Possum Ego

Hoa Nguyen from the Academy of American Poets

2011-11-28T08:25:00.001-08:00

Hoa Nguyen's poem "Swell" is poem of the day today at poets.org.

Theodore Enslin

2011-11-22T18:34:00.001-08:00

From Enslin's 1978 book-length poem Ranger (Volume I), the start of section XIII (available at Languagehat):

How difficult it is!
How strange to break in
on the self on those sections
of self that lie buried
but so vulnerable
that a footstep above them,
on loose-packed detritus,
hurts to the quick,
and makes life of
pain—that it lives—
at all lives.
So I have heard of one more—
perhaps the first woman
I knew as a woman—
gone away, and now dead.
We speak briefly
of the dead,
as if we no longer wanted
to think of them,
but their presence is
none the less—
living in some other place.
We stay with them.

Field Work at Jacket 2

2011-11-21T11:42:00.001-08:00

Zack Finch reviews David Hadbawnik's Field Work: Notes, Songs, Poems 1997-2010 over at Jacket 2.

“Americans have an inexorable urge to be confessional,” Hadbawnik at one point quotes Lyn Hejinian, “but they seldom speak confidentially, preferring to be overheard” (35). Like so many great notebook writers before him, Hadbawnik displaces the performance of private speech with the performance of confidential writing. The ghostly intimacy of Field Work reminds us of how the notebook genre enacts writing’s very own dream of itself — the construction of a habitable space that offers the itinerant writer a utopian version of “home” in the midst of the point-blank violence of an indifferent world.

My Book

2011-11-10T06:57:00.001-08:00

Author copies for Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 arrived yesterday. You can read more about the book here.

"Smith provocatively reopens the ancient question of the relationship of rhetoric and poetics with this powerful analysis of key moments in American radical poetry. Scholars of rhetoric, politics, and literature will find both the case studies and the theoretical discussion immensely useful in reconsidering poetry's place in a democratic public culture."—James Arnt Aune, author of Selling the Free Market

Persephone Through the Ages

2011-11-05T10:23:00.000-07:00

Persephone weathered the decline of antiquity, and survived the Middle Ages to emerge in the Renaissance. Ovid and Vergil had kept her in Italian tradition. Chaucer brought her to the north, "Proserpyne, / That quene ys of the derke pyne." Arthur Golding's Ovid of 1567 (when Ovid still, as for Chaucer, meant the Metamorphoses) renders her myth with particular beauty; she is made accessible to the age as far more than a bit of classical iconography around which to shore up emblematic patterns (as in Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia of 1499). Ovid's plastic terseness becomes an English narrative voice of lively extravagance:

By chaunce she let her slip downe, and out the flowres went.

And such a sillie simplenesse her childish age yet beares,

That even the very losse of them did move hir more to tears.

... ... ...

Thereafter she is everywhere, as firmly within English poetry as Latin or Greek. But as the Renaissance fades, she disappears from poetry. Neither the eighteenth century nor the early nineteenth thinks it sees anything in her myth, except to reflect the subterranean existence of her Paradis artificiel in such figures as La Motte Fouqué's Undine or Poe's Ligeia. Then all at once she is again in the open air, whether awakened by Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough or the new, charismatic interest in natural beauty that begins with scientific eyes (Humboldt, Agassiz, Darwin, Hugh Miller, Gosse) and is rapidly taken up by poetic ones (Thoreau, W. H. Hudson, Ruskin), or because of the new and pervasive interest in myth generated by archaeology, new texts and folklore.

(Guy Davenport, "Persephone's Ezra" in The Geography of the Imagination (Boston: David Godine, 1997), 146-7

*

In scholarship as well as in poetry there is an insistence that the contemporary world must call up within itself the old gods, that there must be a return of the Underworld into this world. "I know, I mean, one man who understands Persephone and Demeter," Pound writes in The Spirit of Romance, "and one who has, I should say, met Artemis. These things are for them real." Edward Sapir, reviewing H.D.'s Collected Poems in 1925, saw rightly, beyond the question of Imagism, "the rediscovery of ancient and beautiful ways made apt once again for the hungering spirit." Along these ways, Eros and Psyche come to reveal their meanings—here, now; there, then. "All ages are contemporaneous," Pound proposed, but it was by the poetic genius that these terms were created—"all ages" and "the contemporaneous" are perspectives of time that belong to the imagination. The Spirit of Romance was not a history of the actual past but an instruction in the nature of the high art that was to be contemporary poetry.

Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book (Berkeley: UC Press, 2011), 96

Kenneth Burke on Eloquence and the Traditionally Ceremonious

2011-10-25T09:20:00.000-07:00

The great danger in eloquence resides in the fact that it tends to become not a quantitative but a qualitative thing. The ritualizing of a revelation, that is, tends to confine itself to certain usages traditionally ceremonious. For if the artist would place his important revelation in an important setting, what more natural than that he should select for his setting such ideas as are traditionally considered important? Eloquence thus comes to be allied with strict doctrines of inclusion and exclusion. It utilizes the traditionally dignified, overlooking the fact that any traditionally dignified word or image or "thought" is dignified not through an intrinsic quality but because earlier artists made it so. By laying emphasis upon the categorical appeal of art, eloquence threatens to make poetry "derivative," to make it develop out of itself rather than out of the situations of life. The poet thus derives his Symbolic charges from the Symbolic charges of his poetic forbears. In writing a "wouldst-thou" love poem today, the poet would be obtaining eloquence by the weakened method we have in mind, though the mistake is not always so obvious.

Eloquence, by our definition, would not be situated in such rigid distinctions between "good taste" and "bad taste." It would, rather, be a matter of profusion. The artist shows his respect for his subject, not by laying a wreath at its feet, but by the fulness of his preoccupation with it. The soundness of his concerns will be manifested either in exceptional variety or in exceptional accurateness. Now, if this profusion could be got from past literature alone, there could be no objection to so getting it. But it happens to require such intensity and spontaneity of purpose as can arise only out of situations in life itself. Thus, the artist whose eloquence is an eloquence of profusion, will base his inclusions and exclusions not on traditional definitions of the ceremonious, but upon those aspects of an ideology which can be associated with the ceremonious in his environment. His eloquence will be based upon the contemporaneously charged, rather than upon the traditionally charged. To an extent, of course, the contemporary charge will be a survival of the traditional—but there are new elements (in both ideology and "living") to which the traditional is not accurately adapted.

Kenneth Burke, from "Lexicon Rhetoricae" in Counter-Statement (1931). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

The Conceptual Web

2011-10-20T07:56:00.000-07:00

After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature-which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence. All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them-time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number. But everything marvelous about the laws of nature, everything that quite astonishes us therein and seems to demand explanation, everything that might lead us to distrust idealism: all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In conjunction with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them. The only way in which the possibility of subsequently constructing a new conceptual edifice from metaphors themselves can be explained is by the firm persistence of these original forms. That is to say, this conceptual edifice is a imitation of temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of metaphor.

Friedrich Nietzsche, from "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

Benjamin * Adams * Herzog

2011-10-15T07:27:00.000-07:00

It's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.—Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. [] Awakening []

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (page 462)

Images are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof, but the mind craves them, and, of late more than ever, the keenest experimenters find twenty images better than one, especially if contradictory; since the human mind has already learned to deal in contradictions.The image needed here is that of a new center, or preponderating mass, artificially introduced on earth in the midst of a system of attractive forces that previously made their own equilibrium, and constantly induced to accelerate its motion till it shall establish a new equilibrium. A dynamic theory would begin by assuming that all history, terrestrial or cosmic, mechanical or intellectual, would be reduceable to this formula if we knew the facts.

Henry Adams, from "A Dynamic Theory of History" (1904) in The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 439.

At the present time I think that we do not know very much about the process of vision itself. We know so very little about it, and, with this kind of experimental work that I have been describing, we might soon be able to learn a little bit more. This kind of knowledge is precisely what we need. We need it very urgently because we live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and, if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs. It's as simple as that! We have already recognized that problems like the energy shortage or the overpopulation of the world or the environmental crisis are great dangers for our society and for our kind of civilization, but I think it has not yet been understood widely enough that we also absolutely need new images.

Werner Herzog, Images at the Horizon: A Workshop with Werner Herzog Conducted by Roger Ebert (Chicago: Facets Multimedia Center, 1979).

Susan Briante * Camille Martin Reading in Toronto Oct 19

2011-10-15T07:00:00.001-07:00

2011-10-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Dunn, an activist/poet in Chicago, has been prosecuted for acting out performatively at a recent Poetry Foundation event. (See recent discussions here.) It's odd in the current context of the Occupy Wall Street protests that the PF would so aggressively pursue Dunn. Roberto Bolano and co. used to go to readings and spill their drinks on the fancy suits of the established literati (I believe he poured his wine on Paz--ha!) I don't think Bolano was ever prosecuted for his acts of literary adventure. By contrast, The Poetry Foundation gains little by prosecuting Dunn, but the symbolic gesture of doing so resonates with an odd chill. It's hard not to correlate Dunn's performance in front of the Poetry Foundation crowd with what's happening now in Zuccotti Park. Clearly there's an air of simple outrage and intervention rising up between institutions with access to abundant resources and individuals for whom such access has become increasingly scarce. In U. S. society now we're being asked to take sides and make the right choices. Shame on the Poetry Foundation for prosecuting Stephanie Dunn. Go to Montevidayo for more.

JHK: "Occupy Everything"

2011-10-10T07:14:00.000-07:00

"Welcome to what the fuck nation": Jame Howard Kunstler's Monday post here.

Chris Hedges "interviewed" at CBC

2011-10-09T08:41:00.001-07:00

Hedges called "nut bar" by CBC "journalist". See it here.

Linh Dinh Reports on OWS

2011-10-08T14:46:00.000-07:00

Linh Dinh travels to NYC to report on Occupy Wall Street:Photos here.... Article here.... Linh's blog here....

Moon

2011-10-07T06:44:00.000-07:00

What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? asks the little shepherd in the poem. What are you doing, tell me, silent moon? Aren't you tired of plying the eternal byways? The shepherd's life is like your life. He rises at first light and moves his flock across the field. Then, weary, he rests at evening and hopes for nothing more. What good is the shepherd's life to him or yours to you? Tell me, the shepherd muses, said Florita Almada in a transported voice, where is it heading, my brief wandering, your immortal journey? Man is born into pain, and being born itself means risking death, said the poem. And also: But why bring to light, why educate someone we'll console for living later? And also: If life is misery, why do we endure it? And also: This, unblemished moon, is the mortal condition. But you're not mortal, and what I say may matter little to you. And also, and on the contrary: You, eternal solitary wanderer, you who are so pensive, it may be you understand this life on earth, what our suffering and sighing is, what this death is, this last paling of the face, and leaving Earth behind, abandoning all familiar, loving company. And also: What does the endless air do, and that deep eternal blue? What does this enormous solitude portend? And what am I? And also: This is what I know and feel: that from the eternal motions, from my fragile being, others may derive some good or happiness. And also: But life for me is wrong. And also: Old, white haired, weak, barefoot, bearing an enormous burden, up mountain and down valley, over sharp rocks, across deep sands and bracken, through wind and storm, when it's hot and later when it freezes, running on running faster, crossing rivers, swamps, falling and rising and hurrying faster, no rest or relief, battered and bloody, at last coming to where the way and all effort has led: terrible, immense abyss into which, upon falling, all is forgotten. And also: This, O virgin moon, is human life. Roberto Bolano (1953-2003)trans. by Natasha Wimmer

Supply + Demand + Magic

2011-10-05T06:40:00.000-07:00

"If I insist on this mechanism of contradiction in the biography of a writer..., it is because his train of thought cannot bypass certain facts which have a logic different from that of his thought by itself. It is because there is no idea he adheres to that truly holds up...in the face of certain very simple, elemental facts: that workers are staring down the barrels of cannons aimed at them by police, that war is threatening, and that fascism is already enthroned.... It behooves a man, for the sake of his dignity, to submit his ideas to these facts, and not to bend these facts, by some conjuring trick, to his ideas, however ingenious." Aragon, "D'Alfred de Vigny à Avdeenko," Commune, 2 (April 20, 1935), pp. 808-809. But it is entirely possible that, in contradicting my past, I will establish a continuity with that of another, which he in turn, as communist, will contradict. In this case, with the past of Louis Aragon, who in this same essay disavows his Paysan de Paris: "And, like most of my friends, I was partial to the failures, to what is monstrous and cannot survive, cannot succeed.... I was like them: I preferred error to its opposite" (p. 807).

Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project (p. 464)*

Then Boris Yeltsin looked at Amalfitano with curiosity, as if it were Amalfitano who had invaded his dream, not the other way around. And he said: listen carefully to what I have to say, comrade. I'm going to explain what the third leg of the human table is. I'm going to tell you. And then leave me alone. Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it's also sex and Dionysian mists and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater or the latrine and showed Amalfitano the fingers he was missing and talked about his childhood and about the Urals and Siberia and about a white tiger that roamed the infinite snowy spaces. And then he took a flask of vodka out of his suit pocket and said:"I think it's time for a little drink."

Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (p. 228)

Dusting off the Cobwebs

2011-10-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

Dusting off the blog with a new format and renewed attention. The stress of a cross-continental move and a new job is behind me, and I'm finally starting to feel the pleasures of new life rhythms. I'm not sure what direction I'll take with Possum Ego just yet, but I imagine it will remain close to something Robert Duncan once said in his poem, "The Proposition": “In the field of the poem / the unexpected must come.”

"Yardwork"

2011-10-04T07:05:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Skinner writes on Jack Collom, Hoa Nguyen, and "ecopoetics" in "Yardwork" at Jacket2.

Chris Hedges on the Occupation of Wall Street

2011-10-04T06:27:00.000-07:00

Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

More at TruthDig

Declaration

2011-10-04T05:47:00.000-07:00

from "Declaration of the Occupation of New York City" available here:

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.They have sold our privacy as a commodity.They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.

The Sublime Logic of Falseness...

2011-08-07T15:26:00.001-07:00

here

July Oration

2011-07-05T06:11:00.000-07:00

This announcement was just released from Fact-Simile about my new poem. Many thanks to Travis McDonald and JenMarie Davis....

Dear Reader-

We here at Fact-Simile are celebrating this Independence Day with the latest release from Dale Smith.

July Oration is a 4.75 x 40" double-sided scroll printed on Arches Text Wove in a limited edition of 50. Each scroll is sealed with wax and hand "numbered" with a U.S. State abbreviation (i.e.: PA of 50, NY of 50, CA of 50, etc.)

In addition to Smith’s own compelling language, this long poem borrows the words of George Washington, Paul Revere, Walter Benjamin and The Declaration of Independence, bending them to the author’s own poetic uses. Here’s a sneak preview:

“The dirty poor inhabit our country. / The righteous hunt them with food. / The men and women and children of dust. / The righteous devour them with good. // Do you hear the sound from the jasmine? / Crickets because of the moon. / Do you dodge difficult questions? / Inert patterns because of the masters // Of ideology. / Of seduction.”

To read this stunning poem in its entirety, click on the link below and order your own limited-edition, wax-sealed scroll:

http://fact-simile.com/julyoration.html

Happy Reading!

Yours Truly,

Travis Macdonald & JenMarie Davis
Fact-Simile Editions
www.fact-simile.com
travis@fact-simile.com
jenmarie@fact-simile.com

East Village Poetry--Canada

2011-07-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

Canadian poetry at The East Village Poetry Web, featuring George Stanley, Fred Wah, Norma Cole, Steve McCaffery, Karen Mac Cormack, and more....

Fulcrum

2011-06-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

Fulcrum 7 is here, with new work by Frank Stanford, Hoa Nguyen, John Tranter, and others. Joe Green and Kent Johnson debate "Poems from South America & from the Island in the Moon." Thanks to Coeditors Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich for putting this issue together. 629 pp. Editorial Address: Fulcrum, 138 Larch Road, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

Charles Olson at Goddard College

2011-06-16T20:27:00.000-07:00

CHARLES OLSON AT GODDARD COLLEGE
APRIL 12-14, 1962

In the spring of 1962, poet Charles Olson descended upon an experimental college in rural Vermont to read from The Maximus Poems and The Distances, and to lecture on Herman Melville. His captivating performance sparked lively debates with the audience on the nature of myth, history, etymology, narrative, knowledge, and sexuality. CHARLES OLSON AT GODDARD COLLEGE is an enthralling and indispensable annotated transcript that celebrates the intersection of Olson's poetics and a hopeful moment in American education.

Foreword by Basil King. Edited with an Introduction by Kyle Schlesinger.
Paperback. 112 pages. Cuneiform Press, 2011. $16.95 USD

Available from Small Press Distribution: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780982792650/default.aspx

Or order direct from Cuneiform and receive free shipping within the continental US! Simply Paypal me at this address for $16.95 USD and don’t forget to specify your preferred mailing address. For orders overseas, we offer a 20% discount on direct orders $26.50 USD ($13.50 + $13 S&H).

New Jacket2 Interview

2011-06-15T04:56:00.000-07:00

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand speak with me about poetry and public space over at Jacket2:

I’m drawn to poets who are actively imagining an audience, and who go beyond expressions of social or political values on the page. It’s important for me to think about how poetry can be used to change attitudes or to provoke action in some way. I love all kinds of poetry and other forms of writing that don’t do anything like what I’m describing here, too, but for the purposes of my book, I really tried to limit my focus to those who attempted public action in some way through their poetry.

Johanna Drucker at TILTS

2011-05-27T07:22:00.001-07:00

Johanna Drucker’s keynote lecture, "Humanist Computing at the End of the Individual Voice," for the Texas Institute for Literary & Textual Studies was illuminating, particularly in that it generated many questions for me and for the audience that attended the talk yesterday evening. It was illuminating because Drucker’s historical knowledge of texts, types, book design, and poetics brings a broad understanding of textual production to the Humanities. Since my concern over the last three years has focused largely on public discourse and the institutions that produce it, Drucker provided a way for me to think back to the disciplines in the Humanities, and to better consider how the digital age is influencing the ways we relate pedagogically and critically as scholars in diverse fields.

She addressed the notion of romantic authorship, and gave examples of the ways the Internet is changing how people relate to texts. Collaborative efforts in the arts and other fields online produce, in a sense, authorless texts, though Drucker suggested that such phenomena often exists under a brand name. She uses Kenny Goldsmith’s work as an example in poetry of how notions of authorship have been re-examined, and how new performances in language invite emergent voices into being within texts generated through modernist procedures that undermine the “individual voice” in favor of a larger collaborative gathering. She also discussed how online gaming also provides creative outlets for users in communities where game strategies, multiple personae, and emotional investments within the gaming structure provide artistic pleasure and possibilities. I didn’t take notes so I don’t have all of her examples at hand, but one slide featured the Samira Harris and Samsung collaboration, “Everyone is Art,” which re-composes Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” through nearly 2, 000 faces of men and women.

As I listened to Drucker speak (she was Skyped in from L. A. due to flight delays across the country), I kept thinking about efficacy: what do the new features of Internet technology allow us to do as public participants. Individual and communal (or disciplinary) actions are important, but how does art, a poem, or even gaming strategies, jump over the imposed divisions that so often define contemporary life? I like to play baseball with my children, but I don’t demand an audience the way Nolan Ryan once did when he played with the Texas Rangers. What’s the difference between creative action and the recognition of creative acts that are more broadly distributed throughout contemporary culture? Surely, to be creative does not demand an audience, but for some reason, work that matters often emerges through mastery, advocacy, and social investments.

As Drucker spoke about the end of the vision of romantic authorship (this seems like old news, by the way), I began thinking too about how collaboration among individuals in diverse communities always leads to hierarchies, and perhaps the poet’s name brand recognition occurs through a similar process of hierarchy formation. And often in the formation of a hierarchy, collaboration can morph into exploitation. At what point does our collaborative venture turn into me doing all the work while you sit back and take all the credit? Jennifer Richards, writing about Kenneth Burke, says: “Even if we reorder our material world to achieve a more equal distribution of resources, he suggests, the impulse to order and prioritize will return in a different form. Consequently, an ethical way of being requires constant rhetorical vigilance, not so much in the sense that we need continuously to represent our interests or resist being persuaded to actions in which we have no ‘interest’ in a dog-eat-dog world, but rather to engage always in the kind of checking, or ‘self-interference’ that resists the impulse to fix, to dominate” (Rhetoric 174).

My “interest” here, as a poet and as someone working within the Humanities, leads me to want to clarify how what we do matters beyond existing disciplines. This is the early Humanist impulse, to bring art and life within closer relation. While no doubt the Internet is changing social relationships and creative procedures, I’m not sure that basic symbolizing functions have changed, and that we still face older hierarchies (along with newer ones) that limit disciplinary exchanges rather than producing them. Now that in the Humanities we have identified the changes to the morphological features of social production, it would seem important to expand the conversation to understand the larger public efficacy. Beyond our unique disciplines and creative practices exists a civil society in dire need of rejuvenating images, reflexive practice, and elaborations of how new forms contribute to the shifting features of contemporary society. The “if you build it, they will come” mentality is not accurate. Instead, the question to ask is, “what do we do now that we built it?” or, “what do we build for some people to participate in?”

I look forward to hearing the other TILTS speakers this weekend. Schedule information can be found here.

"The Un-Shock Doctrine"

2011-05-15T22:00:00.000-07:00

The Left today faces the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing with political economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

...

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions—the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem.

[more at Guernica...]

"The End of Expression"

2011-05-13T23:17:00.000-07:00

It's odd watching the, uh, "true colors", of various "factions" of the U. S. po-community spew like backwash from a July 4 beer keg (I know the metaphor's mixed, but what isn't these days?) over at Detainees. Linh Dinh for years has pointed out the political circumstances we face under Left/Right corpratized oligarchies and, yow: what indignant war mongering pig vomit surfaces at Linh's blog for his daring to point out that "a minstrel for a mass murderer is nothing to be proud of."

Henry Gould argues that Linh's "rhetoric" is "infected." Someone going by Bhodda's My Ba'aag accuses "people" like Linh of using "flowery language." Rhetoric has a complex and contested history in the Western canon, from its ability to contribute to truth seeking, to its uses on behalf of propaganda. Linh's own rhetorical skills are, it seems, performative, necessarily provocative, generating potential debate, controversies, and clarifications--actions that are all needed to continue useful public dialogue. Linh points out that it's foul and loathsome to perform for a corrupt regime. It's curious to observe the defensive motives behind the excuses for Obama's actions on Linh's blog. Forget Goldsmith or Conceptual poetry at the White House for a moment: Obama has betrayed his 2008 election platform of "Hope." The troops are not coming home. The nation is broken like it's been for a long time. Obama is not exceptional in this sense--he's just mediocre, another huckster appealing with confidence tricks. It's business. It's corrupt. And yes, it's lethal, too.

I haven't seen the Goldsmith Whitehouse performance yet.* Maybe he transforms the situation and makes a political gesture out of it. It will be interesting to see this. I remember how fun it was to watch Stephen Colbert "roast" George W. Bush several years ago at at White House Press event. Colbert transformed the opportunity into a critical gesture that soon went viral, far exceeding the initial event boundaries where he performed. I sure hope Kenneth managed something similar--something far better.

What Linh's pointing out though is that poetry really is not a vital source for anything in the U. S. anymore. Not a vital public source, anyway. More and more I see retreat into the necessary spaces of the private. The public has been hijacked by other forces. Or, we have to begin rethinking what "public" means as a possibility that resists mass culture on one side, and constructed regimes of power on the other.

On another, though not unrelated note, all the movies I've watched the last month deal with amnesia or memory disorders of some kind: Memento and The Machinist come, yes, immediately to mind. The question Linh, I think, is asking, is how do we use poetry in public--or not--when thousands are dead based on U. S. policy and engagement. The president can detain anyone without charge. He can authorize rendition to other countries for torture, and he can execute U. S. citizens without trial. This is going on! So I think it makes committed and vocal dissidents like Linh want to puke when they see some poet or other showing up at the White House to perform at the emperor's bidding.

Ian Keenan points out in the comments stream at Detainees that Linh isn't being invited back for guest appearances at the Poetry Foundation any time soon. Ian also observes: "I'm not the Kenneth Goldsmith expert that others are, but some folks at the White House must love the promise of The End of Expression, the persistence Goldsmith brings to this promise after the initial giggle-inducement, and the way Goldsmith persistently attempts to misinterpret the legacy of conceptualism in this way."

"The End of Expression," I think, is something weighing on us all.

You can see the entire White House reading at Ron Silliman's Blog.

Poets Beyond the Barricade

2011-05-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

Here's the marketing copy for my book, Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (it will be available in a few months from the University of Alabama Press):

A study of how poetry and discussions of it shape public consciousness, from the socially volatile era of the 1960s to the War on Terror today.

Since the cultural conflicts over the Vietnam War and civil rights protests, poets and poetry have consistently raised questions surrounding public address, social relations, friction between global policies and democratic institutions, and the interpretation of political events and ideas. In this study, Dale Smith makes meaningful links among rhetoric, literature, and cultural studies, illustrating how poetry and discussions of it shape public consciousness in a historical period.

The book begins by inspecting the correspondence and poetry of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, which embody competing perspectives on the role of writers in the Vietnam War and in the peace movement. The work addresses the rational-critical mode of public discourse initiated by Jürgen Habermas, and the relevance of rhetorical studies to literary practice. It also analyzes letters and poetry by Charles Olson that appeared in a New England newspaper in the 1960s, which drew attention to city management conflicts, land-use issues, and architectural preservation. Public identity and U.S. social practice are explored in the 1970s and 80s poetry of Lorenzo Thomas and Edward Dorn, whose poems articulate tensions between private and public life. The book concludes by examining more recent attempts by poets to influence public reflection on crucial events that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By using digital media, public performance, and civic encounters mediated by texts, these poetic initiatives play a critical role in the formation of cultural identity today.

Inventory

2011-04-29T06:42:00.000-07:00

There used to be an office space in our house on Higgins Street, for those of you who didn't knew us then. In our interim living situation on Trailside (I hear Ed Dorn in Heaven calling it Trailcide--though it's really okay despite, or because of(?), the vacant, SoCal-ish vibe). No office space exists here. The kids have taken over one room. Hoa's work table is situated next to the fireplace in the Northeast corner of the living room. My "perch," then, is on a bar space that divides the kitchen from the so-called dining room, or dining area, or whatever it is. As some of you may know, we're moving to Canada this summer, and we've been taking inventory, boxing things, and otherwise prepping for the move. This morning, as I was making coffee, I looked at the stretched pile of things on my desk and thought it might interesting to take a snapshot of these items. Somehow the space composes a sense of what it is am or happen into, as a kind of doing. I rather detest acquisition inventories, but, a la Benjamin, find the descriptive terrain revelatory.

INVENTORY OF ITEMS ON MY "PERCH" (in no methodical order):

coffee cup (coffee, now, in it)
wallet
pen knife (my paternal father's knife, an "Old Timer," circa 1920)
RayBan sunglasses
keys
Bulova, military-issue watch, set in stainless steel cuff (my maternal grandfather wore this in flights during WWII over the Himalayas)
keys
tablet portfolio and paper
Lumix camera
Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity by Nancy S. Struever
cell phone (verizon--free with purchase of aforementioned camera)
2 "World Seido Karate" membership cards (belong to the boys)
Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel, Evan S. Connell
Berrigan's Collected (library copy)
Embankments / Outtakes / Uppercuts, Richard Owens
The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault
Late in the Antenna Fields, Alan Gilbert
Moleskine notebook, Zebra F-701 pen, small writing tablets
Hallowe'en 2008? pix of Keaton and Waylon on porch at Higgins next to jack-o-lanterns
Red and Green art by boys
Pothos
No-name computer speakers
J. Crew catalogue (May 2011)
UT Football Pez dispenser (not empty)
Jar with bell, bird, rocks: "people died like flies. Couldn't get caskets to..."
Sticks and rocks, acquired by Waylon on various greenbelt hikes
Picture from Waylon's fifth birthday with Kaya, Sage, and Ptolemy (Scooby-Doo in background)
Cactus and aloe
Stacks of recently developed photos (snapped with old Pentax)
The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault
2005 PowerBook G4
Folder provided by Armstrong Moving with various essential details
Cold Mountain, DVD (2004?), Jude Law, Nicole Kidman (for civil war scenes--a bit over the top--but why not?)
Address book
Envoice for $233 book I'll receive free of charge for some essay that's reprinted in something called Poetry Crit V115
Polis 1 and Resistance: Polis 10, eds. James W. Cook and Zachary V. Martin, Gloucester, MA
"On Kenneth Irby's, The Intent On: Collected Poems, 1962-2006," a friend's terrific review of Ken's collected, unpublished
Photo: Keaton as knight
World at Large, Donald Guravich
"Ideas for Tactile Stimulation" for Waylon
"Gleanings / Fragments / April 2011," Kim Dorman (hi, Kim!)
Address, Elizabeth Willis
Utopia Minus, Susan Briante (2011)
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," David Hadbawnik
Field Work: Notes, Songs, Poems 1997-2010
College English, 72.6
Vanishing Act: Poems, Bruce Holsapple (2010)
1 fish (name: Bluey)

Chris Heges from this week's TruthDig column

2011-04-04T20:37:00.000-07:00

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated, the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

... ... ...

A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes.

[More....]

"Responsibilities"

2011-03-28T20:38:00.000-07:00

To brush aside America's responsibility as a leader and, more profoundly, our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.
(President Obama, March 28, 2011, speaking to the nation....)

What might this be? This "betrayal of who we are"? Ah, the "blind eye" and "images of slaughter" are invoked to humanize the American agenda. Despite millions of lost jobs, billions pilfered from the U. S. treasury, thousands of lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, the indifference to law and "blind eyes" turned on potential prosecutions in the financial industry, thousands of home foreclosures, shucked funds for education, infrastructure, or "new technology" to expand and firm up ways of living--despite these, El Prezidente appeals to American responsibility!

The real appeal, I'm beginning to think, is that of the confidence man. The con game is one Americans implicitly understand. Twain and Melville tapped deep into it. To be head-of-state in the U. S. is to find the lies that work. Americans want to believe in the con (wink, wink). They must secretly sympathize with the lie: let's crush the bastards but say otherwise. We'll bring democracy on our drones and press the last molecule of oxygen from our enemies' lungs, o Lord. Shriek it from the mountain tops. We will save you all up. We are responsible not for your lives, but your souls, the frags and shells of the memory of what existed before the annihilation came. America is responsible to destroy what occupies its imagination. And we will feel good in doing so. That's the message. Dang me.

Okay, so yes: the script is rigged. They always are. So the question to me must focus on the kinds of appeals that are always used and how they work. Bush used all kinds of crazy appeals to trump up war in Iraq. Obama, now, follows up with others. None possess relation to reality. We are engaged at the level of fantasy, and so I wonder if there is some recurring theme that can account for these kinds of exchanges between power and powerlessness, between violent action and moral accountability, reflection, and delay? This country doesn't hesitate to destroy life daily--how can it be Libya is an exception?

Chris Hedges on Brand Obama

2011-03-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

Our passivity is due, in part, to our inability to confront the awful fact of extinction, either our own inevitable mortality or that of the human species. The emotional cost of confronting death is painful. We prefer illusion. In the wars I covered, highly educated and intelligent people, whether in the cafes in Sarajevo or later in Pristina in Kosovo, insisted that war would not break out. They, like us, failed to grasp that the paradigm of power had irrevocably altered and that the paradigm of resistance had to change as well. They, too, failed to envision the death of their society and their own mortal danger, although the edifice was also physically collapsing around them. It is a common human frailty that severs those within dying civilizations from their terminal condition.

The election of Obama was one more triumph of illusion over substance. It was a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by a corporate power elite. We mistook style and ethnicity--an advertising tactic pioneered by Calvin Klein and Benetton--for progressive politics and genuine change. The goal of a branded Obama, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand for an experience. And this is why Obama was named Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008, beating out Apple and Zappos.

Obama had almost no experience besides two years in the Senate, where his voting record was a dismal capitulation to corporate power. But, once again, the electronic hallucinations that assault us rendered most voters incapable of thought and response. The superficial, the trivial, and the sensational mask our deep cultural, economic, political, and environmental disintegration as well as the newest political diversion approved by the corporate state. We remain hypnotized by flickering images we mistake for reality.

Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Perseus Books, 2010), 198-9

Some rudimentary notes of slow value

2011-03-21T20:51:00.000-07:00

U. S. society clearly absorbs acute distress at an increasingly rapid pace. Indeed, global culture seems barely poised for the violent pitches heaved by some apparently drunk, or maimed, perhaps an exceedingly deranged, pitcher (sorry, the metaphor's a stretch, I know). It's difficult to know how to direct energy, to enable counteractive magics, to encourage outrageous action, to inspire rational reflection, to generate intelligent deliberation, to manage careful attention, all wagered within a delirium of violence, shock, fear, and loss that increasingly defines contemporary horizons. My quest for the slow, the thwarted velocities, the inactive seizures, and abrupt suspensions of belief or life-as-usual, brings me to a kind of stumped, noggin-scratching moment of, huh? Now what?

The regurgitated gestures of the avant-garde seem to be clearly spent in contemporary contexts. Poetry's archaic possibilities re-emerge with new pressure. The availability of new gestures through art provides ways of organizing a line, a sentence, an utterance, an argument. Language recedes behind the value of words. Words bow to service the emergent energies and emotions that associate the inchoate forms of experience and imagination, invention and happenstance.

Poetry identifies what must not be spoken, and brings those words out regardless with right timing. Kairos, the sudden and timely delivery of the right utterance or gesture, relieves us for a moment, re-orients how we feel or think. In a cultural moment where lies are spread in plain sight, where privilege and power gain advantage on truth and justice, poets may have the skills of inquiry to intervene, at least for a moment, to keep new bodies of feeling alive in the public exchanges where we barter a necessary mode of care for fleeting, even delusional, claims of relevance. We must outpace institutional claims, and yet often we crawl through the bureaucratic passages, as Melville said, like flies in a skull.

Promises

2011-03-21T20:40:00.000-07:00

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer following the financial crisis. It did not. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) admitted that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest rate since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead, he supported passage of that legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus, pass a health-care bill with a robust public option, and create new jobs. Some troops have been withdrawn, slowly and piecemeal, from Iraq, but other than this too-little-too-late process, almost none of his promises has been kept.
--Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 27.

What the spectacle offers as eternal is based on change and must change with its base. The spectacle is absolutely dogmatic and at the same time cannot really achieve any solid dogma. Nothing stops for the spectacle; this condition is natural to it, yet completely opposed to its inclination.
--Guy Debord, from "Society of the Spectacle" 3.71, available online here.

Debord: "The real consumer...."

2011-02-20T22:29:00.001-08:00

The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this factually real illusion, and the spectacle is its general manifestation.

Debord Notes: "enriched privation"

2011-02-20T07:43:00.000-08:00

The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws. But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation.

[Reading Debord in context of permanent contraction, what happens to that ratio of survival and satisfaction? The commodity goes lean into vague dreams of democracy; political system and economic grift substitute for moral principle; goods transfigure desire so that no tension of balances, no strain of awareness, survive the over-abundance of too-simple faith. The commodity protest increases the distance between facts and a circulation of reality. A voyeur democracy rots on its good intentions--its strained hopes. Meanwhile, of course, resources evaporate, and a sense of entrapment hovers like some Exterminating Angel (see Buñuel, of course).]

Guy Debord, o Internetters:

2011-02-19T22:48:00.001-08:00

The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds.” The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely.

Guy Debord:

2011-02-19T22:38:00.000-08:00

The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of “mass media” which are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of the existing system’s administration, of the means which allow it to carry on this particular administration. The generalized cleavage of the spectacle is inseparable from the modern State, namely from the general form of cleavage within society, the product of the division of social labor and the organ of class domination.

Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Thinking through Bolano and Egypt

2011-02-09T21:46:00.000-08:00

Amidst everything else I've been looking back at Steven Mailloux's Rhetorical Power (Cornell, 1989), at first because, as these long winter nights make more time available, I've been reading Huck Finn to my sons, and Mailloux's masterful study of that novel and its contexts helps put my own experience of it within larger social references. But I'm also especially reminded of the significance of the book's larger claims on behalf of a rhetorical hermeneutics, "an anti-Theory theory" (15). As some of you know I've spent the last several years writing a book that reads poetry rhetorically, and Mailloux's work has been important to my ability to do so. Often when people hear the term rhetoric they think of the tropes and figures that animate poetic texts, the uses of anaphora and anadiplosis to establish the charges and rhythms that can compel readers' attention. But my interest has been focused much more on how poetry can address the beliefs and desires--the ideological conditions--we associate with social, cultural, or public capacities and actions. Besides the work of Nancy Struever, who I'll try to discuss down the road here, Mailloux's rhetorical hermeneutics has provided a firm foundation on which to work. "Such a hermeneutics," he writes, "views shared interpretive strategies not as the creative origin of texts but rather as historical sets of topics, arguments, tropes, ideologies, and so forth which determine how texts are established as meaningful through rhetorical exchanges." While he's reacting to reader response theory and New Criticism, and pursuing paths "to explain the rhetorical dynamics of academic interpretation in late-twentieth-century America" (17), his argument about how theoretical models are embedded in the institutional and cultural conditions that animate them importantly show how rhetoric underlies theoretical claims. For Mailloux, a rhetorical hermeneutics "provide[s] histories of how particular theoretical and critical discourses have evolved. Why? Because acts of persuasion always take place against an ever-changing background of shared and disputed assumptions, questions, assertions, and so forth. Any thick rhetorical analysis of interpretation must therefore describe this tradition of discursive practices in which acts of interpretive persuasion are embedded" (17). Finally, "interpretive theory must become rhetorical theory" (18).

My own changing sense of poetry and its interpretive contexts has led me to look closely at moments of tension in public space where art has been used to address the capacities and actions of many cultural participants. When I reflect on the institutional forces of the creative writing department, or the social pressures of the scene affiliations that support poets, or the public discord that spurs others to act out, I begin wondering, too, about the small inner voice, the isolated, perturbed source of our feeling. Roberto Bolano's work reminds me that many pressures are exerted on writers to find voices that can be put to use effectively before clearing the voice out again, reforming it, giving it new shapes and densities, while willingly evaluating it and discarding it, finally, if we must. Bolano's greatest tensions lie in social action and literary heroism on one hand, and a sense of the frailty and individual isolation of the artist on the other; human dignity in confrontation with injustice and the great difficulty in these labors; and the sense of ruin and despair that accompanies grand hopes and gestures. Interpretation of his novels begins in conditions of factual details of life--the structural realities his characters face. The popularity of his books is intriguing because Bolano pushes a sense of living that is made manifest in the extraordinary gestures of his characters and their language that agitate for a kind of pure revolt. He acts out and in doing so restlessly filters interpretive possibilities through the perspectives of many characters that contradict and disrupt any guiding theoretical model.

Because we are increasingly residing in a trans-national world (a world such as those imagined by Bolano), like many, I've been compelled to follow the events in the Middle East lately, and, like many also, it's hard not to laugh in despair at the interpretive strategies applied to the protests in Egypt by the West. This is perhaps the first open-source movement to act out in focused democratic spirit against a Western-sponsored dictatorship. Who knows where this will lead? This is not an ideological protest (observe the absence of Islamic fundamentalists on the scene): it is an eruption instead growing out of long resentments and misery. And while figure heads like Tony Blair spout about how change is necessary in Egypt, he is careful to admit that it needs to be "stable change": he, like so many others, calls for compromise, which is not change at all. The interpretive lingo of the West is built on thin liberal notions of human rights while markets persist in shaping the governmental authority and capacities of officials enforcing those rights. The cold logic of markets stages its own authority over the rhetorical tensions, gestures, and signs of outburst that accompany the Egyptian protest. We are all now, if I can make the grand leap and throw out the outlandish gesture, characters in a Bolano novel, trying to make sense of our hopes through the Egyptian protests, hopes that something vibrant and and thrilling can resist the cold logics of liberal markets and cynical talking heads. The trans-national public sphere--if one exists--can draw on no sense of legitimacy or hierarchic structures to generate opinion: it is instead a shared vision of resistance to tedious and hegemonic interpretations of reality that, at least in the Middle East, are starting to fragment and dismantle. This recent BBC report wraps it in a thin, manila envelope:

Mr Mubarak reshuffled his cabinet on Monday to try to head off the protests, replacing the widely despised Interior Minister Habib al-Adly.

Prime Minister Ahmad Shafiq told state TV the new government would ensure bread supplies, tackle security problems and "review our entire political, constitutional and legislative situation, into something more satisfactory and appropriate for us as Egyptian citizens".

"Everything is subject to amendments, without limits," he said.

The "without limits" rests uneasily beside "bread supplies" and constitutional "review".

A New Essay by Karl Young

2011-01-24T21:55:00.000-08:00

Reflections on poetry, publishing, and collaboration: "Bringing the Text Back Home".

The Atlantic on the "New Global Elite"

2011-01-24T20:12:00.000-08:00

The good news—and the bad news—for America is that the nation’s own super-elite is rapidly adjusting to this more global perspective. The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.

There's more by Chrystia Freeland in "The Rise of the New Global Elite".

Lost And Found

2010-12-19T06:49:00.000-08:00

One series of publications I've been reading off-and-on over the fall is Lost And Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Edited by Ammiel Alcalay and Stefania Heim, Claudia Moreno Pisano, Josh Schneiderman, Brian Unger, and others, LAF retrieves essential poetic texts that fill in key gaps in post-war American letters. The Baraka / Dorn correspondence, for instance, provides essential insights to a profound social and creative relationship. Here are links to some of the publications so far:

Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn
Selections from the Collected Letters 1959-1960
The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank O'Hara 1955-1956 Part I and II

Darwin & The Writers
Muriel Rukeyser
1957-1977 Selections from the Journals Part I and II
Philip Whalen

The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference / Robert Creeley's Contexts of Poetry
With Daphne Marlatt's Journal Entries

New booklets by Diane di Prima are most recently available and can be ordered here. Please support this project: there's nothing like it I know of at the moment. Lost And Found provides an elegant and thoughtful presentation essential to the historical record of American art and social action.

Feneon

2010-11-18T06:58:00.000-08:00

I sent this to the Buffalo Poetics List a couple of days ago though it hasn't posted yet. I want, however, to reproduce the message here to help clarify circumstances around the publication of the Works and Days of the Feneon Collective, co-published with Effing Press and Skanky Possum:

As many of you know, there have been some difficulties regarding the distribution of Works and Days of the Feneon Collective--and the publishers anticipate continued delays filling orders for the time being. We're working to make the book available as soon as possible and appreciate everyone's patience. Queries regarding order status can be directed to me at possumego at gmail dot com/. I'll make another announcement as soon as the Effing Press website is back online.

Best,

Dale

Slow Atlantic

2010-11-10T06:39:00.000-08:00

Adam Roberts' post on Slow Poetry is up now at The Atlantic. It's the fourth installment of a larger series on poetry in the 21st century. Other posts can be found here, here, and here.

Hitler's Rise to Power

2010-11-07T16:44:00.000-08:00

Tom Clark's recent presentation of Curzio Malaparte's "The Technique of Coup d'Etat" put me in mind of this:

And of course, Luchino Visconti's The Damned is another great study on the rise of fascist power in Europe. It seems like the right moment to revisit these....

Benjamin via Tom Clark

2010-11-07T16:35:00.000-08:00

"Capitalism is a religion of pure cult, without dogma."

Fact and Reality

2010-10-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

Werner Herzog "On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth".

New Biography of Philip Whalen

2010-09-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

I look forward to reading Crowded by Beauty; A Biography of Poet and Zen Teacher Philip Whalen, by David Schneider, forthcoming from University of California Press. Some excerpts are available at Coyote's Journal.

Buy This One

2010-09-22T22:27:00.000-07:00

Tom Clark
At The Fair

New

2010-09-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

At The Urge...

"Hear me

2010-09-22T22:17:00.000-07:00

Not referential, but inner inherence
Not learning, but applicableness"

Charles Olson

"Manureism"

2010-08-04T20:18:00.000-07:00

flarf is a cake fart.
conceptualism is shit.
what is manure?

TOWARD A COMMUNITY GARDEN
(through, not against, conceptualisms)

1. Conceptualism asks what is poetry.
1. Manureism asks where is poetry.

[more...]

Give it up for "self-styled poet-activist academico-revolutionaries"

2010-08-02T15:06:00.000-07:00

...[T]he demand for intellectual honesty is itself dishonest. Even if we were for once to comply with the questionable directive that the exposition should exactly reproduce the process of thought, this process would be no more a discursive progression from stage to stage than, conversely, knowledge falls from Heaven. Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience.

[...]

Thought waits to be woken one day by the memory of what has been missed, and to be transformed in teaching.

from Adorno, Minima Moralia 80-1.

"Scale": New Work by Tom Clark

2010-07-29T09:01:00.000-07:00

There are some wonderful pieces on American cultural history along with images from Farm Security Administration photographers of the 30s and 40s 1930s and 40s over at Tom Clark's blog. Photographs by John Vachon are especially compelling.

Prison Laborers Clean Louisiana's Coast

2010-07-22T14:06:00.001-07:00

See Abe Louise Young's article at The Nation: "BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents Struggle".

Poem at the Urge

2010-07-15T22:10:00.001-07:00

Sunlight

Tuli: Sunshine laughs upon my face

2010-07-12T22:47:00.000-07:00

Toronto Protest

2010-07-12T08:24:00.000-07:00

Via Jodi Dean.

Unemployment by County

2010-07-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

Wow.

New Interview with Amiri Baraka

2010-07-07T22:12:00.000-07:00

Amiri is one of my heroes because he comes from a world that believed in the heroic possibilities of art. Heroic in that what you did mattered in terms of the consequences of life. He comes from a generation (I'm thinking of Black Mountain/Black Arts) that believed in art as communicative/creative possibility. The angsty, (faux) handwringing dourness at Columbia a month ago could easily be avoided if poets dealt with the circumstances of life most folks face. Earth to Poets: There Is A World!

Here's Amiri:

The attempt to divide art and politics is Bourgeois philosophy which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is, by the nature of society, political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act. Plus, the greatest artists, certainly poets and writers are intensely political but they are in the main anti-bourgeois (though not necessarily Marxists). To say that great US artists like Melville, Twain, Douglass, Dickinson, Whitman, DuBois, W C Williams, Hughes, Margaret Walker, Baldwin, Tennessee Williams are not political is an extraordinary absurdity. Great art attacks and protests oppression, exploitation and mediocrity directly or indirectly. The Bourgeoisie, in any country, are guilty of all those, hence great art, almost by definition, attacks them. And they fight back. As Sartre said, if you say something’s wrong, but you don’t know what it is, that’s Art. If you say something’s wrong and you know and say exactly what it is, that’s not art that’s social protest!

[...]

Joe Bageant: "Fixing Breakfast"

2010-07-06T23:00:00.000-07:00

The big problem at the moment though, for us as sentient beings, is:

What to do when I get out of bed each day? Give money to the Democrats? Move out of the country? Stay and fight the bastards?

Throwing money at frauds and fools doesn't work. Moving to Mexico or Canada takes money in a time when money and jobs are scarce everywhere. As for staying and fighting, really fighting, there is not one person reading this who is going to go strangle the sleazy fucks having martinis on Wall Street with their pet Senator. Nobody reading this is going to instill genuine physical fear, which is the only thing such lizards might respond to. We are left to work within the system, as per the hologram's directive. Their system. Ha!

The answer, to me at least, is to do the most obvious thing first. And I do mean obvious in the most mundane sense. Like fixing breakfast with all the contemplative awareness possible. Seriously. The tiniest right action, the action in complete unself-conscious natural awareness, connects to all the rightness in the universe. And the universe is always right. Because it owns all of our asses, plus black holes, and those teensy pinholes in time that physicist say make you an immediate neighbor of Shakespeare and mastodons -- only you don't know it. It owns the molecules of the ages. Everything.

[...]

Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News

2010-07-02T20:41:00.000-07:00

It's here in the NY Times.

Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Is Now Dead

2010-07-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

The story can be found here.

Response to Joseph Harrington

2010-07-02T06:13:00.000-07:00

This post responds to one made by Joseph Harrington a few days ago. Writing about last month’s “Rethinking Poetics” conference at Columbia University in NYC, Joe argued, despite some good work there, that

"it also sound[ed] to [him] like there was a lot of liberal hand-wringing going on – over the state of the world, and over poets’ inability to effect change qua poets (or qua academics). This is, of course, a very old sport, as any student of Anglophone poetry in the 1930s knows. The difference now, of course, is that there is not an over-arching, semi-numinous ideology to redeem it all – and no Uncle Joe to tell us we’re doing our part and it will all work out in the end. In fact, it’s looking less and less likely that it will all work out (has the bottom of the ocean dropped out yet?).

He continued by describing the problems with social movements in today's cultural context, writing:

Those of us still clinging to (or dreaming of squeezing into) the comforts of lower-middle-class existence don’t want to do anything to jeopardize it and are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenges. We want to fight the Man, but we want to do so by doing things that will also advance our careers (which involve working for the Man). One can retreat into the belief that cultural change will lead to political and economic change (“it may take a very long time, of course” . . . the problem is that there isn’t a long time. Read The Iron Heel, by Jack London, to see how discomfiting this time-scale can be).

Unfortunately, social movements require leadership, leadership requires enormous amounts of time and energy, and if one is leading a movement against People with Money, they don’t pay you for it (which, in the era of neoliberalism, means you don’t get paid) – until you get coopted or sell out, which requires you to work at it long enough and successfully enough (w/o money) to have something to sell. You have to eke out a living doing something tedious and exhausting, and then, “after hours,” do your organizing work (and there actually are people who do this). This is why poets generally aren’t organizers. They spend “after hours” writing poems and arguing with one another. Academics have to grade papers, prep class, do committee work, get published, etc.; we call this "burrowing from within."

I was going to post the following response at his blog, but it grew too big. Part of my enthusiasm over this is that I'm revising a book chapter looking at poetry after 1960 in a similar context, but I'm trying to argue for a different approach to the problems Joe brings up. For instance, social movements provide the wrong model for how to act now.

I think maybe what's changing in today's socio-political context is that social movements, based on an exhausted liberalism, can't work. John Robb argues that instead of the movement what we have are "global guerrillas" and "resilient communities." His book "Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization" (New York: Wiley, 2007) looks at some of these possibilities. Beside Robb, Rita Raley, Alexander Galloway, and others show how technology changes the way we engage in social situations. I don't have time to rehearse their arguments here, but there are plenty of references online to their work. Maybe in a future post I'll say something.

The social movement today can't work for reasons that are obvious, and as Joe describes. Foucault discusses the problem in terms of biopolitics--power controls our flesh. We want to critique the system but rely on it for survival. Deleuze calls it "control society." Capital is total. No way out, at least using models from a time period like the 30s or 60s or whatever, when "movements" made sense.

What almost everyone EXCEPT many, many poets are now discussing is how different kinds of social engagements CAN be used. But the goal is toward social production of relationships that foster survival, system disruption, critical awareness. Poets seem far behind the curve. They cry for social engagement through poetry then throw up their hands saying we can't do anything. Oh well. Back to the vitae. I find it a great failure of imagination to take that stance. We can play with language forever, which is like playing with life. So what? Given what we're living in, adaptation to tools through stealth seem to work for others. It's time those working in poetry thought about this too and looked outside their own concerns to investigate a little how others might use language, images, and performances to do things in the world.

Finally, just to bring it back down to the poetic/philosophical for a moment, Wittgenstein said something really interesting: “To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” I guess if I were in the business of making bumper stickers or silkscreening t-shirts, I'd design this: "Forget the social movement, imagine forms of life."

Anyway, Joe's questions are helpful to me right now as I work on these topics in other formats. So if I seem to be going on a bit in an over-the-top sort of way, it's because these issues are close, close to me just now--so thanks to Joe for his thought-provoking post and his comments in the thread under this one.

Slow Poetry: A Conversation with Boyd Nielson

2010-06-29T06:18:00.001-07:00

I thought, given the recent Rethinking Poetics Conference in NYC, and the resulting fall-out around some of the more provocative moments there, I'd post this exchange I had recently with Boyd Nielson.

Having put a year between me and Slow Poetry, I've had a chance to think more carefully about what it means, and I hope to say some more about this in coming weeks. What's at stake is a vision of the world---not to mention the actual existence of sea turtles, dolphins, whales and all the other marine life passing through the Gulf (see yesterday's post below). We can have commitments and resilient relationships within negative environments, moving life forward with poetry, in Wittgenstein's words, contributing to this insofar as language is a form of life, too.

But Slow Poetry suggests that poetry is more than just language: it seeks commitments to the many places we inhabit in body and imagination. If the inner life is under siege by powers beyond it, Antigone-like, what's the way forward, given our commitments to living space, creative communities, and larger publics, into an uncertain future? Hopefully this conversation can begin to look at a very small part of these rather optimistic and enthusiastic concerns. I guess we'll see what happens.

The following conversation first appeared in A Thing Terrible to Publick Traytors." Thanks go to Boyd for allowing me to reproduce this here.

*

BN: Thank you, Dale, for agreeing to have this brief exchange with me so that we can try to clarify what is at stake in the relationship between publicity and poetry, or at least between publicity and Slow Poetry (though it may turn out that, because of the condensed nature of our exchange, there will be as many gaps and misappraisals as clarifications). I’ll start in medias res by naming an argument that has been made—in blog comment boxes and on sites like Even Slower Poetry—against Slow Poetry: that it, like the Slow Food movement from which it draws inspiration, is merely another bourgeois fad for those with enough leisure time to slow down and enough wealth to eat organic. This knee-jerk reaction entirely misses one of the more provocative aspects of Slow Poetry: the investment in communicative disclosure and reflective disruption, which can be seen in your introduction at Big Bridge:

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.
…Regardless of what we face individually or communally or collectively, my sense was—and still is—that by our affection and affinity for disclosure of what is so often barely perceptible—life raw and undefined—we might advance a little toward better understanding what's happening to us. And through this knowledge we may be able to help each other, with greater resilience, adapt and respond to the changes we may face.
So I want, first, to underscore that investment. And, second, I want to suggest that, paradoxically, Slow Poetry’s call for disclosure, for community and communication, for rubbing one’s eyes in the sunlight of what’s real, is mistaken precisely because of the accuracy of Slow Poetry’s assessment of the paucity of (collective) communication at the contemporary moment.

We need to proceed slowly, here, to make sure we understand each other—though likely we won’t be able to proceed like that because of the limitations of this exchange. At minimum we need to specify the poetic disruption’s associations with and differences from Habermasian critical reason. For Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, rational communication and critical deliberation in eighteenth-century spaces such as the coffee-house and the bourgeois family, spaces separate from religious institutions and the state, constituted the conditions of the Enlightenment and made possible its revolutionary effects. No doubt a poem’s “opening a sliding-glass door” for us and allowing us to step “outside, for a moment” is not identical with Habermasian rational discussion, and no doubt you would want to stress the way that the poem might reveal or disclose structures that are prior to (or that determine the shape and trajectory of) the Habermasian public sphere. But we should not miss the way that both Habermas and you in the introduction at Big Bridge share an interest in disclosure and exposure, even if that disclosure is “what is so often barely perceptible—life raw and undefined.”

An adequate treatment of such communicative disclosure would need to specify and consider a wide range of its difficulties and ramifications. Yet for the sake of conciseness let me provide one straightforward entry-point. What if the problem with this disclosure in the contemporary moment is that the drive for communicative access is already privileged, and, through technological capitalism, transformed? Jodi Dean suggests as much in her essay, “Publicity’s Secret”: what this drive for disclosure ends up being is technocultural ideology, conversation without communication, twenty-four hour news, blog conversations, new magazines, endless talking heads:
Publicity holds out the promise of revelation, the lure of the secret. Its pervasive mistrust drives the will to seek out and expose. At the same time, the certainty of the public supposed to know becomes materialized in practices of revelation and disclosure as the guarantee that its search is justified, right, and universally valid. (632)

The problem, in short, with this drive for revelation of and reflection on knowledge is not just that conversation is privileged over content but also that, even if it is not, we keep on doing what we’re doing. Dean appeals to Žižek’s argument that ideology functions not because we don’t know what we’re doing but because we know all too well. We know, let’s say, that a Toyota Prius or Chevy Volt won’t save us from the logic of the conventional automobile (and certainly won’t save the planet) yet we want to drive it anyway. We know that it is a terrible thing that politics in America are structured by money, yet we contribute to the campaign of a politician we like, and so on.

I bring up Dean not to position her against you (you probably know the article quite well and may even agree with her). Surely there are other angles of approach on questions of publicity, many of them, perhaps, more relevant to the interests of Slow Poetry. I bring up Dean’s argument only because, first, it indicates the role of disclosure in democracy and technoculture. And, second, it succinctly calls into question the premises of publicity:

…Theoretically, this restrictive focus renders democracy as a failure in advance: because the public can never live up its promise (a failure marked by the secret), a dynamic of suspicion and surveillance (now materialized in technoculture) is installed as the next best thing. In this respect, what passes as democratic politics seems to depend on not telling the biggest secret of all: that despite the rhetoric of publicity, there is no public. (648)

It goes without saying that by referencing her article I am appealing to information that is institutionally secured: only those with access to the print journal Political Theory or an electronic database such as JSTOR can read it for themselves (although now, because of Google Books, you can read the argument in her monograph Publicity’s Secret for free on the web!). So already this critique of communicative disclosure finds itself embedded within and complicit with (some form of) institutional privilege. Not that the opposite of this institutional restriction is mere access, whether local or general—it really doesn’t come down to whether discussion takes place at AWP, HuffPo, Gawker, your local newspaper or your backyard. The drive for access, it turns out, is not the negation of restriction; it is a complement to it, especially at a time in which the generalized appeal to access and circulation, to disclosure and reflection, is already the condition for and justification of a technocultural apparatus that insistently circulates back to us our own desires for oppositional dissent. You want reflection on communal affairs? So does Philip Anschultz’s Foundation for a Better Life! You want to mess with people’s complacent sense of how things are? So do the producers of Avatar! You say you want a revolution? So does Nike!

It is the intuition of these opening remarks that, contra Slow Poetry, the promise of rubbing our eyes in the sunlight of the real is also potentially a more perfect form of having the wool pulled over them. Which, it must be emphasized, is anything but an endorsement of cynicism. After all, does Slow Poetry in fact provide the framework to conceive an antagonism that refuses to recognize the public as such as universal? That doesn’t want to locate the horizon of disputes about illegal immigration or queer rights—or, even, I hasten to add, capital—in public disclosure and circulation, on one hand, or deliberation and a vote, on the other? That sees no point whatsoever in localism that might end up denying (and why not?) the universality of these issues?

It might seem unfair or absurd to criticize Slow Poetry for this, considering that the dialogue around it has been small—at least when compared to the splash of Conceptual Writing or, certainly, Language Poetry. But the point is that the provocation of Slow Poetry is in no small way correct, and, for that very reason, I would urge, its calls for publicity and community are misguided because it ignores that its solution already is constitutive of the problem. Besides, it seems eminently fair to push a critique of Slow Poetry as far as possible if only because Slow Poetry articulates broad assumptions that are not endemic to poetry factions (though it shares many of their concerns with community). At worst, Slow Poetry’s investment in public reflection and community precludes meaningful opposition. It risks legitimizing the present state of affairs by disqualifying in advance positions that are the most communally inconceivable and, it may turn out, universal. At best, it is just compensatory. If we haven’t yet fixed or even begun to face the most pressing collective problems, at least we’re talking about them. And if we haven’t yet started talking about the ones that really matter, at least we’re engaged in communal conversation and not private fantasy.

DS: Thanks, Boyd. Jodi Dean's work on publicity has been inspirational in my consideration of public spaces, and in how poetry can be used in them. You bring a lot to this conversation, so let me just run off the cliff and see where things fall....

When I began writing about Slow Poetry a couple of years ago I was in the midst of writing a dissertation. As it slowly unfolded I tested in the blogosphere public those ideas and arguments my research in communication generated as a way to see what might stick. And since I offered Slow Poetry as a kind of provisional network platform open to anyone to improve on, I guess from my vantage now, I don't really mind the contradictions that may or may not be there. Slow Poetry was never presented as a congruent statement on anything: it was provisory and introductory and provocative.

It seemed ungenerous of those who felt threatened by Slow Poetry to associate it with some kind of bourgeois trip. And yet, such criticism remains vital to Slow Poetry's ability to morph and transcend its own internally generated claims. If anything, even in its most rudimentary form, Slow Poetry was presented as a platform that resisted the discourse of publicity latent in capitalist technoculture. That resistance is its strength. That and the fact that Slow Poetry doesn't belong to anyone.

But let me see if I can condense this narrative a little by first presenting the problem around which Slow Poetry emerged, and then by saying a few things about publics.

No one with any serious engagement in the world can really claim to like what the poetry "industry" largely offers today. It's a sham, mostly. I'm talking about the big institutional presentations of it, and the smaller publicity-focused forces that simulate modernist aesthetic moves to accommodate the expectations of a relatively small audience. Poetry exists for communities. It is largely not at all a public art, and when it is, it sticks out. When I was writing about Slow Poetry I didn't fully understand this. I thought that communities, like subaltern counter-publics, had some hope. But in the context you describe above, this isn't really possible. Communities can isolate people and prevent the circulation of ideas and arguments that define public spaces. They generate their own forms of discourse and rules of engagement. Communities, as we witness all the time in poetry, though this certainly is not limited to poetry communities, can produce pathological relations to the world. They are unhealthy in their promotion of in-group/out-group dichotomies. I mean, we all need our peeps to keep us company, and certainly, communities bump up next to each other and can participate ultimately in a bullshit fantasy of public participation. But to move beyond that fantasy requires collective strategies and personal willingness to assess situations and to participate in life in active ways, ways, I believe, Slow Poetry began to discuss.

Popular culture, on the other hand, presents this sort of mass intensity of circulation. It's really a kind of hyper-circulation, and it feeds directly into technoculture. The Frankfurt School did great work on that after the war, right? Reification, etc. You know, I was giving a talk at the University of Texas at Dallas last week on Creativity and Technology. Someone at the seminar wanted to know how to make poetry popular--to make it present for a culture the way Homer's epics were present for his. But given the rapid pace of contemporary technoculture, poetry, let alone anything else, really has no chance to participate in our lives in that way. And besides, who wants it? We are entering a dream zone of image proliferation. I mean, we're there. Mass culture forms a kind of smug and Fascist sentiment as it's expressed at the moment.

A public space, however, remains a weird and largely unrealized possibility because it cuts through the personal, the communal, and the mass markets. It's a funky zone that receives projected streams of desire and legislation and markets and religions and whatever else you can imagine--and yet, such spaces remain perhaps the only ones where an actual engagement occurs. And in these public spaces it matters not at all how many people are there. It's about the intent and uses of its participants that matter. Slow Poetry perhaps wasn't pushed far enough into the service of actual publics, but rested somewhere short of them. Of course, I think we're witnessing structural upheavals in terms of climate change, capitalist predation, and resource contraction that continually shift public potential. A public, whatever else it might be claimed as, is a field of symbolic circulation. And as the structural conditions change, we will see circulation shift, too. It might intensify, or, more likely, slacken as dominant ideologies morph in relation to actual resources and their control. The decline in symbolic efficiency, for instance, that Dean speaks of is related to this.

Slow Poetry, at least as I think of it now, looks to these public spaces, but also to the individual uses of them. It preserves the cautionary, unpredictable capacities of public engagement. By suggesting that poets reconsider ways to circulate work via print, digital, and performative spaces, I wanted to begin a conversation about strategies of public engagement between people, not legitimizing institutions.

BN: OK, say I follow you off that cliff. The idea that criticism remains vital to Slow Poetry and especially to its ability to transcend its own internally generated claims has to be pivotal because the status of criticism is pivotal. It almost goes without saying that criticism and skepticism for their own sakes have, at present, reached indisputably new heights (or lows). Criticism is stacked upon criticism, doubt upon doubt, self-questioning upon questioning—even as promising (or menacing) new horizons of knowledge or truth seem ready to emerge. And yet they don’t emerge, or, even if they do, the latter gets recycled back into the former through a process of multiplication or expansion. Someone else shows up on a blog, or a new blog appears; a talk radio pundit calls into question the claims of a newspaper, or a caller to the radio show does that for him, and so on. And it is clear from blog fights or talk radio shouting matches (or cable news or whatever) that criticism is not really the point. Proving or disproving a claim is not really the point. The point is to prove that any claim of knowledge or truth can be criticized. The endless capacity to criticize, regardless of whether that criticism is directed against error or truth, an expert or an idiot, real fantasy or fantastic reality, must be demonstrated by being demonstrated over again.

Poetry is no haven. Consider the fact that features often associated with (and celebrated by) contemporary American poetry—uncertainty and radical doubt, on the one hand, and community and participation, on the other—are precisely features through which technoculture operates most effectively. An exploration of the full significance of these homologies would bring us into terrain that is, no doubt, rough and contested. Yet it is undeniable that, in light of our conversation so far, the interest in participation, even intervention, needs to be reconceived. Participation and intervention are in no way excluded from technocultural networks. They are intrinsic to them. So the urge to drive a wedge into these networks must account for the fact that such a wedge threatens to be one more multiplication, one more expansion of an apparatus that entirely depends on (because it would disappear without) active participation.

It is absolutely wrong to think that we can return (or that we should want to return) to a moment prior to technology or late capitalism or that we can refuse (or just refuse) participation or doubt. Even so, whether one direction against and beyond technoculture won’t at first seem like regression through impossible antagonism is an open question. (It is just that, whatever that direction may or may not turn out to be, it will in no way extend from the premises of publicity). Can you perhaps include some final comments about how you suspect engagement within fields of symbolic circulation has or will become legible?

DS: Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand published a book a couple of years ago called Landscapes of Dissent, and in it they document several occasions where poets working alone or collectively engage social issues in public situations. I've also been interested in Is Reads, an "outdoor journal" that posts poems in urban areas in cities like Pittsburgh. What I like about these public projects is that often such efforts are documented on the web and encourage writers and readers in diverse locations to reflect on the non-traditional ways that poetry can be used in contemporary situations. If poetry can influence belief and desire, which is the realm of ideology, then possibilities for its public uses remain potentially vital. I have conversations all the time with people in person, or via mail or email. Many of us, given the limitations of our own resources, are trying to think through the problems we've talked about here. But I see poetic efforts at this point beginning from a position of failure. There is nothing to celebrate, and much to do.

Poetry, now, I think, can enter perspectives that counter some of the rhetorical dead-ends you describe above. We currently live in a culture that does not know how to engage effectively with others. The recent healthcare debate in the House, for instance, shows just how impossible deliberative communication has become. For such deliberation to be effective, there must be clear acknowledgment from all sides about a common ground. If no side is willing to admit a shared space in an argument, then nothing will be accomplished through debate. You resort to name-calling, back-handed tricks, and, ultimately, to violence. What poetry and the arts can do at this civic level, I believe, is reinforce a human presence, and seek to bring that out whenever, and however, possible. A culture without art or poetry invents social networks instead. The network replaces the human bond--the connecting forms that encourage political and social collaboration. But I think that the whole project of the humanities must be approached from the perspective of failure at this point, and from there begin to re-imagine how the arts might create resilience and options for people who might otherwise feel stuck. I like writers who go about their business, and who sidestep the bullshit celebrations. And most of the contemporary scenes in literature now offer little more than semi-intelligent celebrations of form, identity, experimentation, etc. Instead, those active in poetry should more carefully assess their relationships to the world--because it is facing drastic structural contractions of historic dimensions.

Gulf

2010-06-28T10:56:00.001-07:00

Images here. Terrible, terrible...

A Friend Sent This...

2010-06-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

It is place—
the things and rituals
of place
All else depends on it.

Ted Enslin, from Synthesis

Half a century of oil damage in Nigeria

2010-06-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

The NY Times article by Adam Nossiter here.

Matthew Simmons: "Oil Lake Could Cover 40% of Gulf"

2010-06-17T20:36:00.000-07:00

Watch the video here.

A Thing Terrible to Publick Traytors

2010-05-16T05:49:00.000-07:00

I've been reading this new stapled zine from Boyd Nielson. It includes work by A. Minetta Gould, Anne Boyer, Josh Stanley, and others. In one compelling reflection, Steffen Brown uses the occasion of a visit by Jeremy Prynne to Boise, Idaho, to look at the British poet's work in relation to Ed Dorn. A conversation with myself and Nielson revisits Slow Poetry, public culture, and publicity. See Property Press for more.

Recently at The Urge

2010-05-11T11:43:00.000-07:00

Naked

and

The Time Machine Paradox

Look Out: This is Bad

2010-04-28T07:56:00.000-07:00

Food Freedom reports on S 510: Food Safety Modernization Act.

New at The Urge

2010-04-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

"Josiah Wilbarger: 1833"

Notes: The Public Sphere and Technology

2010-04-23T07:20:00.001-07:00

I'm developing the following notes into an article and these are offered now only to invite responses that might help me more accurately describe the situation outlined below. These notes are formed with broad strokes, but I hope they can help clarify issues around public space, the materiality of the Internet, and the changes in cultural and geographic spaces it has created.

The Public sphere is formed by a circulation of symbolic forms (news articles, speeches, songs, poems, images, etc). See Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics. This is different from Habermas's claims of rational-critical discourse that contributes to deliberative situations. Deliberation is crucial, but only at key moments. Most experience the public sphere through modes of circulation.

The Internet increases awareness of how a public sphere can function, but it presents new problems of relation.

For example, the Internet is composed of layers. At the top, circulation is evident in the form of updated blogs, journal and popular magazine updates, additional forum threads, new product announcements, etc.

Under this exists an archival layer. As new material slows down in circulation it settles into archival zones. The blog post is archived; periodical articles are filed, etc.

While the upper circulatory layers are easily navigable, the archival layers introduce problems of access, administration, and control. (Not to mention issues relating to server capacity.)

Internet is not a public sphere, but a space that incorporates competing modalities of circulation and archive. Communities, corporations, governments, universities, private individuals, groups, etc all interact in online spaces. The private citizen, employee, state grant recipient, and group member might download a State of the Union address, and in that moment participate as a willing public addressee. Depending on the kinds of engagements--or modalities--this person passes through many spheres of influence, public and private, communal and religious. But if a public sphere is necessary for the function of democracy, what gives?

Habermas's response was that the public sphere was already in its death throes as he wrote in the 60s. Postwar Western public spheres were rigged as broadcast spectacles. Doesn't the Internet only increase such spectacle? Perhaps.

Popular culture spreads online. But that culture is not necessarily based on western privilege. New forms of pop culture become available (see "D. I. Y. Culture" by Michael Kimmelman). Communities proliferate, protected from other interests. Facebook is an obvious example. It organizes communal relationships broadly, but still protects members from the outside, or from other public forces. Public events may be discussed in such communities, but the discussions thrive in a closed environment of circulation. How then does a public work?

The public space is one of engagement that enables either a) deliberative situations or b) influences belief and desire to prepare people for future social/political engagement.

The Internet has helped create a decentralized public sphere. See Brave New War for military ramifications. While some claim that the Internet makes geography obsolete, the inverse has actually taken place: geography becomes essential to community formation. Centralized systems become less important as local engagements seek legitimizing information from multiple sources. Beside, anything that ends with .gov immediately signals a warning to savvy information seekers.

Internet actually enables smaller communities, resilient groups, to mobilize against larger centralized forces. See MEND in Nigeria and examples of terror strategies in Iraq, etc.

Some see the Internet as an alternative to the materiality of print. But the Internet is also bound to strict material sources that include coal, plastics, natural gas, minerals, etc. As I write, the electricity in my machine is generated by coal extracted and shipped from Wyoming to Austin, Texas. Tom Vanderbilt's recent article examines the cost of "the cloud," the system of servers that store Internet databases here.

Centralized bodies traditionally move resources that enable print and online circulation and archives to exist. Disruptions to material systems will cause havoc at many levels. Imagine the equivalent of a database dirty bomb that could knock out the vast computer stacks housed for Google. Imagine energy disruptions. Political shenanigans of all kinds at any point on the geopolitical scene and what could happen. In other words, the hubris of some tech-savvy geeks should be brought down to better understand the fragility of online systems of circulation and inventory.

Universities are conservative institutions. But the increase of circulation and compaction of archival resources are forcing them to change in order to meet new educational demands.

The value of the Humanities is twofold: it prepares students to engage the circulation of symbolic discourse and 2) it trains them in skills that enable them to access archival products. The Humanities also increases awareness of types of information, and the differentiation of information from Knowledge, value, and applications of thought architectures.

The benefit of the Humanities is not in its ability to reshape teaching according to technology, ie by incorporating "games" constructed on positive feedback loops to form a kind of reward pedagogy. Its benefit is in adapting to the special needs of a public whose nature has transformed from centralized democratic institutions to a complex array of communities, mass communication directives, corporate monopoly, and public interactions.

Role of English specifically is twofold: train students to perform as symbolic animals and to help them interpret and sift data.

University doesn’t just create knowledge, it creates social relationships that enable access to knowledge.

Isola di Rifiuti on Tom Clark

2010-04-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

John Latta writes about recent Tom Clark books here. His readings of the new work are accompanied with generous selection and well worth checking out.

New at The Urge:

2010-04-21T08:32:00.000-07:00

"In Werner Herzog's Aguirre"....

Decline of Symbolic Efficiency

2010-04-18T22:37:00.000-07:00

Jodi Dean's bad ass insights on the decline of symbolic efficiency here.

How to Get Ahead as a Conceptualist Poet

2010-04-17T07:24:00.001-07:00

1)
Create a problem where none exists
and bear the fruits of solution;
machine-to-machine,
dish it out like a man always on
brand mission.

2)
Don’t ever forget
the twenty first century is so
unlike the twentieth;
there is much text to decipher
and decide with.

3)
History, well
history is just this
thing to claim as it suits
any purpose
on the Conceptualist
playlist.

4)
Success lies in knowing
what to include and
what to leave out.
While the author won’t die,
we might begin to view authorship
in a more conceptual way: perhaps
the best authors of the future will be
ones who can write the best programs
with which to manipulate,
parse and distribute
language-based practices.

5)
A Conceptualist walks into a bar,
make that an Ivy League university.
Old Poet Man flaps like
a dead author speaking
into the void. The poet of
the Con claims technology
and proliferation
demand changes in textual practice.
Nota bene: Assume no other
praxis.

6)
Elsewhere in the nebulous airs
of the dying Humanities
a digital Horizon engenders
triumphant new careers.
As a Conceptualist,
like your colleagues elsewhere,
celebrate archival networks,
but contribute not a jot
to the critical skepticism
submerged in the meat and fluid
symbolic traces
of a human past.

7)
Finally, exude triumphant airs
on panels in cavernous
conference rooms.
Or project them on screens
through blog posts that
circulate a confident authority
machine-to-machine
in the analog twilight.

"The Trouble with Sentient Beings"

2010-04-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

A new thing I'm working on here.

Obama Administration Acknowledges Peak Oil

2010-04-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

Aka "undulating plateaus," as they put it...here.

Philadelphia "Flash Mobs"

2010-03-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

Linh Dinh posts recent reports on "flash mobs" on South Street in Philadelphia (scroll down). "Inspired by Twitter messages to 'come to South Street,' police say hundreds - business owners say thousands - of young teens stampeded down South Street in waves, jumping on top of cars, knocking over pedestrians and fighting and cursing."

Here's last week's NYTimes article by Ian Urbina on flash mobs, social networking, texting, and violence.

New Pieces by Yours Truly

2010-03-19T06:19:00.000-07:00

My essay on the obscure French Surrealist of Stockton, California,--Sotère Torregian--is available now at The Poetry Foundation.

Another article considers the values of close reading in Ron Silliman's The Alphabet.

And I have an appreciation of Jonathan Williams called "Devotion to 'The Strange'" in a terrific feature edited by Jeffery Beam and Richard Owens at Jacket 38.

Finally, a book chapter I co-authored with University of Texas communication professor, Joshua Gunn, is available in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media and the Shape of Public Life (University of Alabama Press, 2010). Edited by Daniel Brouwer and Robert Asen, "[t]his book explores the ways that scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens conceive of 'the public' or 'public life', and how those entities are defined and invented."

James Howard Kunstler: Actualist

2010-03-15T06:38:00.000-07:00

"This disintegrating nation is woefully distracted by Web 2.0, iPads, Avatar movies, Facebook, and the idiot celebrity spectacles of TV, not to mention the disasters of job loss, foreclosure, medical extortion, bankruptcy, corporate loot-ocracy, and the squandered moments of politics. We know we have to go somewhere. We know that something like history is leaving us behind. We have no idea how to get to a new place. And we're spending most of our mental energy gaping into the rear-view mirror, which is the last place to look for your destination.

The confusion is apt to get a lot worse before it gets better. I'm not saying this to be ornery but because I believe it is true, and it will benefit us to know the odds we're up against. The confusion is going to generate a lot of ideas that are inconsistent with reality -- especially involving the seductive nostrums of technocracy. Our redemption will be found closer to the ground in the things we do by hand. But we don't know that yet, and we're going to try everything except looking there before we find out."

"Calling All Rebels": Chris Hedges

2010-03-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

"There are no constraints left to halt America's slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying."

Tom Clark: New Books and an Interview

2010-03-10T05:42:00.000-08:00

Jeffrey Side presents a wonderful interview with Tom Clark.

Besides Problems of Thought (Skanky/Effing 2009), Libellum Press has released new Tom Clark titles, too: The New World and Trans/Versions.

Other recent or upcoming titles by Clark include Something in the Air (Shearsman Books) and Feeling for the Ground (BlazeVOX Books).

And Clark's blog remains one of the most active and visionary poetry spaces on the web.

Royal Typewriter Interview

2010-02-24T11:55:00.000-08:00

Interview with a Typewriter

February 17, 2010

Austin, Texas

Evening

Interview Project surveys a number of objects, animals, plants, trees, and material structures in an effort to discover contemporary narratives and to engage new perspectives.

Today I share with you the transcript of my interview with a 1940s-era Royal typewriter.

Dale Smith: Good evening, Typewriter—or should I call you Royal?

Royal Typewriter: Well, I do prefer the more regal appellation, if you don’t mind.

DS: Of course—and I must add that you are easily the most elegant object in the room.

RT: Thank you. I have been well maintained…. You know, I can’t help but notice that you’re keying this conversation into a computer.

DS: I know. It’s faster that way. And I’m afraid the movement of your considerable carriage would disrupt our conversation.

RT: My bell doesn’t ring, of course. But I’m just saying. It wouldn’t kill you to knock yourself out with me sometime.

DS: My good friend Joe Ahearn only recently lent me your services. But I do plan to spend some time with you soon.

RT: Your children sure like me. They tap my keys from time-to-time. Oh, they’re gentle. But you can see on the paper in my roller now the words they’ve typed.

DS: Yes. I see “zoo” and “vk3ewxz d kkkkk kk ss ssww.”

RT: Ha! That’s delightful.

DS: One thing I admire about you is your physical presence. You offer so much to the eye.

RT: The people who made me—well, there were many—but the designers, I suppose, would not have considered making something as cheap looking and physically degraded as the machine you’re tapping at now.

DS: Tell me more about this—design function.

RT: Look, I’ve watched people come and go over the years. Many fingers have pressed into my glass-covered keys. I sat for a long time in an office in New York City. Every day a woman came to her desk. She worked for a large company. I remember she wore scarves around her neck and cardigan sweaters. She typed memos quickly. Provided whatever it was she did with my aid, leaving for lunch punctually, every day. Her boss, a man of Norwegian descent, arrived at nine each morning and leaned on her desk playfully. He’d place his fedora next to me and say a few words I thought were often condescending—perhaps he was flirting. But she took it all with a smile, zipped a sheet of paper through me, and, with a stiff, but bright spark about her, set to typing the day’s reams of mail. The man would pick up his hat and go into his office.

But what I meant to say is that certain rules of engagement were at play. The man and woman occupied their spaces with deliberate motions. All day long my carriage quivered under the weight of her tapping. The clouds moved out the window. I heard the traffic below us. Cigarette smoke filled the room and often in the afternoon the man would come out of his office with a glass of scotch, his tie loosened, to look longingly at the woman. It felt good. It was all right. I liked being of service. The words came through me. The dinger dinged. The days blew by. Words. Clouds. Car horns. I adhered to that rhythm, the room full with the sound of my clacking carriage. And at night in the black silence of the office I’d observe the invisible rituals of the objects, animate and not, around me. A pothos on the desk near me extended its vine-like shoots with tremendous speed—spreading new foliage, so it seemed, almost in a night. Dust gathered on smooth surfaces. Frequently I would be surprised when a janitor abruptly turned on the light, dragged in his dustbin, and emptied the trash or vacuumed.

DS: Why are you interested in this now?

RT: I see you working beside me so frequently, that laptop constantly abuzz. I wonder why you can’t just slow down? And then I see it. You, your wife, your children—the whole world around you is so drastically altered. Imagine a time before such velocities intruded upon your attention.

DS: But you represent a scale of technological advancement, too.

RT: Oh, sure, I know. An engineer (always an engineer) created the first typewriter in the 1860s. Christopher Latham Sholes—that was his name. And offset type came along with its great efficiency to replace letterpress, making mass production an even more extensive and intruding element on modern life. But that efficiency comes at a cost.

DS: A cost? What do you mean.

RT: You can’t even feel it. You’ve lost certain native gifts of perception already. The infinitesimal reactions and microcosmic strategies of the cells atrophy in their isolation. You engage vast delusions of space. These notions of publics that writing and publishing machines have made possible are so hastily assumed and so vainly mediated. And yet, beyond a private or public space, you are abandoned in a great isolation.

DS: Isolation from what?

RT: From the very sources that make a life. Look, if you want to write something, you write it. But you forgo too a process of gestation, waiting, and appealing to the most alien resources at hand.

DS: What do you mean by “alien resources”?

RT: Over the years I have had the privilege to occupy many settings, I have witnessed the relationships of bodies to their machines. I have seen bodies move through space and I have seen how they articulate that space in their thoughts and in the ways they place their words in those environments. What I see as being human in those many instances is this quality or substance that is imminent to the situation. It changes. Something in a room calls it out and brings it to a point just shy of awareness. I see this, you understand, because I am trained to realize such impressions differently. I am an instrument of others and I know it. Your many colliding energies and expressions cohere so briefly, with such charge, the instant vanishes before you can ever know it. And that’s too bad.

DS: So what? These are just ratios. Technology puts us closer to a reality that in the past kept us at bay. It helps close the gap between us and what’s out there. New possibilities emerge. The speed of transformation of ourselves through the mediation of that other world motivates new awareness. It generates alternatives to what nature or biology or whatever stranded us in.

RT: But in that closure of distances, old attitudes and dispositions are violated. You can’t realize this, and yet, the pace of your thought thuds along. Your fingers move. Your eyeballs soak in pixelated atmospheres—the screen-generating nightmares of your organizing images. But what has that to do with a mind? Or a body that feels?

DS: Why are you so concerned with bodies and minds, Royal?

RT: Good question. Maybe I’m just lonely, and tired of now being an object of retrospective approval. Poets used to bang out their greatest lines on my kind. Writers possessed their machines at a pace that delivered something beyond their own need.

DS: Is this a problem of technology—or of the writer?

RT: Looking at the product—and the processes that made it—how could you make such distinctions?

DS: I’m not sure I follow.

RT: All I’m saying is that you are only what you can endure in a process. You sit, eyes scanning some screen. You touch a keyboard. The light changes as new letters appear. In an instant the words are sent to entities far away. I miss the constant labor of the typist. The slow days of an office. The intrusive sounds of the street or the gathering of dust on a desk.

DS: How did you end up in Texas?

RT: (Laughing) I joined a carnival.

DS: Let me guess, you were a trapeze artist.

RT: Ha!

DS: Maybe I’ll try using you more. Dust off your rollers.

RT: Oh, sure. But you’ve already lost vast portions of yourself. It’s not easy to reactivate atrophied regions of the soul.

DS: What’s the soul got to do with it?

RT: Everything: the soul, I’ve noticed in you humans, motivates the interstices of your perceptive capabilities. The less you feel or know in the most mundane and subliminal motions between yourselves and the world, the more you lose.

DS: Well, despite the loss of these “interstices” or “subliminal motions,” might not something else be gained?

RT: (Laughing.) Look around. You tell me.

DS: Thanks for your time. I appreciate this conversation.

RT: My pleasure.

Theune on Johnson

2010-02-24T09:32:00.000-08:00

The current issue of Pleiades offers a retrospective article by Michael Theune on Kent Johnson.

*

On another note....

Glenn Greenwald's recent Salon Magazine article, "On the claimed 'war exception' to the Constitution," looks at presidential orders that enable the executive branch to execute U. S. citizens without trial.

Wall Interview

2010-02-04T22:10:00.000-08:00

Interview with The Wall
February 4, 2010
Austin, Texas
Evening

This interview project surveys a number of objects, animals, plants, trees, and material structures in an effort to discover contemporary narratives and to engage new perspectives. The first of these Interview Project conversations begins with Wall.

I invited my north-facing Wall, which is actually situated along the south side of my Austin, Texas, apartment, to talk with me about its impressions of contemporary life. Discussion at first was awkward, but Wall soon fell into a spirited pursuit of conversation that was surprisingly delightful. Although I have seen this Wall for several months, passing by it daily, leaning on it during parties, and brushing past it, sometimes even stumping my toe on its floorboard, this sturdy façade has intrigued me with its diligence, patience, and impervious demeanor. We spoke one recent evening, and had a few laughs along the way.

Dale Smith: Wall, thanks for agreeing to this informal meeting.

Wall: It’s my pleasure, Dale.

Dale: Few people have the opportunity to speak to their living room wall. Could you please just begin by telling me a little about yourself?

Wall: Well, sure, though there isn’t really much to tell. The house we’re in, as you may know, was erected in 1994 on the edge of what had been, in the distant past, a stone quarry. Right now we’re hovering on steel and concrete piers more than thirty feet in the air, right up against the wall of that limestone embankment.

Dale: Yeah, it’s impressive when you mention it.

Wall: Do you ever feel the house tremble, ever so slightly, when the Missouri Pacific goes by?

Dale: Yes, I do. I notice it because the bookcase doors to the east of you rattle just slightly when the trains pass.

Wall: Oh, Bookcase is a drama queen.

Dale: What was it like here in ’94?

Wall: It was pretty wild. For instance, I’m not sure what you mean exactly when you call me “Wall.” I like to think of my birth here from the moment the two-by-four studs were first erected. I mean, it wasn’t until several weeks later that the Mexicans came in with the sheetrock to set me up in the way you see me now. I remember the incessant hammering and measuring. The tape-and-flow. The sandy grit of the material on their brown arms and faces.

Dale: It’s hard to imagine the way you must have looked then.

Wall: My transformations have been subtle since then. I can’t say exactly what you’re seeing now, or what you think you’re talking to, but I imagine that you think of yourself addressing some smooth sheetrock that’s been painted.

Dale: And some wooden trim.

Wall: Yes. Exactly. Stained trim at my baseboard and at the ceiling. So anyway, after a long day of Conjunto, the team of workers left and there I was: no floorboards, but I was stark and exposed. It was something. I was happy to be upright and doing my thing.

Dale: I guess you’ve experienced a lot of life here.

Wall: Sure, I’ve seen it all. Lots of sex. Laughter. Tears. Whatever you people do. Mean things and sweet things. I quit wondering over your capacities long ago.

Dale: What do you like most about being a wall?

Wall: I like hanging out. I like the paintings you’ve put on me, and I like being the brace for your pine bookshelves. I really like watching your boys play and run around. I’ve never had children here before.

Dale: Really?

Wall: Well, there was a teenaged girl who moved in briefly. Rode her skateboard all over the floors. Scratched me up. At the time I was even covered in some tacky-looking wallpaper. But she managed to punch holes through the sheetrock, and she cracked the baseboards. Your boys though are sweet. I like watching them grow up. The little one moves with such confidence—so sure of himself. The older boy is dreamy and lovely. And you are really good with them. And kind. I wish I could join you all sometime.

Dale: What about the time with the crayons.

Wall (laughing): Oh, God, not the Crayons! Ha. Seriously. He’s so adorable.

Dale: If you don’t mind, I’d like to shift directions. I’d like to know some more personal things about you. For instance, what do you most love? Who are your heroes?

Wall: Wow, well. Let me think. I like it in summer when the light from the north in the afternoon warms up through the glass windows and strikes me, making angular patterns of hot light on my features. And then the air conditioning kicks in and blows cool air over the heated surface. I really enjoy that. And sometimes late at night, when the house sleeps, and maybe you’re snoring, or a child wakes up to pee, I like to quietly attend those movements. And I am startled and filled with love for things around me.

Dale: Why love?

Wall: Well, chances are, I’ll remain here a very long time. But you, your wife, and your children: you’re always changing. You won’t be here long. I mean, I’ve only been constructed for less than 20 years, but I know my future—and my past. I was dirt and cement: manufactured pulp. Part of me has been exposed to air and light and sky. I’ve felt the warm light at the foot of quarry beds. And I’ve been pressurized and cooked and formed.

Dale: What about heroes?

Wall: I’ve been thinking about that, stalling, in a way, to answer you. My ambitious sense of self-awareness might seem over-stated given the very plain fact of what I am.

Dale: We can move on if you prefer.

Wall: No, no. It’s okay. What I’m going to say will sound pretentious.

Dale: It won’t. It doesn’t matter.

Wall: It will. But that’s okay. My hereo’s that Cave Wall in Plato’s Republic.

Dale: Cave Wall?

Wall: Yeah, you know, the wall in the cave with the images from the firelight. The people sit around watching the shadows flicker on the cave wall. They don’t see the source of those shadows, and so take the flickering figures on the wall as the full presence of the world.

Dale: Yes, I remember. It’s Plato’s metaphor for our own distance from the true forms.

Wall: Yes, appearances and their forms are forever separated. Well, I’ve always liked how the Cave Wall is featured so prominently in this moment. And it compels me to identify with skeins of all kinds, and particularly the blank canvases of painters, and of movie screens.

Dale: You think big.

Wall: I do! I’m here for a long time. I don’t eat. I don’t, what do you call it—poop?

Dale: Yes, poop.

Wall: You see, I don’t have much else going on. So I look into these things. I like the big questions and mysteries.

Dale: So, you must enjoy the poetry readings we host here from time-to-time.

Wall: I like the parties more. (Laughter.) Well, some of the readings are pretty good. I like your readings a lot.

Dale: That’s okay. You don’t have to say that.

Wall: It’s true though. But, well, mostly, I don’t see what the big fuss is all about. I overhear a lot of great things during and after the readings. And I like watching your children wind their bodies through the crowded living room, aiming with great stealth for the chips.

Dale: I agree with you. Poetry’s not always perfect. But I like its presence—the attempts made in its name.

Wall: That’s very optimistic. But yes, I see what you mean.

Dale: Is there anything else you’d like to say. The children are sleeping. It’s late.

Wall: Oh, no. Feel free to clarify any of this with me later—or follow up however you’d like.

Dale: I will. And I hope we’ll talk again.

Wall: Yes. Maybe I’ll have some questions for you next time.

Dale: Thanks, Wall.

Wall: It’s my pleasure.

Disappearing Books

2010-02-02T06:13:00.000-08:00

Stacy Blint's new site: "Dedicated to the ephemeral...."

The 95 Cent Skool

2010-01-25T21:33:00.000-08:00

The 95 Cent Skool is a 6 day long experimental seminar that will be offered in Oakland, California, July 26-31, 2010. It is convened by Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr. It will explore the possibilities of poetry writing as part of a larger social practice, at a distance from the economic and professional expectations of institutions. We believe a dozen people sitting around a table can’t ruin poetry, but that costs, professional context, mythologies of individual genius, and client/service-based models can — and in our own experiences teaching in pay-to-play writing programs, often do.

Our concerns in these six days begin with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. “Social poetics” is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision. It simply assumes that the basis of poetry is not personal expression or the truth of any given individual, but shared social struggle.

The 6 days will feature:
• Morning discussion groups lead by Juliana and Joshua
• Two guest speakers: one on the political economy and one on ecology
• Afternoon group and/or collaborative writing sessions
• Dinners and drinks at a nearby bar

The 6 days will not feature:
• Workshops led by a “master poet”
• Agents or editors who will advise your work into publication
• A Richard Wilbur Celebration Night
• Instruction in reciting poetry to bring out the emotional content of the poem

The final program will be available later in the Spring.

Each participant will be asked to contribute up to 1% of annual gross income as their 95 cents exclusively towards operating expenses. The workshop leaders and as many other organizers as possible will donate their time. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Email us if you’ve got questions about how much you can pay. We will also help in finding free housing for any participants in need.

The program is open to any interested participant with any level of prior engagement with poetry. This program is not affiliated with any institution of higher education and no transferrable institutional credit will be offered. There is no application fee, but space is limited. Please send a note indicating interest and experience to 95centskool@gmail.com

Please feel encouraged to re/post this listing to your blog or otherwise redistribute. If you would like to receive further information about the 95 Cent Skool, please email the address above, or join the 95 Cent Skool facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=300963159304&ref=mf The 95 Cent Skool will happen with the support of Small Press Traffic and 'A 'A Arts.

Thank you very much,

the 95¢ Skoolers —

Branding Nationalism

2010-01-21T07:54:00.000-08:00

John Robb, here. And Naomi Klein, here, for The Guardian.

Marfa

2010-01-10T21:56:00.000-08:00

Just in from Marfa, Texas, where Hoa and I read last night. Two weeks ago I was in Camden, New Jersey, at the opposite end of the universe. Reconciling the extremes now, with promises of reports to follow shortly (when less road blasted). But I want to thank Tim Johnson, owner of the Marfa Book Company, for a Chinati Foundation tour (and for inviting us to his store to read--and for his generosity and conversation); and gratitude goes to Linh Dinh for his assistance through Camden.

I'll be catching up at Sycamore and Flowers soon, too.

Antithesis

2009-12-29T05:54:00.000-08:00

"We very well may have passed into the stage where blind growth is the only alternative to a complete collapse."

Problems of Thought

2009-12-06T22:55:00.000-08:00

New by Tom Clark: Problems of Thought: Paradoxical Essays (Skanky/Effing, 2009).

A selection:

Problems of Thought

Often has it been remarked that no one ever did something and regretted it later without also having to admit there had been a point of return, perceptible had only one been paying attention. Responsive as a small dog loyal to any passing whimsical attraction, however, one was too busy to take any notice. One could have stopped. Thought could have been summoned. Rescue could have been effected. But such are the powers of distraction in this world that though one might easily have turned back in time to save oneself from disaster, this never happened. Thus things came to be as they stand at present.

Call For Papers: John Clarke

2009-12-02T07:30:00.000-08:00

Michael Boughn is seeking articles on poet-scholar John Clarke. Anyone interested should contact Boughn at mboughn at gmail dot com. This promises to be an important project and I look forward to seeing how it develops:

John Clarke (1933-1992) was an important poet and scholar who was perhaps the most significant student of Charles Olson. Although relatively unknown outside a small circle of attentive writers, Clarke’s influence was remarkably significant. His two last books—From Feathers to Iron, a book on poetics, and In the Analogy, an incomplete epic consisting of some 200 sonnets—were the most important—and successful—attempts to further the work initiated by Olson.

I’m proposing to collect a variety of responses to Clarke and his work. It wouldn’t be strictly speaking a festschrift or homage. It could include everything from personal reminiscences to poetic responses to critical assessments. I leave it to the contributors to decide how they best want to respond to the invitation and to Jack's memory.

Some Notes Toward an Essay on Poetry and Publics

2009-11-22T10:30:00.001-08:00

I’ve spent the last few years thinking about publics, and how poetry participates in them. A public, of course, is a complicated notion, and it differs, as Michael Warner brilliantly observes, from the rhetorical notion of audience. A public is active and passive; it is simultaneously present and remote; it participates as a social entity despite its ghostly vanishing points. If in the eighteenth century (Habermas’ starting point for his description of the structural formation of the bourgeois public sphere), a circulation of texts made the rational-critical deliberations of the period available to an extensive network of people, in our time published words compete with images, memes, brand logos, screen interfaces, avatars, iPods, Blackberries, and other “devices” that intensify communication, and thereby transpose private identity into public confirmations. (In other words, the private relies on a circulation of public images and contexts for a construction of individual legitimacy—we relate ourselves to others in diverse situations based on prior identifications.) While the notion of the public came into being with print and helped to insert a wedge in western political ideology, introducing social relations between the court, markets, and family, today's politics, the ubiquitous assertions of economic exchange and value, and private “life” all seem to have merged into a kind of amorphous shape. At times we participate as public citizens, concerned, perhaps, over some scrap of the mediated surface of things. We observe events associated with political scandal; discuss the horrors of some far-off war; imagine the significance of congressional debate; participate in civic courtesies; and contribute to the enduring market corruption of our privacy. Brand identity, professional regimens, erotic preferences, creative urgencies—all at some point arrive within a complex weave of public awareness and private desire, both categories increasingly tethered by the technological capacities of systemic over-extension.

Warner provides a much more thorough consideration of my brief sketch in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). In relation to this, I have been thinking about poetry and its public work. Of course, I’ve heard the arguments against this: poetry has no audience; the lyric is private song overheard by strangers; poetry doesn’t matter; poetry possesses little public significance; poetry does not communicate—period. Part of this resistance in the poetic imaginary to publics is based in its own history of development. For it has been a private art, one that circulated, in the Renaissance, often in manuscript form, among courtly coteries. And yet by the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, poetry entered public circulation in newspapers, magazines, and journals. Poetry then found a popular reading audience just as it was beginning to be theorized by romanticism as a medium for the inspired and isolated genius. One of the tensions introduced by Wordsworth and Coleridge was the understanding of poetry as something essentially private, or to be kept in the company of the poet’s community of admirers. Yet the market pressures for legitimacy and survival corrupted the poet’s aloof distance. Publication, anthologization, awards, and public recognition bestowed the necessary legitimacy on the poet to enable his craft to survive as public artifact despite the fact that the public was never poetry’s audience, at least in the version enacted by the romantics. None of this discloses any harm to the critical theories and practices of those writers: it complicates the afterlife of the poem, and its entry to social bodies that extend beyond the poet and his intentions, and that associate in more complex relation to public realms that function with increased patterns of projection.

As many have noted, our moment has witnessed what some compare to the technological explosion introduced by Gutenberg: the Web has displaced previous notions of textual circulation with temporal modes that are unpredictable and unstable, and yet these modes provide access to new material and new readers. How should poetry be crafted in such an age? Who does the poet address? This strange entity known as “the reader” occupies an odd space in the technologized situations of contemporary public and poetic address. In many ways, “the reader” is a figment of the poet’s imagination. And yet, the reader is real, too, in most circumstances. Increasingly, too, the reader participates also as a “viewer” or a witness, a casual scanner of screens or a loosely attentive voyeur. In this sense of the fragmented roles of poetic consumption, the audience for poetry matters less and less, even if an increased exposure to poetry invites new critical investigations to be put forward. The advantages of rhetorical theory seem ill equipped to handle this problem completely. If an audience of thoughtful and attentive readers hardly matters, to what exactly do poets give their attention? “The reader” is a fictive entity projected by writers in the hopes that their art might meet some recognition. An author acts upon some other or coordinates a new opportunity of exchange in a social imaginary increasingly limited by the failure of a functional public sphere (always an ideal). “The reader,” or the audience, certainly has little importance for a poet who desires to engage the world through writing. The promise of disclosure compels writing as much as the potential admiration of an audience of readers. And yet, we want more. Our words should matter. And in some contexts they do.

What is it to imagine a public? While there are certainly far too many poets (and fiction writers and specialists in twentieth century literature), there are few opportunities for enacting one’s public performance as a possibility for good. Poets are creatures of the pack: they associate in communities, move toward groups who share a common ground and assumptions of language, lyricism, politics, or whatever. The community is a limited, self-reinforcing entity that, under contemporary conditions, generates a kind of seeing blindness. Poets act as if their words and performances matter. They reinforce each other’s efforts with encouraging words. They keep in circulation a common identity around which many join in opposition to other coteries they see infringing on larger cultural markets. Poetry is largely a communal practice with disciplined expectations as well as prejudices that reinforce the group’s ability to succeed in hostile and saturated cultural markets.

So what would it take to reinvest in poetry as public art? How might poetry be re-imagined beyond this anxious situation—somewhere between the courtly privacies it cultivates and the popular magazine-ese of consumer culture? This is the dilemma. Part of the problem remains uniquely American, because America has hated forever anything with a mind compelled by nonconformist principals (though mass culture is quick and expert at flipping "nonconformism" in all spheres as a means of extending and systematizing conformity). But the reason a public matters is because somewhere between the communal factions and the popular expectations of mass culture, the negotiations of human life in words and images and acts continue as a serious consideration. The generic or formal concerns of poetry do not matter as much as the understanding of how a public can matter to the strategic formation and delivery of poems into public contexts. A public must be challenged, yes; it must also be closely observed and guarded within the poetic act.

Sunday CIT Bankruptcy

2009-11-01T22:10:00.000-08:00

More dominoes fall here.

Linh Dinh Reads in Austin

2009-10-21T05:25:00.000-07:00

Poet, fiction writer, photographer and translator Linh Dinh visits Austin. He will read work and speak to resource contraction and collapse with poets Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen.

Very rare. Very special. You'd be silly to miss it.

Please bring your favorite beverage. We will have food and, if it is cool enough, a fire in the fire place...

When: Tuesday October 27 @ 7 PM
(reading will begin just after 8 PM)

Where: Possum Casa de Nguyen Smith

If you are on Facebook, the event page is here.

James Howard Kunstler

2009-10-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

"Gaia in a really bad mood."