The Walrus magazine. Neighbour Procedure will appear in the spring from Coach House Books.

TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice is curated by Tim Peterson. For additional information, visit the Tendencies blog.

Hold On To Your Dreams review

Here is a review I wrote of Tim Lawrence's Arthur Russell biography, Hold On To Your Dreams:
http://thefanzine.com/articles/music/373/arthur_russell_revived-_hold_on_to_your_dreams_
"One of the most impressive things that Lawrence does throughout Hold On To Your Dreams, is not only provide a sensitive and detailed rendering of Russell's life, but also the story of large and complex cultural confluences channeled by a single person. Russell's lifework is also a Whitmanesque project of containing multitudes inasmuch as it successfully negotiates groups of people, musical styles, and cultures that, to many at the time, seemed at best mutually exclusive, and at worst downright antagonistic. As Lawrence insists repeatedly throughout his book, during a time when 'avant garde,' pop, classical, (post-) punk, and emergent dance musics such as disco and house could not seem to speak to each other, let alone find common cause, Russell was equally pioneering in each musical culture/genre."