Complicities

I.
-after Paul Chan

There are things we lose
We meant to have lost

Like a first remove the
Strikeout of these letters

These bodies in wartime
We can not be them

Voting with our tongues and
Moreover our dollars doing

The things we wouldn't dare
Poetry what's left of

Poetry must be an indict-
ment of war and people's

Behavior during war and
Mainly the poet's behavior

During war because all
We have are words at

Our disposal and these
Bodies are not only

Disturbed they are not
Only blown to bits by

Language something feels
Us and this is not

Just a feeling this is
Not just an idea either.

II.
-for Dottie

Our care for women
My wife I have been

Thinking about the
Violence committed every-

day against women
There is a point

I believe at which
Every man can no

Longer tolerate being
A "man" can no

Longer tolerate oc-
cupying this calcified

Subject position under-
standing how women

Struggle everyday with
Violence one doesn't

Always intend to
Be Feminist but this

Feeling for the body
At risk of being

Harmed of being
Annihilated or hum-

iliated is Feminist
This feeling for

The excuses we make
Cowardly and cruel.

Brandon Brown's Last Post of 5

is now up at the Poetry Project's blog.

Jane Sprague's The Port of Los Angeles

I recall fondly visiting Jane and her lovely family in Long Beach, CA where I read with Rob Halpern for her events series Long Beach Notebook. We drove together to LA where along the way we passed the ports of which Jane is a scholar and a dire lyricist*...

The Port of Los Angeles
by Jane Sprague
poetry
72 pages
$16
ISBN 978-0925904-77-5


from The Port of Los Angeles

I was singing with a closed mouth

singing thinking

sing no more anger between me
sing no more stillness no breakwater

sing come away slowly
sing carry me home

to no home

Reviews
In this collection of interlocking texts, Sprague adroitly intersperses the distributive dimensions of material and cultural international commerce and its strange-making effects (as on your daily donk of style, and the shine it gets from being commodity No. 1). The Port of Los Angeles has moved this reader from somewhere--to somewhere else. My bet is that many others can catch the rapid ride too. Sprague's vigorous no-bones vocability springs off of every page, and the droids are plotting to revolt!" --Rodrigo Toscano

Part post-industrial sea chantey, part epiphany against the "economies of loss" that expand exponentially with each morning's news that struggles to stay news, Jane Sprague's The Port of Los Angeles offers us a rare and varied thick description (with Whitmanesque undertows) of those moments when our living-breathing-trying-to-pay-the-bills-selves meet the vast expanse that is the seemingly boundless sea. "John Steinbeck was right," the poet writes. And Jane Sprague certainly is, too." --Mark Nowak

*dire is a term I have often heard Sprague use to designate recent lyrical poetries critical of language's complicity with "natural" and social disaster.

A Million Keys | Music Language Thought

I have been enjoying backtracking through this website devoted to cross-over between art + music, A Million Keys.

This music lecture series at NYU also looks quite promising, Music Language Thought.

Stan Mir on Francis Bacon and Rob Halpern

What a great connection! http://bestnightmareyouget.com/?p=238

After Paul Chan's Sade

Body parts without bodies
Parts without parts

Anti-gravity pulls apart
The blue windows bits

Byts silhouettes provide
Place increasingly crowded

Flicker with bodies ace-
phalics on their knees

Bleeding cubes float
At the beginning am I

At the beginning use
Of wall as cage as

Screen saver like the
Flicker like of a sudden

Shudder iconoclast Matisse
Color bars end piece

Activate constructivisms
Malevitch black squares

Fall like the sky dangles
Appears institutional

Why Sade now why
Not Marx why not

Machiavelli or Spinoza
But for torture because

We are in a time
Of cruel affect and

Virtual commandment
Pornos squares

Are flat but create
Foregrounds contexts

The figures seen sil-
houetted like a Walker

Cliché (cut-out) they
Are gestural too these

Quivers shakes diddles
There is reference to Stein

Who overcame beginning
Again and again the

Porno of all narrative
Poetry will there be

An end to this again
And again goth animation

One commands with
Penis erect another

Trembles holding a
Square over their head

This giant negativity
Of what can’t be seen

Partial objects (shit)
Fetish objects reliquary

Remains rubble debris
Something trapped inside

Anamorphosis slight
Blur every one’s penis

Suprematist episodic new
Slaveries why would I

Destroy you once when I
Could destroy you ten

Thousand times (fascist
Aristocrats in

Passolini’s Salo) crawling
Holding lifting fucking

The limits of being
Human act bestially

Crawling on their knees
They make decisions

With their dicks carry
One another on others'

Backs there is also a
Spirit of Sade in labor

There is also a spirit
Of Sade in poetry.

As Per Usual Eileen Myles

hits the nail on the head...

"It's actually a terrible sacrifice the art world demands of poets, the virgins thown into the volcano, so that the shiny painting and sculpture of their time will have its equivalent in print, sort of. The poets will have backed off from the spikiness of their perceptions for the glory of instantly appearing in print at all, and for the glamour of being associated with such state-of-the-art art as modern art and even the small sum we receive for writing the average short review. Of course we like art. But that's not the point. My notebook is filled with poems too. It hasn't been a great poetic age of late, it's been an age that's non-verbal, media-oriented, ultra-visual and naturally pro-money, so no one really understands the loss, only knows that poetry is something art writers do when they are young. Or behind the art world's back."
--from The Importance of Being Iceland

TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice: Zolf / Gluck / Salah

Trish Salah, Robert Glück & Rachel Zolf
TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice
This new series of talks by major poets, titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, will explore the intersection of contemporary poetic manifesto, practice, queer theory and pedagogy. Too often today, statements on poetics and their manifesto-like style have been moralistic or prescriptive discourses. By contrast, this series will attempt a Kinsey-like survey of actual poetic practice--what writers actually do, in the writers' own words--in the process queering the manifesto, inventing new terms for poetics discourse, and emphasizing queer writing and poetics.

The first event features talks by:
Trish Salah, Robert Glück, & Rachel Zolf
...followed by a discussion/Q&A session.

on Thursday, October 29
at 6:30 PM
FREE

at CUNY Graduate Center
(in the Skylight Room)
365 Fifth Avenue, NYC

Born in Halifax, Trish Salah is a Montreal-based writer, activist and teacher at Concordia and Bishop's Universities. Her first book of poetry, Wanting in Arabic, was published in 2002 and her recent writing appears in the journals Open Letter, EOAGH, No More Potlucks, Aufgabe, West Coast Line. Her new manuscript, Lyric Sexology, is near completion.

Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist and a book of stories, Denny Smith. Gluck edited, along with Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück was Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, Co-director of Small Press Traffic, and Associate Editor at Lapis Press. His poetry and fiction have been published in the New Directions Anthology, City Lights Anthologies, Best New Gay Fiction 1988 and 1996, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Best American Erotica 1996 and 2005, and The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction.

Rachel Zolf's most recent book of poetry, Human Resources (Coach House, 2007), won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award. Previous collections include Shoot and Weep (Nomados, 2008), from Human Resources (Belladonna, 2005) and Masque (Mercury, 2004). Her poetry and essays have appeared in journals such as Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics and Open Letter and in the anthologies Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (Coach House, 2009) and Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. She was the founding poetry editor of The Walrus magazine. Neighbour Procedure will appear in the spring from Coach House Books.

TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice is curated by Tim Peterson. For additional information, visit the Tendencies blog.

Hold On To Your Dreams review

Here is a review I wrote of Tim Lawrence's Arthur Russell biography, Hold On To Your Dreams:
http://thefanzine.com/articles/music/373/arthur_russell_revived-_hold_on_to_your_dreams_
"One of the most impressive things that Lawrence does throughout Hold On To Your Dreams, is not only provide a sensitive and detailed rendering of Russell's life, but also the story of large and complex cultural confluences channeled by a single person. Russell's lifework is also a Whitmanesque project of containing multitudes inasmuch as it successfully negotiates groups of people, musical styles, and cultures that, to many at the time, seemed at best mutually exclusive, and at worst downright antagonistic. As Lawrence insists repeatedly throughout his book, during a time when 'avant garde,' pop, classical, (post-) punk, and emergent dance musics such as disco and house could not seem to speak to each other, let alone find common cause, Russell was equally pioneering in each musical culture/genre."

RIP Nancy Spero

http://www.bombsite.com/issues/42/articles/1608

Temporary Services

http://www.temporaryservices.org/

Para-Summit on Revolutions in Public Practice

What: Discussion
When: Sunday 10.25.09
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 10:30 am
Who: Free and open to all

"The New York Public Library is playing host to this Saturday's Creative Time Summit entitled 'Revolutions in Public Practice.' The event isbringing together an assortment of artists, activists,curators, architects, and collectives to discuss in short intervals of seven minutes, some aspect of their (public) practice in relation to issues of social justice. A group of us thought that it would be interesting to send an open invite to all of those participants to a more improvised conversation on the following day. Our para-summit is also an opportunity to broaden that conversation with others who are interested in the issues which the event is attempting to activate. We will begin at 10:30 with a light breakfast (any simple contributions to it are appreciated, bread, cheese, honey, jam, fruit, etc...). We will then begin the discussion at 11:00 and continue formally until around 1:00. If there is a desire to continue beyond that time, we can take ashort break, and then continue further with those who remain."
--16 Beaver

Link to Creative Time Summit on Revolutions in Public Practice:
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2009/summit/

An African in Greenland

An African in Greenland
The Arctic Book Club
Artists Respond to An African in Greenland

September 18 – October 24, 2009

Opening Reception, Thursday, September 17 from 6-8 pm

Flux Factory and EFA Project Space are proud to present Arctic Book Club, on view from September 18 through October 24, at EFA Project Space in Manhattan. Curated by Jean Barberis and Michelle Levy, this exhibition is the result of a several-month long process embarked on by a group of artists responding to Tété Michel Kpomassie’s book, “An African in Greenland,” an account of the author’s unique journey from his native Togo to Greenland.

On September 23rd at 6:30 pm, Arctic Bookclub welcomes Kpomassie to respond to the exhibition and reflect on his experiences since having left Greenland.

Artists: Amber Cortes, Jenelle Covino, The Green and Bold Cooperative, Katerina Lanfranco, Fabienne Lasserre, Valerie Piraino, Greg Pond, Annie Reichert, Julian Rogers, Ranbir Sidhu, and Christopher Ulivo.

EFA Project Space
323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10018
(between 8th and 9th Avenues)

Gallery Hours: Wed. through Sat. 12-6 PM

T. 212-563-5855, F. 212-563-1875

www.efa1.org

The Rhetoric of Glenn Beck's "Battles"*

Not even truthiness
And is it possible that
Pure ideology as
An equally important
An allegory or code
Of appeal was not
I could not tell what
Feature so much in the
He could possibly

Refer to when he
Repetitiousness per se
Compared America
But in the fact that
To a teenager who
By means of it Hitler
Goes out for the night
Provided a "world
With his friends stays

Out beyond cerfew
view" for people who
Drinks and smokes
Had previously
Pot knowing when
Seen the world but
They come home
Piecemeal? Did not
Dad will "kick their

Butt" and they will
Much of his lure derive
Be better off for this
Once more, from the bad
Lesson until I realized
filling of a good need?
He was referring
To everything
Are not those who insist

Threatening his economic
Upon a pure planless
Interest and frankly
Working of the market
Fascist cultural values
Asking people to accept far too
And not something
Slovenly a scheme of
Actually worthy of

Punishment like the
Human purpose, a
Economic exploitation
Slovenly scheme
Of the entire world
That can be accepted
Or the destruction
So long as it operates
Of the environment

I wonder what Glenn
With a fair degree of
Beck could possibly
Satisfaction but
Be thinking when he
Becomes abhorrent
Laments a "simpler
To the victims of its
time" and shows a

Coca Cola commercial
Disarray? Are they not
From the early 70s
Then psychologically
Of a young white boy
Ready for a rationale,
Offering a black
Any rationale, if
Professional football

A coke the football
It but offer them some
Repeatedly refusing
Specious "universal"
The boys offer the boy
Explanation? Hence I
Persistently offering
Doubt whether the appeal
Until he finally accepts

The coke cocking his
Was in the sloganizing
Neck back drinking
Element alone (particularly
Deeply from the archaic
As slogans can only be
Glass bottle an image
Hammered home, in speech
Redolent of com-

passionate masters and
After speech, and two
Complaisant servants the
Or three hours at a stretch,
Context of Civil Rights
By endless variations on
Completely abandoned
The themes). And Hitler
By Fox News' format

Perverted by
Himself somewhat
Neo-colonial fantasies
Justifies my interpretation
Coke = economic
By laying so much
Exploitation qua favor
Emphasis upon the
Child = white master/

White man's burden
Half-measures of the middle-
Black athlete = post-
Class politicians, and the
Jim Crow slave or
Contrasting certainty of
Stereotype of Black
His own methods. He was
People waiting

For a hand-out
Not offering people
It is not obscure at
A rival world view
All what those fascists
Rather, he was offering
In our midst believe
A world view to
As the 'teabaggers'

Signs poorly conceived
People who had no
And spelled incorrectly
other to pit against it
Would have us
Our job, then, our
Believe but a simple
Anti-Hitler Battle is to find
Equation of images and

Signs with ideas and
All available ways of making
Acts of cultural violence
The Hitlerite distortions
Even the terms of
Of religion apparent
Glenn Beck are cod-
In order that politicians
ified they tell us of

A happier time when
Of his kind in America
We were all slaves to
Be unable to perform
The few their economic
A similar swindle
'Developments' and
The desire for unity
Complaisant before

A government
Is genuine and admirable
Disaggregating the body
The desire for national
politic of multitude
Unity, in the present
Governing inasmuch
State of the world is
As all governance

Attempts to divide
Genuine and admirable
Bodies which should
But this unity if attained
Otherwise attract each
On a deceptive basis
Other like a series
By emotional trickeries
Of powers shaping

The One every body
That shift our criticism
The potential to combine
From the accurate locus
With other bodies
Of our trouble, is no
Seize power insurrect
Unity at all for even if we
Become history's subject.


*significant portions of this text are taken from Kenneth Burke's "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battles'"

Virtuosity

Below and above
Master and slave
The mystery of being
All a body holds
But can not see
Their laboring for
This vast nothing
On this threshold
Where we're still
Waiting nothing holds
Us colder than
Masters that we
Are a mastery in
A night of games
And politics
Which passes for
Having lived.

Intimacy

-with Rit

To those servants in Altman's Gosford Park
Separate because they share a name with
Their masters this is the history of an emotion

Before an emotion becomes an emotion
The subject before the subject was a subject
Space and time feels small with you here

A kind of parallel universe of labor thresholds
Separate upstairs from down intimacy
Anticipates a coevalness of souls not equality.

Con/Crescent 1

Check out Con/Crescent 1, a journal of emergent criticism coedited by Jamie Townsend and Nicholas A. DeBoer featuring work by Brenda Iijima, Bethany Minton, Andrew Schelling, Nicholas A. DeBoer, John J. Courie, Thom Donovan, CAConrad, Jamie Townsend, Marie Larson, Amanda Courie, Adrienne Dodt, and Stephanie Goldfarb.
http://www.concrescentpress.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=58

Boy in the Balloon

It's like that
The boy in
The balloon
Supposed to
Be trapped
Is not actually
There the bal-
loon touches
Down the F.B.I
Are there we
All are rapt
By this spectacle.

It's like that the
Boy supposed to
Be secreted in
The weather balloon
Is not there when
The balloon touches
Down our sense of
The real is like
That buoyed by
Our attention.

It's like that
The boy in the
Weather balloon
Not actually there
When the balloon
Touches down is
Mistaken for
Reality the media
Secretes attention
Like it was reality
This is how we
Will have been
Seen through
History's eyes
Hopefully.

It's like that
There're eyes where
The head should have
Been there's a boy
In a balloon that
Is barely there that
Is almost a meme
Where we touch
Down doing the
Imaginary American
Thing again while
Wars go on
Elsewhere while
Hardship is all
One actually feels.

Fuck that balloon boy
And that balloon fucking
Dad their faces are not
Real in the real sunshine
Of national discourse
Hovering like an unidentified
Flying object something
Even more mythical
Dreaming of potential.

Fuck that balloon boy
Who didn't really climb
Into the balloon whose
Father was a motherfucker
Whose mother was a
Fox News victim like I want
To see a U.F.O. anyway
This is a poem for my
Friend Brandon Brown.

To Crown

My friend our dream of waking disavows us
It doesn't notice or give presence to the
Violence we pursue being in relation to
Other beings and blood spilled elsewhere

Than this labyrinth this space-time a site
Where I or you will not become grieveable
Inextricable from a genealogy of morals
Images flaring-up non-sensible of what we

Are capable of given to other visions the
Objective withdrawal of what we would
Have been unnamed just a mound of skulls
Inscrutable quiddity we will not awake

From refusing I have a dream yes we can
Is our bad faith for which skin and action
Has failed us the collective will to awake
Now time is only sufferance saving what we

Know the intelligible guns the accidental
Guts no names enough to crown these bodies
Tear-covered letters form a threshold
Fiction forgoes hell for a made-up sun.

In the In Between (at FANZINE)

Here is my full interview with Chen Tamir and Galit Eilat, curators of the Israeli-based Mobile Archive. Immense thanks to Casey McKinney, chief FANZINE editor, for his labor intensive work editing and designing:

"On the evening of September 15th, 2009 I attended a talk by Galit Eilat and Reem Fadda at New School University's Vera List Center about the Israeli Center for Digital Art’s Mobile Archive. The Mobile Archive is an archive of approximately 1000 DVDs permanently housed in Holon, Israel currently traveling throughout Europe and the United States. With each new destination it travels to, it grows by as many as twenty-five DVDs depending on the choices of the local curators and artists involved in the collaborative project. Currently, the Mobile Archive is being exhibited at Art in General in SOHO, New York, guest curated by the Israeli-Canadian curator, Chen Tamir, as well as curators Regine Basha and Adina Popescu.

During Eilat's and Fadda's presentations at the New School, I was struck by the curators' many insights about the geopolitical situation in the Middle-East, and the specific ways that native artists are addressing the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Fadda's description of Israel/Palestine as a "laboratory for mobility" was especially interesting, and something which I wanted to discuss further with Eilat and Fadda when the panel concluded. I was also very struck by a video Eilat showed from her Liminal Spaces project, which brings Israeli and Palestinian artists, intellectuals, activists, and scholars into dialogue with one another in order to think about and enact interventions into the bureaucracy that governs Israel/Palestine. This video showed Palestinians and Israelis speaking through the wall separating Israel from Palestine with one another via a two-way video conference. During this conference, to the surprise of the artists responsible for setting up the conference, Israeli soldiers policing the wall did not stop the conference and instead looked on with curiosity and amusement.

One of the issues foregrounded in the following interview, which took place on Friday September 18th between myself, Chen Tamir and Galit Eilat at Art in General, is the extent to which The Mobile Archive and Liminal Spaces are both creating genuinely new spaces for artworks to exist in cross-culturally. The Mobile Archive produces spaces for artists to show work that is in between private and public distribution, inclusivity and exclusivity, and which also challenge art's value as commodity insofar as the Archive prioritizes art's "symbolic" values––the ways that artworks can transmit ideas across cultures and create spaces for cultural dialogue. In the case of Liminal Spaces, artists and fellow travelers come together to find the loopholes in a bureaucratic structure. Much like the work of Eastern European artists such as the Slovenian IRWIN group, Liminal Spaces studies the situation in Israel/Palestine in order to intervene and act in ways that affect people's lives in the region on a day-to-day basis. Whereas the IRWIN group issues civilians passports, Liminal Spaces provides information about the Israeli military's use of checkpoints to police Palestinians and Israel's own civilian population."
--from In the In Between: a Conversation with Galit Eilat and Chen Tamir about the Mobile Archive