Lost

If the buildings stacked
Up on the shore of our perpetrated
Language materialized as what
We could have been

Those you missed the things
You missed in their firstnesses they would seem
To step from out of some portion of the blame
They would say we are actually missed*

How we work would not be whole
Not what we produce or legislate
How this will have been

The only place we could be
Or see so we are called from
Wrecks to light dreaming.

* Some time still seems to be missing us

Creative Speaking: Fiona Templeton (@ Harriet)

here

"Reading Templeton’s work for over a decade, and attending a handful of her performances in recent years, Templeton’s work is highly original for its process, which uses movement–and speech-based movement primarily–as the principal means of composition. In a tradition which encompasses border ballad, folk song, traditional theatrical elocution, improvisation, Socratic peripatetics, and post-Beat (Burroughs, Ginsberg) composition via tape recorder, Templeton is led by a writing which is simultaneously speech and vice versa–what we would say if we ever knew what we were going say during the discontinuous present of performed utterance. What occurs through Templeton’s poetics is a radical intention defying the autonomy of speech and writing and proving creative expression once again to issue from embodied conditions."

Tan Lin Metadata Extravaganza

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: EDIT EVENT APRIL 21, 2010

Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking is Tan Lin’s latest book, or rather, it’s three or four books in one, linked by a Google search, a dilemma, and a tourist’s itinerary. Lin provides a provocative answer to our reading conundrum in a post-book world of Web 2.0: he makes everything into a book.

In a book filled with photos from flea markets, bar codes, and meta data tags, Lin traces the movement from reading books to reading everything everywhere: text messages, RSS feeds, your status updates on Facebook, the Company blog, tapas recipes, Yelp and Netflix user reviews, scribbles on electonic Post-It notes, tags on Flickr, fluttering balloons, and aisle signs.

What used to be called non-reading is the new reading. Lin—an intellectual trickster of a very high order—has written a book that defies categorization. It traps beauty in a bar code, on the back of a moist towelette, and in recipes for moo goo gai pan.

AND ON APRIL 21st 2010, as part of 'EDIT: Processing Network Publishing', organized by Danny Snelson at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia,

the EDIT staff will accompany Tan Lin in the reauthoring and republication of SCV on the spot in multiple formats.

The event will begin at 1pm and conclude at 7pm. A reception and Q&A is scheduled for 6pm. The works to be published include

Handmade book, PDF, lulu.com Appendix, Powerpoint, Kanban Board/Post-Its, Blurbs, Dual Language (Chinese/English) Edition, micro lecture, Selectric II interview, wine/cheese reception, Q&A (xerox) and a film.

“Edit: Strategizing Writing Technologies,” organized by Danny Snelson, focuses on editorial strategies and textual conditions in contemporary writing. It is a roving events series pairing innovative performances with focused critical responses toward an exploration of editorial strategies in contemporary writing and the arts. From reframing techniques in conceptual writing to live processing in new media performance, editorial issues of mediated composition seem increasingly pressing.

The events series is distributed in diverse locations around Philadelphia—from institutions such as Slought and the Kelly Writer’s House to smaller venues and galleries throughout the city. An extended argument of editorial theory will relate these diverse locations, with each event expanded online and occasionally drawn together in print or other media.

What Is Poets Theater? (@ Harriet)

here

"In anticipation of this Wednesday’s celebration of The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945-1985 (edited by David Brazil and Kevin Killian) at St. Mark’s Church, I asked a handful of poets theater practitioners and scholars to respond to the question, 'What is poets theater?' The following are extensive replies from David Buuck, Rodrigo Toscano, Patrick Durgin, and Corina Copp, preceded by information about Wednesday night’s festivities."

Fuck Death Revisited (@Harriet)

here

I remember seeing Conrad read for the first time in spring of 2007. Conrad’s best friend, the Philadelphia-based poet Frank Sherlock, had just recovered from a life-threatening illness, a meningitis which he contracted in Philadelphia, and nearly died from. It was Easter weekend at SEGUE series and Conrad said he did not believe in the resurrected Jesus, but that he did believe in the resurrected Sherlock. Conrad’s comment, interjected between readings of poems generated using his (Soma)tic Exercises, was powerful to me for the ways it deflated Easter’s otherworldly promises of salvation and transcendence.

During the poetry reading, Conrad also read a poem in which he intoned “fuck death,” a statement which I took to mean “forget death,” but also that one should have sex with death, that death undergirds life comingling life’s forces with its own. The confluence of living and dying, for Conrad, as for many gay men who grew up in the 80s and 90s, is an unforgettable, if not unforgiveable, reality. An unmistakable melancholy touches many of Conrad’s poems, and especially those poems collected in Deviant Propulsion and The Book of Frank in which people and things that have disappeared are often underscored through their absence—longed for, mourned. In many of Conrad’s poems the inanimate often becomes animated by a spirit of mourning—a longing for ex-lovers, as well as for the victims of sex and gender based crimes. Grief forms the conditions of possibility for action, communication, life loving. Animism grounds impossible return.

Belladonna Book Launch and Two Blurbs (@ Harriet)

here

For those in NYC a week from Tuesday, please come out to hear what I hope will be a wonderful gathering for four of my very favorite contemporary poets.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010; 7:30 pm
Closing Event for Belladonna’s
Year of New Releases

Dorothea Lasky (Black Life)
Brenda Iijima (revv. you’ll—ution &
If Not Metamorphic)
Eleni Stecopoulos (Armies of Compassion)
David Wolach (Occultations )
Dixon Place
161 Christie Street; New York City
$6.00

Ekphrasis Again (@ Harriet)

here

"The poem may become a site for varying degrees of ‘naive’ experience, seeing the art object or engaging with it through any number of different filters, veils—at such a distance from anything one might call the ‘thing in itself.’ The poem also can act pre-critically or post-critically—as a kind of processor for ‘understanding.’ What we ‘see’ in the work of art; the way the art sees us through the lens of social processes, cultural antagonism, the institutional situations wherein it appears (whether magazine, museum, gallery, site, classroom, film, internet, etc.).

The poem, for me, composes ideas, percepts, and thoughts while they are still in process. It is a learning machine or a vision machine engaged with what the art object might reveal as culturally meaningful or, on the other hand, as a withdrawal from cultural meaning—legibility, visibility, exchangeability. It is a bachelor machine inasmuch as it is bounded, prosthetic, and artificial."

Guy Ben-Ner's Second Nature at Postmasters

April 2 - May 8, 2010GUY BEN-NER Second Nature
Employing animals, animal trainers and an on-camera film crew all speaking in rhyme Second Nature restages Aesop's fable The Fox and the Crow combined with Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Can you tell a fable today? Is it not too arrogant to believe you can educate someone? On the other hand, if I believed art could not deliver any kind of lesson or critique of the world, I would stop making it. (Guy Ben-Ner)

In Second Nature Ben-Ner has created a video that emerges from Aesop's fable The Fox and the Crow. It is a video in three parts that blurs the boundaries between ' fact and fiction'. One part of the video is shot as a documentary about specialist animal trainers training a fox and a crow to re-enact the fable, but develops into a fictional re-telling of the fable itself by the animals, interjected with a re-enactment of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot by the animal trainers. The dialogue between human and animal is crucial, exploring subtle modifications in behaviour made through the interaction between the two, where one can never truly control the other.

In the repetitive and questionably futile action of trainee and trainer, Ben-Ner's video owes much to the plays of Beckett - the trainer trains the animals to re-enact the fable; Ben-Ner trains the trainer to act In the documentary and the play; and the animals train each other within the tale itself. He uses the same setting, a lonely tree, to tell two different stories - one a fable and one a play. Ben-Ner reveals the function of fables - the use of animals to tell human stories and instruct our own moral behaviour - and mimics their strategies to manipulate the animal trainers as the fable unfolds. Essentially the action is the same, repeated again and again. (Kyla McDonald - catalog for the Liverpool Biennial 2008.)

GUY BEN-NER Second Nature, 2008
Single channel video, color with sound,10:10 min
Animals Supplied by: Birds and Aminals UK
Fox Trainer: Guillaume Grange
Crow Trainer: Gwen Griffith
Fox: Bambi and Briar
Crow: Oreo and Nabisco
Film Production: Roger Appleton
Sound Recording: Alan Watson
Editing Facillities: CCA, Tel Aviv
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial International 08

Postmasters Gallery
459 west 19th street
New York, NY 10011
212-727-3323
www.postmastersart.com

The Poetic Front Vol. 3

Thanks to Stephen Collis for his excellent editorial and design work on the most recent issue of The Poetic Front, a journal of criticism, essay, and poetics based in Vancouver, BC.

Reviews & Essays

“EXQUISITE HYBRIDIZATIONS” AND THE GENTRIFICATION OF FORMS
Andrea Actis

New tactics in Poetic Activism: Reg Johanson's Escratches
Robert Budde

“The Lore of Four” is a “Copious Leaping”: Transnational Translation and the Visceral Vernacular, Oana Avasilichioaei and Erín Moure’s Expeditions of a Chimæra
Cris Costa

Potential Form and Hank Lazer's Portions
Stephen Collis

Three Reviews
Susan M Schultz

“Inquiring into the symbolic dildo I strap on every day”: A Review of Rob Budde’s Declining America
Reg Johanson

“How many constants should there be?”: Rae Armantrout’s Quasi-Scientific Methodology
Robert Stanton

“...More Careful Zones and Strata”: Charles Olson’s Parallax Poetics in The Maximus Poems
Jason Starnes

Wound Response, Tacit Knowledge and Residual Reading: Dissecting Matrices of Information in J.H. Prynne’s Late-Modernist Poetry
Matthew Hall

Special Features
Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!
Roger Farr

Postscript: Poetry and Anti-Politics
Roger Farr

The Barricades Project, the Life Long Poem, and the Politics of Form
Stephen Collis

Doing the Twist: Modern American poetry and vitalism
Thom Donovan

From Wit to Plunder in a Time of War
Gregory Betts

Becoming Unmoored: Rob Halpern's Disaster Suites
Richard Owens, Andrew Rippeon

Usufruct
Rob Halpern

Conditions of Poetic Production and Reception Part 4. “New Resistant Subjects (Bot to Bot)”
Rodrigo Toscano, Natalie Knight

Critiphoria 2

The new Critiphoria has a lot of great content, including a feature on Radical Poetics & Secular Jewish Culture. However I am particularly looking forward to spending time with these critical offerings:

Steve Benson: Introduction, Performance Text (“to write”), and Live Notes (“m&Msum”)

Abigail Child: FORM AND CONTENT: The Continuing Use Value of Dialogue

Bhanu Kapil: LIBERIA, INDIA, COLOMBIA, SERBIA: ia: [An aesthetics of non-violence. Notes for the book to come.]

Robert Kocik: THE PROSODY BUILDING

James Sherry: Appendix A: How Language Writing Got Its Period

Rodrigo Toscano & Natalie Knight: from “Conditions of Poetic Production and Reception”

Stephanie Young: on Live Film Narration

Utopian/Distopian

for Charles & Rit

Like names falling through
Old levels sounds like
In the open of the public
Eye we are vulnerable
Scrutinized not just for the poems
Sounds they make on the inside

How they still how they don't
Make us whole but the whole
World flickers the time
They take to get outside
And sense not just this sense
Of the mind's survival.


Wants to put
The me back in you

Scratch that
The eyes out
From a fault line
In the ear

I its epicenter
Equivocal of a
Thousand shades

Clear now in your
Tears an idea
Of we

A tenuous this
The future breaks
Upon, opening.


Wants to put
The you back in me

If no other things
The sense of things
Being together

Whole only in
Their potentia

Which is not
False equivalence

Semblance just
A taste of paradise
In this life

Though there is
No other of which
We may speak.


Context relies on ash
When what we will be is blank
As facts without the moon
The surface of the moon
To which they are attached
Words only make more knots
A cage to which the bird
Must refer in some future tense
So that we can make sense
So that the abstract can seem real.


Libraries there are
That are made in the mind
And which we never read the entirety of
And which yet affect us
As though we had read
Everything they contain

That is how it felt
To be with you today
Shaped by words which never
Alone will be mine.

Art Strike Anyone? (@ Harriet)

here

"Examining the documentation of Hsieh’s one-year performances make me think about all that the artist must have experienced while not making art objects, that is, while withdrawing from an economy involved with visual art. And this seems the point of the work: to imagine the vanishing of art itself for lived social practices as a limit of aesthetic autonomy. What, for example, could have kept the artist’s mind and body active while refusing to go outside the confines of a cell for a year (an experience obviously lived daily by actual detainees)? What social difficulties and practical dilemmas did the artist encounter while remaining outdoors in the streets of New York City (the state of necessity, obviously, of all homeless, itinerant, and displaced people living in the city). What daily struggles does one face with another individual whose most private needs can not be extricated from one’s own (a fact we all face cohabitating with others, only not usually on such extreme terms)? Finally, what can we consider the work of art when what comprises the work itself is the avoidance of working—to not give one’s labor power to art as it is expressed by a set of cultural practices and activities?"

Satellite Telephone vol. 3

I am thrilled to have work in Robert Dewhurst's brilliantly edited Satellite Telephone vol. 3, which includes work by BRUCE BOONE, JOSHUA BECKMAN, MARIE BUCK, TODD COLBY, CACONRAD, TANYA LARKIN, HEDI EL KHOLTI, ISH KLEIN, CHRIS KRAUS, NICOLE MAURO, SHARON MESMER, REBEKAH RUTKOFF, and ROD SMITH, and art by TRACEY EMIN.

Interview with Guy Ben-Ner in BOMB

This past winter I was fortunate enough to be able to interview one of my favorite contemporary visual artists, Guy Ben-Ner.
You can read part of the interview here and the rest in print.

Thom Donovan: I watched Second Nature and If Only… tonight. I am thinking about the significance of their many literary allusions: Waiting for Godot, Aesop’s Fables, The Little Prince, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Divine Comedy, King Lear, Don Quioxte, and many other classic works of Western European literature. How does literature influence your work and how do you come to use source texts?

Guy Ben-Ner: In my earlier movies, literature functioned more like a construction upon which I could mount my own material. The grand narratives I am interested in have a peculiar trait: they pretend to be inherited rather than acquired. Most people think they know Moby-Dick without ever really reading the book. When I first read Robinson Crusoe, I already felt I was revisiting it. Everybody knows what the Oedipus complex is, though I doubt many people actually read Freud on it. These narratives are so well integrated into our culture—they actually form this culture—that it feels like you get them from looking at milk cartons and Corn Flakes boxes. In the same way, IKEA showrooms look familiar; you feel like you’re back home, although it never was anyone’s home. I think grand narratives are exactly what you can never revisit—you were never with them, and yet they never really left you. It might seem simple to bring grand narratives down into one’s kitchen, but the relationship is complicated. The “fiction” and my “reality” had to enter into conversation—in Wild Boy, for example, my son really does utter his first English word on-screen, just as the wild boy does. He gets his first haircut and you see him barely managing to dress alone for the first time. It’s both reality and fiction. The fictive element was structured as a “play within a play,” (the obvious example would be the play staged in Hamlet) and that fiction serves as a motor to generate real events in the actual life of the participants. None of the “readymade” material I use comes from the desire to pay homage to this or that artist/writer. I’m using source material as a survival kit, as building blocks; I don’t know any other way. I hope this doesn’t come off as some kind of intellectual game—it isn’t. The “knowledge” I use, those quotations, are a stick to help me walk. I would limp otherwise.

All the Whiskey in Heaven official NYC launch!!!

All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems of Charles Bernstein launch

Sunday March 28, 2010, 6:30pm
Zinc Bar
82 W. 3rd St, New York, NY

Poets & friends read from All the Whiskey in Heaven
Thom Donovan
Peter Gizzi
Kenneth Goldsmith
Erica Hunt
Dorothea Lasky
Tan Lin
Elizabeth Willis
& Charles Bernstein
hosted by Dorothea Lasky

more information on the book at
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/books/all-the-whiskey/
read a review of the book in Time Out New York here: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/books/83616/charles-bernstein-all-the-whiskey-in-heaven-book-review

Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=31844#!/event.php?eid=353717594665&ref=mf

New Dusie Chaps

things are boiling over at Dusie Collective....

On Jane Sprague's The Port of Los Angeles (@ Harriet)

here

In the first part of Sprague’s book she tells a story. She sings herself, “Citizen Jane,” in conveyance (her family’s move from Upstate New York to Southern California), and in doing so speaks both of personal loss—a loss of feeling rooted in a place—and about conveyances far exceeding herself—“ourselves perfectly pitched at the edge of globalism.” (23) Global or international economic exchange is represented by the ports of which Sprague also sings (“container / as the staple / vessel of modernity” [28]). The ports encompass a local ecology of dockworkers and natural phenomena, drug and sexual trafficking, goods transported via shipping containers and other modes of transport. They are also the backdrop for the United States’ over-consumption; its consumption of world products and commodities at the expense of others within an international community—their labor power, their health/wealth, the security of their families and communities. “ownership or loss / and ‘no bordered sense of that’ / I do not know how we were to be (we) unbordered.” (32) Irresponsible consumption and waste as a result of exception.

"I am testing..."

I am testing a series of propositions about friendship and
Community which may or may not last in time
Or produce the results I would have wanted or intended

I am testing them against the tried ephemera of political action
And reflection on this action called theory
Even while it may be occurring

No dream encompasses this contradiction
Between what we dream and how we wake up
And an effective mode of action within a particular
Set of forces or relations

Thus the feeling one is doing nothing
While one is in fact doing everything
One must act very specifically
While maintaining the possibility of everything.

For Robert

My friend when you go away
Into a medical emergency
An emergency of how living
Is practiced I miss you

I feel I am missing out
On my own life the consequences
Of which a building never
Materializing would make it true

Because the building is never
Built it remains a proposal
Or plan about how prosody
Lifts the body outside itself

How ekstasis cures
Your books remain to be written
Because the possible
Doesn’t end with words.

The Archivist

Because you wanted the world to hear
What you heard
Ears are all we are sometimes
A moment of music on them
And not all this drudgery
That is work and that is
A politics of work

The details not the mirage
Of seeing that’s what the archivist sees
Like we were sometimes just eyes
No longer I when we see
Stein said that
Because the world is mindful

Of identity you were taping it
All the time even the noise even the blanks
Before they organized our memories
What was even searchable
As memory

How any of it could impress us
This is where music comes in
Structuring the thing otherwise
All that time with the tape on
Just in case there was music.