Damn the Caesars round-up

I'm thrilled to be included here among such esteemed company in Rich Owens' 2009 round-up.

Poesis as Ecological Remediation

"C. Part Three: Earth Maintenance

Everyday, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered to the Museum:

-the contents of one sanitation truck;

-a container of polluted air;

-a container of polluted Hudson River;

-a container of ravaged land.

Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced:

purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical (and / or pseudo-technical) procedures either by myself or scientists.

These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the exhibition."
--from Mierle Ukeles' Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969

"To become worthy..."*

"Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us . . . Nothing more can be said and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event . . . and to become the offspring of one's events and not of one's actions."

*from Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense quoted in Robert Dewhurst's "The
 Repetitious
 Soul 
of 
CA Conrad's 
Frank
" (unpublished)

Ordering for Sovereignty and Us: Critical Objects 2005-2010

One of my many new year's resolutions is to collate and revise a manuscript of essay, reviews, and statements about poetics and cultural politics. Here is what I've got so far in case any have suggestions about a possible architecture/order/design/publisher.

Sovereignty and Us: Critical Objects 2005-2010

Sovereignty and Us:

Splitting: after a photo-document by Gordon Matta-Clark
Call Backs: on Tyrone Williams
Aporia and Progress: Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure
Every Name In History Is hannah
Hannah’s Bifuraction
Into Bride (Army of Rose)
Every Name In History Is I: on Catherine Sullivan’s Effusions of Meaning
Kyle Schlesinger: Insofar As a Metapolitics of Sense
Entrance Wounds: Richard Foreman’s Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land
Undeserving Lebanon by Jalal Toufic
Sovereignty and Us: Eleni Stecopoulos’ Autoimmunity (TAXT, 2006)
Bare Life: Taylor Brady’s and Rob Halpern’s Snow Sensitive Skin
Love Among the Ruins (3 A.K.): on Brett Evans’ and Frank Sherlock’s Ready-to-Eat Individual (Lavender Ink, 2008) and Rob Halpern’s Disaster Suites (Palm Press, 2008)
Lawrence Giffin’s Get the Fuck Back Into That Burning Plane
On Judith Goldman’s The Dispossessions
Paul Chan's "Sade for Sade's Sake" at Greene Naftali Gallery, NYC
Reading Martha Rosler Reading
In the Open: John Taggart’s Susan Howe
On Vision in Make Believe
A Work of the Actual: on Brenda Iijima
“In the dirt of the line”: on Bhanu Kapil’s intense autobiography
Doing the Twist: notes on Modern American poetry and vitalism
Robert Kocik (introduction for Peace On A)
Choir Praxis: on Daria Fain’s and Robert Kocik’s Phoneme Choir at Movement Research festival, May 4th 2009
Are We Human, or Are We Dancer?: on Daria Fain’s and Robert Kocik’s The Extent to Which
WIlliam Forsythe's Decreation at BAM
George Oppen’s Inoperative Poetics
Presencing the Disaster: recent poetry and art after George Oppen
Allegories of Disablement: some consequences of form towards potential bodies
Open Letter to Patrick Durgin on Disability Theory
“None of us have rules, none of us have scripture”: CA Conrad’s Advanced Elvis Course and the Politics of Spirit

Devotions:

Myung Mi Kim’s River Antes
The Course of Particulars: on Terry Cuddy
David Levi Strauss: A Poetics of Fact
Michael Cross (intro for Just Buffalo series)
“how real or imagined it was real”: E. Tracy Grinnell (Peace on A)
Paolo Javier (Peace on A)
Eléna Rivera’s Unknowne Land (Peace on A)
Wayne Koestenbaum (Peace on A)
Rob Halpern’s Disaster Suites
Rob Halpern’s Imginary Politics (Peace on A)
Lola Ridge’s The Ghetto
Activist Presses in the '00s
CANNOT EXIST #4 (Segue)
Leslie Scalapino (Segue)
M. Mara Ann (Segue)
Erica Hunt (Segue)
Dawn Lundy Martin (Segue)
Stephanie Gray (Segue)
Tony Conrad (Segue)
Corina Copp (Segue)
Propositions After Talking to Robert Fitterman Before Reading Notes on Conceptualisms
Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place’s Notes On Conceptualisms
To See 360 Degrees: Elka Krajewska and Alan Licht’s Plany Mela
Magdalena Zurawski’s The Bruise
CA Conrad’s The Book of Frank
George Oppen’s Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers
What We Do When We Believe: 8 Poets Discoursing After John Taggart
Arthur Russell Revived: Tim Lawrence's Hold On To Your Dreams

For a Discourse:

ON Contemporary Practice 1 editorial (with Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger)
Statement for ON1 launch
A Meme For Suzanne Stein
On Certainty
On Negative Criticism
On Stephen Burt’s “The New Thing”
ON Contemporary Practice 2 editorial (with Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger)

Blogging at Harriet January-March

I feel honored to be invited by Poetry Foundation to blog at Harriet with Sina Queras (of Lemon Hound), Bhanu Kapil (of Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? and her many wonderful books), and Fred Moten, who will coincidentally be reading for SEGUE with Mónica de la Torre later on this January. It is difficult to imagine a better company. For my contributions, I am planning to interview different writers and artists, generate questionnaires, write brief reviews and essays, generate curriculum/exercises, and engage with fellow bloggers/commentors. Please feel free to join the conversation via comments boxes and/or by being in touch directly with me: tadonovan [at] hotmail [dot] com.

Iijima's If Not Metamorphic in Publisher's Weekly

Publisher's Weekly has the following to say about Brenda Iijima's new book, If Not Metamorphic:

In Iijima's fourth collection, shifts and spaces on the page animate the messy and glorious process of making meaning. As suggested by “metamorphic” in the title (meaning a change in a rock's physical form or substance, usually as a result of heat or pressure), geological metaphors are essential to these four long poems. The stunning title piece, composed entirely of questions, sifts and settles across its pages like sediment, both moving (in every sense) and unwaveringly direct. “Tertium Organum” has a noisier geologic structure, suggesting the violence of human intervention: “Twisted corset the tectonic plates make/ when crassness butts up against steel.” This collision of registers and the resulting dissonance is much of the point. Language, here, “encroaches,” “is engorged,” and “is hit by passing vehicles.” Often, it moves metonymically, leading us from idea to idea by way of sound: from “loan” to “lone,” “suffer” to “sulfur,” “sees” to “siege,” and “sunder” to “tundra.” Sometimes Iijima jumps between registers via overt protest, as in “song birds gave way to acid rain.” At her most self-reflexive, she describes her “affection for/ provocative contrasts.” The experience of following these contrasts is thrilling; as Iijima writes, “In a manner of speaking we flew.”

Tears Are These Veils at tumblr.

I started a new blog today, mainly for links and photos: http://tearsaretheseveils.tumblr.com/

Will be tweaking it and adding pics when I can. I like the simultaneous slide-shows so far.

Reading Martha Rosler Reading at MUSEOXIII

The following is from an essay I wrote about Martha Rosler's reading practice in her 1975-1985 video works, now up at MUSEO XIII online. Thanks to Martha Rosler for allowing me to interview her, and to David Shapiro who edited the essay extensively.

"In three videos from the late 70s and early 80s—Domination and the Everyday (1978), A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night, and If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION (1985)—Rosler elaborates her reading practice as a means of encountering the United States’ geopolitical involvement with Latin America. These works pose questions about how one reads video intertextually, how the medium can be used as a vehicle for counter-hegemonic strategy, analysis, and critical reflection, and perhaps most importantly, how to read the United States’ unofficial wars and conflicts. Given the strategies of blackout, disinformation, and distraction enacted by popular media outlets, how is it possible to redirect a viewer’s reading process and critically navigate a terrain of signs intended to draw attention away from the culpability of the state? How is this a matter of “bringing the war home”—a popular slogan from the 60s which Rosler borrows for her mash-up collage works treating the Vietnam and Iraq wars?"

Tears Are These Veils

NO RAINBOW STICKERS ON MACHINE GUNS

Read and sign CA Conrad's "Gays Against Gays in the Military" petition here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/queers49/petition.html

Elective Affinities

Carlos Soto just added me to his wonderful Elective Affinities blog, a project which intends a "map where affinities, differences, and unexpected connections coexist in an ongoing, collective construction." Posts consist of bio, poetics statement, poems, and tags of five contemporaries.

M. Mara-Ann SEGUE Series introduction

As we gather here, politics is failing us again. It is failing us, in particular, at the current Copenhagen summit on climate change. If there were ever a feeling of “now time” in our era it would seem to crystallize around these past two weeks. Reading the reports on Copenhagen, we are told repeatedly that we must act in decisive ways now to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperature of 3 degrees Celcius. Politics is failing us because, as Naomi Klein says, the United States is “holding hostage” the rest of the world by attempting to broker a 'take it or leave'-style deal in terms of its willingness to provide aid. Such is our politics of the worst.

M. Mara Ann’s Containment Scenario: DisloInter MedTexId entCation is a book of hyper-appropriative poetry cum performance score written in emergency. It is an attempt to presence now time, to make now time felt through the urgency of words that defy normative-linear syntaxes to produce an emotive, political grammar of environmental crisis. Given the challenging legibilities of M. Mara Ann’s text—the fact that her book is as graphically complex as it is wildly abstract—I am very curious how she will read it aloud, and what it would mean for such a text to be read aloud. M. Mara Ann’s work requires that the reader learn not simply how to read the work, but how to relate its layers of understanding—its senses of becoming world.

Utterance is so important here because it sounds into the commons what is available as information to all—the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 “Climate Change” summary, the Global Green USA & Green Cross International reports on “Confronting Climate Change”—yet which is withheld from our distracted attention spans, our reified lifestyles and senses of work. Partly incantatory, partly didactic, definitely a sincere shout into a void of citizens who will not have heard, Containment Scenario is ultimately consciousness raising. Mediating primary documents of the climate crisis, it wishes to refocus our attentions by underscoring key phrases from the aforementioned documents; yet it also wants to attune us to the ways that we could view becoming—a more global and heterogeneous eternal return of the same—beyond our outmoded and cynical views of economy, ecology, and justice.

Without thought—without thinking through what has brought us to this point of emergency—ecological problems will only persist whether or not we avert this particular crisis. M. Mara Ann wants us to hear this too—amidst the din of her insisting. That thinking as the ultimate emergency—thinking in motion, thinking in relation, thinking thinking—becomes more important than ever before. And that this thinking should be heard as much as it is seen and read. It should be felt, and this would be a kind of medicine for things in relation. What Parmenides originally imagined as becoming, and what M. Mara Ann reinvents for a politics of human-animal subsistence.

Everything Will Be Taken Away

Or what I mean by this can’t matter
The grave will just be a hole
My self some sense of self
Will be a hole when I am done singing
A place where I lost you of course
Where I stopped world forming
There would be a politics in this
If loss could be felt and not seen

Or it will not be at all no one will be
The land expropriated from the free will not
Be because it will not be a part
Of history every part of the whole is false
Which is not spoken by those who can’t speak
So great is what was taken from them
No amount of naming no amount
Of cash will replace it.

Pastoral for COP15

Everything we pretend to possess
Will be taken from us the land
What is left of the land
Three feet above sea level
In an other’s democracy who
Are "we" fooling

There will no mythology
Except in what we allow
To melt except in what blood
Will be shed pastoralist
Blood soil of whose science fiction
Whose practice let this occur

Lays waste to charitas good deeds
Need of mountains commoner trees
For neighbors not to take up arms
And posit myths of origins
A stressed imaginary reduces

Eschaton of this big lapse of judgment
Grand mal of theory who will be judged
Insufficiently civilized barbarity
Is on the right side of history
When every one is wrong

Who do not interrupt (it) soon enough
Slavery in a storm of progress
No name in history enough
Frightened finally by ‘hybridity’
Necessity, not contingency, pounds
The shores of us

No boundaries but a disaster
Which universalizes makes differences
Also more stark
The little ones less
Developed simplified by disaster
Reduced to their breath bigger than
The lungs
Like Kafka’s mouse singer.

Klein on Climate Apartheid

"There’s an inverse relationship between who created the problem and who can afford to save themselves from the problem, and it isn’t only in the Global South. Think about New Orleans. Right? It’s also the South in the North. The people who had resources could drive out of the disaster zone; the people who depended on the state were left on their roofs, a kind of a climate apartheid, in the United States."--Naomi Klein

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/11/klein

SEGUE READING SERIES: Fiona Templeton + M.Mara-Ann

Saturday, December 19, 2009
4:00pm - 6:00pm
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY

Fiona Templeton is a poet, and director of the performance group The Relationship. Books include YOU-The City (an intimate Manhattanwide play for an audience of one), Cells of Release, Delirium of Interpretations, Mum in Airdrie, London, and Elements of Performance Art. She lives in New York and London. (www.fionatempleton.org & www.therelationship.org)

M. Mara-Ann is the author of Containment Scenario: DisLoInterMedTextIdentCation: Horse Medicine, luminous (the CD), and mirrorrim (the audio visual installation);works related to the multimedia performance, Containment Scenario. Other books include lighthouse (Atelos, 2002) and forthcoming: ecnelis (a+bend press, 2000). www.medusa.org

On "Vision" in Make Believe

Back in September I was asked the following question in regards to my Wheelhouse Press chapbook, Make Believe: "Many moments in Make Believe are concerned with vision. These poems, among other things, explore vision in various modes, from the spectacle of cable news to the very formation of subjectivity. Do you think of your work as constructing what might be called a poetics of seeing?"

Here is a link to my response.

Thanks to Nathan Moore at readwritepoem for his interest.

"While I am saying all of this, I wonder how much any of what I’m saying is conveyed by the poem itself. The poem leads, as David Wolach points out, with its ear, but often the senses become cross-wired — confused and ruinous. I dedicated the poem to my friend Gregg Biglieri who is a master of the pun, and of what he calls “negative synaesthesia” after Zukofsky’s Bottom. Flights into nonsense — into language play — seem necessary for the brain and the senses to sync themselves. So in “Berkeley Island” “when dissolves to wind” and a lens “points and chutes” as though to conflate photography with branching. Nonsense, of which poetry obviously has a lot, is meta-political in that it refuses to reduce language use to a representation (whether for a vulgarly conceived common sense or for the sake of communication).

Living Labor

Criss-cross this chorus
Not marshaling us
The state of the soul or
The soul of the state
Is a formal feeling

An emotional thing
Swerving into the doing
Latent reserves of energy
And potentia across personnel

Body of living labor
Gives me a sign
We are not done with you yet
This is the place we were born
And this the place we became

Slaves in an air other
Than our own
The indentured sing
Of power in a new form

But are not themselves we
Are not ourselves
Beholden to a brand
Locking the flavor in like value

If an emotion possesses us
If a theory of value signs
Off into the void let us rule
For another decade

Let our nets cast us larger
Than our appetites appear
For control or the armies
That we lead
With their hands blown-off

No longer forced to rule
Who will resurrect
What we could not feel
The first time?

Come and See

The withdrawal of those
Guns and eyes never fair
A single one the sun
Not shining on us here
No one lucky enough
No dirt brave enough
To tuck us in
Speak our names a photography
Worn thin with history
A kind of stench our stories leak
A kind of lack our eyes want
When meaning won’t
Be strained.

The starlight on their eyes
It is sometimes
And we are them
Disastered because our voices
Muffle in the din
Of voices given up control
Of what they mean
Bogged down by the dead
And having seen
And not heard
Too much where we wake
We supposedly wake.

Alan Bernheimer SEGUE series introduction

Social histories of poets has always been an interest of mine. Whether Alan Bernheimer is a 3rd generation New York School poet or a 1st generation Language Writer does not matter so much as the fact that Bernheimer is writing and publishing poems again—after a hiatus of nearly a decade—and that these poems are available for our delectation.

Delectation is not a glib critical phrase in the way I’m using it here because Bernheimer’s poetry is all about enjoyment. It is also about an adventure of the mind tuning the senses, exchanging them, inverting them, desynching them—reversing the roles, making them haywire. Synaesthesia rules in Bernheimer’s work, and perhaps that is why he can be easily confused with a New York School poet. Psychadelia is of the hour, it is of practically every line. Sense always negotiating nonsense, and nonsense ideation. His company is Larry Fagin, and Bill Berkson, and Ted Greenwald swerving from the radical cultural movements of the 60s, forward looking at the deconstructions of “a political economy of the sign” in the 70s and 80s.

What Bernheimer shares with Language Writing is a sense of language as a proposition about sense, and how sense-making determines the socio-political. Underpinning each of Bernheimer’s lines is a pun, or, when there is not a pun, a sense of surprise or defiance of expectation that one did not appear. Among my contemporaries there has been a lot of use of the pun towards a political poetry in the last decade or so. I am thinking here of Gregg Biglieri, David Buuck, Louis Cabri, Craig Dworkin, Judith Goldman, Jennifer Scappettone, and Kyle Schlesinger among others—Schlesinger in particular, whose poetry resembles Bernheimer’s own perhaps more than any one else. As I have argued of Schlesinger’s work, and I will say the same of Bernheimer’s: to challenge sense via the pun is always political; it is what undergirds a politics of language insofar as it challenges language’s tendency to become instrumental and representative. Something that stands in for direct action, participation, expression, thinking.

Like Kit Robinson’s work, or Bob Perelman’s, or Lyn Hejinian’s, or Charles Bernstein’s, with Bernheimer there is also a sense that ideas are always affective, and that words—as an abstraction of the real, and as envelopes of the mind—were always bound to our emotional complexes. There is a warmth that radiates from Bernheimer’s work that I associate with the aforementioned writers, though Bernheimer’s political commitments are perhaps a bit more elliptical, his theoretical references a bit less theory laden, his attempt to dissolve the referent in wild significations less performed, more breezy.

I like the term breezy because it underscores an ease or facility of speaking/writing, a kind of grace. What if you could turn le mot juste to all the purposes of language doing philosophy, or simply scoring our least plausible thoughts and sensations? What would any of this prove except that in what we write inheres an incredible potential for language to express non-experience and subtle sensation, to make us dream the actual, to put the real back into what was supposed dream?

Through a logic of language games poetry in the 70s and 80s was able to achieve a distinctly American kind of surrealism—a surrealism beyond the logic of symbols, or the phenomenology of a subconscious; a surrealism of what words can do unleashed from master discourses—of performance, and speech act, and grammatology. With Bernheimer’s recent 'new and selected'—The Spoonlight Institute—we are transported to the beginning again. Of an actual dreaminess that is our everyday having to live with words.