100 Issues of PAJ @ CUNY Grad Center

I will be participating in this panel next week with Bonnie Marranca, editor of PAJ, and Claire MacDonald:

http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/100-Issues-of-PAJ-and-the-Future-of-Performance-Art-Criticism

Mar 28, 2012, 6:30pm | Martin E. Segal Theatre

What is the state of performance in art criticism today? Performance Art Journal has provided a history of performance art in print since its founding in 1976 and continues to be the leading voice for the field and the public. How does today’s critical writing assess current debates in performance art, and who are the new voices and venues for this writing? Join critics and curators Bonnie Marranca (editor, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art), Claire MacDonald (University of the Arts London/Central St. Martins); Thom Donovan (writer and critic) and others for a panel discussion on the specific characteristics of critical writing about performance art and its recent coalescence into a form of public discourse.

Enframing the Brink Part 3 (with Brandon Brown, at BOMBLOG)

http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6497

I also really valued your sense that, on the brink of despair, you feel this simultaneous and “very different feeling” towards the community that one defines oneself in. I mean, I think this is a truly perverse orientation, although I’m not versed enough in psychoanalysis to say that precisely. But the hedonia, the ecstasy that we both experience in our relations (along with the hells of them, of course) does seem impossible with the unbelievable derangement of current conditions. There is perhaps nothing more important to me than this pleasure, and I too think of it as a real balm against realistic morbidities.

Enframing the Brink Part 2 (with Brandon Brown, at BOMBLOG)

http://bombsite.com/articles/6484

As if those voices return to us more real through their framing in a just-left voice message, or through translation works which, as you say at the close of your Persians, always depend on a re-translation by others who will make the work matter through their own performances, a performance by their future bodies.

"An exercise is the heart"

--for Conrad

An exercise is the heart
Before there was any attachment
To the garbage that was man
That died, that was, again

“I heart,” do you remember when
It was cool to say “I heart”
Words like hearts drift down
The pages, animated gifts
They even remember recent
Conflicts US taxes pay for

What the poets forget
Too avant-garde or not avant-garde enough?
Hard to decide
The way class warfare and genocide
Stick to the ribs

Project your own anthems without them
Lodge your skin your soul in public space
Anathema to this war against the dead
War against animal potential inside us
Fertility to change existence

A (glory) hole if I am blind to no suffering
Writes these lines someday someone will know what
They mean contemporary to them but
Maybe not now smear the world on your body
No one owns your body I will be present to
You if you promise to be present to me
When we are dead what it matters what
We have loved

Intended to be silly disobedience qua innocents
Fuck the world up in reverse reverse the
Smack down in backward motions descend
To rise like a film I want to believe

In the fire crowning our heads
Unspeakably real like fearless speech
Proceed through the misshapen
Sloughing-off eternity
Social antagonism
Like ghosts do

They project space
They perfect a public
Speech in private
With their private parts
Of speech

Phonemes democratize
The mouth one is really
Here because we are all
Here in hell, together
“Why can’t we all
Pull through?,” Robert asks,
The patient being
Universal condition of
An embodied commons

Words form objective existence of love
The order they’re in
Mediating
Love for the
Body/world

Garbage even—

Write our names profane
Instruments so the world
Will be better

Crown our tongues with flame

The point of poems is recognition
Recognition of death so there is no more fear

The terrible things the world has done to us vanish
The terrible things we have done
To the world inspire us to act.

Enframing the Brink... (with Brandon Brown, at BOMBLOG)

Really excited about this correspondence that will be appearing at BOMBLOG in installments for the next month. With the brilliant poet-translator, Brandon Brown.
Many thanks to BOMBLOG editor, Clinton Krute, for his editing and encouragement.

http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6427

Footage from Frank Sherlock Presents (on YouTube)

Here is some footage from the reading I gave with Anne Waldman, for Frank Sherlock Presents

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=frank+sherlock+moonstone&sa=X&spell=1&search=Search&oi=spell

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Andrea Geyer (@Art21)

http://blog.art21.org/2012/02/28/5-questions-for-contemporary-practice-with-andrea-geyer/

"There are many different forms of expression that are named “art” or “culture.” What relates them for me is their potential to offer an experience, a space of reflection, a place to ponder complex issues, to ask difficult but necessary questions, a site of knowledge, a poetic document of the context and time and conditions of their authorship. I think art is needed because it allows a public space inclusive of a complex diversity of ideas and forms that are otherwise difficult to experience, address, or even recognize. As a collective social space it gives possibility for these ideas to reinsert themselves into parts of a public consciousness. I am interested in a public space of (slight) discomfort, unexpected emotions and pleasure that only art can create. Offering an anchoring point, art has the potential to engage places we don’t know or can’t acknowledge—places of uncertainty. It helps us to recognize the fringes of our own comprehension not as a threat but as potential. Art is a collective space, even if the viewing of the work does not necessarily happen collectively. The idea of the shared experience remains with artworks thus framing it as a political site. The viewers appears bodily and socially as vulnerable and incomplete to herself and to others and is invited to understand this condition not as a shortcoming, but a productive site of actions."

An Appropriated Form for Spectacular Action (@J2)

https://jacket2.org/commentary/appropriated-form-spectacular-action

"Dance emerges less as a metaphor, and more as an appropriated form for spectacular action, in the Spanish group flo6x8’s video, Body Versus Capital (2011), which compiles video of the group’s dancing and singing Flamenco in banks throughout Seville. This work, unlike any other work in the exhibit, documents a form of protest that I find extremely compelling for its tactical reappropriation of a traditional cultural form. Were the members of flo6x8 who perform these songs and dances not virtuosic, I do not think that their work would be nearly as successful. Harnessing the power of this cultural form native to Spain, which relies almost completely on the body (with the exception of basic prosthetics such as heel-toed boots and acoustic guitars) the group activates and agitates a social body. In one video from the compilation, we see a member of the group spill pennies on the floor of a bank then begin to dance over them. In another, no less than twenty dancers “swarm” a bank, forming rows and then a circle. Bank security guards seem at a loss about how to remove the dancers. At one point we see a security guard in pursuit of a dancer as she twirls away from him, continuing to dance."

*

Thanks for including me in *, Luke McMullan and Sophie Seita. A brilliant new journal!

Someplace other than what he read (@ J2)

Here is a little write-up I did about David Buuck's performance this past weekend at the Bowery Poetry Club, for Segue Series.

"As David also commented to me afterward during an extensive conversation about his involvement in the Oakland occupation, where his performance may have seemed to attempt to reenact scenes from the occupation, it instead foregrounded the impossibility of successful reenactment, the bodies that produced its context being withdrawn from us, the social conditions that produced that context someplace other than what he read and the video he showed. It reminded me of something Adorno says in Aesthetic Theory, that we reenact what could not be felt the first time around. Through his use of bodily and textual constraint, and through tactical remediation and recontextualization, David touches an affective content that we might otherwise not feel through the representation of political and social traumas, traumas which for many have become deeply personal through their involvement with the occupy movement."

Recipe for writing a New York School poem

at J2

Ode to Blue Ivy

--after Tyrone and Dana

The poem of your life together reads like a trademark,
Jay and Beyonce, on the Gucci bags and Marc Jacobs bags
We all know are fake, and that we of course love
Not in spite of this fact but because the circle
Of authentication and signifying is broken, when you
Rhyme I often think of this Chris Rock skit from
Saturday Night Live, he is singing 90s R&B with a band
Rhyming "pank" (which is to say pink) with the phrase
"so your breath don't stank," cultural products conform
To us as we conform to them, this makes for an
Artificial environment where our despair can be enjoyed,
Where like commodities or brands it should be named.

Baby Blue Ivy's name sparkles like others in your poems--
Cristal, Rolex, Mercedes Benz, Gucci--in your raps I mean,
Which if not for cash moves should be taken for poems,
Hymns to the object becoming subject, to a past of other
Kinds of branding and the futures in your songs uncontained,
No equal signs in this, just a difference E Flat makes,
Just a difference primitive accumulation makes on the skin.

Joyland Poetry and Revolutionesque

Thanks to the editors of Joyland Poetry and Revolutionesque for inviting me to contribute work. Nathan Austin, Ana Božičević, and Amy King.

Books Talking with Tyrone Williams (on UStream)

Video streaming by Ustream
Here's UStream footage of Tyrone Williams and I talking with one another for Nathaniel Otting's Books Talking series at Flying Object gallery.

Constraint is not silent nor at rest (@J2)

Love-how-you-pick-books-so-big-can-rest-in-your-lap-built-environment-of-our-common-book

Valentine

--for Dottie

There are ideas I have but don’t consider mine
Like there are images of your tiny hands I have
There are images of your eyes when I have kissed them
There is the notion of kissing that is culturally specific
And really I didn't kiss your eyes because that would be gross
Your eyeballs, I mean, I kissed your eyelashes while you slept
And didn't dream of men with eyes also kissing you
Of other women with hands made of flame
The role of substitution in poetry and life being of interest to us both

If I bite your style or if younger poets bite your style
Does that mean we are in love with you or that we want to be you?
What's the Shakespeare line, "number there was slain"?
If you be phoenix, I'll be turtle trudging through identity's paradox
Mistaken for Platonic yet wholly on fire our avatars and animus obtain
Some principle of the divine only a semblance of speech can recall,
That kissing on our devices we recall actually, the phanopoeia of our eyelashes meet

Like grief we might say they flutter, that they kiss vulgar notions of eternity,
Does this mean we are living or that we affirm our despair at death?
Recall the love of things we first bat with flame.

Frank Sherlock Presents (at Moonstone Arts Center, Philly)

Frank Sherlock Presents
Anne Waldman & Thom Donovan

Tuesday February 28, 7pm

Moonstone Arts Center
110A S. 13th Street,
Phila., PA 19107

Hannah Weiner and Intense Autobiography (@ J2)

Here is the full version of the talk I gave at Rex Regina gallery last fall.

"Basically, I want to use intense autobiography to describe self-life-writing practices (the literal translation of auto-bio-graphy) that stray from the genre of autobiography, in which one provides the facts of their life, from birth until present, usually late in life. While intense autobiography exists in relation to these forms of self- or person- writing, it is different. And where it differs largely are in two respects: 1. That writing is not a transparent, narrative means of making self or person appear retroactively, but the very means through which the person/self comes into being in relation to a social milieu; 2. Through intense autobiography the “body”— that container demarcating human personhood and rights — becomes a site of experience and experimentation where the limits of the self are related, if not often contested, in relation to a public, community, and/or social discourse."

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Claire Pentecost

Five questions with the heroic Claire Pentecost...

"In many ways my need to know and explore how the world works is my art. I think this is partly why I have developed the idea of the public amateur: the artist as someone who learns in public, putting the production of knowledge itself up for scrutiny. Why is the production of knowledge so important? It’s not only because knowledge is partly what determines one’s position in relation to risk, but... also because the expertise of authorities has for the most part failed to manage the risks of a technological society (part of the Occupy movement derives from this recognition). It becomes increasingly clear that no one is going to save us and we have to work together to experiment with new ways of being in the world. For this we have to return knowledge to the realm of the social by producing knowledge collectively. We have to start with 'I don’t know,' and proceed to think across disciplines to propose alternatives to a system founded on violence against life."

Talking with Tyrone Williams (at Flying Object)

Thanks to Nathaniel Otting I will be talking with Tyrone Williams at Flying Object in a couple weeks (Sunday, February 12th).

Really excited to discuss Tyrone's Howell, which is a dense and demanding book, and to my mind his opus.