Frank Sherlock's Love Letter November 15

Wonderful to receive this poem from Frank Sherlock last night. In response to the raid of Zuccotti Park.


Books

gone

Shelter

gone

I've been

screaming

out of key

all day

for you to

cover

the promise

hole

in the wall w/

a horizontal

picture or

something

that looks

like joy

I've been waiting

Ah this

sunrise

again on

a failed

paradigm

this stare

too far

into space

for too long

to remember

the name of

this city

Here is

a hammer

Here is

a bulb

A number

of things can

happen like

building in

light

killing in

darkness

or touching

each other

during

our magic

hour

I trade

news links

through

militarized

playspace

to keep

witnessing

fresh

to stay out

of the back

catalogue

while

looking to

not be

abandoned

Take a sip

of war

commodity

from my

bottle when

you get here

I know you

get thirsty

You might

taste traces

of blood but

this is what

I have

to offer

The sound

you might

hear is

quiet running

counter to

anticipations

seizing on

conservation

as if shorter

showers matter

Pardon

my reach

to be

respirited

filching a cup

of memory

as memory

Are you there

This company's

the worst

The trapdoor

spiders' prey

lines up

in the web

in perfect

single file

I hate them

& I'm not

talking about

the spiders

Feed on

a symbol if

it's helpful

This phone

has hit

the wall

It still

works as

a transmitter

Call me

Where does

the exile

end & the

life begin

Your now is

three hours

before my

now & your

now is six

hours after

my now &

where in

this hell is

our future

but so far

ahead it'll be

unrecognizable

upon arrival

Not to

get all

necrocentric

but there's no

contradiction

between

the love of

flowers &

hatred of

floral

wallpaper

This was

real this is

real since

nothing

can be

destroyed

even when

pushed

into fire

I take

the cremains

to the Risk &

Disaster

Studies

section to

Poetry

(of course)

to the bridge

between

the smart

side of

the river &

mine to

the cafe for

conversation

Part funeral

Part miracle

The miracle

can no longer

be buried

There is

a difference

between death

by despot &

natural death

but neither's

truly painless

Pretending

there is no

loss foretells

more loss

than I could

ever shoulder

I've waited so long

Living through

catastrophe due

to no fault

of our own we

feel around

in this blackout

for everything

unseen

Yes we're

engaged

No we never

dated I

swear it's

really not

that weird

Before I woke

I banged

piano out

in a field

the floodrotten

shed in

the distance

I composed

for you w/

ham & wire

It sounded

good at

the time so

what if it

came out

sloppy it was

Peace Be

With You

sang so far

away from

church

That was nice

but we are

awake now

captured

while viewers

haven't

discovered

that craters

seen from

a distance

render these

wounds less

than their

actual size

I despise

missionaries

& their boring

positions

I'm tired of

lying on my

back just so I

can be taken

This interest

rate this

jobless stat

this market

demographic

has gotten

up to stay

human

I have almost

died again

to prove I

am a person

The library

starts over

You are

what I've

waited for

& finally

we're here

Two paragraphs on "intense autobiography"

From the talk I gave at Regina Rex gallery last wkend:

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 socius.

Intense autobiography can also refer to a series of practices upon the body, much as Foucault spoke of disciplinary practices in terms of a “technology” or “care” of the self. The body-self is a site where subjecthood is negotiated and contracted; where disciplinary boundaries and biological essences are tested; where the body as a territory is both mapped and deterritorialized, as in the many famous cases outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. What I want to talk about when I talk about intense autobiography is how self-life-writing demarcates social, biopolitical, and geocultural thresholds. Through forms, and not simply a received narrative writing which blandly insists on a continuous definition of self as a contained or enclosed interior, I believe writing and aesthetic forms may present the movement and passage of person/self/subject through a duration (where intensity refers to movements in time, and extension may relate movement in space). This writing is about becoming; it is about movement and undergoing; it is also about undertaking a radical empathy by which “self” and “other” and milieu and environment inform one another, as much of the most remarkable poetry and art of the 20th century has ventured. Form is necessary to the prospect of a radical autobiographical writing practice, because it is through the discovery and invention of forms that the subject becomes observable as a series a thresholds relating inter-subjective, psychosocial, and biopolitical exigency—the very urgencies that autobiography, as a genre, normally excludes.

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been available to anyone else.

Until time and justice are one
Or we are forgiven
Movement heals our wounds while
It opens a million more

While you opened, while
Your mouth opened, I heard
The throat do its thing.
I heard the song express

A million things about
What we are here for,
Thinking about the generations
We turn around them

While they turn around us,
To assemble those burdens
The dance called out,
Into the heat of air

That leavens, leaves us burned.

Chase Granoff's intuition is preceding over my understanding. (@ The Chocolate Factory)

intuition is preceding over my understanding.

by CHASE GRANOFF

Collaborators and contributors:

Megan Byrne
Jon Moniaci
F.P. Boué
Thom Donovan
Paul Mpagi Sepuya

November 16-19, 2011
8 o'clock pm
tickets $15

Chase Granoff’s intuition is preceding over my understanding. is a solo performance of a landscape exploring an expression of time and place, present and past. Interested in the movements of sustainability, slow and local and how they can be applicable to choreographic thought as expressed through improvisation and score, this choreographic exhibition will unfold through a multitude of expressions in hopes of offering various perspectives of the questions that created it - grounded in the honesty and transparency of the bread that will be offered.

Considering the Steve Paxton quote "researched the fiction of cultured dance and the 'truth' of improvisation" – is choreography an aesthetics of change? How is my interest in bread making part of a dance (life) practice? Is dance a politics? This solo has something to do with becoming a father. Re-becoming a dancer.

For tickets, please visit www.chocolatefactorytheater.org or call (212) 352-3101.

Post-show drink specials courtesy of Dominie's Hoek, El Ay Si, The Creek & Cave.

On Hannah Weiner and Intense Autobiography (at Regina Rex gallery)

Lectures by Thom Donovan and Melissa Scherrer
accompany the current exhibition DÉJÀ VU

Saturday, November 12 @ 1pm

Regina Rex
17-17 Troutman, #329, Queens, NY 11385
Hours Sat & Sun 12-6pm and by appointment
Contact: info@reginarex.org or 646.467.2232

IMAGES: (left) Hannah Weiner (photo c. Tom Ahern 1978), (right) The Predictive Almanac of 2009

Thom Donovan
Thom Donovan will discuss the concept of "intense autobiography" found in the work of poet Hannah Weiner (1928-1997) whose life and writings were so inextricably linked. Weiner perceived innovation as both performance and survival tool, and her embodied condition as clairvoyant journalist/schizophrenic led to some of the most personal and psychologically complex texts of her time. Donovan is a poet, essayist, art writer, curator, teacher, editor and archivist. He edits Wild Horses Of Fire weblog, ON Contemporary Practice, and writes regularly for Art21 and The Brooklyn Rail. His first book, The Hole, will be out later this fall with Displaced Press.

Melissa Scherrer
In 2008, Scherrer made an artist book with her artist/husband Mike Pare called the 2009 Predictive Almanac. Now out of print, the golden booklet was a self-help guide containing home remedies to deal with astrological predictions for the following year. Scherrer will tell us about this book and offer us predictions for 2012. The audience will also be invited to participate in an interactive personal development session. Scherrer resides in New Mexico with her husband and daughter, where she makes paintings, photographs and paintings on photographs and teaches at the University of New Mexico.


DÉJÀ VU includes artists Ivin Ballen, Tatiana Berg, Lisa Sigal, Frank Trankina and Selina Trepp. The exhibition is up until November 20th and was recently reviewed in WagMag.


-------------

Regina Rex is an artist-run exhibition space located at 1717 Troutman, in Ridgewood, Queens. We are open on Saturdays and Sundays, 12-6pm.

Directions: L train to Jefferson, exit, walking along Wyckoff to Troutman. Walk up (north) on Troutman two blocks, passing St. Nicholas and Cypress, to a large brick building on the left. Regina Rex is in suite #329.

If you would like more information, or an appointment outside of gallery hours, please email info@reginarex.org or call 646-467-2232.

Hannah Weiner and "intense autobiography"

Help me write a talk for next wkend, on Hannah Weiner and what I'm calling "intense autobiography." How does autobiography figure in your own writing and/or art practice? How specifically in ways that may be considered counterintuitive to or innovating upon the genre of autobiography? How, likewise, someone who you admire, or with whom you share affinities? Email me at wildhorsesoffire [at] gmail [dot] com.

Two Dances for Leavening

--for Chase Granoff

1.

Your mention of making bread
Makes me think of leavening
A leavening for change is a leaving
It takes time and is kneaded

And is needed this is a pre-
political thing, this is a post-
political thing, this is most of all
A political thing, this ingestion

Through the mouth or the hearth
That surrounds the mouth makes us
A domestic scene whose worth is
Measured by the public, floating

Upon the heat of the air, in this sense
Of seeing or being in the dance
For a polis we can partake of
We are down below, all, we are all

Animal down here, and this con-
sumption is too large to fit coffinlike
In the tomb our planet has become
Conviviality and nourishing substance

Must do their work that surrounds
That surrounds the mouth a res
Publica so-called this bread
Until it is held in common, until

Sense levels us we are left to leaven
The leave-taking of our senses
Must be plain, made by dance
So becoming becomes a heaven

Presupposing time and justice are one.

2.

The ingestion of one substance
We are making
That we are making
The world up as we are also
Movement and we are built
To move in waste our ways otherwise
Than being what you have to say
When breath becomes bread
And there seems no other way
But in this dance other forces sway us
We are persuaded like the world twists
The way it depends on bread
Everyday to sustain
The simplest things
It is the simplest things that are
Easiest to forget
If we ever remembered them at all
I am using the line as a continuous breath
Not a metaphor for things seen
Like we can breathe our way out of this immiseration
Pivot and pirouette our way out of debt
Out of the pollution of everything
To assert the fourth dimension
Betrays our sympathy
And not merely our power over, as Pound claimed,
Every being
To leaven this sense of awe again
The power of things over words, that would
Be bread
Making the world up as we move
These built lines of song
These step-like tones
When time and justice should be one.

Review of Rachid Ouramdane's Ordinary Witnesses (@ The Brooklyn Rail)

Here is a review I wrote of Rachid Ouramdane's incredible Ordinary Witnesses.

"In this place—zero or nil—the dancers move low to the floor. They are grounded—literally. And it is from the floor that they will rise, and writhe, and continually fall again. As if gravity itself were complicit with the violence committed against them. As if it were also a force of resistance embodying the harm that had been done to the violated and tortured. Gravity becomes an active and visible material through Ouramdane’s choreograph[y], propelling the body/subject (back) into being."

OccupyLanguage (@Facebook)

Writers stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street

OccupyLanguage is a working group that encourages the staging of readings in public spaces, and especially via public transportation.

What works/text would you wish a public to hear read aloud? Which may overturn or redistribute a common sense? Which may lead to argument, debate, provocation?

OccupyLanguage meetings are held Sunday evenings at 8pm at 60 Wall St., after the Poetry Assembly general meeting. Each week, a new project proposed by a member of the collective will be performed based on a set of guidelines.

We will reconvene weekly to consider the effectiveness of the texts read aloud, and the kinds of interactions the readings open up in different public spaces. Treat it like a workshop. What worked and what didn’t? What did people find interesting, and why? What led to dialogue, emotional response, enjoyment? We want to invite a certain kind of cooperation in "reading," avoiding traditional styles of unidirectional address which lead to distracted listening and/or echolalia. We might also consider if the readings act as a kind of public service announcement. Not soapbox-style diatribe, but the limited broadcasting of texts that have been carefully considered in advance as something you would want a stranger to attend.

The committed citizens occupying Zuccotti have made us believe again that public space so-called is worth occupying: putting our bodies into it, holding conversation and symposia there. And that such gatherings in the spirit of commons—to be among one another in debate, discourse, and struggle—are a good unto themselves.

Dumps

--after Jennifer Scappettone

There are dumps
And then there are dumps
Violent like sunlight
Hides in methane
Like a heathen/eden of capital
Literally farting up a storm
Of paradise, a kind of last frontier
Of our thingness
Last men do it all night long
Until we all become subject

Methane, last bastion
Of property relations
Called pollution erstwhile
Profitability is our fatal
Enclosure threats of extinction
Literally fart carbon
Cash rules nothing moves
But the money
Out of the island Staten
Home of the Wu Tang Clan
And retired police of course
They closed the schools around
The dump for capital

For methane, the most absurd
Thing was these dumps were made
At all, now a profitable farting
Shitting us our common fiction
Of ecology & capital
Coexist these are the levels
We are dealing with
The unthinkability of waste
While endgames take place.

Shadow speaks with me

Shadow speaks with me
Is this the scarcity
We were dreaming of
The people we were
Inside the people
Light outside
In the trees no repeat
Performance is this singing
Like praise they rise
Up singing
Speaking not knowing
Where body ends pre-dawn
In the park somnolence
Gives us reason.

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Maureen Connor (@Art21)

Check out my 5 Questions for Contemporary Practice feature with CUNY Queens professor, artist, and activist, Maureen Connor.

In the works of Personnel Connor explores a tension between the work environment as a kind of ruin—a place inhabited by future’s past—and as a site begging for revivification, to which one can give new life while not abandoning its history. Working with limited means, Connor has been resourceful in exploring these problems, which anticipate her most extensive project to date. The Institute for Wishful Thinking, which she founded with Gregory Sholette and others in 2008 and discusses below, moves beyond the criticism and practical design problems of her former projects into problems of legal and non-governmental mediation. Soliciting proposals from individuals, and making possible residencies for artists and art groups, IWT attempts to mediate between governmental and non-governmental sectors on behalf of artists who believe their work can benefit the public good.

LRL's zero profit model

The editors of LRL e-editions are thrilled to announce the launch of SIX new books! This time around, we’re changing things up a bit:

In the past, we’ve only ever charged $2-3 over cost for our print-on-demand books. We’re now ready to commit to making exactly $0 from this series: FROM NOW ON, ALL PROFITS FROM THE SALE OF PRINT-ON-DEMAND BOOKS IN THIS SERIES WILL BE DONATED TO A DIFFERENT SMALL PRESS EACH YEAR. First up: Chax Press. So, any purchase of a print-on-demand title from this series during 2011-2012 will have the added benefit of helping to support the efforts of Chax!

Over the next few weeks, we’ll launch one or two titles at a time, beginning with a book-length review of Michael Cross’s Haecceities (Cuneiform, 2010), which is now available for download/purchase.

Please stay tuned for new books from David Brazil, Sarah Mangold, Hugo García Manríquez, and Pattie McCarthy–as well as one monumental reprint from Beverly Dahlen!

Find out more on our newly redesigned e-editions site: www.littleredleaves.com/ebooks/.

Somatic Poetics

The following is part essay, part proposition, part thinking in motion (provisional, unfinished, disruptive). It is a response to Patrick Durgin’s generous invitation in spring 2010 to address “somatics” in regards to recent writing practices and poetics. Through the following text I take excursions with various contemporaries. These excursions are not meant to be representative by any means (the following is not meant to be a definitive mapping of a field, manifesto, polemic, or ‘last word’) but the continuation of a discourse that has become visible to me in the past few years. All the propositions here are hopefully extendable. To many of them I owe my conversations with the Nonsite Collective — and to Rob Halpern, Eleni Stecopoulos, Amber DiPietra, David Wolach, Taylor Brady, and Robert Kocik in particular. And also to Daria Fain, CAConrad, Dorothea Lasky, Brenda Iijima, David Buuck, and Bhanu Kapil.

I dreamt we were susceptive to language

that care might be agency’s complement

and form never more than condition
passing as body

— Eleni Stecopoulos

Etel Adnan Tribute at Small Press Traffic

Lindsey Boldt and Small Press Traffic have put together a tribute to the contemporary Lebanese-American poet and artist, Etel Adnan. Thanks to Lindsey in particular for inviting me to participate in this incredible bouquet of writings.

Contributors include Ammiel Alcalay, Anne Waldman, Ben Hollander, Robert Grenier, Brandon Shimoda, Cole Swenson, Csaba Polony, David Buuck, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Jen Benka, Joanne Kyger, Lynne Tillman, Megan Pruiett, Michael McClure, Nancy Peters, Roger Snell, Sharon Doubiago, Simone Fattal, Stacy Szymaszek, Stephen Motika, Steve Dickison, and Thom Donovan.

Occupy the MTA: a Proposal

The struggle to claim Zuccotti park as strategic and symbolic ground for the commons is not over yet, but one can imagine that Bloomberg will be successful in forcibly removing the occupiers. The committed citizens occupying Zuccotti have made us believe again that public space so-called is worth occupying: putting our bodies into it, holding conversation and symposia there. And that such gatherings in the spirit of commons—to be among one another in debate, discourse, and struggle—are a good unto themselves. Poetry and art have played a role in this, however minor, inasmuch as the “human microphone” reading format may revivify the poetry reading as a democratic and dialogic mode of assembly. To repeat someone else’s words not only bears a religious function, but is a way of feeling words move within you, to make others’ words inhabit your own vocal chords and nervous system. It is in other words to incorporate and understand. That names were drawn from a hat—no curation, no hierarchy—was also remarkable and unlike most poetry readings, with the exception of that most humiliated of formats, the “open mic.”

The events of Zuccotti Park this past month have set the practical imagination ablaze, and made us imagine anew what is possible in public space supplemented by social media, video, digital photography, etc. I propose that a working group form to consider giving readings in public spaces, and especially via public transportation. What works/text would you wish a public to hear read aloud? Which stand out as revolutionary? Which may overturn or redistribute a common sense? Which may lead to argument, debate, provocation? Groups of 5 or more may board trains and buses to read agreed upon texts aloud. 5 or more so as to bear witness in the case of police intervention, but also so that the readers will feel supported, not alone in their deliberate action. Read a text and then disperse. Or remain if the public engages the reader and wants to discuss. Reconvene regularly to consider the effectiveness of the texts read aloud, and what texts to read in the future. Treat it like a workshop. What worked and what didn’t? What did people find interesting, and why? What led to dialogue, emotional response, enjoyment? If the human megaphone/microphone amplifies cooperatively we might think of the MTA occupation similarly. As inviting a certain kind of cooperation, if only through distracted listening and not echolalia. We might also consider if the readings act as a kind of public service announcement. Not soapbox-style diatribe, but the limited broadcasting of texts that have been carefully considered in advance as something you would want a stranger to attend.

Talk at CRS with Jenn Joy

This Saturday, at the invitation of choreographer Daria Fain, I will be giving a talk with Jenn Joy about my experiences as a dance writer, with special attention to confluences between poetry and movement-based practices. Please join us!

October 15 10:00am to 1:00pm
DONATION SUGGESTED $5
@Center for Remembering and Sharing
123 4th Ave. At Union Square

People are Making Shitloads

--after phrases by Ben Kinmont

People are making shitloads
This disconnect
The advantage of the absorption
Making shitloads
To close the system
To close the system not
To open, disclose
Shitloads, people are making
Is a service
Is a service when this not being
It is clearly an invitation
This sense of loss
To close the system
Is towards the beginning of ideas
People making shitloads
Devastate quality
As a response to absorption
Is a service
This disconnect
Is a service
This sense of loss less as ephemeral
Than a failure
To close the system
The people make
Making shitloads
To open, to disclose

But it is not 2008
That constitutes a lag
In advance of witnessing
The system collapse
Of witnessing
The system from within
This sense of loss
People are making unamplified
Inside the people
Less as an ephemera than
A need to surround buildings
Produces the world one
Is hearing beyond control

Give me a mic check and
I'll give you the world
People being made the
People being made
While the mic's not on
Are you hearing the sound
Of the world
Surrounding buildings
Whose murmurs were control

Up in this city finally plausible
Beyond control
Give us the world
And we won't divide it
Like the pie divides what
Do you hear
People making shitloads
Now they are heard
Pie charts now they are
Ripples in the middle of
The people
Intoning the air inside me

So what we simulate
Is indivisible
From the sounds we make
Like Stein
Says explanation people making
Shitloads
What do you hear
The people being made
While we hear
Where a process begins
Beyond control
A people swells
Inside the ear.

New PennSound recordings

PennSound just put up quite a few new materials at my page there, including readings with CA Conrad at Zebulon Cafe, Joseph Bradshaw and Dana Ward at Con/Crescent in Philly, Steve Farmer for Poetic Research Bureau in LA, Catherine Meng for 21 Grand, and at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver.