Deadpan at Weird Deer

here is a link to Dorothea Lasky and I reading a selection of our collaboration, Deadpan, at Travis Nichols' Weird Deer:

http://weirddeermedia.com/2008/06/deadpan-collaborative-poems-by-dorothea-lasky-thom-donovan

Braille Eyes

Dreamt I was evicted
from my house so
there would be no

more home for my
tears to dwell in but
in you I called

to you in some way
like one does in
dreams fact of tele

pathy but you were
already there that
is you are always

already here with me
who keeps an image
of the loved con

stantly before them
loves truly so there
will always be a place

to dwell hearts ears
seek braille eyes
what touch owes you.

Peace On A presents: Power & Performance

Despite my affinity for the term relationality, we may need other language to approach the issue that concerns us, a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well.
~ Judith Butler

Peace On A

presents

Power & Performance
featuring presentations by David Buuck, Julie Patton, and Chen Tamir

Sunday, June 8th 2008 6PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

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

about the readers:

David Buuck lives in Oakland, where he organizes BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. He is a contributing editor for Artweek, and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.

I had disembarked at the Embarcadero, platforming myself into some semblance of public figuration. The bay area rapidly tranced it, from the resident base camps to the clamor and throng. Up and out into the punctuated street-sprawl, shadowed by the public directives. Heaved out then into the scablands, street-rocks popping against the undercarriage of the survival carts. Billboards tower as trees might shadow that. The turn lanes apropos of the new gold rush. Steetside is saddle leather, limbered for the pickets. 425,258 a day, fro and bending to it.
~ from Electricworks


Julie Patton extends her pulpoethic strategies into collaborative spaces via anyone willing to hand-dance—recent activities include stirring up an ArtScience mecca in Cleveland's inner city, "A Roon for Opal" art installation as part of the Olin Art Museum's (Lewiston, Maine) "Green Horizons" exhibition. "Using Blue to Get Black," an extended argument about the color blue forthcoming in Crayon Magazine. The rest is herstory.

riff off of
"Using Blue to Get Black"
(for my mo' there mudder)

blah blah blew light
be lack beat subject
leadible huge margins
lake back eerie bl accents
reeking scalp blue hung
er un
speak a bruised surf
faces mean blood ism
cl...oud braille lean
read
conscious pilots (heavenly friction)
hum blue staff
road read stratejeans
bic hus blind air
high hand le soluablu sex pack
14 ml tube b lousy pinkablue
sigh sing argue a pale smiles
be lie a blue lip fast
(as you write for days
vary a ble tongue brash
dis as stern pen onyx drink text
siccative blind
azurite for days
terre blue ish cast
boon flower b light
belie s can vast memory
ig blue not house a b...loa
ice, water, oil, wind
con vert sable skin c lash
crop then go after value
ire my bluest I
pearl pliant
goo out
b rain b light
tinktured, wheight bl+ u…
more than you can thank
heaven
flat to be tied re
touching orange
cut off your risk so
bleu to feel raw skies
scrump back ground
pain t hang
soul solvent
gesso so yes so blue
tellin’ me making do
with all that
blue


Chen Tamir is an independent writer and curator based in New York, Toronto, and Tel Aviv. She holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College. She is also a curator at Flux Factory in Queens. Her most recent curatorial efforts are on view in Toronto at the Barnicke Gallery with a show called "Stutter and Twitch": http://www.jmbgallery.ca/exhibitions.html

In “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” art historian and theorist Claire Bishop called Bourriaud up Relational Aesthetics’ cliquishness. She advocated instead for what I’m calling “Social Practice.” Social Practice is not reactionary to Relational Aesthetics: They run parallel. Their distinctions may sound benign, but it’s important to differentiate between artwork that reinforces a closed system, and one that challenges it. Although it’s really nice to hang out in galleries and feel cool, what we (and I mean a very broad “we”) need is art that takes us beyond that, or at least makes us question what that means. Sometimes that can be uncomfortable, forcing us to deal with issues we’d rather not face, or people we’d rather not associate with, but that discomfort is productive.
~ from “Social Practice”

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers, activists and scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

Peace On A presents Rob Halpern & Eleni Stecopoulos

Movement (or shape in writing) is a knowledge that isn’t one’s thinking per se. One’s thinking by itself is movement that is knowledge.
~ Leslie Scalapino

Peace On A

presents

Rob Halpern & Eleni Stecopoulos

Thursday, June 5th 2008 8PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

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

about the readers:

Rob Halpern is the author of Rumored Place and Snow Sensitive Skin (co-authored with Taylor Brady). Two collections of poems, Disaster Suites and Music for Porn, are forthcoming this year, and a little chap called "Imaginary Politics" will be out from TapRoot Editions this month. He's currently co-editing the writings of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the first of which, "For a Realist Literature," can be found in the current issue of Chicago Review. He lives in San Francisco.


from MUSIC FOR PORN

Like yr body’s inner edge I feel things everywhere this pure circum
— schisms surround me but whatever happened in the car my
Social vacancy fills with random abductions stories extending

Lonely from the day’s bleak tone rows a landscape or whatever de
— scending points in space can’t see how we’ve been thrown
Out of the thing’s now blank interior it’s always a gamble trade

Being no event no self-evidence inside the dispersion affects
You boy how yr organs go on finding me here as one who might
Still feel a distance even when living in the other room strung

Out between their cries and the inner heat yr body leaves rim
— ming images lips limits what these circumcisions sing around
Me no more optical effects now pure pictures eyeing this — heaven.


Eleni Stecopoulos was born in New York, NY and currently lives in San Francisco. She has published a chapbook, Autoimmunity (Taxt, 2006), and her first book, Armies of Compassion, will be published by Palm Press in 2009. She is at work on Earth Also is a Private Language, a book-length poem that takes place via the island of Evvia (Euboea): its geothermal springs and hydrotherapy traditions, ancient cults, and family stories that involve escape. In 2007 she guest-co-organized the Paros Symposium on Poetry and Translation in Greece. This spring she curated an event on poetics and healing, featuring psychologist Eric Greenleaf and poet/design/builder Robert Kocik, for the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.


we have been made into
immovables domestic warp
the sacrum into acquisition
at the expense of the people the real people the principal
line that cuts us phoneme that articulates
my pursed fingering air as the instrumental
difference plays . the feeling
for people whose names we can barely
pronounce those names amnesty delivers
when I see human on a soup can
administer the homonym before
english can attack

from “Sacral Thought,” Armies of Compassion



Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers, activists and scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

The Phoneme Choir (ad)

MOVEMENT RESEARCH FESTIVAL SRING 2008
SOMEWHERE OUT THERE
Thursday May 29th - 10 pm
THE PHONEME CHOIR
Judson Memorial Church Gym, $5
243 Thompson St, just off Washington Square South
R. Steiner wrote: “The entire universe is expressed when the alphabet is repeated from beginning to end.” Join us for an orchestrated performance of the forty phonemes which are the English language's most basic structural units. The Phoneme Choir is part of The Prosodic Body, an ongoing collaboration between choreographer Daria Fain and architect/poet Robert Kocik based on their exploration of language as a somatic practice.

4 Songs for Governmentability

Who decides
who gets to live and

who gets to die
and who misses them

and who mourns eventually
that our science can

only keep
some of us alive and

them not even for ve
ry long

may be the w
orst

fact of all that
‘keeping alive’ shou

ld be the problem of
all science and medi

cal practices
to stay alive to

relieve pain
to die comfortably honorably

represents the
limited extent

of our creativity
and thinking.


So the prisoner
sings and is his body
tho he is
in prison and the state thusly
courses through
him a ‘capillary funct
ioning’
of power thusly
through us in that
song of some
immanence open and
ungovernmentable which
unsentimentally
will see
the walls of sovereignty fall
in a way unlike the way
they were built.


Wearing your ‘war hair’ in the rain
please let your enemies deserve you.


Too much governmentability
not enough desire

for the good we are not good
or just without which law

sustains us lawless except
we won’t pretend some sovereignty

wasn’t the word pretend these
prisons were good

for the soul 'infinitely detained'
by no due process what rogue

state was ‘we’ unmourned
or ‘they’ far away like bodies

we can’t see they see us
down into a Roman thing

incision of the ‘two bodies’
burnt by what remains.

Felt Sculptures

here are some felt sculptures!

http://feltproductions.wordpress.com/felt-sculptures/

Deadpan Audio at Eric Baus' To the Sound

Here is a 50 min. audio track of Dorothea Lasky and I reading our collaboration Deadpan.

http://baustralia.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/dorothea-lasky-thom-donovan-read-deadpan/

Shabbat Selectives

~ for Kyle, after his 1st St. Marx reading

If and when you flipped your shit
A lot a mode of interrupt

That shows the senses a way out
Of sense demonstrates a parity

Of insight the printed word
And word spoken in the air

Like it were printed a kind of hall
ucination what “fuckery” would

Reveal context wherever we go
Hell opter literalism folds

The world so we are in it
Like a wreck of print lends eyes ears

Ears eyes touches these distances
Song adjusts your mind is on

My mind again its different
Colors of the sky today none

theless irradiating a common sense
The lower cases too equivocate.

Me & Rob @ Mike Kelleher's Pearl Blossom Highway

here is a link to video footage Mike Kelleher took of me and Rob Halpern reading together the first night of the SUNY Buffalo George Oppen Centennial:

http://pearlblossomhighway.blogspot.com/2008/04/rob-halpern-thom-donovan-reading.html

Peace On A presents: Stacy Szymaszek & Sam Truitt

“I don’t do stuff for the dead. I keep promises.”
~ Jerome Caja

Peace On A

presents

Stacy Szymaszek & Sam Truitt

Friday, May 9th 2008 8PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

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

about the readers:

Stacy Szymaszek's latest publication is *Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane* (Faux Press). Her self-portraits, along with texts by Killian, Jarnot, Gladman and 5 others, written in response, are featured in a new OMG chapbook called *Stacy S: Autoportraits*. Her 2nd full-length book is *Hyperglossia*, forthcoming from Litmus Press in January 2009. There are no ships in it. She holds down the fort at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

My interest in Hart Crane began as purely physical. I saw a picture of him when I was a young boy that gave my confused desires a focus. He was wearing a Marseilles sailor suit, leaning against a tree in Mexico with a dark-eyed woman named Peggy Cowley. None of this mattered at the time. It was his hair, which was cropped close on the sides and combed up in front. I acquired this hairstyle slowly, each cut coming closer to resemblance. In my mind, something forbidden was happening. When I asked my mother to buy me striped shirts from the mall, she seemed pleased that I was showing any interest in fashion. Not knowing what else to do, I copied what I liked about him. It is remarkable that a Hart Crane biography ever made it to our little public library. Voyager was being discharged and sold for a dime. Its 831 pages, including the index, was written by a man named John Unterecker and published by Liveright, the same press that issued the trade edition of Crane’s magnum opus The Bridge. A previous reader had underlined a sentence on page 656, "Then in front of Orizaba everything suddenly begins to change. " Hart Crane had originally written this on a postcard."
~ Stacy Szymaszek, from Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane
Faux Press, 2008

Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of *Vertical Elegies: Three Works* (UDP, 2008) and the forthcoming *Street Mete: A Work in Vertical Elegies* (Palm, 2008) as well as *Vertical Elegies 5: The Section* (U. of Georgia, 2003) and *Anamorphosis Eisenhower* (Lost Roads, 1998), among other books. Sam Truitt holds an MFA from Brown University and is currently a PhD Candidate at the University at Albany, where he teaches, as he does at the College of St. Rose and Bard College. He lives with his family along the Hudson in a warehouse district.

from "THE SONG OF RASPUTIN," part 1??What began in confusion ended in a pencil-thin mustache??& 3 centuries have passed like a dream.?St. Petersburg stands, lovely & vast, at the edge of a sea on a marsh bristling?with fleas in a match-box dancing in the Gypsy Quarter where R sleeps? dipping tonight?to a dramatically low décolleté shaped with underwire cups,?hands black from tilling the soil boldly up the steps of the throne?to share the power, the bed & the Byzantine luxury of queens!?Huge enterprises had come into being. An epidemic of suicides swept? through the city?& the courts crowded with hysterics listening.?For everything was available. Vice was everywhere. Sensualists &? pessimists.?An insane, tremendous male vigor like an airplane?Nijinsky, the great male dancer, displayed to the world outside?But it is too terrible. I won’t do it again.?The particular charm of his person turned into a conviction arriving a?complete surprise by post afterward,?a typical story considering the vacillations and strange lack of?communication between the upper & lower portions of life? unbridgeable, even by good will.?Or what entered through one door fell through.?Or we have ikons, the Japanese shells.?Or T interned in the Peter & Paul Fortress soaked her mattress? in paraffin, lit it & lay down?beneath the moon beneath the stars the sod burning during the war in? humid August?as Moscow & trams were overturned.?& everybody was Kung-fu fighting they were fast as lightening? incinerating herself like love extending?continuous rays until the eternity of eternities receded onto a painted screen? of camouflaged figures.?Or the folds of an umbrella on an overcast afternoon tucked into a? shoulder bag & left in the carriage?this page, this blank page! this??England ! a corked jug & shaggy head braced in a vice mumbling scripture.?The hope is that somehow he gets his mouth to the lip of the jug to tear the? seal & jerk it, gulping, up?to spare himself thereby the grief of coming to.?Because across every page of the manuscript’s scrawled in magic gunk? “Exterminate the brutes!”?The water pounds the shore. The back of his head explodes.?The projector switch gets thrown. Everything is spun, inside or out.?What will in will out.?What happens here makes the spout?at the center of the fountain splash on the bare-breasted marble naiad?who configured with some dolphin is an aspect of the collective tug? yawning at our abdomen.?Though poesy, sweet rhyme, remains necessarily like politics an oral fixation? concerned with tracing a stain on the scrotum??Infringements of vice like lace at panty-edge? mumbling scripture??For in this emotion where these two sad seasons meet?I stand the blue ribbon of blood clots coiled around my feet,?vigorous & vast. The brush. The dirt clouds. The steam.?Bits of sad broken glass ground under a cloud perplexed.?Yet where hope springs water leaks?& shadow of leaf pattern on hard-packed earth,?Diotima, sound that fell to it humming the new pink lake in the middle of? New Jersey at the edge of the industrial accident.?Beneath the roof with the moss growing on it?opening our mouths at the dentist’s office, a cherub?plunging an arm through our genitals the stories?are re-emerging out of the technologies?as a brazen head wedged in a vice flailing in a formula of trying x what? fits which?like so many of her thoughts does into a ratchet-set?picked up off the ground overheard &?cranked to catch the thing as it spills still?out there. Though the thing remains an etude
~ Sam Truitt

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

EXCLUSIVE: The pub. date for Truitt's VE: 3 Works is June 5th. UDP's Matvei Yankelevich will be on hand to sell prepublication copies of the book at an extra-special, exclusive, to-be-announced reduced price.

Sam Truitt’s expansive sequences enact a “radical human recomposition of what we are or were or will become,” widening the frame of the human. See here how our many skins (language, world, self, the quotidian) are perforated with the senses. These forays into our various and secret registers help rip the holes wider, where sunlight floods in.
~ Eleni Sikelianos

O Coevals

~ for Rob, Myung and Stephen

Sovereign stumps make the shipwreck glitter

Being in the same place with you and calling
this coeval

Coeval enough to say hello not be
ing outside

What we would call event
to make a new sense I saw this city

Changed which lodged us how the past

Was once the past and the future
whenever we spoke

Anterior to any effect the present could hold

What couldn’t be
because we couldn't return from catastrophe


We witness bells that this was theirs
That shade equals sun in exquisiteness

Non-identities piling up like pylons
A physics without cars beings without

Impact move to what here to what
Their equated it I feel so much pressure

Around you to burn a discourse and not
Touch any time we were or event

Living us so live my life will never finish
What my death leaves unfinished this

Town never seems to work those sovereign
Stumps sing us into battle effects

Of power fires hymns even the sun
Forgot to burn so sing patiency which

Organs won’t be consumed what ex
Change won’t always be sung for being

Too far from off-shore what bodies we
Haven’t won’t account for limbs little

Substances Nature complicit with who
Gets to live grieves its contrivance.


like no one looped
their body in the d
ark this was mourn

ing to maintain an
identification with
that dark something

that was dug here
me and not me sou
nd and not sound

nor an understanding
stars account for a
place that won’t make

us live or die won’t
be consumed by the
violence of *our* voice.

2 after Courbet

with Dorothea Lasky

Dead Girl

In the face of value hers looks
In a mirror as if to not see
Herself instead a frame she keeps
Body paralyzed from the eyes
Down within the sound she
Makes not being active if not

For their labor a kind of prosth
esis darkened by the background
And their skin color complicity
Makes itself an object the living
Give themselves an alibi by play
ing dead or in seeming semblance

Says this origin the real thing
Sings without the frame to put it in
It must be fitted for us to be a
Spectacle it would resist reflecting
Pigment twists in vain to this
Like changelings can’t change

Proudhon’s mind bent to necessi
ties his smudges on spec and
Within the frame more than what
Spectralysis can show the thing
Before eyes were wrecked like
Little hairs dissemble night stars

Put flesh on flesh like pain appeals
To a cave the private was occulted
Brought to the light or origins due
Is what we produce when we work
Through the pane the pane of glass
That is our made worlds the folds

Of flesh of women uncontrollable
For all he seemed to dream them
Staggering before a way the sea is
Seen breasts spill out and foamy
Waves prove no realism preferable
To immanence denaturing touch.
~ Thom Donovan

We are from the moon

Courbet says we
Are lovers from the moon
I am glad that we are not anything
But the grand thing we were making that one day
That was bitten by sands, marvelous oceans
The tuber fruit rising among fishes
In a forgotten moon
Or we are lovers from the moon
Like the two girls all turned
But not lovers like the stag agape in the forest
We are two things in the whiteness
The black forest
I think we are soaring above anything else
I fight and walk, fight with everyone
I am full of fighting in my flesh
Courbet paints a woman so full of hair
Her flesh feels like nothing we have seen before
I rise and wake, I am a fish with broad lips
I rise and wander like a rising sea creature
In the rakish waves
I rise, I am purple fruit in the ocean among seaweeds
You pass and are drawn to something beneath
The ocean, and when you take me among you
I can see in you the things that I always was
~ Dorothea Lasky

from Presencing the (New) Disaster(s): some consequential poetics after George Oppen (Talk)

Discussing George Oppen with my friend Kyle Schlesinger recently, and contrasting his work with the collaboration of Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern, *Snow Sensitive Skin*, Kyle reminded me that the situation distinguishing contemporary poets from Oppen is not just a matter of generation and historical embeddedness, but of degree. When I proposed that the poetry of Taylor and Rob was a new kind of lyrical reportage, Kyle imagined the daily routines of the poets searching beyond mainstream newspaper dailies for indymedia sources, bringing to bear on these sources minds shaped by radical habits of thought, attention and action.

Between ourselves and Oppen I do not think we can say anymore that “All this is reportage” since when I read many of the writers of my generation I am reminded just to what extent an unprecedented problem of coterminous information explosion, implosion, saturation and occultation delimits what we can do as writers at the hands of a certain technology (the fact that we use word processors and internet search engines and multimedia software, rather than typewriters and printed newspapers as our parent and grandparent generations did/do). I would even argue that the situation of poets today, while many of us take up the mantle of Oppen’s lyrical valuables in relation to his ideological preoccupations, resembles as much if not moreso those of writers in the 30s such as Bertolt Brecht, Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Reznikoff, and the Louis Zukofsky of “A – 8” whose works embody problems of reportage as both the “getting down” of facts, as well as the critical reflection of those facts through formal discovery, filtration, and negativity.

Another matter of degree regarding a generation gap between those I am calling “my generation” and Oppen’s own (and *only*(!) 60 or 70 some odd years separates our births) has to do with catastrophe itself as a socially (and not naturally) inflected consequence. While The Bomb, WWII, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, Totalitarianism, and the erosion of democratic superstructures in the United States are nothing to sneeze at in Oppen’s case, nor are the ways that such events and phenomena have telescoped since Oppen’s generation creating many of the geopolitical and ecological crises we now find ourselves in. While it might be futile to attempt to put ourselves in Oppen’s shoes, as it were, and while I feel an incredible debt among my generation to Objectivists, and Oppen’s objectivism in particular--a debt that often elides our parent generations--disaster is not what it used to be. Or rather, we must take-up new meanings of this term within a discourse for our present.

As Rob Halpern writes in his essay, "Post Disaster," from an unpublished manuscript entitled *Disaster Suites*, forthcoming from Palm Press:

*But what do we mean by disaster? Perhaps nothing more than the shape-changing confluence of state, police and capital, that old troika by whose logic everything we can’t see appears as if already calculated from within dominant regimes of representation—our democracy of total visibility—forcing into the light of language and law precisely what resists these violent operations. Lyric can only be complicit with it.

Or, one might equally locate disaster in the coercion of common sense truths about disaster, as in the media-driven identification of bodies lost in scenes of global conflict and other social voids—a dead boy in Gaza, a thirsty woman in post-Katrina New Orleans, or a transgendered person caught-up in the social disaster that is gender itself—as if such bodies counted, as if they really mattered.

My friend Thom suggested that I think of disaster etymologically, in relation to the stars. So I began considering disaster, as being delinked from stellar guidance, unmoored from the visible constellations, or dissociated from the horoscope and other forms of totalizing organization and whatever mythologies of fate, which nonetheless continue to determine who lives and who dies. Unlike the death of any one, disaster is what we hold in common as a community, despite its not being there for us to share as a site of communion.*

What does George Oppen mean by disaster? For me, the term can not be dissociated from that other term from Oppen’s poetics, “shipwreck,” which first appears in *Discrete Series* 30 years before its recurrence in tandem with *disaster* in Oppen’s poem from *The Materials*, “From Disaster”. In this poem disaster comes from shipwreck, and the objects of shipwreck are immigrant families living, or rather, surviving, in the tenement houses of American inner cities, and eventually among the lawns of American suburbs.

Scanning the pages of Oppen’s *New Collected Poems*, I can find no other use of the word disaster throughout the work though “shipwreck” and motifs of shipwreck will appear multiple times, and words close to the meanings of “disaster” and “shipwreck” will recur insistently: “danger,” “precarious,” “emergency,” “vertigo,” “failure,” “disorder”…. When Oppen takes up the term disaster and its synonyms I take him to refer to a situation of fatelessness and atelos (as the term’s etymology suggests) but also some sense of breaking-up and distance ensuing from this break-up, that the world should be disassembled into parts or entities which should never form a communicable or known totality.

I believe this is Oppen’s Diasporic sense of the “breaking of the nations” being a literal breaking-up of people (like the mythological breaking-up of the Sefiroth from Kabbalist literature, which in Hebrew means “enumerated” or “numerous”) into radiances nearly touching, but never doing so. These radiances presence the shards of a disrupted or interrupted substance: the substance that is a people substitutable for the whole of life, the universal, by their very particularity--their substitutablility in chosenness.

Following the last sentence quoted above from Rob’s “Post-Disaster”—“Unlike the death of any one, disaster is what we hold in common as a community, despite its not being there for us to share as a site of communion”—I would relate Oppen’s similar sense of a community only constitutable and locatable by its distances, however small; and the necessity of distance to enable a being with by which entities should not become subsumed by other entities nor by communal organization at large—that is *mediate* and not *immediate* as such. Oppen’s poetics may also allegorize a disaster or allergy of beings, as words themselves perform inoperativity/"failure” both through a caesura where meaning becomes indeterminate and multi-directional/bifurcative (what John Taggart refers to as Oppen’s “sliding”), but also by a visible cleaving of words through tabs and linebreaks in Oppen’s late books, from *Seascape : Needle’s Eye* on. There are also those palimpsestual distances of Oppen’s daybooks and working papers wherein construction itself, the worked-over-ness of the poem, yields an enigmaticalness of glue, pipecleaner, nails, paper upon paper….

In Oppen’s work, I also link disaster to a form of intentionality that induces inoperativity to make the poem an extension of consciousness, and thus activity. In the work of contemporaries I read after Oppen, there is a sense of failure and not mere indeterminacy that may account for the sincerity of forms—their tests of poetry. Where the poem does not fail, that is, where it does not produce an awareness of distance where distance equates disaster and intended shipwrecks, the poem fails (i.e., it fails by not failing). Through this failure to fail, the poem remains “mannerist” or merely “declamatory”. The poem becomes useful or useable where usefulness negatively implies the instrumental as the end of catastrophic humanist endeavor (plans, projects).

Such is Oppen’s Heideggerian recognition. That being shows itself where things break down or things disclose themselves in their thingness as historicity; that thinking occurs in dis-ability, where the habitual cognition/memory is disabled so that one must think through the origin of things, what they are, and their properties as they relate and echolocate one another in impermanent worlds. I believe Nonsite Collective’s draft proposal takes up this problem of Oppen’s work, and the ways this work is truly revelatory or ontologically purposive, where it states: “In a situation where resources of every sort are being expropriated, displaced or enclosed—the commons shrinking before our very eyes—the Nonsite Collective deploys its organizational and intellectual labor in an effort to make use of the world without using it.”

I think about this statement often, both in proximity to Oppen where he writes “Failure, worse failure, nothing seen / From prominence, / Too much seen in the ditch,” after his experience of surviving his battalion in WWII, and “’Substance itself which is the subject of all our planning’ // And by this we are carried into the incalculable” where Oppen tarries with his perceived Heideggarian affinity. It is this carrying into the incalculable which seems the principle ethical wager of Oppen’s work, as it may intend an ethics of poiesis to think toward the unconceptualizable, and therefore exterior—the infinite as it can be experienced in thinking. Such is one of Oppen’s many twists on the original thought of Heidegger.

“To make use of the world without using it”—a paradox—implies an act of use or useability that is no longer instrumental, and that therefore does not use-up or become anything other than part of an ongoing process of activity. Such a prescription relates Oppen’s own senses of incalculability and failure to problems facing our ecology as they involve a nexus of economy, law, politics, ethics and other cultural realms. This past weekend, I picked up a copy of Land artist, Agnes Denes’ selected writings at a bookstore, wherein Denes includes her statement from her famous 1982 work, *Wheatfield*, a work in which she planted two acres of wheat on a landfill in Downtown Manhattan’s Battery Park. The aporia generated by Denes’ work may touch what Nonsite intends by “making use… without using” in relation to Oppen’s poetics:

*My decision to plant a wheatfield in Manhattan instead of designing just another public sculpture grew out of the long standing concern and need to call attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values.
...To attempt to plant, sustain, and harvest two acres of wheat here, wasting valuable real estate and obstructing the “machinery” by going against the system, was an effrontery that made it the powerful paradox I had sought for the calling to account.
It was insane. It was impossible. But it would draw people’s attention to having to rethink their priorities and realize that unless human values were reaccessed, the quality of life, even life itself, was in danger. Placing it at the foot of the World Trade Center, a block from Wall Street, facing the Statue of Liberty, also had symbolic import….
Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept. It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, hunger and ecological concerns. It was an intrusion into the Citadel, a confrontation of High Civilization. Then again, it was also Shangri-La, a small paradise, one’s childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, peace, forgotten values, simple pleasures.
What was different about this wheatfield was that the soil was not rich in loam but a dirty landfill full of rusty metals, boulders, old tires, and overcoats. It was not farmland but an extension of the congested downtown of a metropolis where dangerous cross-winds blew, traffic snarled, and every inch was precious real estate. The absurdity of it all, the risks we took and the hardships we endured were all part of the basic concept….
After my harvest, the four-acre area facing the New York Harbor was returned to construction to make room for a billion-dollar luxury complex. Manhattan closed itself once again, to become a fortress, corrupt yet vulnerable. But I think this magnificent metropolis will remember a majestic, amber field: vulnerability and staying power, the power of the paradox.*
--from Agnes Denes' *The Human Argument*

In Denes’ work, a work shared by Nonsite Collective member Amy Balkin as well as other artist-activists after the Land Art movement of the 70s and 80s, to make-use is not to have but one end that is useful; but to produce the consequences and effects of processes as the artist deploys them tactically through her situational art. By presencing the multiple failures of a socius—to account for global and local disparities of wealth, and the discrepancy between real estate and land used for farming that foregrounds such disparities—Denes succeeds in her unusing of the world. The failure she produces is a success of her art: that she should yield wheat crops on a barren land-fill in a blighted New York City, and that this should draw attention to her work as a work drawing-out aporias and contradictions of cultural exchange. Dematerialized by its dismantling and conversion into real estate, what remains are nonsites—photodocuments, films and writing—that may be resited by future culture workers after Denes’ original intention, and historical situation.

*From non-site to site: As the negative term in a dialectic of social contradictions, non-sites exist in a process of ongoing relationships. As such, they can’t resolve themselves, just as they can’t exist in isolation. Rather, we might think of them as persisting in tension with their opposites—sites—while moving toward reintegration into living social ecologies. If the non-site is a constructed response to an illegible social process, how might we imagine or understand the conversion of non-site to site? And how would that conversion alter site’s meaning?*
--from “A Draft Proposal,” Nonsite Collective, 2007

--my carbon credits *public smog*
our outposts on the commons
being *waste* expands there
no limit to what’s left over-
time remains *say life itself*
where gulls wheel scout mark
mountains of what won’t decay
no future reference a bird-
filled sky affirms

--*what guarantees the working day*

--from Taylor Brady & Rob Halpern's *Snow Sensitive Skin*

Eleni Stecopoulos On An-My Lê's Small Wars at SFMOMA

http://blog.sfmoma.org/2008/04/25/small-wars/#more-120

Amberwaves in Negativeland (Nonsite)

We are not a camera obscura
for the world as was once sup
posed and this is not opposite
day after all you can do that on
television the way your smile
triggers something in my brain
waves an implosion makes yo
ur body disappear into the things
we have made keeps gesturing
but can’t explain the war away
nor this fiction they call nation

Like we was even exchangeable
there or able we must be a means
the fire must be our fire we must
own it as we write and read this
book erstwhile sprinkled with le
aves and dirt because we appear
in the world we are sites for sore
eyes we mean “X” as in wrecks
places became subsequent to this
urgent complicity this being with

Confused tulips and spring ca
me too early this year so actually
your mythology is outmoded
April is the cruelest month for
poetry can only break your hea
rt if it doesn’t persist in some
allegory of agency or love which
is a kind of allergy or actually
produce that world we would want
because that is what we feel
the words must say the city in
its springtime that is not our mu
sic yet not green wrecked enough
so we can see us surpassing it

Nor any ideas but in relation
to each other often contradiction
becomes this city we must live in
because it is nature more than
nature more than the trees were
nature when what flowered was
wheat too bountiful for the realty
so our “common law” is reality
contradiction became a quanta
for which we use for how we
are used land art and land use
art art of use not a useful art

The air was this quanta the privati
zation of our barest needs purifies
blame does not purify the world
every thing we seem to touch this
nation turned to shit long ago we
need a body for this endangered
consciousness made from the fail
ure of all this discovering some new
mode of gathering in what remains

Elka Krajewska in Filmslash

Check out Elka Krajewska, whose *Plany Mela* I reviewed last spring, interviewed by Nancy Rhodes in Filmslash:

http://www.filmslashmagazine.com/node/45

Dirt Eaters

for Brenda and Conrad

No one was the wiser
How much blood
There would be

No one seemed to care
Given to stenches
They can’t see

Offshore we must find
A means that is
Pure to gather again

We must shove dirt
In our mouth until
We taste blood

That blood occulted
Like the 5% who
Took all the wealth

In the meantime
There will be new
Uses in this eating

Of dirt this new re
membering which must
Remain our meaning.

All This is Discourse (Statement)*

Reading Oppen’s Daybooks and selected prose recently I was struck again by the diversity of Oppen’s philosophical sources, which include Neoplatonism, Jacques Maritain, Aquinas, Leibnitz, (William) James, Karl Jung, and of course Martin Heidegger. While there is no denying Oppen was invested in philosophical problems and discourse, he also realized philosophy’s limitations as they relate to poesis. For Oppen philosophy could never be anything more than a stimulus for the work at hand, if not also another object to be incorporated into the work, another set of words to be tested as things with which to think, to generate, to know as much as anyone knows. I wonder in fact if some damage has not been done to the reception of Oppen’s work by the focus on philosophy, as well as by such self-mythologizing accounts as Oppen’s own letters concerning his suspected “plagiarism” of Heidegger. Eschewing any rigorous analogization of Oppen’s poetry and philosophical concepts and systems, it seems more important that we, as scholars and poets, put to use our own experience about how philosophy and theory infiltrates our work, potentializes the imagination, and lends itself to poetry’s toolbox, if only to the ends of inoperativity (those tools breaking). For it seems, as Zukofsky notes in *Bottom: on Shakespeare*, that poetry and philosophy do not usually get along, and yet at the same time would jealously put on the mask of the other. Oppen’s work for me is proof that the poet may be every bit as rigorous as the philosopher in thinking one’s existence in relation, however the thing philosophy does not often do which Oppen’s poetry does is enact. Philosophy lacks action. And where philosophy becomes active, when it does the thing it would otherwise propose and systemetize, it broaches poetry. Poetry’s enaction (what Stein famously called “composition as explanation”) proves Spinoza correct when he writes “the eyes are demonstrations of the mind.” However I would extend this proposition to the poem’s movement. To read the poem as a kind of field of meaning a la “composition by field,” but also the wonderful event horizons of Oppen’s late-work, is to move with the line and into lines as lines intend meaning in their motions, the measure and sound and consequence of those motions. This “saying of saying” or “pure expression” exceeds conceptualization embodying what is perhaps most ethical about the poem as an act of meaning: that the poem exceeds what can be said and thus thought about it beyond its own reenactment. The way we make it active by reading it and thinking with it beyond any convenient recourse to criticism or theory per se.

*presented as an opening statement for The Shape of Disclosure George Oppen Centennial Symposium panel, "The Literary-Philosophical Spectrum," organized by Poets House April 8th, 2008 at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Two Inconsequentials (Deadpan)

with Dorothea Lasky

"Two inconsequential things can come together to form a consequence."
--Jack Spicer


Everything is important

Everything is so important now
The lilac flower growing up
From what seems to be a washbasin
The clouds
I remember the old leper’s lips in this moment
I remember the odd man in California
Who did not love his wife
But could not stop talking about her either
And so, maybe he loved her slightly
But yet had something like hate, not the full thing, his complaints
Echoed in me
They were complaints about me somehow
And what about the boy
Who was left for dead under the airplane?
What about him?
I cannot remember his name, although I want to
These poems are essays
Important ones
And everything else became important when I met you
Everything became important again
I had been called elitist by those closest to me
For trying to think that we had a shot
To come on and make this world right
I had my voice made fun of
I had died inside a million times by
The lack of anything, infinite resignation
Infinite resignation, Kierkegaard says
Is the last stage before faith
And you can’t have anything
Like a belief in the moon
Without seeing your own black night in front of you
Like some tempting ghoul, its ferocious eyes
Darling, we are the ghouls, but we are also tender
And when act upon the world in this way
The world cannot help but be happy at our choice
To not give up
I will not give up!
I will not give up anything til
They lay my dead head upon the ground
And smash it, take pictures of it
Do all the horrible things they had always wanted to do to it
Before they do all those horrible things
I will make one choice to be good with you
Let us be good, iced-bright one
The purest thing empties out of you
And I can hear it
The sweetest bird-like thing
Is what it is, is what you are
Its acid-yellow head
Infinitely tender upon us all
Otherworldly, tenderly enacting
The kind of actions that make the saint
But not a bad saint, a good saint
In front of me in these symptoms
In this age of doom
All my dying ideas
Alive again
Because you breathed the air that you did
Important air
That swirls around you
Everything
Every piece of air important
Because it feeds us and you
And our brothers and sisters
And the other people we love
Because they are living with us
In this important moment, this time of being us
So that we cannot help but rejoice that we are one thing
So God?
Yes God
We are all one thing in this God
We have infinite resignation to be God
Because God is the thing
After you have all but given up
Everything
The most important everything
But everything
My love
And yours
The children’s love
To breathe this air
The air of health
Which is in and of itself
With the black clanging in the distance
A version of a saint


That heart slowed by glass
That heart that is not mine
Not yours that heart outside
Which I can see no longer

Works floats there and is a
Resin for what once was li
ved what twice-dying breath

Slows within this resin there
Is a sense of effect in glass
How one got here to be so red
And not somewhere for the
Heart to stop time would be

Like this we will begin in
Allegory again demonstrati
ons will be a medicine for

Thinking and doing what we
Do the cause of all glass to
Frame this and exhibit a case
Of us encasement of our fact.


You’re dying O you’re dying
Into the stage lights and second
Lives reflections that are the

Lives of adult children not sure
What age they are yet living
Against that light of day what

Hardens us against it once ag
ain made the face soft you are
Talking and I am always tired

But two inconsequential things
Can become a consequence ba
cked by what life was impend

ing a stage happening at every
Moment we died of our dying
What women what men are we

What result of this that some
Time passes how the face beca
me hardened in this knowing.


How the people we are become
Us actually exponential powers
We became action before that

Light as a kind of action those
Lights feel hard we knew we we
re dying before we knew what

Hit us exactly some images of
Us seem to be more real for the
Fact that there are others we hold

Inside us other women other men
For the fact that we make pictures
We are “not me” we are them th

ese eyes blinking through us all
The identities we had to kill did
We really have to kill them to be

Any one and the curtain and the
Stage and the audience that is
Never one hearing these lines.


I think of Henry
James the way
his characters mo

ve like animals
with memories
remembering wh

at they did not do
what they could
not become be

cause truly time
is their master
and what we can

not imagine our
deaths as the stage
lights pour down

on our faces and
the sunlight pours
down like it were

this real light of
dying O we are
dying to meet ea

ch other there you
talk while I am al
ways tired resig

ned infinitely res
igned to touching
you in these dis

tances in them
fear almost seemed
like our friend.