Imaging her Autotelos*

*image courtesy Eliza Newman-Saul (2005)

The juridicizing of all human relations...

The juridicizing of all human relations in their entirety, the confusion between what we may believe, hope, and love, and what we are supposed to do and not supposed to do, what we are supposed to know and not know, not only signal the crisis of religion but also, and above all, the crisis of law. The messianic is the instance, in religion and equally in law, of an exigency of fulfillment which—in putting origin and end in a tension with each other—restores the two halves of prelaw in unison. At this same moment, it shows the impossibility of their ever coinciding. (This is why the actual opposition between secular States, founded uniquely on law, and fundamentalist States, founded uniquely on religion, is only a seeming opposition that hides a similar political decline.) But in this, it points, beyond prelaw, toward an experience of the word, which—without tying itself denotatively to things, or taking itself as a thing, without being infinitely suspended in its openness or fastening itself up in dogma—manifests itself as a pure and common potentiality of saying, open to a free and gratuitous use of time and the world.
~ Giorgio Agamben

Are We Still Married?*

Like Eyes that looked on Wastes ~
Incredulous of Ought
But Blank ~ and steady Wilderness ~
Diversified by Night ~

Just Infinities of Nought ~
As far as it could see ~
So looked the face I looked upon ~
So looked itself ~ on Me ~

--Emily Dickinson




Signs scar everything—presentiments of sight.

We drove on reproachful roads
and prepared everything
but who we are.

The stars are closer now than ever before

but I don’t
want their correspondence.

How can we remember what we recollect first?





The bomb’s always set. And eyes not always ours. And ears eclipse somewhere else.
Bearing messages to our future dead.

Tongue it has been a crescent. Now it longs for obfuscation. To cleave what was said and what is left. To make telling its gleek.

To believe what world is and what is should have been. To pin this sudden clearing in the mind might uncure sin.

In recordings of my dreams I’ve pressed that lack. Blinking to traverse when.




Why in love have we stalked?

We can’t see the animal’s trapped.

The cage door flickers and swings open—and opens

Singing, *Are we still married? Are we still?...*

Who foresees a wound when it is here?




This blue screen we seldom recognized
And slides of places we never were,
Our terrific coverage—a ruse.

Why is the flower an unequal thing?

Difference contacts difference.

Everywhere I look I see ruins.





Somehow we shouldn’t be...
but we must be for

To commit semblance.

To augur remiss tains.





Sweeping our names into this grave

Developing *tracelessness*.

Residues of drum precedents
speed and slow in these lines.

Intervals rise.





*A little time in the pure state.*
A little spot in the eye.

Where *don’t* became *battle*
silos push the air around.

Distant lands suddenly sing
being made of the same thing.

Recall what it means to be unique.
Contraction from critique.





Kill a hole preciously! Correct a capital!

Ransom our will.

Nothing could love Life more.





Why shouldn’t one hate the catalyst
forcing us to reflect
as such on essential stains.

I would prefer to forget
except when you continue your killing spree.

I would prefer to forgive
except only eternity is really just.




While the candlelight is particular
I’ve survived to destroy.

Is there a light that is still not for yes?




Skip town mammal. Don’t confront
the seen eventual.

I know when
it isn’t my turn to breathe.

When we donated dust
hushed by frame.





Could there have been *great discoveries* any other way

then to be reported
by guns
or skinned by flame?

Your love smothers to soar.

If *image of love*
were only image of love and not more.

We might do each other
the courtesy to discern

powder from the keg. Spirit
from its folios.






Your eyes swear
by night-light:
*No more logos!*

No revolution no ratiocination

Lingering in wings.
Flinging this sight.




The hunter has never
wholly seen the deer.

The Open claws a minute
when we’re not here.





I have lived
for rinsing
sty sometimes.

I have died
to widen
the floor.

Surviving
without eyes
or ears to save—

blimps of this rave.






This instance swears
I’m *darkest space*
becoming darker sky.

Never having known me
these letters turn holy.





Holy to be and holy to see!
I propose blindness a historical event

--the world not an entire friendship.

I presuppose possession a
privilege of the personality

who seldom knew flourish, who couldn’t tell
fire from flour.

I provide a grave and everything it conceives
confiding qualities subtended from loss.




You would seem a savage except you’re so pretty.

I’d be a mantle
if not for these tears.


*composed 2003-present.

The Pale of Settlement (Revision)

~ for Louise Nevelson

A colorless guilt
This self-fashioned light

Of the shipyards shore grey
Beardless presence

Of an after

Math after

An aftermath

Wood assumes
Number to not forget

This distance

Beyond the pale of settlement
& into

The arms of this shadow now
We sing a world uncolored

Of those pograms
A more immediate Kiev

They destroy destroy again
For the 29th

Time to ruin
Ruins affix stack

This not world

Variations on seen things seen

Words and wood
What definition of the present

To measure slivers
Through the city scraping

The eye

Fresh it seemed pure conscience, pure

Sense pirched on rocks for thousands
Of years we stand

In this night-
mare counting shadows

as they fall from earth.

Homage In Blood

for Rob Halpern
after Franju

Thru this pressure g
un and that hammer
thru the scalpel we b
elong to the animal

the animal is a total
process surviving the
mortal meat. But a t
otal process disappe

ars again within pro
duct reappears as a f
ilm or a skin the hide
sings released from

meat the throat sings
with steam and blood.
I wonder Franju why
your camera doesn’t

shake like Brakhage
20 years later his re
velation to see with
*one's* own eyes as if

flesh were only matter
it is terrifying the re
flexes of dying ani
mals are a spiritual ev

idence. I want to bre
ak my lines there wh
ere the animal no lon
ger has a head or hoo

ves but the legs up to
the shins keep shudde
ring a beauty of *poten
tia* undissipated better

than any metaphysics.
The zombie sense of
this the eviscerations
of site the subject who

sees the subject who s
ees this also evacuated
would only be where t
he incision is made tha

t is where their pain is
apparent. Those hands
like tools extend back
into the body this hum

an technology doesn’t
fuck around the torso
rips open the throat expl
odes and this is a mach

inery somewhere in re
lation we are unmade.
From start to finish the
se hands are made from

death material because
the soul must show itse
lf somehow to the world.
I want to show you how

we make death I want to s
how the factory lines ho
w modern death was alw
ays a factory with hooks

that a technology is just
something we don’t have
to think about until *I* de
parts and thinking arrives.

Oh One Arrow

*Oh One Arrow* is now out with Flim Forum Press. Check the advert. below:

flim forum press presents
Oh One Arrow

ISBN 978-0-9790888-0-3

featuring work by:
brandon shimoda, thom donovan, jonathan minton, adam
golaski, lori anderson moseman, katie kemple,
christopher fritton, eric gelsinger, jacqueline lyons,
john cotter, jeff paris, michael ives, jaime corbacho,
matthew klane, pierre joris, and aaron lowinger

cover and insert art by luke daly

208 pages
$18.00

to order, call boyd printing company
1-800-877-2693

or contact: klane@flimforum.com

($5.00 is added for shipping and handling, as well as
sales tax in NY state only, and particular to the
county)

Peace On A presents Paolo Javier & Eléna Rivera

Peace On A

presents

Paolo Javier & Eléna Rivera

Friday, December 8th 2006 8PM sharp
BYOB & suggested donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Paolo Javier is the author of *60 lv bo(e)mbs* (O Books), & *the time at the end of this writing* (Ahadada). He recently completed a full-length play, *Lunatic*, & has presented his short dramatic works at Poet's Theater Jamboree in San Francisco. He edits 2nd Ave Poetry (http://www.2ndavepoetry.com/), & lives in New York.

Eléna Rivera is the author of *Mistakes, Accidents and a Want of Liberty* (Barque Press, 2006), *Suggestions at Every Turn* (Seeing Eye Books, 2005), and *Unknowne Land* (Kelsey St. Press, 2000), and a recent pamphlet entitled *Disturbances in the Ocean of Air* (Phylum Press, 2005). She won first prize in the 1998 Stand Magazine International Poetry Competition and the 1999 Frances Jaffer Book Award.

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and scholars. Past presenters at Peace on A include Alan Gilbert, E. Tracy Grinnell, Cathy Park Hong and Andrew Levy. Scroll down Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

“to the united states of america on the other side of this page”—Hannah Weiner

Introductions to Paolo Javier and Eléna Rivera

Teaching Kamau Braithwaite with a class at NYU last night, I was struck by a coincidence between Braithwaite’s “Letter Sycorax” from his book *Middle Passages*, and the work of the two poets reading tonight: Paolo Javier & Eléna Rivera. Of course many of the problems Javier and Rivera share with Braithwaite immediately become apparent reading the three poets together: how to posit a linguistic-poetic subject without legitimating it through a mythology of fundamental community? How to posit such a subject in language where language itself bears all the baggage of neglectful and malicious histories? These are just two of the problems that seem readily available to me confronted by the triangulation: Braithwaite, Javier, Rivera. However, a deeper problem that emerges in all three writers is one we may pose as a problem of allegory, or, more accurately, as my friend Gregg Biglieri termed it on the phone last night: *allegoresis*. Where allegory alone implies a static set of symbolic-dramatic properties, *allegoresis* may point to a more active process whereby these properties are made, and re-made: invented, renewed, enacted. In Braithwaite’s “Letter Sycorax” an allegoresis takes place where the poet evokes the figure Sycorax—the mother of Caliban from Shakespeare’s *The Tempest*—through the customized electronic word processing format he uses to write and publish (also called “Letter Sycorax”). Through the ways he employs this type format, Braithwaite cleverly draws out many of the antinomies pervading what the poet calls *Aur-iture* and *Nation Language* (the language of “the folk,” subaltern, enslaved). Here, through (mis-) or (dis-)spelling, words open up to their doubleness at phonetic, morphemic, and syllabic registers between written and spoken language; technologies of mechanical reproduction and standardization are themselves always Janus-faced insofar as they reveal both “a storm of progress” sweeping up the past, and the “straight gate of the messiah”—to use Walter Benjamin’s famous phrasings concerning “Historical materialism”. To write a “letter Sycorax” than seems to channel all of the immanent forces of culture at one’s disposal in order to overcome, to curse by curser, to spell and dispel, to exist in exile, to sound letters at a constant point of bifurcation where literal words become their own mythology: a mytho-praxis; a "making allegory" of letters as actors, as en-actors "symbolic" only insofar as they effect.

*

Shakespeare’s writing argues with no one: only in itself. It says: *Love’s reason’s without reason […]; flaming in the . . . sight . . . Love hath reason, Reason none.* The writing exists as its own tempest…
~ Louis Zukofksy

Heavenly nuptials, Multiplicities of multiplicities...
~ Deleuze & Guattari

Allegory is mentioned on the first page of Paolo Javier’s book *60 lv bo(e)mbs* where he writes, “I rode above allegory. / I see a situation where Leda pleads for the absurd.” Here, to ride above allegory may mean to not condescend to it, or perhaps to ride it out like a wave. Where Leda would normally give birth to an egg, she instead “pleads for the absurb”. Pleading for and producing the absurb, Javier also proceeds; his book abounds with linguistic play, neologism, transliteration, detournment, and other signage of the absurb, contradictory, and trickstering. The (in-)formal structure that sustains the book is a self-involved interlocution (or “call and response”) evocative as much of a KRS 1 or P. Diddy as the three Steins (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Bernstein).

When Javier repeatedly refers to a “Trysteaser” throughout his text I believe that he may be alluding to such a dialogic coupling or interlocution. There are any number of couples who couple with the proper name “Paolo” in the text. There is Frederick Nietzcshe, who seems to act as a kind of foil to “Paolo” and others; there are Paolo’s “parents” "Prim" and "Rose" Javier, “Cam 1” and “Cam 2”; there is the Phillipino poet Jose Garcia Villa, who in the last poem, “A Play A Play,” is triangulated with “Nietzche,” “Paolo,” and “Love”.


Where William Carlos Wiliams calls the poem “a small (or large) machine made of words,” Javier’s text is a sprawling bachelor hydraulics of words and syllabics: a tryst machine generating the absurb not just to overcodify or deterritorialize, but to make actual virtual conditions of language-use where these virtualities may bring into being a new multiplicity or set of powers among a whole. This is an erotic activity for sure, an allegoresis of the double/couple trysteasing, producing, and reconstituting linguistic sense (like Deleuze’s Lewis Carol or the Zukofsky of *Catullus* and *80 Flowers*) at a point of indiscernibility where representation is both recaptured and released. There is no territory here because desire has no map, only a GPS called a critical erotics. Javier’s desiring language production persists to argue with itself, if not Culture in the largest sense.

Not any more Rene my corzine somber Tabasco cinema barcodes go
Arrival *coo where, po* allegory tubas sweltering dalaga
Marry poses more rain dulcinea deaf in ear native
Camel triangle yells the soul lamp of Paolo he’ll agree he’ll argue (68)

*

The navigator who makes use of the sea and the wind dominates these elements but does not thereby transform them into things. They retain the indetermination of elements despite the precision of the laws that govern them, which can be known and taught. The element has no forms containing it; it is content without form. Or rather it has but a side; the surface of the sea and of the field, the edge of the wind; the medium upon which this side takes form is not composed of things. It unfolds in its own dimension: depth, which is inconvertible into the breadth and length in which the side of the element extends. To be sure, a thing likewise presents itself but by one unique side: but we can circle round it, and the reverse is equivalent to the obverse; all the points of view are equivalent . The depth of the element prolongs it till it is lost in the earth and in the heavens. “Nothing ends, nothing begins.”
~ Emmanuel Levinas

The darkness of trees
Guards this life
Of the thin ground
That covers the rock ledge

Among the lanes and magic
Of the Eastern woods

The beauty of silence
And broken boughs

And the homes of small animals

The green leaves
Of young plants
Above the dark green moss
In the sweet smell of rot
~ George Oppen


I have already mentioned George Oppen in a number of my introductions for Peace on A so far, however the poet seems particularly close to Eléna Rivera’s book *Unknowne Land* and a possible allegory unfolding within its pages. It is the late-Oppen I particularly think of—*Seascape: Needle’s Eye*, *Myth of the Blaze* and *Primitive*—in regards to *Unknowne Land’s* own primitiveness.

The book is structured by the elements: Fire, Earth, Water and Air. There is an almost Medieval sensibility in this, a throw back to angelologies and aeons, an impossibly beautiful Scholastic imagination of number and essence. But the language is not Medieval or Scholastic; and if it is alchemical at all it may only be so in effect, where the language is transformative if not transcendent.

Rivera reminds me that the elements themselves are ethical. And that an ethics of the person, the lyrical subject if you will, is redoubled in language forms as they mimic elemental quality. In “Fire” a certain radiance is achieved by a beautiful line that zips across the text, exterior and sudden not in verticality but in horizontality. I read this formal maneuver as a wonderful inversion of the traditional analogy: the horizontal (line) is to the social as the vertical (spacing/line-break) is to the Divine:



In Earth I am struck by the feeling that the language is a literal sediment being sifted, alluvial as such. The text visually resembles a sieve or net, where it catches voices and images, and sifts impressions in time. In the spaces between words, phrases and sentences one feels the breaking of the earth itself as a breaking of the subject of poetry, a going down in tectonic and mantled shifts of language.



In Water, Rivera has used a series of tercets to mimic a flowing quality of water itself. Here the sonic, rhythmic and intellective values of the poem are not unlike Lorine Niedecker’s wonderful longer poem “Wintergreen Ridge”.



In the penultimate section, Air, the language provokes a sense of weightlessness or grace as, like in Fire, a horizontal row of words cuts through the middle of the poem. In these word rows (with much space left between individual words) one’s vision adjusts to the space of the page, and the fact that the words seem to not be in their proper sequence, or a linearally readable sequence for that matter. The words are light in this sense, having drifted from sequentiality.



In the last section, The Sphere, the fact that the poem is ordered by couplets belies the tension, and drift, within the couplet form as the poem attempts to reorder itself by a grammar and syntax within the couplets, perforating its own map (a perforation Rivera alludes to in the last page of her book).



If *Unknowne Land* is fundamental, I think it is fundamental in an ethical sense that the element is a ground or dwelling for encounter with otherness, if not "the" Other itself. When George Oppen repeatedly speaks of fire and stone, islands, the waterways he traveled by with Mary Oppen in their boats, the elemental is that which brings the personality, the ego, out of its self-enclosure. In Rivera and Oppen both, this encounter with the element is as affirmative as it is melancholy insofar as the self only becomes the self through the struggles against it presented by the world outside, beside, near: an otherness both presupposing and antedating "I", society, others. This limit-work of estrangement calls to mind Hegel’s prescription to “feel against your self”; but also Emmanuel Levinas’s insistence that in the encounter with the other is a necessary *inter-ruption* or *unworking* of being itself. The writing of the poem constitutes the activity of this primitive ethics, this ethics of the fundament. Land “unknowne,” mis-understood, un-theorized or grasped in aspect. Land un-intended. Dis-extended.

*

Paolo Javier:



*top-most image: Anton Van Dalen in his "living room".

Rob Halpern's A Little Lyrical Philosophy

Thrilled to receive the following from Rob Halpern, with whose permission I post...


A L I T T L E L Y R I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y
for Thom Donovan


Yes being this non-

Site you could be

Singing no with me

Too as if being

Could be anything with

Me here is not

What matters being these

Things we didn’t make

The world the one

We might have sung

Another world that doesn’t

Count here for one

And won’t have been

Here what I say

I mean can what

I say defy this

Function to name this

Function has no future

Which is just what

I thought about the

Subject ourselves not being

One as we are

I am this bald

White void this concept

Without identity or depth

A blank in being

Yours I can be

Some notion itself being

Imaginary not what’s real

Whose name has only

No world no state

Like the time when

You put your whole

Thing in my mouth

We ruptured between what

It all could be

And what this is

‘Where there is nothing

Save myself’ nothing saves

What exists in thought

I think I dread

To think what this

Really means is not


[rh — 01/04/07]


* ‘Where there is nothing save myself,’ from Amiri Baraka’s “Duncan spoke of a process”
**above image: Amy Balkin's *Mt. Everest Mall*

On the Beach*

THE DRAWER OUT

An eye peace

REMAINS

An ear peace

DRAWN FROM WORDS

*

This small
Large mech-
anics
Called grace
Separates
The animal
From the animal
The head
From the head

Call it being
This ring
And this
Ring
Calling
The animal
To song
And flight

Fleeting
Fact
Of falling
Fleeting
Fact
Of a will's
Grasp
Ungrasped

*

WHAT WINGS x 2

One
Must
Fall
First

A modal fall

*

One must fall
To ageless
Incoherence
One's wings
Must turn
To dust
And dust
Must turn
To songless
Weeping
This will be
A charade
Of force
Our song
Will be
It will
Sweep
No one
Into its
Wake and
Wake
Kill from
Become

*

FLAT BLUE COLOR
SKY GOES HERE

(site)

CLOUDS CLOUDS
CLOUDS CLOUDS

Sun somewhere

Waves little crests
Their multitudes

(cite)

FOREGROUNDED REEDS

*

)
CANCEL
OCCULUAR
DURING
(

*

some things inside celophane

*

On the rim
Of all things
Seeing all
Things thin
Slices the actual
Reeds receeding
A world

On the rim
In waves
The waves
In waves
Thin Turner
The blue
His favorite

A timorous graph
A word like a wind
Sock a kinetic fact drawn
Like an Oceanic Dean

*

On the rim
Dreams are
Facts too
Of percept
Or ideas
Of waves
Composing
Motion

On the rim
And thinking
I just want
To see
The thing the way
The thing is
Actually
I want to say
What words mean

An ethic of gesture
Think your horizontal
Elements on the way and on and on

*

Earth

A SEVERANCE

Sky

*

The background of this dance has no background

Like a ring to an animal subtract hands from hands

Feet from feet we move without First Mover seemingly


*composed X-mas 2006 on Cape Cod

Thanks to the Scanning Bed

Thanks to Jane Lea & Brandon Stosuy I just got a scanning bed...

a New Year's card


from Cory Arcangel's Migros Museum monograph (2005)

a flyer for my fleeting improv group with Dave Nuss (No Neck Blues Band), Sheila Donovan (Tallboys, Amolvacy), and others

Eva Hesse's suicide in reverse?



three Polaroids of places I've lived

A Kabbalistic sticker by my friend Josh

a favorite (self-)portrait by Maya Deren, from Anthology Film Archives' The Legend of Maya Deren Vol. One Part II: Chambers (1942-1947)

me and my friend Marian, Fall 2005

a favorite "schablone" photo from Caroline Koebel & Kyle Schlesinger, Fall 2004. Check their Schablone book (2005) w/ Chax press...

some notes inside my copy of John Taggart's Loop

a Borscht recipe from a postcard I found at a Ukranian shop in the E. Village

Catherine Sullivan's Metro Pictures show, "The Chittendens," may have been the most interesting art showing in NYC (Thomas Hirschorn's "Superficial Engagement" and Guy Ben Ner's "Berkeley's Island" aside) I saw in 2006

Badiou on Grace & Apostalic Discourse

There invariably comes a moment when what matters is to declare in one’s own name that what took place took place, and to do so because what one envisages with regard to the actual possibilities of a situation requires it. This is certainly Paul's conviction: the debate about the Resurrection is no more a debate between historians and witnesses in his eyes than that about the existence of the gas chambers is in mine. We will not ask for proofs and counterproofs. We will not enter into debate with erudite anti-Semites, Nazis under the skin, with their superabundance of "proofs" that no Jew was ever mistreated by Hitler.

To which it is necessary to add that the Resurrection--which is the point at which our comparison obviously collapses--is not, in Paul's own eyes, of the order of fact, falsifiable or demonstrable. It is a pure event, opening of an epoch, transformation of the relations between the possible and the impossible. For the interest of Christ's resurrection does not lie in itself, as it would in the case of a particular, or miraculous, fact. Its genuine meaning is that it testifies to the possible victory over death, a death that Paul envisages, as we shall see later in detail, not in terms of facticity, but in terms of subjective disposition. Whence the necessity of constantly linking resurrection to *our* resurrection, of proceeding from singularity to universality and vice versa: "If the dead do not resurrect, Christ is not resurrected either. And if Christ is not resurrected, your faith is in vain" (Cor. I.15.16). In contrast to the fact, the event is measurable only in accordance with the universal multiplicity whose possibility it prescribes. It is in this sense that it is grace, and not history.

The apostle is then he who names this possibility (the Gospels, the Good News, comes down to this: we *can* vanquish death). His discourse is one of pure fidelity to the possibility opened by the event. It cannot, therefore, in any way (and this is the upshot of Paul's philosophy) fall under the remit of knowledge. The philosopher knows eternal truths; the prophet knows the univocal sense of what will come (even if he only delivers it through figures, through signs). The apostle, who declares an unheard-of possibility, one dependent on an eventual grace, properly speaking knows nothing. To imagine that one knows, when it is a question of subjective possibilities, is fraudulent: "He who thinks he knows something [...], does not yet know as he ought to know" (Cor. I.8.2). How is one to know when one is an apostle? According to the truth of the declaration and its consequences, which, being without proof or visibility, emerges at that point where knowledge , be it empirical or conceptual, breaks down. In characterizing Christian discourse from the point of salvation, Paul does not hesitate to say: "Knowledge[...] will disappear"(Cor. I.13.8).
--Alain Badiou

Weeeping As Not Weeping

A Pricksong

--for Harry Partch & Aaron Moore

Some stray notes help
The open cope

A locomotion
Coats

The clouds
As they American
Pass

With strings detached

The least is the highest

The last shall
Be fast

Croons hobo neckbones
At long last.

The Man Without Hands cont'd

Without hands
But a mold
Still wet
From where
It fell

From a discontent
About description
About movement
A place ideas

Can continue
To move
Not for long blank
Nor for long similar
To themselves

This is the frame in an egg or a shell like a shack you forgot in the uncartooned desert

This is the bulk of dark the delving into it as it separates an optics from a prism of control

An ascendence a whereabouts an operation overlooking this operation

The model exits the picture and enters and exists this is a grasping of that model's animation

But eyes failed
To touch eyes
In the space remaining
Before eyes
Or after knowing was for

The reflection of flecks
The wings seeming
To touch
The symbolic haste

Of these wings
The uncasing of stars
An animation
Sings of pinpricks
Starts and stops

Rob Halpern's Disaster Suite

Experiences are not "as if." The disappearance of the I in the moment of the shudder is not real; but delirium, which has a similar aspect, is nevertheless incompatible with artistic experience. For a few moments the I becomes aware, in real terms, of the possibility of letting self-preservation fall away, though it does not actually succeed in realizing this possibility. It is not the aesthetic shudder that is semblance but rather its attitude to objectivity: In its immediacy the shudder feels the potential as if it were actual.
--Theodor Adorno

We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future--that which is yet to come--if the diaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.
--Maurice Blanchot

An adequate response after a surpassing disaster cannot be only political and economic, but has to include a specifically cultural and artistic component. A distinction has to be maintained between an understandable willful rejection by some of the defeated of what they associate with the defeat; and an objective withdrawal that has nothing to do with the intentions of individuals, although the later can be read as a symptom of this objective withdrawal....
--Jalal Toufic

So far I have received three books from Vigilance Press, a press without authorization or bibliographically established origin. The third of these books is Rob Halpern's *Disaster Suite*, whose epigraph reads *No 'force of nature ' did this* and is attributed to (an) "Unauthorized Report". Having been struck by Halpern's powerful first trade editon book off Krupskaya, *Rumored Place,* I am dumbstruck by Halpern's eerie epigraph and succinct, following text...

*Disaster Suite* is labored, if not enviably "fucked with". Which is to say, I read it as a text of found and altered language materials--a textual "non-site" (Smithson)--but also a text, like *Rumored Place*, of one incredibly skilled and intellective eye/ear. I have no doubt that Halpern is among the foremost of a new lyrical poetry (and "lyrical" in the most exalted sense of such a stigmatized term), and an appropriate edition to the other texts so far published by Vigilance: Michael Cross' *cede* & Craig Dworkin's *All Saints*.

If I could guess at the way the text was made I would say that Halpern took much time to re-work a group of texts found and composed, "playing" with their sequencing, their "mixing" and re-mixing. This is a poem one must read not only backwards and forwards, but non-linearly--each line seems so much to set off each other line, each punctuation mark and spacing every other.

Wetlands and marshes slow.
But my poems, like *phynance*
---- this accumulation of waste ----

I mean *this*, you and "the cranes
Like ships," they're relentless
---- targeting flows, pipelines ----

Thru which the silence, too,
Has slowed, tho it's still refining
---- me, I'm down to prewar levels.

When I read the "disaster" of Halpern's title I read *disaster* in terms of at least two souces: after Maurice Blanchot for whom *disaster* refers to an ontological *inter-ruption* by which time has ceased to "flow" chronologically and/or synchronically and remains as a *trace*--an anachronistic event or anarchism deferring sequential beginning (*arche*). I also read the term where Jalal Toufic more recently refers to a *surpassing disaster* as a time *at* or *after* the "end of [a/the] world," a period of "withdrawal" whereby cultural traditions are occulted by a social disaster, or disaster otherwise.

The disaster I believe Halpern to "actually" refer to in his text I don't doubt to be local and global at once; it is one of widespread and emergent economic-ecological catastrophe. The locale I continually picture reading his text is the Pacific U.S. coast where I know him to currently live. And yet there is an effective sense of the occult and ubiquitous infusing his text: that this disaster is everywhere and nowhere, that like all disasters that of *Disaster Suite* both immaneticizes and transcends space-time. Halpern's is a global and local disaster concomitantly, a disaster of the universal and the particular in the worst possible (*nouveau-*) Hegelian sense.

Over and above the market, I'm off trade
Now, without exchange means nothing
Like 'the dawn' has no commercial plot

Not belonging to itself, my value affirms
What goes unfounded and this won't count
As one subtracted from prevailing orders

Of inclusion, a unit has no real unity
I mean artifically difference just can't be
Spreading in a tree is not a rock, a bird

The formal rigors of Halpern's text valuably contribute to a textual experience of *this* disaster as well as a melancholy, Janus-faced hopefulness there may be ways to (re)establish (a/the) world(s)--regain sensation, spiritual and material well-being. One feels and thinks disaster in the writer's persistent concatenations of syntax, his sensitivity to caesura and sonorous dislexical sequentiality. Conveying emergent and harrowing contents form itself manifests disaster. Halpern (like a Celan or Oppen or Susan Howe or Mackey) shows us we are diasaster-ed by surpassing measure. Such recourse to surpassing is perhaps all we can hope for lyrically to embody what is happening and what keeps happening to the brink of despair: the Bush administration, unwaning global capitalism, national complancency, Iraq, unprecedented environmental mistake, religious-political nihilism. Formal experiment and radicalism itself must not compromise after the last seven years (nor the upcoming years of that much greater challenge), and Halpern's verses fortunately insist the effort of "shuddering" (Adorno), a shaping in disaster towards word-forms so we are haunted, expressed and potentialized towards action.

Then his voice just petered-out becoming
Strands of pale blue smoke he was gaunt
As an old crane and just as wild as what

I'd be anything to wind you back around
Reaquaint ourselves with lost sensation
Invent a world to save us from the world

Just feel this ---- *damaged roadside fringe*

The Man Without Hands (Weeping As Not Weeping)

In one of the earliest stages, when I was doing the scenario, I thought when one comes to the far top of this gigantic house, to an attic room, a last character would appear, some kind of a giant with barely discernible wings, some kind of angelic figure. He would lift the arm of the phonograph, the music would stop, and one would see all the film's scenes in still-frames.
~ Patrick Bokanowski

To keep grasping at hands the pitcher
breaks time's immediacy an egg of reason clicks
we are an image-track of cause we are the sound-
image of grace voluntarily sucked-up
into things into a world phonographically
removed from the suddeness of place.


A reverse-shot for description
following the light a serial
light the motion of actors unacted
the dancers undanced the film
unfilmed the workers in this
country of the undead
an involuntary appearance
serials light the motion


This man-god kills itself again
this man-god rising without hands
these signs were put down
in books the miraculous
stop-action of pages never ceasing
to amaze us believers
all words were meant to be read
and sung but this ladder
can never be unclimbed twice


A plaster for movement
A mold for dance
A thought-perimeter
A mulled mold
A degree holder
A modal desiring function...
Smallest when we see
Smallest when we leave
Smallest when we concept


The world leaves
me a miniature
to operate a machine
of no desire any longer
a mother fucker
just floating there un-
beknownst to itself
or any first mover
for that matter


Grace suffices to move nothing but itself
as a movement of thought it removes
everything but the necessary as a movement
of words it requires a mind so readied
to think with words (materials) that the sense
that words are being used falls away
leaving only the feeling for expression
the attempt to express adequate ideas themselves.

The idea of "world"

[Mulla] Sadra responds to the argument that paradise and hell cannot be located in this world with an admirable analysis of the very notion of "world." The idea of "world" is the idea of an absolute totality, such that there is nothing external to it. Consequently, a "world" has no place. Understood correctly, the "world" is perfect and complete in itself and, consequently, has neither a "where" nor a "place." On this point, he says, Aristotle is right. From this it follows that it is absurb to ask where hell is or where paradise is. They form a world in and of themselves and are not "parts" of this world; they constitute "the land of the otherworld." This land is the land of the soul; and it is in the world of the soul that the torments of hell and the joys of paradise take place--physical torments and sensible joys that occur through the intermediary of the senses of the soul, that is, through the sensibility internal to the soul. These sensations are infinitely more intense than what we feel with our physical bodies, and that is the truth of the Qur'anic promises and the divine warnings. At stake in moral life is something that ordinary people understand very well and that philosophy must take into account: the soul's eternal suffering or permanent enjoyment [*jouissance*], in the singular mode of its "resurrection."
--Christian Jambet's *The Act of Being*

Inland Empire

A hole on the way to heaven
The real face is made of tears
Lightning strikes the real
Voice summoning our substitution

A hole on the way to hell
Tears remove the face
From the face monitors remain
Within monitors this is our thesis

Of forthcoming a hole on the way
Skyward speak the static
Set theory close your eyes
If you believe yourself to be.

Michael Cross & Myung Mi Kim (@ St. Mark's)

This entire week I have wanted to post something to mark the occasion of Myung Mi Kim's and Michael Cross' reading together at the Poetry Project this past Monday. With the exception of myself, Cathy Park Hong, Eliza Newman-Saul, Stacy Szymaszek, Brenda Ijiima, a creative writing workshop from Fordham and a handfull of PP regulars there was an unusually small turn-out for the reading. This seems to me a curious fact where Kim is at the top of her game, and Cross has emerged as a significant younger poet and seminally artful publisher of new writing.

I have already written something at this blog about Kim's recent book with Cross, *River Antes*, a book which no doubt furthers Kim's serialist project and should, with any luck, come out soon with a major academic or trade publisher to reinforce Kim's reputation as one of a handfull of American poets at middle-age thinking across their books in rigorous ways. After hearing Kim read again last Monday, I also recognize Kim to be entirely singular in her off-page delivery. Very few readers give such vigilant* attention to their presentation, where the decisive pauses in Kim's reading create an auditory situation necessary to hear what is being read--and therefore for the work to convey maximal meaning, to onto-acoustically (less than psychologically) maintain the tenuous relationship between reader and audience. What is also consistently striking to me is Kim's ability to change tones and registers as quickly as she does, and to maintain her voice at a threshold of audibility. Where the voice remains at this threshold the audience "leans in" heightening its own listening powers, making a room ring with language-presence: a decisive Pneumatology, a relation within which to dwell...

Of Michael Cross I will only say now that he is one of my most valued contemporaries. This value issues mainly from the intensity of his writing and revision practice, as well as the difficulties of his thinking. Cross's recent poems "Sacred" & "cede" (now out as a chapbook with Vigilance press) display the tuitions of Cross's efforts. Each word feels here as if a nail driven into the page, and the rhythms of the poems cleave a modal, inter-textual quickness of a hearing-brain making caesuras within longer lines--nearly punctuationless, antinomian, utterly obediant and potential (free?). The importance of caesura in Cross's poetics points to what is for me a dual problem of Grace and intention in certain ongoing poetics. How the en-Graced writer may move as a vitual automaton in the language, going beyond mechanism in mechanism itself, emptying knowledge of a knowing or knowable content. A poetics of Kleist's God-Marionette, of Event, of Cartesian-cinematic phantoms. Inasmuch as Cross approaches his work like a (Matthew) Barney or (Rachel) Whiteread, or before them Robert Smithson, making molds as "Non-Sites" by which to process language-materials, his work also admits a continuation of some of the great living artist-poets: Acconci, Coolidge, Darragh, (Susan) Howe, Mayer, P. Inman, Retallack, Taggart.

*I borrow this word from Stacy Szymaszek's concise introduction for Cross and Kim last Monday.

True Name

--for kari edwards

At its moment of conception

The angel falls

For itself the immortal

Thought-body falling

Into the socius for

Itself a body

Smoked its last breath

Your Soteriology

Both brave and frightened

The bright words splay

Our sex the body

Is really a symbol of itself

Singular before its true name.