Contingencies

--after Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno

All these penguins just chilling out

It’s so dark and all the ice is melting under our feet

The feet of the transcendental subject

Now that there is only horizon and inside and outside this drone

In my ear not even mine, but not yours either

What they are gathered for, the penguins

They love being together and warm each other

While another world ends, the world that is our only one

Machines talk to one another, adjust the thermostat

Inside this earth

A moon rises but it is not the moon after all,

Nor is it the sun either, this light source

But a suddenness of places we can’t gather

Far away the birds dream a fog machine in Central Park

The anti-moonlight of their minds eye teleporting damp

Light sources that are only lights, glissando lights

Dry ice communicated between objects

As if just any moon could rise.

*

The wall moves without you

But this isn’t so strange,

And the lights flicker and go out

But this isn’t so strange,

And the posters on the wall glow in the dark

But this isn’t so strange,

And there are robots which

Reproduce Marilyn Monroe’s

Handwriting on hotel stationary,

But this isn’t so strange either

And it isn’t so strange that the sound

Of a dog rustling in the grass

Or of insects buzzing is amplified,

Or that an anime character is speaking to me

And that she has a live body double

Played by a teenage girl,

Nor that a balloon rises over the houses

And looks like a moon at this scale,

Nor that the room can contain a microclimate

Or that penguins gather around a light source,

Or that a piano plays by itself while an

Ash-like substance falls to it

Dusting its lacquered surfaces—no

What is strange is that we are here at all

And that your face is lit-up suddenly

In a building that seems like a ruin but

Has recently been renovated,

And this feeling of having lost you

While we wait for the orgy scene

And that the cops have to break up the marching

Band as they play “Hava Nagila” in tandem with

A-ha’s “Take on Me,” the crowd booing the police

As we queue up outside the Centre Pompidou,

And that your Paris apartment is so similar to

Your New York apartment, and that one would

Eat a plank of cheeses for dessert.

*

And then we realize that we were the aliens

And then we realize that we are the monsters

And we never did understand why they created us

And we never will understand why they want to destroy us

And so it must be something that we didn’t know we did

How would we ever even know the intentions of an alien?

If a machine could talk what would it say

I don’t think these pianos are playing for us

I’m pretty sure this wall wouldn’t care if it crushed us

When we lose our faith in Marilyn we have lost our faith of humanity

Listening to the world like I was Christopher Knowles

They were building an arsenal against their only world

They were tracking a message because they didn’t know who sent it

Buffy’s Two Bodies

What to do with the bodies of a girl

I wonder, how the girl

Becomes an idea

Of power and dispossession

Simultaneously, like in Spring

Breakers when they stick

Two guns in Franco’s mouth

And he starts sucking on

The barrels (double penetration?)

How the ski masks anticipate

Pussy Riot, and how Pussy

Riot antecedes all martyrs,

Every concept of the messianic

Because there is really only one

So that when they dance

To Britney this is an ironic

Choreography of (female) power

Two remain as if

To evoke the doubleness

Of (feminine) violence

The girl’s two bodies

As they lay waste to the world

I heard Pussy Riot is being freed

And watched videos

Of Voina today, whose art

Pranks landed them in prison,

The video where they shoplift

By secreting poultry

In their vaginas, the video

Where they pretend to

Hang immigrants in a

Department store.

Machine Writing Questionnaire Part II at TCR

Here is the second part of my "machine writing" questionnaire, posted at The Capilano Review's blog.

I also think that the idea of ‘the body’ being a negative limitation is ableist, in the sense that disability reveals absolutely the limits of what a body can do determined within a social field. Something I will often do in my classes is ask the students to first identify a way that they feel “enabled” by their environment, then to produce an exercise that will intentionally defacilitate them in relation to this environment. Conversely, I ask them to identify a way that they feel “disabled,” and to attempt to use this disability to make art. In other versions of the exercise I also ask them to use art and/or writing to frame ways that their environment is disabling, or the source of a disability they have identified. Many of CA Conrad’s Somatic Exercises are good to assign in this context; because they are so much about mediating ourselves and our writing practices in relation to larger social and political problems. I also look at writers who identify with disability communities or as disabled, such as Jordan Scott, David Buuck, Robert Kocik, Amber Di Pietra, and Denise Leto. It is especially useful to think of the ways all of these writers respond to disability with new forms, no doubt because their experiences of embodiment demand this. In some cases, living with disability in a world inhospitable to people with disabilities seems the most profound art, an art that puts most other performance practices to shame, because what is at stake is so much more—sometimes it is a matter of life and death and always it is a matter of quality of life. As Eleni Stecopoulos has noted: “disability founds aesthetics.”

"Did the Lights Just Go Out?" PoemTalk

Tyrone Williams, Patrick Durgin, and I did a PoemTalk with Al Filreis about Steve Benson's poem, "Did the Lights Just Go Out," as performed by Benson at the SEGUE series and Kelly Writers House in February, 2003.

Power List

Or by hugging the cops

Or by posing with them in photos

Or by cooking them a hot meal

Or by standing beside them and farting

Or by pining away for W. Bush publicly

Or by kissing a bust of him and serenading him with a guitar

Or by blocking the way of traffic

Or by standing in front of the cops hurling insults, maybe bottles, maybe rocks, maybe Molotov cocktails

Or by wearing a handkerchief for the tear gas and throwing the canisters back at the cops

Or by writing a song and playing it for the others

Or by writing a poem and reading it for the others

Or by dancing with or for others 

Or by linking arms and marching (as though this were a dance you had choreographed)

Or by holding meetings, studying together, discussing strategy

Or by starting to plan

Or by stockpiling arms

Or by forming an alliance

Or by splintering into sects

Or by branching into affinity groups

Or by exposing your own body to harm in hopes that this will produce an image of unjustified cruelty, of the law not acting as it should

Or by inspiring pathos and empathy in whoever may see the photograph or the video of your body being harmed

Or by touching another’s body, a body the larger society would not like you to touch in that way

Or by refusing to work

Or in the body itself refusing to work

Or by going to work but destroying the tools

Or by going to work but not doing the things you’re supposed to, instead maybe writing a poem

Or by going to work and writing email and chating on Gchat and reposting links on Facebook

Or by disseminating internal memos among your friends

Or by leaking sensitive information

Or by finding out everyone’s email passwords and reading their email

Or by napping

Or by taking drugs while on the clock

Or by changing the structure form ‘within’ laying claim to power so as to alter its expression

Or by trying to gain a position in government

Or by having a town hall meeting 

Or by starting a petition

Or by writing a letter

Or by starting a blog

Or by placing an ad

Or by calling a referendum

Or by assembling a team of lawyers

Or by finding a loophole in the law

Or by making art that tries to dramatize a legal anomaly or capitalizes upon a legal anomaly

Or by manufacturing passports

Or by founding a charity

Or by chanting a slogan

Or by marching

Or by beating a drum

Or by giving a free concert

Or by fundraising

Or by performing charitable acts

Or by working on behalf of the disenfranchised or an oppressed minority

Or by working pro bono for a legal cause

Or by occupying buildings

Or by taking over the entire city, erecting barricades around the perimeter

Or by raising a militia

Or by publicly shaming one’s leaders when they have committed crimes against humanity

Or by hacking an organization’s or a private individual’s source of funding

Or by stealing from the rich or well-off

Or by robbing a bank

Or by taking from what is commonly shared

Or by squatting

Or by refusing to use one’s legal name

Or by avoiding all use of credit cards or other means by which the state and corporations might track one

Or by replacing the name given to your ancestors when they were slaves with another

Or by boycotting the businesses that would not serve your people, the people with your same identifying features

Or by refusing to leave when they tell you to leave

Or by not resisting when they attempt to move your body

Or by packing a weapon

Or through assassination

Or through bombing

Or through car bombing

Or through suicide bombing

Or by organizing a union

Or by forming a network among global laborers and labor organizations

Or by refusing to sign a contract

Or through contractual ownership asserting the rights to how your music is distributed

Or by owning the masters

Or through conspicuous consumption

Or by rearranging those works of art on display

Or through reformatting

Or by removing a work outside the museum or other sanctioned cultural location

Or by defacing or erasing a work of art representing a cultural regime currently in power

Or by toppling a statue

Or through looting

Or by refusing to show

Or by refusing to play

Or by refusing to read

Or by only making your art with others and never giving your name to it

Or by refusing to take credit

Or through plagiarism

Or through reappropriation

Or through sampling

Or through detournement

Or through the derive

Or through intertextuality

Or through preservation

Or through the creation of an archive

Or by regulating access

Or by interacting with an audience differently

Or by reading your poem or playing your song in the street

Or through street theatre

Or by organizing an event

Or by creating a carnivalesque atmosphere

Or by making people feel they can speak or move more freely

Or by reminding everyone of those who are not free to speak or move

Or by caricaturing a political leader or someone else in a position of power

Or by ‘roasting’ the president

Or by speaking ‘truth to power’

Or by laying claim to the popular media

Or by making information more widely available

Or through education

Or by making sure there is wider access

Or by being willing to go to jail

Or by providing prisoners with educational resources and other basic human rights

Or by breaking out of prison

Or by breaking out others from prison

Or by enacting legislation

Or by making sure a neighborhood is protected from gentrification

Or by holding out

Or by creating strong community networks

Or by appropriating agency for one’s community or for communities in need of resources

Or by opposing developers legally and extra-legally

Or by boycotting strike breakers

Or by not eating meat produced by the industrial-agricultural complex

Or by not eating meat that is produced inhumanely

Or by not eating meat

Or by not using certain gender pronouns

Or replacing certain gender pronouns with others

Or by giving a stranger a swipe

Or by refusing to specialize

Or by giving up art

Or by refusing to show one’s work in certain institutions

Or by constructing the built environment differently

Or by founding the institutions you would want to be a part of, the businesses you

would want to participate in

Or by dropping out

Or by committing suicide

Or by committing Facebook suicide

Or by holding hands in public

Or by kissing in public

Or by baring one’s breasts in public

Or by loving too intensely

Or by stealing

Or by being lazy

Or by refusing to produce any art this year

Or by refusing to consume

Or by volunteering to distribute food and medicine and rebuild homes

Or by refusing to vote

Or by voting

Or by not paying your taxes

Or by dumping one’s trash in public

Or by appearing naked in public

Or by performing bodily functions in public

Or by just showing up

Or by pitching a tent

Or by refusing to act violently no matter what

Or by refusing to attend the popular media

Or by recycling or composting

Or through the avoidance of nouns

Or through the use of heteronyms and collective names

Or by refusing to participate in certain representation practices

Or by organizing a revolt

Or by storming the palaces

Or by breaking through the phalanx of cops

Or by saying what you shouldn’t

Or by throwing a party

Or by taking drugs

Or by presenting your work publicly

Or by making public statements

Or by filling your purse with ketchup

Or by chaining one’s self to a bank vault, or an old growth tree, or a building slated

for demolitions

Or through infiltration

Or through spying

Or by refusing to invest in oil and coal

Or through divestment

Or by sharing a meal

Or through a hunger-strike

Or by embracing another culture, taking on their customs and habits

Or by posing questions

Or by talking back

Or by paying attention

Or through devotion

Or by considering everything in relation

Or by not paying attention

Or by shifting the balance of power

Or by parenting differently

Or by forming alternative affiliations

Or through the withdrawal of tradition

Or through the embrace of traditions

Or in allowing others to make decisions

Or by giving up power

Or by stepping down

Or by building consensus

Or through the establishment of solidarity

Or through the elimination of the ego

Or through a de-emphasis or displacement of 'the self'

Or through depersonalization

Or through collectivization

Or through participation

Or by refusing to participate

Or through skepticism

Or through dissensus

Or through reprinting

Or through diplomacy

Or by staying alive

Or by reproducing

Or through the transmitting of cultural memory

Or through comedy

Or by becoming vulnerable

Or through the providing of care

Or through the forgiving of debt

Or through donation

Or by setting up a trust

Or by preventing further exploitation

Or through fucking

Or through reparation

Or through forgiveness

Or through forgetting

Or through reciprocation

Or through symbolization

Or through patience

Or through anger

Or through sorrow

Or through joy

... 

New ON website and PDF Archive series

ON Contemporary Practice is pleased to announce the launch of its new website, as well as our new Monograph and PDF Archive series. 

Please visit our Monograph series page for more information about Robert Kocik's Supple Science, available for order now.

We are also pleased to inaugurate the PDF Archive series with five essays by Dodie Bellamy (on "the feraltern"), Andrew Durbin (on Justin Bieber), Norma Cole (on Emmanuel Hocquard), Andy Martrich (on brnt ghst vlnt), and Brett Price (on naming). 

For a complete listing of current and past PDFs, including segmented PDFs for volumes 1 and 2 of ON's print journal, you can visit the PDF Archive here.

To submit to ON's Monograph series or PDF Archive, please check out our submissions guidelines.

"Machine Writing" Questionnaire Part I at TCR

Here is the first installment of responses to the "machine writing" questionnaire, at The Capilano Review.

Perhaps, I have wondered too, how writing with ones hands might bring me closer to what I call “idiolect,” a term Robert Kocik uses to describe the poems in my book The Hole. Could this actually be a more accurate term than “lyric” or “expressive,” which have often been used to distinguish poetic writing that is not reliant on collage, assemblage, constraint, procedure, algorithm, or appropriation? I associate idiolect too with language that is both radically particular and eccentric, originating with rhythms and cadences and peculiarities of a singular writing practice, while also touching something that partakes of a commonplace of contemporary language use (vernacular, idiom, dialect). In this way, it may be similar to a “nation language” (Kamau Braithwaite) or a “minor literature” (Deleuze/Guattari). Kocik also distinguishes idiolect by its evocation of the “first-person-plural”; the way one may invoke collective subjects through an “I” that is neither entirely an extension of the singular or the multiple, but an expression of their simultaneous and mutual articulation.

SUPPLE SCIENCE: a Robert Kocik Primer launch!

via Michael Cross's The Disinhibitor

Greetings Friends:

Thom Donovan and myself are incredibly excited to announce that our first monograph under the sign of ON: Contemporary Practice, Robert Kocik's book of collected essays, Supple Science, will hit the streets on Sunday, November 17th, and there are three ways to help us celebrate!

1) First, join us at SPT for the official launch event:  

“UBIQUITOUS DIVIDEND”

SUPPLE SCIENCE BOOK LAUNCH 

Small Press Traffic

Artist Television Access

992 Valencia Street, SF

Sun. 11/17 5pm

Spoken, choral and choreoprosodic selections from the ongoing libretto "Re-English," an investigative musical that treats our current ecological and inequity crises as consequents of the sonic and connotative qualities of english, calling upon forms and phenomena as diverse as neuroendocrinology, cosmogony, naad, triple bottom line accounting, optativity, dead languages, energy cauldrons, and even poetry to re-tune our tongues, imbuing them with unheard of inherences, moods, admixtures and admonishments.

2) Then, join us for a Prododic Body workshop at the Long Leg Series:

PROSODIC BODY WORKSHOP 

Long Leg Series

New Arts Building Consortium 

1 Grove Street, SF

Workshops: Fri. 11/22 6:30-9:30 pm

Sat./Sun. 11/23-24 10-3 pm

Public Showing: Sun. 11/24 7:30pm

In this workshop we will practice the Prosodic Body, opening broader interoceptive, energetic connections. We will work with correspondences between phonemes and the neuroendocrine and somatosensory systems, sync our heart rates with danced poetic meter, involve cellular respiration in vocalization, perform phoneme puncture, embody cosmogony and become the direct experience of biophysics. We will integrate “choreoprosodia,” movement and language, fulfilling each other's expression.

3) Finally, join us at the Public School for a conceptual exploration of Robert's ideas:
 

"PRODUCING POVERTY WON’T BE A CRIME UNTIL POETS MAKE IT ILLEGAL (AND THE INTERRELATED MATTER OF THE UNFORMED FIELD OF PROSODY)" 

The Bay Area Public School2141 Broadway, Oakland

Mon. 11/25 7pm

We'll discuss two concerns particularly: 1) law as creative writing along with shared productivity as poetry medium: This is a call to begin writing the book on banking, corporate and finance law for poets. 2) the missing artscience of prosody: a lab or anechoic darkroom for carrying out qualitative and quantitative testing of the effects of tone, beat, frequency, silence, darkness, color and other prosodic phenomena on various bioprocesses.

I hope to see you at one of these events!

"What is Community?" questionnaire and Nico Vassilakis' response

I generated the following questionnaire for facilitating a writing workshop last spring at SVA, for my course about "intense autobiography." Afterwards we discussed Bruce Boone's Century of Clouds. This past weekend I gave the questionnaire as a hand out at the Poetics of Healing mini-symposium. Nico Vassilakis responded and his response is also posted below:

What is Community? (a Questionnaire)

1. To what communities do you belong? Name them. What are the defining features of these communities?

2. What distinguishes these communities from other communities? What limits and unites their members?

3. How would you characterize the politics of these communities? Illustrate with an anecdote or series of images. How would you describe your relationship to the

politics of these communities?

4. How do you enact your political beliefs through a daily practice? Provide a soundtrack or series of sounds rather than description to express this enaction of belief.

5. How do you enact your beliefs through an art practice?

6. Describe a time when you rebelled or provided a challenge against your community? How did this make you feel? How would/do you make art based on this experience—to channel or mediate it?

7. To what communities do you belong in your dreams?

Exercise: Read over your responses and select language that is interesting to you.

Use this language to compose a poem.

If you wish to share, mail your responses to wildhorsesoffire [at] gmail [dot] com

A visual one

Looking at seeing

Using alphabet to make objects

Using alphabet visually as language for seeing

The eyes and the eyes

Open

The ego of the eyes

I like what the eye likes

Share this

There is no power structure

We all see what needs seeing

We create so as to replicate and enhance the fascination visual alphabet holds for us

U, U, double U, double, double, double U

By getting it and getting it right

It continues by honing your intentional mark

We chose work

Chosen for its lack of repetition

To toss it far enough that nothing relates at such a distance

A community of happenstance

A confederacy of surprise

Healing / Community / Public / Space (event)

Healing / Community / Public / Space 

Talks & Poetics*

Melissa Buzzeo

Thom Donovan

Pavlos Stavropoulos

Eleni Stecopoulos

david wolach

Saturday, October 12, 2013

4:00 - 6:30 PM

Unnameable Books

600 Vanderbilt Ave.

Brooklyn

~

PLUS 2 MORE NYC EVENTS BY PARTICIPANTS:

Eleni Stecopoulos, david wolach, and Thom Donovan

The Multifarious Array Reading Series

Friday, October 11, 2013

7 PM

Pete's Candy Store

709 Lorimer

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

http://multifariousarray.blogspot.com/

Discussion: Austerity, Fascism and their Popular and Libertarian Responses in Greece

with Pavlos Stavropoulos

Sunday, October 13, 2013

7 PM

Bluestockings 

172 Allen St.

NY, NY

http://bluestockings.com/events/

~

* Healing / Community / Public / Space continues the Poetics of Healing project in New York City.

For more information: 

http://subterraneanarthouse.org/past-events/vital-forms-healing-arts-crisis-friday-april-19th-saturday-april-20th/

http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/eventCalendar.html#HEALING

~

Melissa Buzzeo is the author of For Want and Sound (Les Figues, 2013), Face (BookThug, 2009), and What Began Us (Leon Works, 2007). Her poetic work has been greatly charged by a long engagement with hypnosis, palm reading and a desire for an altered consciousness tied to the body but radiating outward, which is to say healing. Or writing.  She graduated from Cornell University and The University of Iowa's Writing Workshop, and currently teaches both Creative Writing and Architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. This year she is the 2013 Poet in Residence at Opus Projects Gallery in Chelsea.      

        

Thom Donovan is an exemplary Post-Fordist laborer. He works as a poet, critic, scholar, archivist, professor, editor, and curator. His book The Hole can be purchased at SPD and  he is currently working on his second book of poetry and first book of critical essays. He is the author of"Somatic Poetics," an essay regarding contemporary somatic practices and aesthetic discourse, and is a founding participant of the Nonsite Collective. For more information visit his blog Wild Horses Of Fire, now in its eight year.

Pavlos Stavropoulos is a longtime activist and organizer involved in numerous local, national and international liberatory and anarchist struggles, including anti-fascist and anti-austerity resistance in his native Greece, where he is associated with the journal Ευτοπία (Eutopia). He is a founder of Woodbine Ecology Center, which focuses on sustainable communities and indigenous perspectives, a certified permaculture designer and instructor, a water and sustainability educator, a street medic and a father.

Eleni Stecopoulos is a poet and teacher who lives in the Bay Area. She is the author of Armies of Compassion (Palm Press) and a recent chapbook, Daphnephoria (Compline). "The Poetics of Healing" series, her collaboration with The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, was supported by a Creative Work Fund grant  and featured participants from diverse fields, including philosopher Alphonso Lingis, poet Raúl Zurita, anthropologists Barbara Tedlock and Dennis Tedlock, physician-poet David Watts, and many others. She is currently finishing a book based on the project. 

A longtime union organizer, writer on performance and experimental sound composition, and former body artist out of Detroit, david wolach is founding editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press. wolach’s first full-length collection of poems is Occultations (Black Radish Books, 2011, 2012). The full-length Hospitalogy was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in May of 2013. wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and cultural theory at The Evergreen State College, and visiting faculty in Bard College’s Language & Thinking program.