Recent Stuff

Kristin Prevallet reflects on "Practicing Slow Poetry":

As an artist / writer I can't stop producing (images, words, ideas) because producing is what keeps me alive, connected to other people, and present. I join the ecological and political movement to restore the planet and save humanity from the doomsday forces of capital -- and in the process, feel the conscious need to shift my own habits of production and consumption.

But how do I begin? How can my poems work to illuminate the shift?

The poetry reading is a good place to start because it is a site where active engagement with audience has the potential to build much more than my ego. Taking Elrick's idea, I've begun to spacially inhabit the poems I read out loud. This means opening the space of the poetry reading to an experience that takes language to a new level -- off the page, into the body, beyond the breath. I think of it as an offering.

Richard Owens address the notion of the "commons:"

What "common" and "particular" hold in common is their malleability. We can do any damn thing we want with these words, fiddle with them to meet our ends, stretch them like pennies to make ends meet. It is precisely because neither are particular in any essential way that each are so useful to so many.

Josh Gunn discusses agency at The Rosewater Chronicles:

Because of the posthumanist critique of human subjectivity, one finds a variety of positions on the concept of agency among rhetorical scholars. There is no consensus among them about what agency means; some would even dispute this summary. Crudely, these positions can be reduced to three: (a) rhetoricians who continue to defend the Enlightenment subject and agency as conscious-choice making (humanistic agency) ; (b) rhetoricians who understand agency as a complex negotiation of conscious intent and structural limitation (dialectical agency); and (c) rhetoricians who narrowly define agency as a capacity to act, and the subject as an open question (posthumanist agency).

James Howard Kunstler on "The Coming Re-Becoming:"

Everywhere you turn in this nation, you see a society primed for implosion. We seem unaware how extraordinary the American experience has been, especially in the last hundred years. By this, I don't mean that we are a better people than any other society -- these days, ordinary people in the USA make an effort to appear thuggish and act surly, as though we were a nation of convicts -- but for decade-upon-decade, we were very fortunate. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s may seem like a relatively peaceful and gentle "time out" from a frantic era of hypertrophic growth, compared to the storm we're sailing into now.

Graça Capinha on Conceptual Poetry

I've included a large portion of Graça Capinha paper, "The Authority of One's Own Pronouncements or the Density of Materialized Social Being: a Few Notes on Cenceptual Poetry," here because her words correlate so well with some of my arguments about Slow Poetry as a modernist project of agonistic social and spiritual engagement.

By arguing for how authority is created in language, she pushes against the infrequently questioned pomo (langpo) obsessions with partisanship and referentiality. She asks: "what is the power beyond this form of imagining truth? Who imagines, why, to what purpose?" Capinha offers one of the soundest critiques of partisan poetics and post-modernity I've read in a long time. She provides a specifically rhetorical inflection that can help Slow Poets redefine the terms of poetic engagement. Here is a portion of her paper (the rest, linked above, deserves a thorough read too):

This is the other trend of conceptual poetry that was present at the conference and the one that interests me: because this poetry is interested in the exploration of these (and other) threads, these “undertones”, the tones that are counter-hegemonic, inbetween the tapestry of dominant language. This poetry is trying to open locations for the inscription of what is there – and, yet, not part of the dominant cartography. This is the trend that I see as embracing the modernist project and its ultimate challenge. What Alfredo Bosi would call an “ultra-modernist ‘post’-Modernism”. This is the poetry ready to accept reciprocity in the Discoveries of one’s selves and the others’. These are the poets holding to their social and political responsibilities, unafraid of taking their own authority in the struggle for authority that all language is – emotions included (especially because, according to Portuguese neuro-biologist Antonio Damasio, the part of the brain where language is located can only start when the part of the brain where emotions reside moves first). And the discussion around emotion and expression sounds so over! The question is not whether anything is true or cheating. I don’t believe in programmatic non-referentiality the same way I don’t believe in programmatic referentiality. The question is what is the power beyond this form of imagining truth? Who imagines, why, to what purpose? In an agonistic model of language, one anchors in an empowering subject-position – in each context – in language & through language. Subjectivity/identiy (to be accurate I should say “subjectivity/identity constellations”) doesn’t exist outside of language: the first expansion of the body and the first forgery, yes, but, still, I anchor – always looking for a radical trangressive paradigmatic re-orientation of concept.

“To pretend to be nonpartisan, above the fray, sorting the ‘best’ from the ‘weak’ without ‘ideological grudges’ – as a highly partisan poet [Charles Bernstein] recently put it, as if to mark his own partisanship in the course of denying it – is an all to common form of mystification and bad faith aiming at bolstering the authority of one’s own pronouncements” – I find this to be the most disturbing form of authority, because there is always a subjective choice of the material which comes masked, as if the poet were transparent, i.e., speaking with “universal” (non?)meaning…. But then, that’s probably my historical problem… A machine as a poet, and a machine as a poem (one that refuses to “make” meaning) is beyond the recognition of the materiality of language and the new technological conditions. The stereotype repetition, the celebration of the poem as “thing”, makes it nothing but another product in the market, something purely instrumental.

My problem with Charles Bernstein’s “the answer is not the machine but the politics” is that the decision for the machine is already politics… The kind of politics that is very disturbing and that I cannot help but take position against.

Ideological Determinants

Timothy Morton, in the introduction to Ecology without Nature, asks, given the sense of urgency in addressing environmental collapse, "[w]hat is the point of reflecting like this?" The answer he will explore throughout the book is: "Since ecology and ecological politics are beginning to frame other kinds of science, politics, and culture, we must take a step back and examine some of ecology's ideological determinants."

Slow Poetry's call for more critical reflection on our practices and engagements with the world (variously defined) correlates with Morton's project calling for reflection on "ecology's ideological determinants." This brings me to wonder how we might likewise reflect on poetry's "ideological determinants" in a productive and useful way? Given the litany of problems we face, from a growing ozone hole, destruction of coral reefs, contracted energy resources, and threats of a potentially greater resource war in the Middle East, what, quite broadly, does poetry offer? Can it *do* anything? Slow Poetry, by not theorizing particular modes of practice or compositional strategies, may be able to provide a kind of platform through which we are able to reflect critically on our practice and engagement with the world. In poetry there lives the alien, the disappeared, the forgotten, drained, despised remainder of some long dream taking shape and dissolving.

I offer these notes with my own critical reflection. In part I despise any movement, any attempt to shape a poetics into some defined object of scrutiny for others. Back of my mind I hear Roberto Bolano's character, Don Crispin, in The Savage Detectives saying: "The problem with literature, like life,...,is that in the end people always turn into bastards." And a bit later, through the mouth of another: "literature isn't innocent." Slow Poetry must embrace what this means. Innocence and self-importance, or the significance of particular practices must be disregarded for a less innocent, more practical, and yet broadly reflective inventory of human relations to the inhuman--an ecology of others and otherness? The self-righteousness and satisfaction that so often descends on poets, comfortable in their habits and practices, give us nothing. There is then a moral dimension to Slow Poetry. No environment is innocent--especially ours.

Kristin Prevallet and Slow Poetry

Kristin Prevallet, in a recent interview, has useful things to say that correspond in signficant ways with Slow Poetry:

I’m opening my old, spine-crumbling copy of [Olson's] Selected Writings (ed. Creeley, 1966. Bought used at Moe’s in San Francisco for $4.00). Here’s what I get: a Mayan Letter about Pound’s Cantos: “that the substances of history now useful lie outside, under, right here, anywhere but in the direct continuum of society as we have had it (of the State, same, of the Economy, same, of the Politicks… (84). On a previous page: “I keep thinking, it comes to this: culture displacing the state” (83).

What it means to my work is this: that poetry as an activity and practice is written on the fault line of society – meaning, at the point where it is cracking, on the verge of splitting, contradicting itself, laying bare it’s underbelly. Poetic language – whether it uses or usurps propaganda, whether it refers or disrupts references to politics, whether it appeals to economic flow or is sold by no one, read by no one, collected by no one but the writer – exists to displace the state. The state could be a state of mind, so the poetic disruption that occurs is psychological (an epiphany, for example, that moves a person’s mental state, even temporarily.) The state could be a state of propaganda, so the poetic disruption that occurs is to use language not to sell people stupid (or useful) things and political platforms, but to perceive how language works in this capacity. The state could be a state of economy, so the poetic disruption that occurs is to produce objects with no use-value outside of the poem’s capacity to be read, heard, discussed, understood, translated or mistranslated.

This is an absolutely essential theorization of how poetry can work in the radically transforming environment we face today. Behind this is a preference for provisory thought and action--a flexibility to inhabit a reality that tests our capabilities to inform the spaces (social, spiritual, psychic--whatever) around us.

Kristin in recent years explores performance as a communicative form that can address audiences in potentially useful ways. She discusses her performance in Boulder a few years ago--"Cruelty and Conquest"--here.

Her understanding of performance suggests that such spaces can lead an audience to reflect on their implications in the symbolic exchange on stage between performer and actions. This can expand capacities in an audience to reflect on the meaning of a reality that is being tested before them in the expressive movements and actions of the performing body.

The ancient rhetoricians always worried over the body in the delivery of texts. Isocrates, a great Sophist, only taught--he could not himself practice rhetoric because he was unable to stand before crowds. In performance, the body bares witness to the symbolic actions its form detonates in space.

Prevallet is pushing poetry to work in ways that can challenge an audience to see a reality she wants tested or re-evaluated. Given the complex exchange of symbolic systems--from the gov't and corporations, (to name two big agents of social engineering) to the more minute but essential exchanges in the production of every day communication--Prevallet asks us to look at the cracks in these orders of influence.

Bolano: from "Literature + illness = illness"

"While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure."

Poetry and Ecology

Laura Elrick has written eloquently on themes important to Slow Poetry. See Poetry, Ecology, and the Reappropriation of Lived Space for arguments about poetry's potential value beyond the text.

Here's an excerpt:

I would like to suggest here a further possibility for poetry—the exploration of what Henri Lefebvre has called “rhythm analysis,” which would investigate “spatio-temporal rhythms of nature as transformed by a social practice.” Such a poetry would not engage in descriptions of space, nor in the classical musicality of the individual breath or line. Rather, it would enact an analysis of “space as social morphology.” Through attention to acoustic and gestural movement (clusters, breaches, chains, gaits and even physiological “drives”) and especially the way they are traversed, “mobilized, carried forward and sometimes smashed apart” by institutional power and the state, such a poetics would develop the non-formal knowledge of the body, while becoming conscious that “the whole of (social) space proceeds from the body…”

Conflict and Adherence

These notes, so far, have concentrated on ways to understand poetry as a productive and communicative art that can be applied to diverse situations. Production is not limited to texts, but is viewed as a socio-spiritual practice that helps prepare audiences for ways of looking at poetry and the context of the world(s) in which texts may eventually arrive. SP also stresses the necessity of slower consumer practices, preferring close readings to quantitative ones. SP values individuals as key motivating forces of poetic agency. That is, while systems or networks may influence how power is distributed, at each point, poets make rhetorical decisions about their work, determining the context and means of engagement.

SP describes a common situation of communicative exchange through which poets may consider their relationships to writing and the world. The de-centralized approach understands poetry to be like opening a sliding-glass door, stepping outside, for a moment, and rubbing one’s eyes in the sunlight of what’s real. Given the scarcity of resources and a general contraction in the daily life of contemporary society, SP offers a speculative platform through which to theorize potential strategies for poetic production, consumption, and reflection on the practice of poetry and life.

SP differs significantly from more centralized movements. By centralized I mean a pattern of self-aware literary production that forms around particular individuals and is associated with geographic or online communities. Whether you’re Ezra Pound, self-consciously organizing literary movements to advance the work of you and your friends, or merely happen to be “grouped” by academic interests, the model SP resists here is of little nodes of influence prescribing formal options that poets can use to address the concerns of a particular group. There's nothing special about compositional practices. How such practices are readily advanced to others matters more.

By contrast, SP tries to develop descriptive platforms. Dedicated to promoting communication, commons, and communion, SP offers ways for authors to share strategic insights and information about the geographic, social, environmental, and political situations of their diverse areas of influence. As a de-centralized platform for a description of reality, poets (and others) are free to contribute to the anarchic nature of Slow Poetry’s ongoing transformation of ideas, claims, and conjectures regarding the nature of reality.

More politically, SP encourages poets (and others) to imagine how communication in various degrees and situations creates system awareness, responds to interruptions, or prepares spaces (more humbly) for reflection. SP provides “strategies for living” rather than incongruent juxtapositions of “meaning” in any literary sense—expected to be taken as an end of poetic production in itself.

If there is one bias behind SP it is this: literature no longer provides adequate claims about reality. Other disciplines offer better models that describe our current predicament. This is not to suggest that literature should be ignored—merely that those working within its coordinates should find better ways to accomplish their tasks for audiences. Arguments regarding cultural value and meaning do have their place—or they did during a cultural period that anticipated an endless supply of natural resources. “Nowadays” Slow Poets must crawl over the ruins of high lit and sift down in the overlapping boundaries of other disciplines. As A. Roy puts it, such distinctions between high and low, value and actuality, the great and small—all need to be compressed into alert arguments for the complex interactions of daily life with the political.

(Also, SP values the negative--pushes into it--accepts it as condition of things here.)

Since other poetic models exist, Slow Poets must look for vital points of intersection within these communities, taking note, however, of important conflicts. This can be a distraction, though, and it’s best to maintain focus on one’s experience in the world rather than being drawn into fruitless discussions over points around which there cannot be any adherence.

Look for the conflict. Look for shared ground. What adheres? What matters--to help grasp a functional perspective of present things?

Readiness

There have been a number of great posts in the comments fields here (and elsewhere) about Slow Poetry the last few days.

A friend writes to direct me to the concept of “slow medicine” as another discipline looking for ways to shift pace. The focus is on the body’s particular needs. Rather than treating symptoms, slow medicine looks at the greater environment in which bodies live (and die), and tries to bring them into equilibrium with it. This is a vast reduction, and I know very little about slow medicine, but there are enough parallels between it and SP to spur further investigation. There’s a NYT article about it here.

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Slow movements address a downsize in scale--looking to environments closer in--at the people who inhabit a living world. Slow poetry works to shift attention to scale in order to locate values common to others. “Slow,” I am reminded by one attentive reader, “can move to discussions of form, even with Olson’s ‘instanter’ at its side. Impromptu means ‘readiness’: in Duncan’s world the accumulation of ideas and impulses to the point of writing it out in humanly generated forms. His model was the Schubert Impromptus.”

This sense of readiness informs slow poetry thoroughly.

Readiness to adapt to new forms, new arguments, new ways of seeing in a rapidly changing world.

Readiness to confront the public and private pressures we are facing—but also:

Readiness and flexibility in the poem and in the self.

Readiness to doubt and investigate.

Readiness to embrace the tool and the word--but not to fetishize either.

I wonder how google advances notions of readiness—especially when behind it, finally, natural gas, a resource that is increasingly scarce given the rate of consumption in the U. S., provides the energy that allows us to access with ease endless streams of data clusters. Doesn't it keep us from readily engaging environments more immediately and physically present?

Some News

July 7 – The Wall Street Journal (Roger Bate): “Amid Zimbabwe’s political violence is an economic lesson for anyone who doesn’t keep an eye on inflation… With food aid only trickling back into the country and hundreds of thousands without enough cash to buy food, it was clear during a trip there last month that the crisis is deepening. Consumer prices have more than doubled every month this year, in some cases doubling every week. A conservative estimate provided by Robertson Economic Information Services, a Southern African consultancy, says that prices are now three billion fold greater than seven years ago… The exchange rate is currently an astronomical 90 billion Zimbabwe dollars to one U.S. dollar… Buying anything is a ‘bizarre experience,’ said Lucy Chimtengwende from Bulawayo, who spent $12 U.S. on lunch recently, with the bill in local currency being an astonishing 1.1 trillion Zimbabwe dollars. The menu had no prices on it, she told me by phone, prices are quoted to you and are constantly changing. And if you want to pay by check, good luck. Most proprietors don’t accept them, and for those that do, the price is double, given the time it takes the vendor to receive payment.”

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July 9 – Bloomberg (David M. Levitt): “New York’s Chrysler Building, once the world’s tallest skyscraper, was acquired yesterday by the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund, for an undisclosed price.”

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July 9 – Wall Street Journal (Jacqueline Palank): “Home builders, retailers and transportation companies were among the nearly 5,000 businesses that filed for bankruptcy last month, a number that has almost doubled in two years. In June, 4,992 businesses sought to reorganize or liquidate under bankruptcy protection… That is an increase of nearly 50% over last June’s 3,408 filings and almost twice as many as the 2,574 companies that filed for bankruptcy in June 2006.”

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IndyMac is second largest bank failure in history.

Further Reflection

John Latta offers these good comments on Slow Poetry at his blog, Isola di Rifiuti:

For the “slow poetry” regenerates—isn’t the danger in relenting (whilst the brute agon of the moment charges forth endlessly, oil or no oil) a falling into mere “generalizing” thought? See Olson’s “Human Universe” distinction between “language as the act of the instant and language as the act of thought about the instant.” Where goeth the “MOVE, INSTANTER” under such? The percept’s got to splice the air forking (making its own path) like lightning, with lightning speed. (Of course, if one’s talking about grabbing up detritus off the public roadways and jigging it about in some jerry-rig’d simulacrum—that’s not writing anyhow. That’s Lego-work.) (Of course, if one’s talking about printing books, “that glut,” sure. My “policy”—so precisely’s I am able to accountancy it—is, roughly one book per quarter century. Rubbing Torsos, 1979; Breeze, 2003. That ought to be sufficient for anybody.) (One note: that “SloPo” monicker rather deftly defeats the intent—abbreviatory mangles signal a corner’d market and empty into the dirty stream where conservation’s no longer stung by the archaic (“the impulse to recover beginnings and primal energies”), that ethical center of the modern; “besides, they are ugly.” One’d do better with something like “lackadaisical verselet-ing.”) I start’d a piece call’d “The Poppies” that went “contend against local breezes, little juggernauts / of the indistinct . . .” and stop’d.

If ever there was a slow poet, it’s John. Insistent, attentive, paced to the occasion—his work and his words at Isola bring forward careful and suggestive arguments for ways to look at the world through poetry. His objections to Slow Poetry are welcome. Indeed, I notice in myself these last days a relative amplification in this space. The speed of thought activates more thought, and so it avalanches, accelerating just as I would hope to turn it around—arrest development. And yet, I don’t want, too, to reduce conversation—but to bring it within range of something truly valuable. I’m not sure how close, indeed, I am to treading in the murk of generalization in these notes, for, as I’ve stressed, these are speculative commentaries, conjectures, and descriptions: what-ifs? Olson, in his particulars—INSTANTER—advanced a notion of composition, though, admittedly, I have looked at Projective Verse as a theory of poetic communication, too. At any rate, I don’t prescribe a compositional methodology, nor do I want to describe a poetics that looks to produce some end product. Instead, between the poem and the person—a world—articulated, yes, INSTANTER. Attention to how the exchange of personal forces within a daily realm constitutes a poetics—this—perhaps is a beginning?

As for the monicker: SloPo—I wanted to use the term before others had a chance to do so—hopefully deflating its potential pejorative use. Also, I want to stress, I am aware of how ultimately defeating such poetic “schools,” “movements,” “networks,” whatever, can be. I don’t think I’m offering anything useful only for poetry here. These are notes through which to reconsider communicative relations to local, global, and imaginary environments.

Soon I’ll leave this vacation I have taken in Slow Poetry—to go back to work. But here, loafing around with ideas I have been thinking about for quite some time, what I may discover remains undetermined. My instincts are to look beyond the personal and beyond the poem to access a world. What are the access points? Self and other mediated in the communicative realm of words. World is word—but with plenty of bumps and bruises to go with it. Anyway, percepts move at “lightning speed,” perhaps—or indeed, particularly in the solitude of one’s quiet midnight cell, electric filament burning incandescent. To what magnitude of intelligence do such precepts gravitate? Here, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson—the lone cranks submissive to their internal energy and drive—not as model, per se, but as outward motions of an intelligence groping, always, through the dark. THE Dark—cold, resistant.

Resilient Communities

I have been trying to imagine how poets might contribute work within what John Robb calls “Resilient Communities.” Today, regarding the “adding of resilience to local communities,” he writes:

Local is the only choice. The ability of the global system to dampen instability and prevent failure is nearing zero. We have neither the organizational frameworks necessary for global governance nor the precise tools of global policy required (even IF we were smart enough to manage something this complex). Any chance of real global change must start at the ground level by correcting the true sources of the problem and spread virally. Resilient communities eliminate nearly all of the drivers towards global instability and mitigate the effects of instability already in the system. It's self-reinforcing.

Resilient communities, he argues, are those that adapt local conditions to the results of global contraction. They evaluate the available potential in their surroundings to adapt to life at a reduced pace. Resilient communities provide more than a survivalist mentality—they proactively identify needs and prepare local resources to sustain the activities of daily life.

With this in mind, slow poets reflect on ways to contribute to the adding of resilience in their communities—and beyond. Robb’s argument, I believe, is that if communities are not resilient to coming shocks, they will disappear (die-off?).

Once, in a bar, talking with poet David Henderson, we observed that a future energy shock might blow up the whole system. He didn’t think people would be psychologically or spiritually prepared. Poets have a better chance of this, and they might, through the example of their carefully attentive works, add some resilience to communities that would help them contribute to either supporting systems threatened by near certain shocks, or by re-imagining a social and environmental landscape wherein life continues, albeit on a different scale.

Slow Poets will have to find ways to make sense of the new situations local communities face.

Kent Johnson at Isola di Rifiuti

Kent Johnson offers a compelling response to Tony Towle, Bill Berkson, and Andrew Epstein today over the controversial claims of authorship in Frank O'Hara's “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island."

Arundhati Roy: Slow Poet?

In a 2001 interview with David Barsamian, Arundhati Roy says:

Today's world of specialization is bizarre. Specialists and experts end up severing the links between things, isolating them, actually creating barriers that prevent ordinary people from understanding what's happening to them. I try to do the opposite: to create links, to join the dots, to tell politics like a story, to communicate, to make it real. To make the connections between a man with his child telling you about life in the village he lived in before it was submerged by a reservoir, and the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. The God of Small Things is a book which connects the very smallest things to the very biggest. Whether it's the dent that a baby spider makes on the surface of water in a pond or the quality of the moonlight on a river or how history and politics intrude into your life, your house, your bedroom, your bed, into the m ost intimate relationships between people—parents and children, siblings and so on.

If you lose these connections, everything becomes noise, meaningless, a career plan to be on track for tenure.

This argument for connectivity preoccupies the attention of many slow poets too. The relations of life (in H&N-ese--social productions) to the political are significant. What happens at the exchange or boundary or whatever of the intimate experience of the individual with the broader political and public formations that inform action, decision, reflection? A poetics that can articulate such relations and show how the political influences the daily might contain significant value potential. But this certainly isn't new--need it be? Certainly, experience within diverse situations prepares a writer to reflect on how individual communication may contribute to an idea of the common that is anarchic in its social values.

Like Flarf, Slow Poetry resists making arguments about form. Unlike it, however, SP stresses knowledge of communication within specific situations. If Flarf presents a theory of invention based on in-group strategies of composition, SP argues for a willing adaptation of the poet to the circumstances of others. This is not the same as saying: write what the audience wants to hear--in some "skool of quietude" sense (driving the dead literary metaphor deep into a horses mouth). Deliver to an audience, instead, what you determine they need to hear--but in ways that can potentially persuade their ears to listen, for a moment, against the backdrop of endless noise and meaninglessness our "culture" generates. Culture, or as it is now so marketed as a multicultural bonanza of consumer possibilities, generates meaning--okay. But how is meaning shaped and determined by the contexts in which it is produced and received? That's the greater question. It's also why SP prefers a geographic or resource model of communication. The terms of literature and culture no longer provide adequate descriptions of reality.

To write a poem and call it inappropriate may be true for one group, but not another. This is fine, but the writer must recognize the limitations of such approaches to writing and not be hurt when others fail to respond in a respectful manner.

Or, like Bruce Andrews, who writes against meaning, subverting it, ripping at it's attachment to language, there is a point at which the other altogether disappears, leaving the meaningless poem alien, disconnected, robbed of communitas--with only a few careers at stake. Okay. This is reductive--Surely others will elegantly disagree. Point is: Roy's argument helps us see the potential in slower relations to the networks of every day life.

A SloPo Common?

Henry Gould wrote to question the use of the word "movement" as it is applied to various poetry centers.

I'm not satisfied with it as a metaphor for SloPo either. A SloPo Common would make more sense.

And yet, turning to this word forces me to reconsider the relationship of slow poetry to production. Hardt & Negri, from whom I take the term, point out that "common"

is perhaps most easily understood in terms of the example of communication as production: we can communicate only on the basis of languages, symbols, ideas, and relationships we share in common, and in turn the results of our communication are new common languages, symbols, ideas, and relationships. Today this dual relationship between production and the common--the common is produced and it is also productive--is key to undersatnding all social and economic activity.

Although I can't sign up with the H&N thing totally, I think that this rethinking of production is significant. A sense of production focused on communication rather than textual objects is a key element of SloPo.

Global Guerrilla Thinking

“During the recent mass arrests of ‘insurgents’ in Saudi Arabia,” writes blogger John Robb, “a new book by Sheik Abu-Bakar al Naji (al Qaeda's lead warfare theorist), Governance of the Wilderness (Edarat al-Wahsh), was found in safe houses. It appears, both to me and the many readers that sent me news of this, that al Qaeda's theory is edging ever closer to Global Guerrilla thinking (the optimal approach for small group warfare/global insurgency).”

He goes on to paraphrase key points from a review of the book by Amir Taheri, including:

System disruption. “countless small operations” that “target oilfields, sea and airports, tourist facilities and especially banking and financial services” to weaken the state and create a "wilderness."

Temporary autonomous zones and primary loyalties “Islamists in the ‘wilderness’ must create parallel societies alongside existing ones.”

Avoid control of a state don't “set up formal governments, which would be subject to economic pressure or military attack.”

Interestingly, many of these points should be familiar to Slow Poets, while others we might more adequately adapt to our uses.

I became aware of the notion of Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) in the early nineties through Hakim Bey’s (Peter Lamborn Wilson) book TAZ. Substitute “Islamists” with anarchists, poets, artists, or whatever and you get the point. Much of the small press publishing movements have helped articulate shared structural affinities for artists looking at ways to develop communities within existing ones by manipulating available print and non-print publishing technologies, as well as through word-of-mouth discussion. I reflect in wonder at how often I am gratified and delighted to share company with so many brilliant and intelligent people from all parts of the globe—via mail, email, and the occasion of travel (while it lasts).

While poets rarely face the problems associated with determining whether or not to “set up formal governments,” it makes sense, increasingly, to avoid centralized systems of production and consumption of poetry.

The days of this-or-that movement, with figurative or actual authorities, no longer makes sense when, as Ron Silliman, Steve Evens, and others have noted, there are more people writing today than ever before.

Pointless effort and time are wasted in setting up centralized poetic movements that seek to establish the reputation of coteries. Traditionally, coterie movements appeal to popular or academic presses to help them shift scale to a larger (consuming) audience. (See Jules Boykoff’s brilliant analysis of attempts by the FBI to prevent MLK’s ability to shift scale in order to garner the sympathy of a large national audience in: “Surveillance, Spatial Compression, and Scale: The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr,” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, vol. 39, issue 4, September 2007 available http://www.blackwellsynergy.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/action/showFullText?submitFullText=Full+Text+HTML&doi=10.1111%2Fj.1467-8330.2007.00549.x accessed 7 April 2008.)

Such attempts to shift scale are unrealistic, however, for most people who practice poetry at whatever level they manage to participate in it. We all have day jobs, domestic lives, and inner intelligences motivating our attention. The few figures capable of motivating successful scale jumps may not be the best poets, nor may they have the best arguments about how poetry works for widely distributed and complexly arranged audiences. Often coterie values in art are projected onto others who may not share such values. (The claim that a value-less art—or an irrelevant art—is important is to simply transform the scale of value to meet the needs of a particular audience.) The upshot is that poetry quickly is put to the service of agendas established by successful leaders of a particular movement.

Slow Poetry, by contrast, focuses on writing what, at particular moments, needs to be written in response to particular situations. SloPo practitioners are ambitious for their work, and they strive to bring it into the world—absolutely. SloPo de-emphasizes meaning—a traditional concern for students of literature—in order to stress how certain written works operate within a given situation for a particular audience. Meaning is a provisory arrangement between writers, authors, and the words they share.

There is much potential overlap to work out in these notes in the future. But the key goals of Slow Poetry are to invent work for audiences extended through space and time along various geopolitical and spiritual coordinates. See Blake, and TAZ comments above.

System disruption. This is trickier. Slow Poets may or may not contribute, with others, to such physical disruptions of global systems. Poets, probably, can contribute to system disruption, however, by expanding an audience’s capacity for perspective shifts.

Scale-wise, the Slow Poet’s job remains in humble territory. No grand system disconnects. No dramatic violations of corporate hegemony or nationalist ideology. When, however, a reader encounters new ways of seeing an experience of the world, new possibilities are suddenly available to him or her to reflect on. It’s like opening a sliding-glass door, stepping outside, for a moment, and rubbing one’s eyes in the sunlight of what’s real.

System disruption is interpreted here as system interruption by Slow Poets. Or, perhaps, it is a process of producing system stress. We carefully have to think this through, however, because we rely on vast networks of communications and supply to maintain basic daily life. Slow Poets must ask themselves to what are they committed?

I work under the assumption that some type(s) of system disruptions are inevitable either through continued black swan events or through the downturn of financial markets or through the reduced supply and upward demand of oil. Therefore, how do we create a poetics that can address communities facing resource stress (can we?)? Another way to think about it is, contra Flarf and other movements, this: we must find ways to base our commitments to poetry in resources and geo-politics to form widespread, interconnected networks. This is offered to oppose the sort of literary pursuits or subversions of meaning embedded in a vast cultural complex that exists without too much worry over the oil and natural gas pumping the machines. It may seem premature to ask these questions: but it’s really not. Reams of articles exist detailing the tsunami of grief that we may face.

At times in my thinking here I feel as though things are bit too Hardt & Negri-ish. Some of their arguments about the production of social life and all of that do make sense, and that vast networks of power are distributed and confronted in creative ways spontaneously around the world—Nigeria, now, just being one such region where people have come together to address injustice. H&N, however, follow a kind of Foulcauldian logic of power that Slow Poetry resists.

Instead, as poets, we are uniquely situated to argue for new forms of value (value can't be escaped--it can only be defined by the needs produced within each situation where poetry operates), within unique situations as they arise. I am suggesting that a provisory poetics that adjusts itself to the needs of diverse readers might benefit us all at a moment when the inverse model appears to have alienated a larger reading public. As I wrote a few days ago, the individual, ultimately, stands out as an agent of social transformation. Slow Poetry is an invisible network that helps poets detonate rhetorical spaces with language. These notes are offered as exploratory texts regarding the possibility of a new trans-regional poetics that is attuned to the shared resources of a crippled planet (our goal is to keep the lid on things and prevent WWIII--no shit!). This is a description (not a definition) of reality and its possible outcomes for poetry.

More on slopo

David Hadbawnik offers some reflective commentary on slopo and Flarf....

SloPo at Lime-Tree

K. Silem Mohammad has posted a valuable note at Lime-Tree about Slow Poetry. I am particularly honored by all of the comments there that help me understand how Slow Poetry might be more fully argued. Brian Salchert's comments in particular acknowledge the stakes involved.

A coming post will look at how slow poetry can learn from global guerrilla strategies to transform communications standards in poetry from a literary platform to a real-world, intelligence-based set of actions that will contribute to greater reflection and strategies of living for certain readers. Also, I will look at how previous literary movements have contributed useful elements that can help slow poets understand their mission as loafers and agents of verbal arts. It will also look at how to move beyond closed systems of literary intelligence to treat poetry as a strategy for interfacing with other disciplines. The stress, as I'm thinking of it now, is on communications and resources rather than on literature and culture. These simplify the problems at stake, but such reductions are often useful to begin the process of understanding what it is, more specifically, we hope to achieve. Slow poets only figure it out as they go.

Key points, however: acknowledge mistakes, accept responsibility, extend generosity.... More to come....

Gary Sullivan on Flarf

Here's a terrific interview--much of it discussing Flarf--with Gary Sullivan, who directed me toward it earlier today. (It won't be news for some of you.) It complicates my thinking about Flarf as a tool for writers to use to explore de-centralized forms of communication. The focus on appropriation and technologically-generated forms of poetry is strikingly different from Slow Poetry's reduced-speed approach. But we don't want to alienate our brothers and sisters, even if some of their skills at discursive communication are a bit threatening and, indeed, challening to over-look. Perhaps some productive interface is available down the road.

In the Sunlight of What's Real

Terms such as “use,” “value,” “meaning,” “significance,” etc when used to describe poetry’s active contribution to living systems of communication quickly bog down. Part of this is because much poetry of the last century has been stretched through many threshold’s of particularized experiences and responses. When poetry-as-“value” becomes oppressive, it is necessary to reorient the poem’s attention to some other value-less scale. Poetry, as Robert Duncan notes, is, indeed, irrelevant. But in what ways can such irrelevance activate potential capacities for reflection among certain readers?

At our bubble-bursting moment, such questions of value appear irrelevant. All that matters is the particular orientation of a poem to an audience. The mystery of the union of those elements establishes a certain bond. How one discovers a particular poem—often by accident or chance—determines to a degree how that work is received. The question of “value” is determined according to participants within vividly realized situations in which space has been cleared, momentarily, to pause over a poem. Fleeting moments accumulate to present some sense, through ongoing reflection, of the poem’s ability to interrupt the habits of mind native to any reader. The poem, contra Bernstein, will not challenge a reader to re-examine the ideological context in which language “operates.” Instead, the experience of the poem is like opening a sliding-glass door, stepping outside, for a moment, and rubbing one’s eyes in the sunlight.

We can discuss literary or poetic values all day—but for whom will this matter? There are some disturbing things happening right now that charge the every day with a growing sense of urgency. The usual grind of life under American Cap is hitting a new scale of value that rests in nature: commodities. If poetry can disrupt the every day—a noetic detonation of some kind for an occasional audience—we might think, as practitioners, of ways to do this with maximum impact. The hope, of course, is to expand capacities for understanding the totality of the real as it surges through our living systems. If poetry is not apprehended in a more ancient sense as a special kind of communication (echoed by communion and commons) then its inert force will drag itself forward like a giant Wal-Mart hustling goods in the last days of cheap oil.

We must recognize key contexts where poetry can be applied to shift perspectives via reflection on the complex social and political forces that interact and claim certain points of reference in our lives. If MEND can disrupt oil production in the Niger Delta, drastically affecting the quality of “life” here—communicating through global markets an extreme disaffection with the Nigerian government—poetry, on a smaller scale, might mimic such explosive acts of communion. Instead of disrupting global market platforms, however, a poem does something else in the lives of its readers. It’s like opening a sliding-glass door, stepping outside, for a moment, and rubbing one’s eyes in the sunlight of what’s real.

Elizabeth Robinson at Bookslut

My column at Bookslut this month discusses Elizabeth Robinson's Inaudible Trumpeters. Please visit the site if you have a chance.

Coyote's Journal and SloPo

Andrew Schelling’s recent talk at Orono correlates closely with what I’ve been trying to describe in these notes. The talk, given at the Poetry of the 1970s Conference, focuses on presses and journals that found their originary spirits in a 1970s ethos that took direction from divers cultural and geographic traditions. He locates a grounding for this poetics in Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred and, edited with George Quasha, American A Prophecy. Such anthologies, along with Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar, argued for the significance of global poetic traditions just as the Euro-Americo-centric movement known as Language Poetry (LP) began to form its own social critiques via linguistics and Marx. Schelling doesn’t (and I won’t, much) go into the LP’s curious turn away from de-centralized global systems of poetic communication in favor of a certain kind of anti-communion-communication-commons of single-minded class coterie.* Instead he points to how certain journals inspired a poetics that looked closely at ecology, economy, and diverse bio-regions of the globe for inspiration in creating responses to a world in need of poetic definition. Much of the work he recounts has been buried in the landfill of LP. But it is a genuinely heroic and trickster movement he describes:

If there’s a magazine that to my thinking could capture the Seventies bioregional ethos, it has to be Coyote’s Journal. Edward van Aelstyn, William Wroth, and James Koller founded it in 1964, from the ashes of a suppressed issue of the Northwest Journal. The Modernist discoveries I spoke of a moment ago give scope to Coyote’s Journal’s, and you can see if without even breaking the covers open. The earliest issue I own is 1966’s #5-6. Its front cover reproduces a 1905 photograph (black & white) by naturalist Herman T. Bohlman: a coyote (Canis latrans) in close-up, peering through high stem prairie grasses in Oregon. The extraordinary cool intelligence in the coyote’s face is what makes the photo irresistible. The issue itself includes Projectivist poems by Snyder, Whalen, Kyger, and some early Clark Coolidge, and a chapter of Robert Duncan’s H. D. Book. From its first issue, Coyote’s Journal regularly placed a handwritten or block print poem on its rear cover—I’d say to emphasize the period’s belief in poetry as a physical act. Similarly the journal’s interest in concrete poetry, as well as “sound poetry” or verse built on non-lexical voicing, fore fronted the physicality of poetry.

In this tradition of poetry-making, he includes Bob and Susan Arnold’s Longhouse Books, who have been making “hand-made items since 1971.” More recent approximations to Coyote’s energy include, according to Schelling, presses run and edited by Jack Shoemaker, Jonathan Skinner, Sylvester Pollet, myself, Hoa Nguyen and others. Behind these presses there is a willingness to introduce poetry to specific contexts in order to help readers reflect on the interactive coordinates of reality that literary tools so often fail to help us apprehend. There is a focus on exploring the terms of a larger world and showing responses and arguments to it.

Anyway, I’m running out of steam here, but I’m thankful for Schelling’s account because it provides a historical retrospective on some of the contributors to my understanding of SloPo. No doubt others are out there, and I’ll be trying to introduce some of their work here in future notes too.

*Of course, as Slow Poets, we love some individuals closely associated with LP—but the movement as a whole must be acknowledged as a coterie marketing strategy that significantly limited de-centralized visions of poetry. Strategies of group-promotion elaborated a determinate force-field-like illusion that strengthened coterie confidence while allowing certain individual authors room to explore terrain native to their own experience (I’m thinking of Hejinian and Howe (Susan), for instance). Such strategies have been imitated to a large degree, and with some success, by promoters of Flarf, although in its case the movement itself is the only significant force at stake. Individual reflection, compositional strategies, and cultural criticism is largely stylized to suit the larger (non)objectives of the movement. Again, certain individuals stand out—such as Ben Friedlander, though he is admired by Slow Poets primarily for his earlier non-Flarf-related writings. Rod Smith’s work, too, stands out from Flarf’s textual accumulations, but his writing prior to the Flarf phenomena certainly prepared an order of attention in him to poetry that not even Flarf can seriously impair.

Every Day Life

Scott Pierce of Effing Press is one of the most thoughtful SloPo publishers out there. In our conversations over the years I have learned from him about grass-made papers, soy-based inks, and other printing methods that offer alternative means of production to those produced by the high pollution-yielding mainstream print industry.

Speaking of SloPo, Scott has a Chandler-Price letterpress in his living room that dates to the end of the last century. He produces beautiful covers and broadsides at a useful and realistic rate—especially so as he supports this print work with a day job at a local high tech firm. I imagine in coming years that letterpress machines will become increasingly valuable. They already sell on Ebay at a pretty good price. Type, also, has grown in demand. In addition to manual typewriters, letterpresses and other non-electric printing technologies will become, no doubt, increasingly valuable for all.

I keep thinking too of SloPo as a noetic platform that is available for all who find it useful. In fact, there are no new methods or insights offered by SloPo. Instead, it helps us recontextualize, recycle, and reflect upon valuable tools of production, consumption, and, most importantly, the relationship between people and texts in the active making of every day life.