Interview with Colter Jacobsen

Here is a little interview I conducted with Colter Jacobsen for The Drawing Center's blog.

I Hope You Are in That Sun

Burning your hegemony

In effigy to all

That is absent

Inasmuch as we are

But this skin of names

Burning on some

Other sound for now

In whose dreams

Did the sun appear

No sun at all

Like a light before

Light was

These notes stretch

All the sounds we can be

Forget the violence

Of their music

Other first principles

We can’t mean

Sweating in exile

From certain pedigree

Identity messes

Everyone up

The ego which was all

Disabling sings

A new name

This morning a kind

Of third thing no

Sun could ever be

Suffered like a drug

Everything we see

The world

Is an epigraph

So call grace its score

That knowing spreads

Its cure

Rhyming in a world

No one has seen

Sequenced like my Lord

Summoning an end

To music.

--for David Rattray

David Rattray: a Recognition (event)

Please join us for an evening & an afternoon of readings, film & visual art marking the life, work and ongoing influence of poet and translator David Rattray (1936-1993) on the twentieth anniversary of his death.                                 On Friday April 5 at 7PM at the Leo Koenig Gallery (545 W. 23) in Chelsea.                                 Lynne Tillman                 Nicole Eisenman                 Vincent Fitzgerald & David Rattray                 Dia Felix                 Basil King & Martha King                 Chris Kraus                 Betsy Sussler                 Liz Kotz                 Kevin Cooney                 Raymond Foye                 Eileen Myles                 Thom Donovan                 Jim Fletcher                 Ken Chaya                                                 and Saturday April 6, 2PM                 St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 2nd Ave & E 10th St.                                 Joanna Furhrman                 Robbie Dewhurst                 Eileen Myles                 Gerrit Lansing                 Susie Timmons                 Garret Caples                 John Godrey                 Kim Lyons                 Chris Kraus                 David Able                 Ann Rower                 Jesse Browner                 George Quasha                 M.Mark                 George Green

Vital Forms: Healing and the Arts of Crisis (Conference)

The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, presents a two-day symposium on the subject “Vital Forms: Healing and the Arts of Crisis.”

All events take place at the Subterranean Arthouse in Berkeley.
Conceived of and curated by Eleni Stecopoulos, in collaboration with the Poetry Center, the project “Poetics of Healing” is supported by the Creative Work Fund.

Friday APRIL 19
Saturday APRIL 20

Melissa Buzzeo, Thom Donovan, Margit Galanter, Bhanu Kapil, Beth Murray, Pavlos Stavropoulos, david wolach

2179 Bancroft Way, Berkeley (just south and east of downtown Berkeley BART)

• Friday, 7-9:30 pm, talks & performances, $10/$5
• Saturday, 2-4:30 pm, workshops integrating writing with movement/somatic work, $10/$5
• Saturday, 7-9:30 pm, talks & performances, $10/$5

VITAL FORMS: Healing and the Arts of Crisisa two-day Symposium featuring Eleni Stecopoulos and special guests:

All-events ticket at door first evening: $25/$15

intense autobiography.^A  mutual aid.^{B, A}  light touch.^C land-escape / soundscape.^D a charged space.^E  building the dream house that is the body, where we live.^F self-organization as a devotional act.^G  poetry as radical organizing.^D

What forms do we create in crisis, from crisis? What forms nourish us, heal us, free us to live? 

^A Thom Donovan, ^B Pavlos Stavropoulos, ^C Bhanu Kapil, ^D david wolach, ^E Melissa Buzzeo, ^F Beth Murray, ^G Margit Galanter

Place of Action

I am drifting from you

And looking back

While you take my picture

And this, this is becoming real

That is, it has more

Presence the more it happens

This longing not to be

A balloon drifting from you all

Umbilical in the wind

Like some Eurydice to pose

In the snow not knowing

What the moment can only

Pretend to know

*

Taller knowledge and being woman

The center members bar grinds

Who had been or would become

Boys night they just want to share the practice

They’re all naked and the mind shine through

What’s on the outside loyalty that’s designed

And the pleasure and the next it’s the little things

Location is not necessarily--bam, scribble

Who is fulfilling their job is on my sleeve

To the extent that art can bring people together

Allowed more than just a sandwich

Spirit and living under the sky

Each environment liposuction money

How does one dream

Police and angry neighbors

When asked why you are here

*

Before there was social media

There was a field

When will a field be for us?

The forest surrounding it 

Is a sudden frame

For the awareness we may disappear

Like the subject of one of Ashbery’s poems

Until we are just a ghost of form

Until this is the opposite of seeing a ghost

These figures laughing in the sun

Distracted by a slogan no one can see

When nature never was

*

You learn to love the longing 
He rewrote me back in

Being displaced by geography

It’s like we bring the distance

The string got cut

Imagine that string falling

Imagine the distance it took the body

To do the body

She had washed his hair

Your body is no longer you

Kissing the lips

Blueness eternally corporeal

And the way it looks

That snapping of no more longing

*

I think what you’re trying to say

Is that we’re growing apart

And we don’t even know it yet

We are growing closer

Trying to formalize this moment

Inadequately with a camera

While the sun’s at your back

The trees make for a kind of theater

Like the eyes could be everybody’s

And this is what we mean

By the limits of a socialism

That hasn’t even appeared yet

Or disappeared before

We could register it

Create a prosthesis for realism

By pointing, cloaking the present

With a time no less real

Because we were

Its only evidence,

String of our revelation

String of our not knowing

String of our wondering

Who didn’t I miss when

I looked back

When “I miss people

I haven’t even met yet” (D. Ashford)

What fields will be for us?

To what future communities

Will you belong

In your dreams? (B. Boone)

The Next Big Thing (survey)

via Jennifer Karmin

1. What is the working title of the book?

Withdrawn

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

My next book, provisionally titled Withdrawn, like my previous book, The Hole, concerns how lyric valuables emerge through a discourse. But also how one wants the poetic content to disappear and discourse to take over. I wonder sometimes if we should not throw away the poems after we are done using them. To amuse and seduce and draw-out others. They are relics and ruins as soon as we write them, so what if they turn to dust? I don’t know how to write such a book, so right now I am grappling with how it could possibly appear in the world. “Grappling” means sending it topeople who can help me understand it, and who might become its co-authors in turn. What I want to risk through these modes of production is not the fetishization of collaboration—a trend in both poetic and aesthetic discourse—but rather a becoming vulnerable to the input and aid of others. There is want for dialog, but also more than ever for disagreement. I imagine the blurbs of the book (if it should have any) being deeply ambivalent, perhaps even entirely negative. The poems express a longing for collective enunciation. The book ends with the Occupations of 2011-2012 tellingly. It mourns the death of Leslie Scalapino and others along the way. Death being the ultimate withdrawal.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

N/A

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I would like to think that one could strike a balance between Joss Whedon's emo/camp and Bresson's deadpan coldness

5. What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Our feelings are an apocalypse.

6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

5 yrs

7. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Friends, comrades, other muses. A constant oscillation between feeling another world is/was possible and something more ambivalent.

8. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Possible contributions from others.

9. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Neither, I hope.

Eléna Rivera & Thom Donovan @ NYU Bookstore (reading)

Introduction for Andrew Levy (at the Poetry Project)

Andrew Levy’s work reminds me that we have not yet determined what a search engine can do. Nor assemblage, nor appropriation, nor lyric. Inhabiting multiple voices—including his own at times—he pits an assortment of discourses against one another, humorously sounding their dissociations. Like the Flarf Collective and others, Levy uses Internet crawls to gather content.* Yet in Levy’s work we are never exhausted by an ironic disavowal of an elusive scene of political and social possibilities infecting the multitude through social media. To great effect, Levy channels the mad affects pervasive in our current media environments, transmuting them through an alchemy of cut and paste and ‘original’ writing. Disparate affects enter center stage—like actors before there was a subject. His daughters Sadie and Gita, for instance; his students at CUNY; and those friends with whom he daily corresponds via email (Levy may also be one of the first poets I know to actively mine his inbox for poems). “There is hope, just not for us, “Kafka writes. And substituting for hope, what then, love? And when love is not an adequate intention, perhaps we must do with the secular messianism of our common sense being put to the test. Common sense—the commons of language subjected to systemic injustice, economic disparity, and environmental travesty—is re-alienated and only thereby renewed.  Language becomes a prosthesis for seeing subtlely, hearing at the thresholds where what we can expect poetry to do is nothing less than reignite our sense of sense itself. Don’t Forget to Breathe, Levy’s latest collection, is a high-point for me in an ongoing discourse about what lyric can do face-to-face with the accelerated collapse of a global economy structured by a series of wars all of which test the alibis of whoever should posit 'the good life.' I feel extremely privileged to be able to read this book. That it would be available to me like so very few books of contemporary poetry are.

*immediately following my introduction Levy admitted that he has never used Google searches to compose his work.

"Buffy Poems" at WONDER

Some of the poems I have been writing after Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) are up at WONDER.

Thanks to Andrew Durbin and Ben Fama, co-editors!

New at COMPLINE (ad)

Order here

What won’t we alienate so as to once again possess it (talk)

The following talk was given for the event Windows/Mirrors, a series of "non lectures" at Kunsthalle Galapagos in DUMBO. It was hosted by Adam Fitzgerald, who provided participants with the following prompt:

"Unless the mirror becomes a window, we will never see into the world, even ourselves. Unless the window becomes a mirror, we will never see into our seeing. The world of our parents was a TV world, an imagination that offered a window onto the 'world' that was manufactured, conventionalized with little scope. The world of our generation is increasingly a mirror world, where the Internet hedges us into promoting and narrowing the view of our own self-image. How do we balance window and mirror, can they become synonymous, and what is the danger if they do/don't?"

___________

What won’t we alienate so as to once again possess it

some notes on reflexivity, poetry, and social media

For the past year and ½ I have worked a fulltime plus job that requires that I am not online nearly as much as I had been in previous years when I was a part-time cataloguer and adjunct professor. Withdrawing to a large extent from Facebook, and in turn from many correspondences that I would have once had via email (forget about slow formats like letter writing) has resulted in a certain kind of melancholy, the decathexis from a feeling of participation and mutual exchange that I felt with others, and most intensely with certain poetry and art communities around the occupations of 2011 and ‘12. This participation no doubt had its superficialities, its codes of conduct and manner (liking or not liking something; commenting or not commenting; friending, ignoring, blocking; endlessly inviting). Yet these basic elements of Facebook seem vatic now; which is to say, they often pave the way for more substantial exchanges. Not just the sharing of information (links) or opinion (comments) but discourse via comment streams, tagging, reblogging. While I remain completely suspicious of the corporate platform, whose structures and propriety guidelines make themselves up as we consent, I am also convinced that endless groups have squatted in the medium, reappropriating its various potentia, the agency taken by its users despite hypervigilant managers and programmers.

Facebook was and is some kind of big party, a party had while the world is laid waste to in every possible way. Facebook has also prompted the decapturing of particular affects and content within a period of the accelerated accumulation and circulation of semiocapital. As a form of life, or that which extends and disperses life forms, it escapes. And here I am paraphrasing Fred Moten quoting Michel Foucault in an interview published at the end of his book B Jenkins. I also know I am echoing one of my favorite books of poetry to come out in the era of Web 2.0: Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life. Can’t we read This Can’t Be Life as one extended hashtag or shout-out? Shouldn’t it be read as a brilliant mining of pre- and post-social media networks, where emailing, texting, and Facebooking constitute drafting processes. Where they give way to a virtuosic performance that resists “authenticity” while maintaining and putting forth emergent forms of intimacy, a range of affects that may only be possible through participation in an environment conditioned by Web 2.0. Perhaps we can’t help but read any recent book (of poems) in relation to Web 2.0. Yet many of Dana’s works extend New York (School) Poetry and New Narrative writing into an era in which the dream of these movements for aesthetic-communal reflexivity seem fully realized, in fact in often vexing ways. Could Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups be written now via Facebook? Could Robert Gluck’s Margery Kempe? I wonder.

There’s an ambivalence in the title This Can’t Be Life that’s difficult to pinpoint, an ambivalence presaged by Jay Z’s song “Big Pimpin’,” which Dana lifts his title from only to lovingly place it back in its proper context via epigraph on the first page of the book. 

This Can’t Be Life:

As in: This can’t really be happening. This can’t be my life.

Or: What the fuck won’t we alienate?

Or, better yet: What won’t we alienate so as to once again possess it as experience. Reflection, recognition, interpellation.

(Jay Z and Dana are both Hegelians.)

Life so-called appears in the places we least expect to find it; that is its infinite charm. A fugitive bios is the radical kernel of cultural production, whose dark matter is both rejected and captured by commodity fetishism. Life escapes in spite of the totally administered environment of Web 2.0, that which now embodies networked capital.

As a way of addressing Adam’s Windows/Mirrors dichotomy, I want to extend some propositions about the tagging function of Facebook and hashtagging in Twitter, a medium I am less familiar with. The problem, or if you prefer poetics, of tagging goes back to Frank O’Hara and continues through New York poetries, in which we frequently encounter the use of proper names and their abbreviations, where the abbreviation seems less to protect the innocent than to circulate an open secret. Maybe in some cases it is actually a deflection of possible gossip; or a display of humility (Creeley?).

The name in O’Hara functions like a tag inasmuch as it constitutes an affective node—a point of singularity or intensity riven in what Susan Howe calls a “universal flux.” In O’Hara case, it is not just a form of possession to name (which is to say, Adamic); it is simultaneously a gesture of affection and a wager of association circumscribing real or imagined power. The (deterritorializing) power of the band, the pack, the non-familial group, for instance. The (reterritorializing) power of the coterie, the clique, the immediate circle. Branding (or proto-branding) lurks in O’Hara’s use of the name. It is a key aspect of the proper name qua tag’s doubleness. That it constitutes both a form of social capital and expresses a kind of agapeistic relation. Homosocial (if not sexual) as in Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Friendship,” highly regarded by both Bruce Boone and Gluck. In which the hope for a liberatory recognition of identity is always bound up with commodity culture; the types and constructs this culture produces; the forms of appropriation it elicits, in fact has always been begging for. (Cf. Gluck’s talk at New Langton Arts Center in 1983 for a wonderful unpacking of these ideas with regards to narrative tactics and what he calls “caricature”; cf. also Rob Fitterman’s introduction to Rob the Plagiarism, where he addresses consumerism and identity formation).

Last spring I saw this ambivalence of the proper name qua tag in action, at a reading given by Joseph Bradshaw for the series I organize with Dottie Lasky at Pete’s Candy Store. Joseph read for the first time a poem I’ve since heard him read a few times, “Of Being Numerous.” The title alerts you that something unusual is going on. That the poem he is going to read is some kind of metatext, a poem about a poem. And not just any poem. The poem of George Oppen’s poethical canon.

The poem starts and seems like it will never stop; there is an anaphoric insistence that drives its lines. Its half-tongue-in-cheek litany echoes Oppen’s title, taking it too literally. The litany of proper names is mostly comprised of the names of contemporary poets, but also brand names. At a certain point, listening to it, I was fascinated. Not just to hear these names of people I knew in close succession, but to in some way anticipate my own name, which eventually was read in tandem with an image of Cori Copp holding an iPhone. The intelligence and singularity of this poem issues from the way that Joseph is playing with the narcissistic investments we form through and with Facebook, a medium I know Joseph to have actively avoided all these years. The Mathussian numerousness of Oppen’s original poem is complicated by Joseph’s tactical deployment of the proper name in a tagging function that foregrounds the flattening of proper name and brand name by social media culture. Playing with the distance between self and image, name and social capital, it fucks with our reflection to the point where that distance is abolished. Attaining The Real (in Zizekian parlance). Reckoning with the capture of our capacity to enjoy without a feeling of complicity in a larger matrix of governmental and economic forces.

There is another poem that would be interesting to look at in this context. Anne Boyer’s “The Day Steve Jobs Died, “which I was able to publish last year in a feature devoted to “Poetry During OWS” in Rethinking Marxism. The poem, one might say, is a remapping of O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” in which we find the poet moving from site to site, commodity to commodity, ‘friend’ to ‘friend’ throughout his daily life, blissfully unaware of the death of the famous blues singer. In Anne’s brilliant rendering of this poem, proper names are preceded by hashtags. And where we must imagine the 2^nd Avenue of O’Hara’s day in “The Day Lady Died,” in “The Day Steve Jobs Died” we imagine the mass arrest of 700 demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge via Livestream.  If O’Hara’s original poem lyricizes an everyday (physical, urban) network of proper names traversed by the names of commodities/brands, if it revels in the egotistical sublime of Personism, Anne reexamines the function of the name in O’Hara’s original poem through the windows offered by contemporary social media, where individuals united in their resistance against finance capital struggle to remain in touch and share vital information virtually. Anne’s poem is satirical. But it also reflects the liberatory recognitions and information sharing that social media makes possible, a potential that should not eclipse important spatial practices but which we have learned through the occupations and other recent civilian uprisings can feedback and inform a new mapping of social-civic space.