Reading for Melissa Buzzeo's BFA Workshop at Pratt Institute

Melissa Buzzeo asked me to give a reading and talk about my work the other night at Pratt. I liked so much the company and the sense of rapport with her students.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ge1dv7eawsislc/Reading%20at%20Melissa%20Buzzeo%20BFA%20workshop_5-2-2016%20%281%29.mp3?dl=0

For Eleni

If we are sick
And we are all sick

How do words care
For the sick?

We are dying to live
There is something

I am dying to tell you
When language ends

Don't call this cure
Call this method

Call this the necessary
Blocks we throw up

To know we are here
And not just a voice

That pain is just the beginning
Of what we will say

To each other a kind
Of poetry just without

The poem.

Tzak feature

George Life, editor of Tzak, has kindly posted a set of poems of mine composed over the past couple years.

Tripwire 10: A Pestschrift for CA Conrad

An updated and extended version of my essay, “None of us have rules, none of us have scripture”: CA Conrad’s Advanced Elvis Course and the Politics of Spirit, appears in Tripwire 10 along with many other essays, remembrances, and tributes to CA Conrad.

TRIPWIRE 10 * A Pestschrift for CAConrad, with an interview, prose, poems, & a play by CAConrad, plus TC Tolbert, Magdalena Zurawski, Frank Sherlock, Anne Boyer, Marianne Morris, Allison Cobb, Jen Coleman, d/wolach & Elizabeth Williamson, erica kaufman, Thom Donovan, along with work from Danielle LaFrance, Juliana Spahr, Lila Matsumoto & Samantha Walton, Sarah Hayden, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, Frances Kruk, Sheila Mannix,  Jenifer K Wofford, Alicia Cohen, Cesar Moro (trans. Esteban A. Quispe), Heriberto Yépez, ko ko thett, Steven Farmer, Nachoem Wjinberg (trans. David Colmer), Ghayath Almadhoun (trans. Catherine Cobham), Bert Stabler, Julian Francis Park on Claudia Rankine & Fred Moten, Tyrone Williams on Jocelyn Saidenberg, erica kaufman on Frank Sherlock, Eric Sneathen on Chris Nealon, William Rowe on Joshua Clover, Danny Hayward on Lucy Beynon & Lisa Jeschke, David W. Pritchard on Marie Buck, Kristin Palm on Wendy Walters, Linda Russo on Lorine Niedecker, James Sherry on Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Laura Moriarty on Syd Staiti, Nich Malone on Towards. Some. Air. (eds. De’Ath & Wah), & Ryan Gato on P. Inman. Cover by Yuh-Shioh Wong. 340 pages. April 2016. $15.

Interview with David Buuck in The Conversant

Thanks to Caleb Beckwith and The Conversant for publishing this interview I conducted with David Buuck! 

I think also about unlearning as much as deskilling, to let go of mastery as the threshold of the literary and let the materials and questions lead the work. Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff have written about inexpertise as a method—“inexpert investigation” is one way they phrase it—and I find their line of thinking about research and poetics compelling. At the same time, it’s a delicate balance between forging forms of politically committed work through methodologies of deskilled inexpertise (‘rigorous amateurism’ I’ve called it elsewhere) and simply half-assing a bunch of genres/media one has only half-studied & calling oneself a cross-genre performance artist or whatever. And of course to then try to corral everything into a book, when so much of the work exists off the page, either at/on specific sites or in/as time-based performances, means that failure is inherent in the book form. Could we unlearn the book?--David Buuck

Bath House 14

Bath House just published some work of mine along with Ana Božičević, David Buuck, Chyrum Lambert, and George Hajian. Letters to Beka Economopoulos, David Buuck, Etel Adnan, and Jordan Scott from a book forthcoming with Shifter Magazine.

VISCERAL POETICS by ELENI STECOPOULOS

VISCERAL POETICS 

Eleni Stecopoulos 

with a foreword by Alphonso Lingis

VISCERAL POETICS tracks “the chronic syndrome of the West” and the cruel treatments of poetry’s resistance. At once a call for an embodied scholarship, a poetic work of criticism, and a fragmentary autoethnography of the author’s health crisis at the millennium, Eleni Stecopoulos’ book moves in a complex field of languages and bodies, between symptom and art, diagnosis and composition, fascia and form. Stecopoulos aligns her method with diviners of entrails and holistic healers, tracing the resonance between locations that range from demonic possession and parasitic vowels to acupuncture and diaspora Greek. Opening new directions in poetry and poetics as well as literature and medicine, Stecopoulos argues for the body’s poetic agency and a different understanding of the therapeutic potency of art.

Focusing on works by Antonin Artaud and Paul Metcalf, Stecopoulos articulates a remarkable set of correspondences between experimental writing and the modalities and diagnostics of holistic medicine. In new readings of Artaud, Stecopoulos explores his collaboration with pain and use of energetic principles derived from modalities like homeopathy and acupuncture. She revisits the poetry and “translation therapy” of Artaud’s asylum years, understanding his exoticism as a technology of healing through world languages. Stecopoulos animates the complicated role of Artaud’s multiethnic background and ties his translations to histories of linguistic imagination situated in colonial encounter and nationalist and imperialist strategies.

VISCERAL POETICS also includes one of the few sustained meditations on Paul Metcalf’s documentary narrative GENOA: A TELLING OF WONDERS, a hybrid text that becomes a navigation of Western disease and the imperial conceptions to which American letters bear witness.

A critique both of the ways institutions disembody us and the primitivism that persists in heterodox seeking, VISCERAL POETICS seeks “to overwrite discourses of pathology with currents of empathy.” It joins the tradition of American poets’ scholarship exemplified by Charles Olson’s CALL ME ISHMAEL and Susan Howe’s THE BIRTH-MARK, and does something uniquely its own—a grand refusal of the division between who feels and who interprets. Stecopoulos’ book is the second in ON Contemporary Practice’s Monograph Series, which features extensive essays and collections by single authors as well as collections by multiple authors regarding discourses in contemporary poetics.

PRAISE FOR VISCERAL POETICS

Eleni Stecopoulos is singularly aware of a healing power in poetry that touches the most obscure depths of our carnal existence. She seeks to uncover “how the body in its opaque poetry can be homeopathically treated by poetry—as aesthetic, not anaesthetic, therapy.” Eleni Stecopoulos’ researches open an important field for investigation and practice: the healing force of language, of poetry.

-         Alphonso Lingis, from the Foreword

Searching in real time, thinking/feeling as writing, this tour de force of authentic scholarship reaches far back to the matrix of writing/embodiment at the crux of human consciousness, far forward into a modernism (Artaud, Metcalf) that explores the edges of such embodied writing, and in all directions as Stecopoulos’ every insight emerges from and remains immersed in a surround of the immediately personal. This is a lyrical study of great depth, an epic poem of experiential erudition. 

-         Maria Damon

Eleni Stecopoulos’ brilliantly provocative, syncretic manifesto identifies idiopathic disease with ideolectical poetics, pathology with anomaly – the flesh of the text and the text of the flesh – bringing home the liberatory potential for visceral readings of the unintelligible. For Stecopoulos, diagnosis is a practice of aesthetic translation and poetry a quest for knowledge outside the disabling strictures of Western rationalism. Written in lyric bursts of telegraphic intensity, Stecopoulos follows her guides, Artaud and Metcalf, through veils of suffering in order to repossess, from the jaws of evisceration, her own life – and ours. 

-         Charles Bernstein

In a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves, Eleni Stecopoulos performs healing rituals upon medical practices and cultural prescriptions, writing toward her own healing process, with opacity as sustaining wayfarer and shield against early collapse. Disease emerges as narrative symptom for disconnect, and language becomes subtle homeopathy, weaves a new myth, for suffering writers and suffering war-torn worlds, in a visceral poetics based on Artaud’s asylum writings: “a rhythm of exorcism against the drying out of opium by conspiracies and consecrations” (Artaud, SELECTED WRITINGS).

-         Petra Kuppers

Experience what “radiates from a text,” “the gravity at the core of theater” in this long awaited critical work from Eleni Stecopoulos, the genesis of her Poetics of Healing—a curated series of stages in which these ideas are enacted and the isolated patient finds place in a complicated communal as both are changed. Placing the psychic reading of the body that refuses with will next to the reading of poetries claimed unreadable, she makes a document of vital forms for a new kind of scholarship, for a new and ancient kind of person or poet one and the same in the hopes that they won’t be re-swallowed by the dominant but will find their own breath. A breath that will resist and resist singularity and in the failures or blocks, the resetting, find the choral-tragic—through a different kind of reading/witnessing. The violences of a larger social body made visible though a syncope pressing right up against poetry. In this epic lyric, everything and nothing at once. In “a form that holds, rather than explains”—the mystery of how this beautiful important project came to be.  

-         Melissa Buzzeo

The central question of VISCERAL POETICS is how to be. How to be a body. How to be a body in pain, a body not in pain. How to be a thinker, a scholar, a writer about literary works. How to be a poem too. It is unusual for a piece of literary criticism to take on such weighty questions. And Eleni Stecopoulos gives us no easy answers as she consults various forms of literatures and healing, questioning all of them and her relationship to them too. And as she does this she writes a book that is beautiful and moving, a life’s work dedicated to the work of living.  

-         Juliana Spahr

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Interview with Schloss-Post

Clara Herrmann of Schloss-Post (Akademie Schloss Solitude) conducted this interview with me regarding Occupy Poetics.

For the most part, I felt there was a potential historical value in a lot of this material, so I wanted to preserve that sense of the work’s artifactuality. I, for one, would write something very different now were I asked to address the political landscape, but I feel it is important to see a process, if only a process of becoming a little less ignorant and naïve regarding the truth of one’s place in the world, or of simply changing one’s perspective. I think Amiri Baraka is a kind of hero in this regard because his works stage the drama of changing one’s mind and position. Which is to say, they dramatize a process of becoming the person he is, which is of course ever-mutable, always changing, in relation to his contemporaries and contemporary events. This is also why as a general rule I refuse to rewrite poems years after their composition; because time changes how I write, and I want to admit time into the poems in different ways. Without acknowledging these time signatures/stamps, which become more acute with age, something is lost. Something proper to a moment, occasion, process, configuration, relation, or event.