Franco Berardi (Bifo) at 16 Beaver

This Monday we are happy to meet at the Autonomedia warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (55 South 11th Street 4th Floor, Brooklyn – nearest train JMZ to Marcy Avenue). The meeting is the first chance to publicly discuss the upcoming seminar we have organized with Franco Berardi (Bifo) at 16 Beaver Street (Sept. 3-6). This event is meant to be an occasion to meet people who would like to participate, to distribute some copies of Bifo's most recent book (Precarious Rhapsody) and begin some discussions / formulate questions that we may want to explore in the seminar.

To orient our conversation, we will be considering “Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination” which appeared in the journal SubStance several years ago.

To download this week's reading, please visit:

http://www.16beavergroup.org/bifo/berardi.pdf

Usufruct (III)

Where there is no going away
Is a stain on our national debate
The spectacle of how we care
For everyone no one is prepared

By the law since we portends
This wound not a projection
Others win awards while you
Get the prize still writing the

Particulars of that storm in that
Storm history is always near
We seems this distance from it
Events receding into our present

Present a certain not yet me
An unprecedentedness the ele-
ments partake of this nature
This all-too-human nature.



The recognition that history is always near.

The recognition that events recede into the present.



We lay our bodies down
Preenact gestures no speech
Will suffice for

And this was we we first
Were this
Art this tool that
Discovers a use



The recognition that form is never more than an extension of the body.

The recognition that form is never more than an extension of interacting bodies.

The recognition that form is never more than an extension of body bags.


We touch there is
A paradise after all
The last judgment is for the

Living tunneling
Towards these straight
Gates all translation

Work is a warp
In the dirt of the line
Bearing across our survival.



The recognition that form is never more than an extension of how one feels.

The recognition that form is never more than an extension of how every one feels.



Migration says I when
What it means to say
Is are we still living

Mastery—the primary stressor

We is not we whenever
We see

Like some
Identity formation
Winged
—Rarer sightings
Of being

(repeat insistently)
He was just a Black
Man who liked to
Write sonnets.

We not I becomes
A question for “myself.”



The recognition that forms are not unlike arable land ripe for usufruct--for common use and enjoyment.

The recognition that there are forms we have yet to recognize because the people from whom they arise are not yet
recognized.

The recognition that there are forms we can't imagine yet because the circumstances which would make possible their existence have yet to arise.

The recognition that there are forms we can't imagine yet because the circumstances which would make legible their existence have yet to arrive.

Usufruct (II)

The yeomanry of the open
Spaces they may subside
Or be usurped then what
Will be what will possess
What once possessed us

Be become so great devourers
Be become so great men
They will pass into another
Ditch not us not another

Night and so deeply enjoy
What we cannot own
Be become so great devourers
Be become so great men.



Not a forest in sight
We should call a forest
A euphemism for being
And property what has
Discovered me that
I am composed

Of waste lands and
What may not be en-
closed the toxins
That one breathes
The media we can’t see.



Your bruise blood
Martyrs the human-animal
There is no our here yet
No we shit except when we hear

What red dominates
And what black
Dominates what blue comes out
To children
Comes home to children

One weeps because their
Bodies were the case
One cries because mediation
Becomes a muddle.

Usufruct (I)

Out in that field and you’re not
Even tired of your laboring yet
Under it the sun there is no
Food or suffering there we didn’t

Seem to make and no longer
Telic did we create the many
Mores no one would touch
The wastes the arable earth

They had to create a thousand
Myths to keep us in place
To make a fence around our
Crumbling sensate light.



Of that land grab and when we
Were stranded by property
Men were enlisted go site which
Cataclysm the abandoned earth
Nature could not even dream-up
The dreams of those giants
The plans of those last men.



An instinctual notion of existence
This is where particulars come in

Ask yourself whether language
Will ever be complete all the words

For snow words for feelings we
Haven’t considered metaphor of

The buildings we are bound
To the structure of these things.

ECOPOETICS 6/7

featuring writing by: Emily Abendroth, Fatho Amoy, mIEKAL aND, Kristen Andersen, Karen Leona Anderson, Stan Apps, Robert Ashton, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Christine Boileau, Timothy Bradford, Pam Brown, Julieann Brownton, James Bunn, Andrew Burke, Michael Basinski, Charles Bernstein, Bonny Cassidy, Louise Crisp, Justin Clemens, Jon Cone, Jack Collom, Matthew Cooperman, Gregory Day, Tyler Doherty, Thom Donovan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theodore Enslin, John Estes, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Alec Finlay, Lisa Fishman, Benjamin Friedlander, Forrest Gander, Jody Gladding, Liberty Heise, Krista Ingebretson, Jill Jones, Patrick Jones, Michael Kelleher, John Kinsella, Kyhl Lyndgaard, James Koller, José Martí, John McBain, Ray Meeks, Graeme Miles, Stuart Mills, Peter Minter, Luis-Aguilar Moreno, Derek Motion, Jesse Nissim, Alistair Noon, Lucas North, Antonio Ochoa, Peter O’Mara, Isabelle Pelissier, Carol Quinn, José Rabéarivelo, Daniel W. Rasmus, Joan Retallack, Sarah Rosenthal, Linda Russo, Kate Schapira, Andrew Schelling, Jared Schickling, Jonathan Skinner, Gary Snyder, Juliana Spahr, James Stuart, Alf Taylor, Angélica Tornero, Rodrigo Toscano, Lauren Tyers, Erica Van Horn, Stephen Vincent, Damian Weber, Simon West, Les Wicks

318 pp. $15 PUBLICATION DATE AUGUST 20, 2009 (order here)

BACK ISSUE REPRINTS ARE ALSO AVAILABLE

ECOPOETICS: Poetry, essays, fiction, translation, interviews.

"A (more or less) annual journal dedicated to exploring creative-critical edges between making (with an emphasis on writing) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings)."
--Ecopoetics editor, Jonathan Skinner

List Poem (Usufruct)

Birdtables... Lace Bedspreads...
Pottery Logs Sawn
To Order Pond

Liners Honey Goats'
Milk Pedlar Dolls
Rotted Mushroom Compost

Eggs Laid While
You Wait Toms
Glads and Cues

Replacement Windscreens
Dwarf Lop Rabbits
Maggots Sweet Corn

Terrier Meal Horse
Pellets Karate Lessons
Haircut Sir? Golden

Labrador Puppies Ready
Soon Clay Pigeons
Cream Teas Welding

& Resprays Baby
Bunnies Pullets' Eggs
By the Tray

Pork Sausages and
Shoe Repairs Concrete
Tubs for Sale.*

all text from J.M. Neeson's Commoners: common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700-1820

We Are This Pack

We are this pack with the fire
On our faces with our backs
To the wilderness we make
A new circle without center

Our elbows where we nearly
Touch each other are new centers
They are points in space denying
Diadem its high life so we are

So many errands licking up
The language in our wake
We survive so everyone survives
Making use of every waste.

Advancing Feminist Poetics & Activism: A Gathering

This should be a pretty amazing symposium:
http://belladonnaconference.blogspot.com/

No One Starsong

That crowd not
Separated by death
Allegiance to little
No one starsong
Of possession again

This is the way
We tour the end
Like it were not
The end by an-
other beginning

We are before the
Threshold of
Another beginning
The world will shed
The world what

The world will shed…

Are We Human, or Are We Dancer?

This past winter I wrote a piece on Daria Fain's and Robert Kocik's performance "The Extent to Which," sponsored by Danspace. You can now read the piece in the current PAJ: a Journal of Performance and Art. Here's an excerpt...

"For Fain and Kocik, the right to determine genetic material should be left to poets, artists and other sensitive, creative people. As such, they are the unacknowledged geneticists of the world. In Germ, Fain/Kocik continued their attacks upon a genetic essentialism which not only discriminates among human beings (and therefore upholds various bad isms of our culture), but also human, animal and (in)organic life as they depend on one another. The germ becomes that which, via mutation, can leap over whole species in a single bound, therefore acting as a kind of wild card among the larger phylum. But the real germ of Fain’s/Kocik’s collaborative work of course is the aesthetic itself, as aesthetic phenomena may shape and alter genetic material. As Kocik pronounces in Overcoming Fitness, “May poetry determine phenotype!” By determining phenotype, poetry and art determine life itself; “nature” and “nurture” (pseudonyms for the real and the imaginary) are no longer mutually exclusive, but contingent upon one another."

Another Nail House

--for Dale Smith

Another nail house and another rip
In the tale of us that house lifted

Into the air by balloons is the question
What will be left to critique when

Capital is through with us and what
Is ironic about those land grabs the

Poem must preserve a place to remain
In what is not real the poem must be

An active force in a universe that is
Heterogeneous however real.

I Have a Basement Apartment. Now What?

I Have a Basement Apartment. Now What? debut presentation

From 1990 to 2005, more than a third of the new housing created in NYC outside of Manhattan were phantom apartments – illegal conversions of basements and cellars. These invaluable sources of affordable housing, often occupied by New York's newest immigrants, also happen to violate many of NYC's building and zoning codes and pose serious safety threats. What should happen to all these homes? Who decides?

This summer, CUP Teaching Artist Hatuey Ramos-Fermín and students from the College Now Program at Hostos Community College investigated these hidden homes. The group talked to tenants, landlords, the Department of Buildings, housing lawyers, and advocates to uncover the politics of living underground.

Join us on Friday, August 7 as we present the results of their investigation: "I Have a Basement Apartment. Now What?" – a comic book produced in partnership with Chhaya CDC and Make the Road New York. A dramatic reading and comic-making workshop will be followed by presentations from students and community organizations on mediation strategies and avenues for new legislation. All attendees get a comic.

Friday, August 7, 7 pm
I Have a Basement Apartment, Now What?
Make the Road New York
92-10 Roosevelt Avenue
Queens, NY
Take the 7 to 90th Street/Elmhurst
(718) 565-8500, ext. 409

Two Poems

What I does we refute by being
We and sometimes a dialogue

Or the beginning of an action in
Space names become consequent

To this that they were not each
Other’s mine and I can only express

What it knows through this event
There is the truth that with only

Knows—everything else just a
Sympathetic hole outsourcing us.


What sings us the beaks too big
Wing span too large for this cage

I am made of make and I am made
Of these things not me and to let

Them cry no singular thing are we
This shop-floor not exploitable that

Would kiss these lips instead these
Glass houses in which we won’t

See me and no one will accurately
Describe a feeling for what is right.

(June-August 2009)

Big Bridge Oppen and Slow Poetry features

The new Big Bridge includes features on Slow Poetry (ed. Dale Smith) and George Oppen (ed. Eric Hoffman), the latter of which includes a review I wrote of Oppen's Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers in the winter/spring of 2008.

"Last summer when I began writing about Slow Poetry, I wondered if poetry that dramatized the dark and stupid could matter much longer. So I began framing raw questions that might help myself and others respond meaningfully to these dark and stupid times. I wondered how I could make sense of what's happening around us through poetry, through art? Perhaps Slow Poetry could be a way to help orient attention again in art to the world. I liked the term, too—Slow Poetry—because it associates with Slow Food and that now-global movement's linking of pleasure for food with a commitment to community and the environment. If we can enjoy poetry—itself an essential form of nourishment—why not also take into account the contexts of its making and reception?"
--Dale Smith

"...I asked contributors to provide essays approaching particular Oppen poems, focusing primarily upon Oppen's aesthetics and prosody, together with critical reactions to recent Oppen scholarship (in particular Cope (2007), Heller and Nicholls (both 2008)). This was only the most general of requests as I wanted as little restriction as possible discussion of the work. As Oppen himself wrote, he could not bring himself to write poetic "exercises," nor did not want my contributors to be forced to contribute critical ones. It was therefore with great pleasure when I received these essays, which I believe represent a significant move forward in Oppen scholarship, marking both the distance Oppen scholarship has come since the work of Cuddihy and Hatlen at the same time pointing the way forward for the Oppen scholarship to come."
--Eric Hoffman

CAConrad on John Weiners at PhillySound

check it out! I love the poems Conrad has selected for a new Weiners EPC author page, like this timely one:

TRIMETERS

Your lips in a cloud
the spirit that visited
before I died
still assigned to the dead

the cyanide garments
that spirit vented
with tears in payment
from provincial rent

Without personal burden
only refuge denied
such taking allowed
as federal government

Climate Counts

I am extremely skeptical of the rise of "green" capitalism, yet this organization seems a necessity for responsible consumption given our current global economy:
http://www.climatecounts.org/about.php

Two related websites:
http://www.goodguide.com/
http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/index.php?nothanks=1
http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/about_my_family.html

"The limitation is us"

Rereading Mike Kelley's book Foul Perfection, I came across this passage, which seems a wonderful parsing of two discrete definitions of the sublime and the sublime's relationship to objectivity. The passage is quoted from an interview Kelley conducted with Thomas McEvilley in December, 1992:

"Thomas McEvilley: Along with formlessness, the theme of the sublime in recent art involved a sense of the human individual possessing in a hidden way a potential for vast spiritual greatness. [Barnett] Newman is again the obvious example. But clearly you approach it differently.

Mike Kelley: Right. I have a big problem with that reading of the sublime. My reading is more Freudian, involved with notions of sublimation. I see the sublime coming from the natural limitation of our knowledge; when we are confronted with something that's beyond our limits of acceptability, or that threatens to reveal some repressed thing, then we have this feeling of the uncanny. So it's not about getting in touch with something greater than ourselves. It's about getting in touch with something we know but cannot accept--something outside the boundaries of what we're willing to accept about ourselves.

TM: You're not concerning yourself with what's on the other side of that limitation.

MK: The limitation is us. I'm not interested in what's not us. But to keep talking about it in relation to the threat of physical annihilation separates the project too much from aesthetic discourse. And I want that also to be a part of it. It's about one's interaction with an object, not just one's interaction with one's self. The focus is on the object."

Whose Objectivism?

Stephen Burt's eccentric genealogical construction of contemporary potery after Objectivism, "The New Thing," seems yet more evidence that the Objectivist nexus is not one, but many. And all the more reason poets themselves should take responsibility for making the work of their peers legible to each other, and help to reveal its place within larger historical continuums and trends (a work too often reserved for professional critics).

Having grown up among intense communities of poets and artists (as well as critics!), and having studied Objectivism as a graduate student, I am struck by how distant Burt seems from my own senses of an Objectivist continuum in present-day poetries (however much I enjoy reading many of the poets whom Burt mentions).

Citing Burt's statement, "For [C.D.] Wright, as for [Juliana] Spahr and [Mark] Nowak, poetic attention to facts and things—emulated, reclaimed, quoted, re-framed—speaks to the material conditions a left-wing politics works to change. For other makers of the New Thing though, the solidity they seek is not so much economic as phenomenological: the poem finds, and emulates, some permanence—it is, and describes, something with weight and “measure,” small enough to hold in the hand" I wonder: must the political-economic and the phenomenological be partitioned? Many of the most rigorous poets I know today work through political definitions of the phenomenological and vice versa.

The emergence of political subjects through the incommensurably singular presents a contemporary definition of Objectivism to which I am beholden. Looking back at Oppen and Zukofsky in particular, I believe much of their work allegorizes the emergence of the subject as it struggles to act as a political being via a phenomenology which foregrounds textuality as an extension of various forms of social mediation (the fact that writing has an objective existence and this existence mediates a reader's reality). Oppen's engagements with Heidegger's "arduous path of appearance" comes to mind most readily here; but so do the uncanny convergences of his poetics with Hannah Arendt's thought, for whom the political was also fraught with ambivalence and difficulty. "Left-wing" content, or any content for that matter considered properly subaltern, does not separate itself from matters of form (because it simply can't). Rather, through the subaltern--or that which is made illegible, invisible, or impossible by its situation within the social--form and content constitute an inseparable unity because they coappear within a single event.

For another, more vitriolic take on Burtian objectivism see Stan Apps' Free Will Applicator here.

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ON1 press

Here's some welcome press for ON1, compliments of the University of Arizona Poetry Center's July newsletter .

"ON: Contemporary Practice is a forum for writers to exchange ideas about their contemporaries: writing that takes place now. In their preface to the inaugural issue, Cross, Donovan, and Schlesinger describe a collection that is “not edited, per se, but the accretion of response to the emergency of the present.” These are potent words, and the essays and conversations in ON do feel high-stakes, nervy, and engaged. Tenney Nathanson on Beverly Dahlen, Dale Smith on Hoa Nguyen, Jonathan Skinner on Julie Patton, Tim Peterson on kari edwards, and Jen Hofer and Sawako Nakayasu on each other are just a few of the pairings. Collaboration vibrates through the pages like electricity, and it takes the form of analyses and enactments. ON is great conversation and great theory, protean and visceral."

Copies of ON1 may be purchased at LULU.

ON2 is on the way with contributions by Corina Copp (on Rodrigo Toscano & Poet's Theater), Robert Dewhurst (on Dorothea Lasky), Robert Kocik (on Stacy Syzmaszek), C. J. Martin (on Rob Halpern), Evelyn Reilly (on Rosmarie Waldrop and contemporary women's writing), and Tyrone Williams (on Erica Hunt) among many others.