2012 Disinhibitions

via Michael Cross

It's the Political Economy, Stupid (essay)

order here

Interviews at The Conversant

The following are links to two interviews at The Conversant, the first with Andy Fitch, the second with Matvei Yankelevich, regarding his book Alpha Donuts and my book, The Hole.

AF: After everything we’ve discussed about The Hole’s constructivist, cybernetic, participatory nature, I feel we haven’t given an adequate account of the lyric sections. I find it interesting, given what you’ve said, that you capitalize each line, that you provide neat and tidy quatrains, that you’ll outline something like a sentence structure then close serialized sections with definitive periods. What draws you to this orderly local architecture? How has the significance of these lyric passages changed once placed amid the book’s broader discontinuities? How would you describe the lyric’s enduring status amid post-Language poetics or contemporary poetics? Here I can quote some lines if that helps: “What voice of lyric what / Voices would resist the doing / Should syntax still be a sacrifice / Like cutting off one’s limbs / While still alive isn’t that / How Mallarmé put it of Rimbaud’s / Becoming an arms trader?”

TD: The term “lyric” seems inadequate. I tend to use it as a place holder. But often people will use this term as a foil—a negative way to define a retrograde poetics, an outmoded contrast to emergent constellations of writing. To me this all becomes quite problematic. I maintain a more or less daily practice of writing poems that look lineated, that often deploy quatrains, that retain formal characteristics people associate with poetry. I value staying faithful to this practice, to its rhythmic possibilities, to certain compositional principles. But in terms of the dynamic you’ve drawn, between localized lyric details and globalized experimental structures, I’ll sense how a literary form inflected with lyric potential can become much more interesting when you direct it someplace else, when you juxtapose more discursive elements, when you rethink design features. For example, I have a manuscript I’ve worked on for some time, with about 160 pages of mostly lineated poems. But I’ll wonder what it would mean to distribute this manuscript, collect responses to it, then remove the poems, or make new projects out of those responses. What if those withdrawn poems just served as the vehicle for inviting something else? Still I remain committed to poets working through prosodies based on constraint and procedure. One book I love that just came out (tragically, because published posthumously) is Stacy Doris’ Fledge. Its intense prosody works through some of Celan’s grammar. Much still can happen within inherited and imposed forms.

At Small Press Traffic with Sara Larsen and Suzanne Stein, September 2012

Video shot and edited by Stephen Novotny
Reading organized by Michael Cross

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Suzanne Lacy (@ Art 21)

The practice of listening is so foundational to public practice that it’s almost a cliché. What we don’t talk about is how listening is, in fact, learning. That’s why I got into this kind of artwork. When I work on projects I listen carefully for both the learning as well as the images that form between us. I test the images out in conversation and eventually the shape of the work emerges. In the process, friendships form and I begin to see issues from both personal and political perspectives. If you work in the territory of oppression, you cannot avoid being radicalized by people’s experiences.

--Suzanne Lacy

"A riot is the language of the unheard" at Cooper Union (Video)

Homage to Etel Adnan (Anthology)

at SPD

Does the Document Promise? (@ Academy of American Poets)

I would like the tense of the promise to be the tense of the poem I am dedicating to you, just as soon as I've written it

“Talking about my generation” (@ The New Museum)

“Talking about my generation”: Jill Johnston and the Critic as Subject

Movement Research in Residence

Cover Image: 

Elaine Summers, Ouverture, 2012. Photo: Sarah Holcman

Part of RE:NEW RE:PLAY, in Discussions

Presented in conjunction with Rethinking the Imprint of Judson Dance Theater Fifty Years Later: Movement Research in Residence.

Critical Correspondence is an online publication by Movement Research. For this program, Critical Correspondence coeditors Aaron Mattocks and Marissa Perel honor the celebrated writer and critic Jill Johnston, whose experimental and personal voice communicated the culture of the interdisciplinary 1960s art scene. In light of Johnston’s innovative contributions to the form, this conversation considers contemporary criticism and the writer as subject. Speakers include David Velasco (editor of artforum.com) and Claudia La Rocco (founder of theperformanceclub.org). The event culminates as Movement Research artists perform readings of reviews on dance and performance.

Readers:
Thom Donovan
Ariel Goldberg
Cassie Petersen
Christine Shan Shan Hou

"A Riot is the Language of the Unheard" (at Cooper Union)

I will participating in this event with many other fine folks next weekend. It is part of a larger exhibit currently up at Cooper Union, Ruptures: Forms of Public Address.

Occupy/Poetry

"When Zuccotti Park was still occupied something that impressed me were the various tents that provided medical and emotional aid to occupiers. This is something that we too often disassociate from struggle: mutual aid. And it is also the reason for struggle, maybe its primary reason: to become a society of mutual aid. Poetry provides not just a Kantian critical distance from events and subjects, as I notice certain poets arguing for; but it binds and is immediate to intersubjective formations that undergird collective social action."

The latest Boog City features talks from a panel I was on with Tyrone Williams this past August, regarding poetry, activism, and Occupy Wall Street, edited by Brenda Iijima and David A. Kirschenbaum

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Doug Ashford

"The forms in my working process these days are chosen for both their factual reportage and their imagistic drift. I want to know what motivates the figures depicted, if they imagine in unknown relations; figures that are beautiful because they respond to emergency, moving as if empathy has taken them into a momentum that overcomes catastrophe. Although sometimes hard to see, political disaster creates events of extraordinary love because it makes the enduring of life imaginable beyond dark practical economies of getting and selling."

--Doug Ashford

The Hegemon Say (Chapbook)

Check out this chapbook, hot-off Michael Cross's COMPLINE press in Oakland, CA.

Designed after Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Pomegranate Offering (1975), it features a single poem dedicated to Cha.

Literal Blood in Colorado Review

The latest Colorado Review contains some poems I wrote after Paul Thek. Thanks to my friend Sasha Steensen and the other editors at CR for inviting me to contribute.

Poetry During OWS

The following feature contains original writing by 19 participants: Anne Boyer, Dana Ward, Anelise Chen, Brian Ang, Marie Buck, Stephanie Young, Lauren Levin, Brandon Brown, Kristin Prevallet, Josef Kaplan, Brian Whitener, Rob Halpern, Alli Warren, Jackqueline Frost, Michael Cross, Frank Sherlock, Thom Donovan, Susan Bernofsky, and David Brazil. The feature was edited and composed between September 2011 and April 2012, dates which correspond roughly to the first seven months of the Occupy movement. It was originally published in the Summer 2012 issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism.

Dog Day Poetry Marathon Schedule

See you all there!

August 17th - 19th at Outpost 186.
186 ½ Hampshire St.
Inman Sq., Cambridge

Friday: 7:00 - 10:00pm
Saturday: 1:00 - 5:00pm & 7:00 - 10:00pm
Sunday: 1:00 - 4:00pm

FRIDAY    
7:00    John Mulrooney
7:08    Emily Spiegelman
7:16    Kythe Heller
7:24    Chuck Stebelton
7:32    Brenda Iijima
7:40    January O'Neil
7:48    Jordan Davis
break    
8:06    Maria Damon
8:14    Anna Deeny
8:22    Ruth Lepson: Talk on Alberto de Lacerda
8:37    Guillermo Parra: Talk on Jose Antonio Ramos Sucre
break    
9:02    Lori Lubeski
9:10    Dayana Fraile
9:18    Michael Carr
9:26    Rachel Sachs Steele
9:34    Janaka Stucky
9:42    Bridget Madden
9:50    Gilmore Tamny

SATURDAY    
1:00    Jim Behrle
1:08    Ben McFall
1:16    Susanna Gardner
1:24    Jenny Zhang
1:32    Cheryl Clark Vermeulen
1:40    Ish Klein
1:48    Hassen Saker
break    
2:06    Aaron Tieger
2:14    Jess Mynes
2:22    Marcella Durand: Talk on translating Baudelaire & Proust poems
2:37    Zachary Bos: Talk on L.E. Sissman
break    
3:02    Tracey McTague
3:10    G.L. Ford
3:18    Allen Bramhall
3:26    Patrick Doud
3:34    Mairead Byrne
3:42    Mark Lamoureux
3:50    Erica Kaufman
break    
4:16    Brendan Lorber: Talk on Ruin & Desire
4:31    Nathaniel Otting: Talk on editing minutes BOOKS
4:46    Filip Marinovich: Talk on the Poetics of Initiation At Brooks School in North Andover
break 
7:00    Susan Landers
7:08    Jen Benka
7:16    Carol Mirakove
7:24    Leopoldine Core
7:32    John Coletti
7:40    Dorothea Lasky
7:48    Eileen Myles
break    
8:06    Jack Kimball: Talk on Don Quatrale, Rene Ricard & Billy Barnum
8:21    Ethan Fugate: Talk on Bike-Commute Photography Poetics 
8:36    Douglas Rothschild: Talk on how great he is
break    
9:02    Karen Weiser
9:10    Simone White
9:18    Jessica Fiorini
9:26    Jacqueline Waters
9:34    Edmund Berrigan
9:42    Betsy Wheeler
9:50    Thom Donovan

SUNDAY    
1:00    Anthony Cuellar
1:08    Suzanne Mercury
1:16    Joel Sloman
1:24    James Cook
1:32    Farrah Field
1:40    Kimberly Lyons
1:48    Anna Moschovakis
break    
2:06    Rachel Levitsky: Talk on the Office of Recuperative Strategies 
2:21    Jim Dunn: Talk on Harry Crosby
2:36    Carol Weston: Talk on Stephen Jonas
break    
3:01    Aaron Kiely
3:09    Ryan Gallagher
3:17    David Rich
3:25    Amanda Cook
3:33    Sean Cole
3:41    Michael Franco
3:49    Gerrit Lansing

The 90s

I awake to this apocalypse too
And Black Earth like the earth
Was dying into the 90s
Where I was born

So the dead awaken
I am this grave of empathy
Left over from wanting to live
So dying becomes a property of life again

*

Put the munis back in community
Wanting it is a sign of our alienation
Hurt today that I appeared (hurt)

These personal apocalypses and these collective apocalypses
Render an affect of high school
This inner light and that outer light
Of the 90s in high school

The sky went dark
The world went dark
And only then was there hope

In my 90s where cafe culture reached its peak
The 90s begins and ends inside the mouth
Indie rock begins in your mouth

*

It is a poem of friendship
I am dreaming the 90s before
I could remember anything
There were spaces we shared
The bodies we were eventually
To share not invented yet
There were certain reminders
We were still human forms
That we were not undead
Which sex do you identify with
When you see a vampire?

Sonnet 64

When I have seen the upper

Echelons of America

The rich proud cost unlikely to respond 

When sometime lofty towers

The recent war with

And brass of what Benjamin when

I have seen the reflection

Is an undertaking and the firm 

Soil almost heroically cleaved

And the Internet of debris

Ruin hath taught me so interestingly 

Circulating with telling intensity to win

The major companies

Their deeper allegorical significance.

American Books' Solicitations Launch

• • Thursday, August 9, 2012
  • 8:00pm
• 
  
  
  

  SOLICITATIONS: Limited Edition Release + Reading Come celebrate the release of Solicitations, the first project from American Books. Featuring both visual and textual work by a wide array of writers and artists, Solicitations was conceived of as a means to gather community around this new press and the kind of work it will make visible in the future. An evening with readings by: CORRINE FITZPATRICK DOUGLAS PICCINNINI JARED WHITE JOHN COLETTI KAREN WEISER NICOLE WALLACE THOM DONOVAN WILL EDMISTON And a screening of "17 NEW DAM ROAD", new video by: DANI LEVENTHAL

Boog City 6th Annual Poetry and Music Festival

Among the many events at Boog City's 6th annual poetry and music festival, I will be reading and presenting on a panel about OWS and poetry Sunday, August 5th at Unnameable Books in Bklyn.

Here is a link to a PDF of the complete calendar:
http://www.boogcity.com/boogpdfs/bc72.pdf