37th Annual Poetry Marathon at St. Mark's Church

Come out for one of NYC's longest standing poetry traditions, the 37th annual Poetry Project marathon on News Year's day. Listen to a deluge of poetry and live music, and browse among a great selection of new and vintage poetry books for sale.

Poets and Performers include: John Giorno, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Philip Glass, Suzanne Vega, Taylor Mead, Eric Bogosian, Anne Waldman & Ambrose Bye, Foamola, Anselm Berrigan, Ariana Reines, Peter Gizzi, Liz Willis, Ted Greenwald, The Church of Betty, Thom Donovan, Tim Griffin, Todd Colby, Tom Savage, David Shapiro, Jonas Mekas, Josef Kaplan, Judith Malina, Albert Mobilio, Alex Abelson, Bill Kushner, David Freeman, David Kirschenbaum, Diana Rickard, Don Yorty, Dorothea Lasky, Douglas Dunn, Alan Gilbert, Alan Licht w/ Angela Jaeger, Charles Bernstein, Christopher Stackhouse, Citizen Reno, Cliff Fyman, Corina Copp, Aaron Kiely, Adeena Karasick, Bill Zavatsky, Bob Holman, Robert Fitterman, Rodrigo Toscano, Brenda Iijima, Brendan Lorber, Brett Price, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Curtis Jensen, Dael Orlandersmith, David Vogen, Derek Kroessler, Diana Hamilton, ARTHUR’S LANDING, CAConrad, Akilah Oliver, Douglas Piccinnini, John S. Hall, Samita Sinha, Sara Wintz, Secret Orchestra with special guest Joanna Penn Cooper, Shonni Enelow, Bob Rosenthal, Brenda Coultas, John Yau, Julian T. Brolaski, Evelyn Reilly, Filip Marinovich, Douglas Rothschild, Drew Gardner, Eleni Stecopoulos, Elinor Nauen, Eve Packer, Jo Ann Wasserman, Joanna Fuhrman, Dustin Williamson, E. Tracy Grinnell, Ed Friedman, Edwin Torres, Eileen Myles, Elliott Sharp, Emily XYZ, Erica Hunt, Erica Kaufman, Evan Kennedy, Joe Elliot, Joel Lewis, Frank Sherlock, Gillian McCain, Greg Fuchs, Janet Hamill, Jeremy Hoevenaar, Jeremy Sigler, Jessica Fiorini, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jim Behrle, Julianna Barwick, Julie Patton, Michael Lydon, Lisa Jarnot, Maggie Dubris, Marcella Durand, Marty Ehrlich, Merry Fortune, Michael Cirelli, Kristen Kosmas, Laura Elrick, Lauren Russell, Leopoldine Core, Nina Freeman, Paolo Javier, Patricia Spears Jones, Paul Mills (Poez), Michael Scharf, Mike Doughty, Karen Weiser, Lewis Warsh, Linda Russo, Penny Arcade, Peter Bushyeager, Rebecca Moore, Mónica de la Torre, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Nathaniel Siegel, Nick Hallett, Nicole Peyrafitte, Pierre Joris & Miles Joris-Peyrefitte, Kathleen Miller, Katie Degentesh, Kelly Ginger, Ken Chen, Kim Lyons, Kim Rosenfield, India Radfar, Tonya Foster, Stephanie Gray, Susan Landers, Tony Towle, Tracie Morris, Valery Oisteanu, John Coletti, Rachel Levitsky, Edmund Berrigan, Macgregor Card, Wayne Koestenbaum, Will Edmiston, Yoshiko Chuma, Nicole Wallace, Arlo Quint, Stacy Szymaszek and more T.B.A

This Is Not a Performance

--for Adrian Piper

Gives me the back
The backside this dance
Does the butt but does it
Suffice to be an object

In this dance motherfucker
Reduced to steps, reduced
To hips, a kind of scream-
like script I am hinting at

Like shade light passes through
Light, like there was no
Beyond but what is social
What is a social material

Leaving me what’s left-
over from the armor
Love makes up the difference
Motherfucker my only friend

Nice up this substance
Come shadow come on
Open up a window
Pull this ladder up into skin

Songs the object and songs
The subject refused to sing
Ring thought balloons
Make the black still truer

No equal signs, no commons
In this index of who you is
In the present
The archive betrayed us

Blindfolds around entire bodies
Like a pair of eyes all over
Your body, a dance that was both
A fusion and a wreck

The eyes remain the windows
Of the soul, but who looks in and
Who looks out’s a question
Your body posed.

A poem by Chris Martin (part II)

Reading Dana’s great piece on
ease. Uneasiness
leading everywhere at once. On labored seas
of greased thought. How the beliefs
slide into caprice. Salt
caught in an unknown wound. Gravel
corroding a once
solid grave. But surely to startle
tune into foot-fault, toe spitting over
the melody’s surface. To suck
dust from a moony footprint or
print money by dusklight.
“Respiration” was always coming
on back then. Visibly shaken. Fuck it.
Roam the Empire State or Roman? Cuss
long. Blast holes in the night. Kiss
the eyes goodbye I’m on the last train.

--from Every Time I Decided Not to Set Myself on Fire

Paul Thek and the Art of Failure (Notes)

Here are some notes from an essay I started working on today addressing the work of Paul Thek.

Installation art, before it was absorbed by the practices of artists and curators who could perceive its salability and various ways to preserve its memory, was a medium of failure. And this is perhaps why Thek invented it (however inadvertently): because he is an artist of failure, sublime failure. Why does Thek fail? What is the failure which he embodies, expresses through his body of work but through the installation works especially?

The installation works succeed precisely where they deliberately fail to produce a reproducible or representative object. This fact has been cited time and time again. That through the installation format Thek’s work not only lost in market value (at a time when the market wasn’t nearly as hyped as the one of today); but more so, the possibility of its being cared for by museums, galleries, and other institutions of art's valuation (despite the fact that Thek showed in some of the venues now considered the most significant for visual art in Europe in the 60s and 70s). This desire for the work to be unrepresentable, for it to remain live and to only produce ephemera—relics which may or may not be cared for—is part of Thek’s intention which I particularly respond to. And we can trace this intention through a number of different elements in Thek’s work. Namely, his use of ephemeral materials such as newspaper (for nearly all of his “paintings”), chalk, and even sand (for a sandcastle reproducing Bruegel the Elder’s “Tower of Babel”). If the Technological Reliquaries may be said to take Conceptual and Minimal art ‘down’ from a Neo-Platonic realm of ideational givens to the suffering of a soma, then all of the work relates a form of suffering through the effects of time, history, and labor—the approximation of a lived duration which imagines anything that could be preserved, and that could thus continue to exist outside its immediate presence, as ‘dead’—a relic or ruin. Whether as calculated fuck you to an American art world that had forgotten Thek, or to a world which he would have liked to have abandoned for nobler ideals (charitas and agape for instance), the work—despite its intense materialism—embodies a set of ideals; ideals of another world. Ideals of a better world, I think Thek would have agreed. Not yet-to-come, but always (at least potentially) 'here and now'. Especially now.

Art can be an exodus from art. It is as such in the work of Thek, and many of his contemporaries. Art as reproductive, violently reduced to an object. Art reduced to a saleable, possessable, preserveable thing rather than something binding, acting as a kind of social material, a participative-communal property. Many of Thek’s works attributed to him were in fact made in a workshop-like atmosphere, in which the artist’s collaborators (who were also his friends and apprentices) would have much to contribute, and whereby the social activity of the workshop (how someone cooked and arranged a particular meal, for instance) largely determined “product” (what was produced as installation, if only so that it could be eventually devalued and neglected by curators and potential collectors alike).

Interview with Adam Pendleton (in BOMB)

My interview with Adam Pendleton will appear in the upcoming winter issue of BOMB, which drops next Wednesday. Here is a preview.

Pendleton is a rare artist in his ability to synthesize disciplines and mediums, and to steer with collaborators toward “total works,” which yet remain drafts of a larger essayistic practice. His works—like those of his many avant-garde forebears—are experimental in the truest sense. He sets up a laboratory in which our social and political desires can appear, however fleetingly. Historical materials (images, sounds, and printed language) become a point of departure for making present what cannot be grasped by representations of history (narratives, archives): the emergence of events and situations, which can only become known retroactively. Recent live art has rarely been more conscious of its origins in civil disobedience and the civil rights movement, where we view the body as a site of social antagonism, and as a “case” for struggles for recognition and justice. With Pendleton’s work, even though we are often left with aporias and blind spots, we feel the force of historical matter self-organizing and finding form beyond representability and essence. We discover the protest of the object—works of art and performance resisting their subsumption by common epistemological frameworks and modes of narration posing as truth.

A poem by Chris Martin

Check out this lovely poem by Chris Martin, from a forthcoming book called Every Time I Decided Not to Set Myself on Fire

So what if these were notes not
for something more
finished, but for something more
like ruins, not Gothic
Revival Horace
Walpole fakes, not stonewashed
jeans, but real ruins, lived-in
to death, a little ruin
of a typewriter that bit
ribbon after ribbon
until every blackened tooth
smashed, guiding a whole polis
of letters into the skies
and trucks and boxes? Say
these ruins were like no
other ruins in
that they were (not actually)
invisible, as in invisible
to commodity, like no one
would ever stand in front of them
in a photograph, or rub one
of their crumbly faces, or point
at a cluster of dots
on some cheap map, but ruins one
could only stumble
upon like it was someone else’s
life left between a stand
of hairy pines, and no one thought
to walk there again, it wasn’t
a way anyone going
somewhere would go, a huge fucking
mess, not left to someone
to deal with, but devastating
in its beauty
because it’s someone else’s so
gone you just know
you’ll never know anything
factual about it, or the person
whose life it was and now
only is, this gorgeous
nothing pointing
everywhere but at itself, this event
you (now) and only now (you)
are allowed to see, an event
that barely even unfolds, but just sits
there in all its inaccessibility
like a flood that isn’t
a real flood because it never moves
and it can’t be a real event
because there aren’t any streets
to walk home on, or string
to unravel, there is only this ruin
running in place, that no
one else will ever happen
across, that absolutely everyone
will miss, just as you have
missed everything else, some fat
animal staring at a reason, some bear
furrowing, so that
soon even
you will miss it, this ruin, this impossible
strip of “life” that will
drift with other endless parts
of you you lost
along the way, over all
this time, will shift
like another gleaming doorknob
in Brigadoon, so as always
to stay where you are
not, a great big floating thrift store
of late appendages
like a fool fingering walnut shells
to remember the meat.

Rebecca Davis's what I'm saying is born from the weather (in Brooklyn Rail)

In the new Brooklyn Rail I have a short review of Rebecca Davis's what I'm saying is born from the weather, which appeared last month at Judson Memorial Church:

Can dance help one to understand weather as a “thing”? Can the body become synched with climatic substance? Can it undergo or embody the weather as a substance? The title of Davis’s performance comes from a book of poems by the Colorado-based poet Eric Baus, called The To Sound. In his book, Baus cracks open a poetic syntax in order to put it back together again, in the process helping his reader to understand and explore a poetic grammar. One could read Davis’s dance in a similar way, in that it may also attempt to represent the weather as an ordering of both discursive and sensory experience.

Intro for Thalia Field (at SEGUE)

Here is my all too inadequate introduction for Thalia Field, who performed with an ensemble including Jena Osman this past weekend at SEGUE series. Reading Field's work last week got me thinking again about exactly what we mean when we call poetry (or anything for that matter) "experimental." Likewise, I was sent back to other poetries which incorporate both essay, play, and 'thought experiment' into a verse-like mood of texture. Zukofsky's Bottom: on Shakespeare; many of Susan Howe's poems and essays; Rosmarie Waldrop's lovely essay, "Alarums and Excursions" among others....

For over a decade Thalia Field has been providing us with a literature at the boundaries of poetry, theatre, fiction, philosophy, and essay. Through her work genre and disciplinary boundaries become confused to say the least. More accurately, we might say that the confusion of genre, discipline, and field gives way to a more holistic and open investigation of thought through a writing practice.

As such, Field takes up the work of a truly “experimental” literary genealogy, one which recalls essayists such as Montaigne and Emerson, but perhaps finds most of its purchase in a heuristic approach to composition which grew out of early modernism, and continues to this day. In Field’s most recent book Bird Lovers, Backyard (New Directions, 2010) she evokes an experimentalist genealogy through the controversial figure of ethologist Konrad Lorenz, whose essentialist views about animal behavior coupled with Nazi sympathizing reflect what is troubling about anthropomorphic approaches to animal biology. Through Bird Lovers, Backyard, Field proves that writing can problematize methods of experimentation extended historically and laterally from the natural sciences.

In another book published by Field this past year, A Prank of Georges (Essay Press, with Abigail Lang), Field and her co-author take up Gertrude Stein as a kind of muse. This is fitting given Stein’s dual backgrounds in experimental psychology/neurobiology and literature/visual art. The title of the book comes from a line of Stein’s, “Prank could be called George if one were used to it but one is not,” and the book indeed is a prank if we think about a prank being related to grotesque and harlequinry (two genres Field draws upon throughout her work).

There are so many things to recommend about A Prank of Georges, which weaves a tissue of quotations from various strands of philosophical, literary, scientific, and etymological texts in order to explore the function of naming for construing and constructing identity—a problem which obviously fascinated Stein from The Making of Americans until her late works about fame and celebrity. What is striking about the use of quotation in this book is how unique quotations become like players in a dialogue—speaking their lines, performing certain actions; acting!

The directness (and direction) of this discursus I find attractive and true to Field’s and Lang’s muse who through composition as explanation was able to grasp philosophical difficulties associatively, synaesthetically, and emotionally, finding form in apparent chaos, performing witz through structural adequacies. What if the essay was just a matter of sequencing, editing, design—many of the movements from A Prank of Georges seem to ask? What if what we called “poetry” demarcated the ‘text’ after a discursive scaffolding had been removed?

In Field’s writing thesis disappears giving way to what the writer, in the spirit of Stein’s death bed repartee, calls “an ecology of questions.” A Prank of Georges, like so many works by Field, brings us closer to thinking in its state of flux, movement; as it is forming and deformational (monstrous, sublime). In which we see, and feel demonstrably, thought taking shape, as a kind of extensive dramatic action among the literal letters. Letters as actors, as players.

A Literal Blood (Installing Spirit)

belatedly, after Paul Thek
composed on World AIDS Day


No sex here,
no content
except what
survives as joy,

and praise fail-
ure which becomes
you not nailed
to anything

no concept but
suffering a
semblance nonetheless,
so real was it

inside us and
embodying and gut-
ted, metaphor
the ongoingness

of notebooks,
eternal sketch
of that towering
to topple a wreck

subsides in unful-
fillment, time
runs out but your body
afflicted was free,

its total simul-
taneity like a
sympathy atoning
for nothing

all language becomes
a love letter,
all drawing
describes a pun

on sunset, on relic,
on humility
the world continues
to end

though neither
spirit or body appear,
no soul outside
of history

art is uncleansed,
a literal blood,
uncleansed would be
a place to begin.

Melanie Crean's How To Do Things With Words (at BOMBlog)

Here is a little piece I wrote about Melanie Crean's recent exhibit at Parsons, "How To Do Things With Words," which addresses the effect of speech performances within recent aesthetic practices upon political action and civic discourse:

Another artist whose work I came across for the first time is that of Azin Feizabadi, who had two video works in the show. The first video work, in collaboration with Ida Momennejad, The Epic of the Lovers: Mafia, God and the Citizens (2009), is a lyrical essay about the Iranian demonstrations following the elections of 2009. The visual content of the video features figures seated with hoods and veils covering their faces. On the hoods and veils are projected images taken from the Internet of participants from the 2009 demonstrations. The seated figures represented by the video move only slightly. When they do, the images projected on their faces become distorted and deformed. The images of projections alternate with amble black leader, which punctuates the lyrical tempo of the sound-track whereof one hears portions of a diary read by the collaborators, Feizabadi and Momennejad. The diary consists largely of a series of questions and observations focused on the demonstrations. Poignant about the questions, is how they address contemporary socio-political uprisings, and particularly the sense during such an event that one is no longer acting as a single individual. The lovers’ dialogue—if that’s what to call it—calls to our attention the dilemma of the subject who must perform agency as part of a spontaneous collective subject. Skepticism and hope pervade the dialogue, which offers a moving and thoughtful portrait of the Iranian demonstrations both as a specific geopolitical event and as an index of a more general problematic of how collective subjects may come into being and solidify.

Others Letters: Dan Thomas-Glass & Stephanie Young

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new project, Other Letters, which will feature correspondences between contemporary writers, artists, and culture workers that reflect current aesthetic practices and cultural production.

The first post features correspondence between Stephanie Young and Dan Thomas-Glass about Thomas-Glass's project with Aaron Sachs, 880, which he proposed to Young for Deep Oakland, a website devoted to social ecologies around Oakland and the Bay Area. As the description at Deep Oakland has it, 880 involves "An examination of Interstate 880 as an intermediate space: between languages and experience, history and present, dislocation and locatedness, as well as literally between media. Multiple speeds register; materials included iPhone camera, globalization, real estate developers, financial crisis, Google maps, and daily commute."

Please stay tuned for more correspondences in coming weeks!

To produce that failure
To represent the pain
Of others the living carcass
In a trial of innocence

Meat begets meat, fish fly-up,
Spill your guts in the air,
Strapped into the air
Like some Odysseus to his mast

What siren songs did you not hear
In your practice to profess
That failure to register the pain
No image will tell

What remains encases
Breath begets breath
But no one saves face
Since no one will be saved

Activity synchs these traces
The newspaper on any
Particular day
Becoming a withdrawal of day

Substituting hours for praise
To produce that failure
The world we would want inversely
Mourning becomes our joy

Affliction becomes a flight
From being afraid, presence escapes,
Tombs become archive-like
In the present

Deriving from these lips bounty praise,
Since nothing, since no
One will be saved
I take the world to be breath.

December and January at SEGUE

I am getting excited about the start of my third season co-curating SEGUE, which begins next Saturday (December 4th) at 4PM at the Bowery Poetry Club. I have posted the names of readers and the dates of their readings below. For bios you can go to SEGUE's website.

DECEMBER 4: THALIA FIELD & ALLEN FISHER

DECEMBER 11: BONNIE JONES & ANNE WALDMAN

DECEMBER 18: ERIKA STAITI & ANDREA BRADY

JANUARY 8: CECILIA CORRIGAN & MAC WELLMAN

JANUARY 15: SHONNI ENELOW & RENEE GLADMAN

JANUARY 22: CA CONRAD & NORMA COLE

JANUARY 29: DOUGLAS KEARNEY & YEDDA MORRISON

While you were perimeterizing
I was off being nowhere
Shimmering with neglect
Like this backlit praise

That other light
Must represent despair
Which raises us up by what powers
What powers, what powers

To which we will not grow
Feeling stops to form a focus
Stunned by our shapelessness
Need turns to broken song.

Glenn Beck Redux

“The more an affect is known to us, then, the more it is in our power, and the less the Mind is acted on by it.”
--Baruch Spinoza

Nicky Tiso took me up on my proposal to recompose the histrionic gestures of Glenn Beck, the footage of which is posted at Tiso's blog, Grand Hotel Abyss.

Rich Owens on Abandoned Buildings and Wild Horses Of Fire (PPNL)

Poet-scholar Rich Owens has a thoughtful essay in the new Poetry Project Newsletter addressing Sean Bonney's Abandoned Buildings and Wild Horses Of Fire in terms of devaluation, distributed authorship, and the limits of digital commoning.

You can also read a PDF of the essay at Michael Cross's The Disinhibitor and at the Poetry Project's website.

And here I sense the vehicle that delivers Bonney’s poems and Donovan’s criticism embodies almost precisely the same contradictions each confront in their thinking—that is, the very instrument that allows each to circulate their work to the widest possible audience also shackles and mediates it, distorts and compromises it, generating a tension that challenges the potential efficacy of the work. But the risk Bonney and Donovan court in addressing the commons by way of a fundamentally compromised and widely devalued digital publishing service alerts us to the rigid material limits we—as poets, artists and critics—are forced to work within and through.
--Rich Owens, "PRISON-HOUSE OF COMMONS: SEAN BONNEY VIS-A-VIS THOM DONOVAN"

5 Questions with Carin Kuoni (at Art21)

My second post at Art21 blog for my column "5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice)" features Carin Kuoni of New School University's Vera List Center for Art and Politics:

Something unique about the VLC – and Kuoni’s approach as a curator (as you will see below) – is the extent to which she has thought through the ramifications of her programming and the VLC’s relationship both within the larger institution of The New School as well as the institutions and communities with which it has worked. I particularly admire that the VLC’s events tend to relate and build upon one another and reflect a curatorial ethos. I also admire very much the evolution of the VLC from strictly organizing programs and events towards more recently producing curricular documents (textbooks, anthologies) and creating a fellowship program intended to bring scholars, teachers, and artists to the university to participate in programs and curriculum.

The New (Chor)us

This past week I attended two readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project on Monday and Wednesday nights. These readings featured Jennifer Karmin, Brandon Shimoda, and Dana Ward. Jen and Brandon read on Monday night and presented a perfect pairing, curated by Macgregor Card who is currently the Monday night series curator at the Poetry Project. What was striking between Jen’s and Brandon’s readings was that, in very different ways, they were both evoking forms of chorus. Jen did this literally, through a dramatic, polyvocal recitation of the first six cantos of her book, Aaaaaaaaaaalice, which I participated in. Brandon evoked the chorus through his reading from a scroll of poems that included pieces others had written for or about him, and which he has published (or intends to publish) under the (collective) name “Brandon Shimoda.”

The first poem read during his reading was in fact not read by him, but by the poet Kate Greenstreet, who was in attendence. So that after Brandon was introduced by Macgregor the first person you saw—as though a stand-in for Brandon—was Greenstreet, reading one of Brandon’s poems or one of her own (I am not sure which). There was an uncanny effect about this substitution, one perhaps telling of Brandon’s subject, which relates the historical and personal repercussions of Hiroshima/Nagasaki for the poet. Another substitution that occurred during the reading was when Brandon read a review of his book, The Alps, written by the poet-videographer Brandon Downing, who was also in attendance. In conclusion to his review Downing pronounces Brandon Shimoda "dead," a pronouncement I felt to be sublime within the context of Shimoda's reading, where Shimoda, as present as he was, seemed nowhere to be found--a continuous flutter of others' voices and autonomous imagery.

I wonder if this move to the chorus, and to substitutional performance modalities, is a return of sorts to the “death of the author” problematic which writers and artists have taken on in fundamental ways for the past half century, or if in fact what these writers are getting at is something different. In the work of both Jen and Brandon, a presumed author does not just become "decentered" or "obscured" in the course of a reading through the performance of appropriated texts, but dramatize their situation of address with those with whom they feel affinity, friendship, and a sense of community. In Jen’s case, as she travels to read in different cities she contacts a group of poets to perform her work in situ with her. In Brandon’s case, via the uncanny substitutions to which I have been referring, he evokes a multiple-singular subject, the use of a name to enfold others, to evoke the presence of their company, conversation, and particular relationships. Like Marguerite Duras and others before him, there is a sense that the 'self' in relation to others is labyrinthine rather than linear, refractive rather than reflective, polymorphous rather than univocal. The result is that one must ask the Nietzschean question “Who is speaking?,” which concerns the author function, yet it is also to recognize the author/person/subject—"Brandon Shimoda”—as a construction of correspondence and exchange, if not of love. The pursuit or process of love at least—a distribution of the ‘person’ or of the proper name as indication of collectivity evoking the heterogenous multiple.

Why the recourse to chorus now? Two other poets who have recently taken to choral modes of performance and aesthetic production are Robert Kocik, whose ongoing Phoneme Choir with choreographer Daria Fain includes professional and amateur performers from backgrounds in music, poetry, dance, visual art, and somatics/body work—and Jennifer Scappettone, whose recent collage work, which she will often read with a host of other performers, is imagined as a “pop-up chorus.”

My sense of the chorus offering a common form among recent poetries culminated this week with a reading by Dana Ward. In Dana’s work, multiple levels of discourse are put into play, narrative pov dissolving in an arduous path in which Ward encounters commodities in storefront windows, or recounts an encounter with a stranger on a plane in which he tries to explain what he does “for a living.” One very clear touchstone of Dana’s work is Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a sense that commodities are something Janus-faced, that they contain a dialectical tension in which both redemption and despair, fetish and use value, are replete with one another, in which they in fact produce a third quality held-up by the aesthetic object. So too, Dana's works takes-up New Narrative writing as a kind of template, and particularly the work of Bruce Boone. Who doesn’t hear Bruce’s legendary story, “My Walk With Bob,” in Dana’s recent chapbook, “Typing Wild Speech.” What I have been calling the choral mode of recent poetries (perhaps for lack of a better term) is most startling in Dana’s work where he reads letters he’s written (and some he’s received), foregrounding correspondence as a crucial moment of (his) process. By relating correspondence as he does through the format of poetry (in the name of poetry?), Dana radically destabilizes distinctions between private and public spheres, interiority and exteriority, and most of all formality and informalism (I am particularly fascinated by the ways that Dana uses informality as a rhetorical technique in his poems and during his readings, which both ingratiates his readers/listeners and commands their attention, which also plays in exciting ways with notions of decorum, elocution, and manner in regards to the poetry reading as a received format).

Life and writing meet in Dana's work, mediated by shared exigencies. The risk is a bad faith through which one's friendship and participation in community could ossify into an object, a potential consequence of process-based and participatory art that I see Ward rigorously resisting and foregrounding, trying to find a solution to, an exodus from. It will be exciting to see how his forthcoming books address this problem when they come out next year, since Dana's work has existed “off page” for the most part, circuiting in relatively private channels such as email exchanges and limited edition chapbooks (something he and I talk about here), and of course through the poetry reading itself as a mode of exchange and distribution.

Dana’s work is important for our moment—I believe it is anyway—because it is showing us again how the autobiographical and the socio-political are codependent, and how delicate the dramatization of this codependence is through a body of printed, non-circulating, and entirely oral (and aural) works. In this way, perhaps more than almost any other younger writer, he takes up the largely unpursued problematics of New Narrative writing: How to invent forms of writing which can combine autobiographical disclosure with critical analysis? How can forms of story become life-forms themselves? How can narrative formalize the process of a writer's non-alienation from a world of others? During a time when so many corners of our society demand that we identify and brand ourselves, Dana’s work—like Jen’s and Brandon’s—seeks transformation in a kind of radical porosity, a giving over of the work to others, a desire for vulnerability and openness, for lack of control, for infusion and dissolution in discourse, distribution, and modes of reception outside of appropriate/d channels.

Poets’ Potluck (@ the Poetry Project)

Please come next Friday, partake of food and drink, listen to some great poetry!

Co-curated by Brett Price, Thom Donovan, & Sara Wintz. The Thanksgiving Poets’ Potluck is an opportunity for New York City’s poetry community/ies to come together for an evening of readings, performances, and delicious food. An array of writers from the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s series as well as other local reading series will read/perform their work. Any one interested in bringing a dish for the potluck will contribute to an amazing Thanksgiving feast. If you’re interested in bringing food, please email Brett Price at fridaynightseriesp [at] gmail [dot]com.

Paul Thek’s "Teaching Notes"

The following is a transcription of Harrell Fletcher's invaluable transcription of Paul Thek's "teaching notes," contained in Fletcher's booklet Thek's Teaching Notes. The notes were generated for a "4-D Sculpture" class at Cooper Union taught by Thek between 1978-1981 (a core class in Cooper Union's curriculum at the time, as Flectcher explains in his introduction). Fletcher's booklet, published at his request by Publication Studio for an event at the Whitney around the current Thek retrospective, comprises a transcription of the artist's notes, and responses generated by Fletcher's 2007 studio class at Cooper Union, which (for lack of a better term) reenacted the content of Thek's original class based on the notes. Being particularly interested in the teaching practices of artists and writers, I find Thek's notes extremely curious, both as a document of his teaching practice and inasmuch as they reflect his larger aesthetic concerns and processes. I also find attractive Thek's approach to art through questions and exercises, which may instigate a process of self-discovery, interrogation, and dialogue with others. Namely, one's students.

Paul Thek’s "teaching notes":

Name
Age
Birthdate
Place of birth
Position in family
Nationality
Religion
Education
Hobbies
Career plans
Parents’ education
Parents’ birthplace
Parents’ religion
Where do you live now? With whom? For how long?
What income do you have? From what source?
What property do you own?
What are your requirements in a friend? Lover? Mate?
What kind of art do you like? Painting? Sculpture? Music?
What do you read? How often?
Do you buy books? Records?
What is your favorite color?
What are your politics?
Have you ever been seriously ill? Serious accidents?
What do you do on a date?
What is the purpose of dating?
Do you believe in premarital sex?
What happens after death?
Tell us about other members of your family.
Tell us about a close friend.
Tell us about someone who inspires you.
Tell us about the most exciting thing you ever saw, did.
How many rooms are there in your home?
How many floors? What floor do you live on?
Do you have your own room? Do you share it? With whom?
What does your room look like?
On what do you sleep? In what? In what position?
Do you take baths or showers? Do you use perfumes or deodorants?
What style or look do you prefer?
Are you interested in sports? Which? How often?
Do you believe in abortion? Do your parents?
What is your worst physical feature? Your best?
What is the main source of difficulty between you and your parents? Teachers? Friends?
What annoys you the most in others?
What kind of teacher do you prefer?
If you were a teacher what would you propose?
How would you grade your students?
What is eternity? What is love? What is art?
What is a symbol? What is religion? What is psychology?
Who are your role models?
Who is the person closest to you at the moment?
Who is the person physically closest to you at the moment?
What in your life is your greatest source of pleasure?
How do you know you love someone?
How do you know that someone is interested in you?
How do you know that you are happy, sad, nervous, bored?
What does this school need? This room? You? This city? This country?
What is abstraction?
What is a mystery religion?
What would it be like if you behaved with absolute power?
Redesign a rainbow.
Make a French-curve rainbow.
Design a labyrinth dedicated to Freud, using his photo and his writings.
Design a Torah.
Design a monstrance.
Illustrate the Godhead.
Add a station of the cross.
Design an abstract monument to Uncle Tom.
What is a good temple? A bad temple?
Who is your favorite character in the Bible?
Who is your favorite character in Gone With the Wind?
Why does an icon have to be human?
What is sacred? Profane?
What is the most beautiful thing in the world?
Make a paperdoll of yourself.
What is theology? What is secular?
Explain the Zen doctrine in your own words. What does it mean?
What does it mean “In the beginning was the Word”?
Can you find a book on making sculptures of paper?
Make a spaceship out of a cereal box.
Make a paper chain out of a book.
Redesign the human genitals so that they may be more equitable.
Design a feminist crucifixion scene.
Design something to sell on the street corner.
Design something to sell to the government.
Design something to put on an altar.
Design something to put over a child’s bed.
Design something to put over your bed when you make love.
Make a monkey out of clay.
Design a flying saucer as if it were The Ark.
Make a large folded-paper airplane, paint on it a slogan which you think will revolutionize your life.
Make an icon out of popcorn.
Pain a balloon gold, paint a balloon silver.
Make a necklace out of coal.
Paint a series of playing balls like planets, be accurate.
Design a black mass out of any materials you can find.
Design a work of art that fits in a matchbox, a shoebox.
Design a new clock face.
What is the difference between philosophy and theology?
Who is Hans Kung?
What is liberation theology?
What is mysticism?
Who was Meister Eckhart?
What is the purpose of art?
What does ‘spiritual’ mean to you?
What is the most difficult thing in life for you?
Can art be helpful in dealing with this difficulty? In what way?
What is ‘service’?
What is the purpose of society? Of government?
What is the surest way to happiness?
Who is Savanarola? Augustine?
What is attractive in a woman? A man?
What are the qualities of physique most attractive?
What are the personality problems of being an artist?
What is it like to be an American in the 20th century?
Who is Roosevelt?
What is action painting?
Pop art?
The Louvre?
What languages do you speak? Spoken at home?
What religious articles do you have in your home?
Make a skyscraper out of inappropriate materials.
Make a prisoner’s pillbox hat.
Make scatological object, or use scatological words.
Illustrate your strangeness, act out your most frightening perversity.
Design a box within a box to illustrate selfishness.
Design a throne.
Why are you here?
What is a shaman?
Make a piece of curative art.
Make a piece of psychological art.
What do you think has been the greatest hurt, mental and physical, that you have suffered?
What do you think are the qualities of a life fully lived?
Can you suggest a project, for yourself or for a group, or for any number, which might deepen your sensitivity to time?
What is greed?
What is verbal knowledge?
What does tactile mean? Can you show me an example of tactile sensitivity in your personal life?
What do you do to make yourself more attractive sexually? Why do you do this?
Do you really like very beautiful people? Do they really have special privileges?
What is polygamy? Explain its function in the society?
Make a design of your favorite literary person. Event. History. Project for Ellis Island.
How much time should you work on a class project? How much time should you think about it? Discuss it?
What do you think of money? Make a structure to me explaining your concept of money, or out of money.
Should art be useful? Useless?
What is pablum?
What is capitalism? Communism? Socialism?
What is leisure?
Make a structure out of photos of primitive people.
Make a structure illustrating anything from the book of proverbs.
Can you construct a functioning lamp that illustrates the concept of freedom?
Can you construct a functioning ashtray that illustrates the passage of time?
What is waste?
Who was Malthus?
How can we humanize the city?
How can we humanize Cooper? How can we redesign the Cooper triangle?
What should the student lounge look like? Where?

Remember, I’m going to mark you, it’s my great pleasure to reward real effort, it’s my great pleasure to punish stupidity, laziness and insincerity.

These marks won’t make much difference in your later life, but my reaction to you will, but the reactions of your classmates to what you do will.

Your classmates are your world, your future will be like this now, as you related to your present, you will relate to your future, recognize your weakness and do something about it.