Saturday, November 16, 2013

"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.

Friday, November 15, 2013

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!