Hank Lazer's The People's Poetry
Lazer talks about some good things here, like Susan Schultz, Walter Lew, internet writing and publishing as possibly constructive reversals of globalizing infrastructure. He makes an attempt at addressing rap and spoken word (though in embarrassing uncle mode, ugh!), and goes out of his way to discuss neglected writers like Taggart, Enslin. He talks about Maria Damon! It's clear he's genuinely interested in asking questions about what the present situation is in poetry.
More importantly, he gropingly sees the idea of _dispersal_ as being possibly constructive. He is not even close to understanding the depth of the paradigm shift he is glimpsing out of the corner of his eye. He nervously reverts to mostly giving shout outs to Language poets who are already very well known and widely influential.
When discussing younger writers, this otherwise interesting essay becomes questionable. There seems to be some defensive gravitational impulse that keeps him from escaping triumphalist generationalism, though I would add that he's hardly the only established writer to have this problem:
_A major hazard for this generation is a bland eclecticism, with technically adroit writing that remains superficial because the cultural and historical tension of the formal gestures has evaporated._
If these gestures now lack historical tension (meaning it is no longer the 70s and early 80s?) then he is complaining that young writers sound too much like language poetry and that this doesn't work any more because those gestures only had a political meaning during the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations? Would this mean the Lazer considers himself and his contemporaries to have at some point (in the mid 80s?) to have stopped writing in the present? He would then be advocating completely different gestures (direct contextualizations I assume, and think he's hinting at) that operate in present political context of the 90s and 00s? Gestures that poets of his generation are not making, even though they are working in the same period?
Or does he mean that only work that repeats Language Poetry's formal gestures AND framing propositions is valid? That _their_ work is _pure_ (his word) and that _younger writers_ are adulterated?
This seems like a hasty recycling of statements from Lyn Hejinian's famous Rain Taxi interview. My most cynical read on this is the possibility that this kind of statement is intentionally picking out some Iowa workshop / Jorie Graham imitators (work which actually IS confessional poetry with spray-on coating of Language Poetry) and ingenuously saying _look the kids aren't any good, we're the real deal_ as a generational PR move, ignoring the interesting younger writers. Lazer may actually not know about the existence of much writing by poets 20-40.
Or is this kind of statement just a temporary thing -- a presently incoherent conflicted response to a group artistic mid-life crisis?
4.29.2004
4.21.2004
The night beacon of the lighthouse pulsating in the darkness. Giant bands of glowing fog-light turning through space every ten seconds.
Pigeon Point. Named for the wreck of the Carrier Pigeon. This was a good spot for shipwrecks and rum-running, for the same reason.
Oil lamps and Fresnel lens -- 1872. 1,008 brass-framed prisms to concentrate the source of light. Joined together to form a six-foot-diameter in a circular frame.
Now a 1,000-watt light bulb.
When the steam whistle first blew, cows from a nearby ranch stampeded to the beach. "The cows must have thought there was a very wonderful bull down there."
1970's, the signal was automated.
The night sky, fog moving under stars.
Pigeon Point. Named for the wreck of the Carrier Pigeon. This was a good spot for shipwrecks and rum-running, for the same reason.
Oil lamps and Fresnel lens -- 1872. 1,008 brass-framed prisms to concentrate the source of light. Joined together to form a six-foot-diameter in a circular frame.
Now a 1,000-watt light bulb.
When the steam whistle first blew, cows from a nearby ranch stampeded to the beach. "The cows must have thought there was a very wonderful bull down there."
1970's, the signal was automated.
The night sky, fog moving under stars.
4.18.2004
Butano State Park. Coastal Redwoods. Damp and dark at the stream basin. Areas of thick underbrush and overturned redwood trees. Steep slopes and moist, thin topsoil. Not the tallest redwoods but still big enough to be micro-environments in and of themselves. Ferns growing on branches 100 feet up. Purple Iris'.
An economy of sunlight, with the tallest trees taking the most and the animals and plants who dig moisture and shade thriving at the bottom. Some of the lower areas are only redwoods and ferns. Prehistoric looking. Banana slugs, moss, spiders in rotting, upturned root beds.
Going up the ridge. Small desolate areas of terminal Douglas fir forest. Dead trees that choked off their own light -- renewal cycle sustaining them in the overall balance and long term coherence of the forest's symbiotic mechanisms.
Hot, flat fire road with sunlight enough to sustain poppies. A relief to start back down the trail into the cool, moist air and complexities of the mixed Douglas fur and Redwood areas. Sharp patches of sunlight filtered though branches. Unusually quiet. Recent burn marks around the trees -- everything here evolving around the fires. Improvising to turn destruction into something good.
I love the chaos and order mixed together. Are these state park enclosures preserved areas of nature? Or are they now art?
An economy of sunlight, with the tallest trees taking the most and the animals and plants who dig moisture and shade thriving at the bottom. Some of the lower areas are only redwoods and ferns. Prehistoric looking. Banana slugs, moss, spiders in rotting, upturned root beds.
Going up the ridge. Small desolate areas of terminal Douglas fir forest. Dead trees that choked off their own light -- renewal cycle sustaining them in the overall balance and long term coherence of the forest's symbiotic mechanisms.
Hot, flat fire road with sunlight enough to sustain poppies. A relief to start back down the trail into the cool, moist air and complexities of the mixed Douglas fur and Redwood areas. Sharp patches of sunlight filtered though branches. Unusually quiet. Recent burn marks around the trees -- everything here evolving around the fires. Improvising to turn destruction into something good.
I love the chaos and order mixed together. Are these state park enclosures preserved areas of nature? Or are they now art?
4.17.2004
Pescadero, ala trout fishing spot, classic tiny old west town crossroads but with New England architecture. Used to be a seaside resort on the stage coach route.
We arrive at our resort, Coastnoa, Right up against Butano State Park.
Mix of tent areas, cabins, rooms and common areas. Young couples and families. Lightly streaming tinges of anger beneath the crunchy veneers.
Fire place in the room. Duraflame logs provided. Wax and sawdust. I take an interest in Duraflame as a take on content. Their motto is the secret of fire.
We arrive at our resort, Coastnoa, Right up against Butano State Park.
Mix of tent areas, cabins, rooms and common areas. Young couples and families. Lightly streaming tinges of anger beneath the crunchy veneers.
Fire place in the room. Duraflame logs provided. Wax and sawdust. I take an interest in Duraflame as a take on content. Their motto is the secret of fire.
Half Moon Bay. Pleasant small town. Crunchy yuppie stuff and child rearing scenes. Katie's friend Stephanie grew up here, living on a boat.
Picked up, to my surprise, a used copy of Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, in the used book store here. Marked up only in the first chapter.
Excellent, strong coffee available every ten yards. Why did the culture of strong coffee never develop in the East? Must be the French/Italian take on eating, which involves taking time to enjoy one's food, never happened in the East, esp. New York City, where food is quickly shoveled into one's mouth as you earn money or race toward the next marker. That, or eating is an excuse to be seen in a status-generating/reinforcing room, where one waits to enter, and is then rushed out like an item in a factory.
NYC has a dispiriting, corporate-dork Starbucks every two blocks, but does not have anything like the coffee culture of the west coast. The East Village has many small coffee shops that survive, not one of which has coffee one tenth as good as an average place the Bay Area. Not exactly about coffee. It is about whether there is an expectation that one is ever suppose to feel that they are abiding within their own duration, even for a small stretch. In the culture of NYC this feeling would be taken as a sign of weakness.
Picked up, to my surprise, a used copy of Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, in the used book store here. Marked up only in the first chapter.
Excellent, strong coffee available every ten yards. Why did the culture of strong coffee never develop in the East? Must be the French/Italian take on eating, which involves taking time to enjoy one's food, never happened in the East, esp. New York City, where food is quickly shoveled into one's mouth as you earn money or race toward the next marker. That, or eating is an excuse to be seen in a status-generating/reinforcing room, where one waits to enter, and is then rushed out like an item in a factory.
NYC has a dispiriting, corporate-dork Starbucks every two blocks, but does not have anything like the coffee culture of the west coast. The East Village has many small coffee shops that survive, not one of which has coffee one tenth as good as an average place the Bay Area. Not exactly about coffee. It is about whether there is an expectation that one is ever suppose to feel that they are abiding within their own duration, even for a small stretch. In the culture of NYC this feeling would be taken as a sign of weakness.
4.14.2004
Space of pacific coast highway 1, the realized dream of Dr. John L. D. Roberts. An incredible artwork, though one build by prisoners etc. 1919-1937. Pacific ocean and lush farmlands right up against each other, flowers and vegetables. Limestone cliffs.
The total lack of commercial signs. No McDonalds. No Billboards. Because of policies. Ecologically unsound road repair methods let in destructive nonnative plants, Pampas Grass. Unbelievable feeling of freedom and space on this road. Curving and extending. And the air so full of information -- compared to the unbreathable stuff we use for oxygen in NYC.
San Gregorio State Beach, south side. Old Ohlone village. Estuary and freshwater marsh. No egrets today. Crumbling cliffs and expanding views. The combinations of types of erosion here, sea water, creek water, wind, create a particular variety in the contours of the limestone and shallow topsoil. I remember seeing humpback whale flukes come out of the water right at the beach here years ago. A little girl pointing and screaming in delight and fear.
The cliff line looks like a turkey on a slicer. The Red-winged Blackbirds doing legato notes with a curious timbre. Bright orange shoulders. The sound a combination of machine and cat. Excellent group riffing.
Sparkling early evening sunlight on ocean waves.
The total lack of commercial signs. No McDonalds. No Billboards. Because of policies. Ecologically unsound road repair methods let in destructive nonnative plants, Pampas Grass. Unbelievable feeling of freedom and space on this road. Curving and extending. And the air so full of information -- compared to the unbreathable stuff we use for oxygen in NYC.
San Gregorio State Beach, south side. Old Ohlone village. Estuary and freshwater marsh. No egrets today. Crumbling cliffs and expanding views. The combinations of types of erosion here, sea water, creek water, wind, create a particular variety in the contours of the limestone and shallow topsoil. I remember seeing humpback whale flukes come out of the water right at the beach here years ago. A little girl pointing and screaming in delight and fear.
The cliff line looks like a turkey on a slicer. The Red-winged Blackbirds doing legato notes with a curious timbre. Bright orange shoulders. The sound a combination of machine and cat. Excellent group riffing.
Sparkling early evening sunlight on ocean waves.
4.13.2004
California Notes
Flying into SF at night. Black area of bay water. The negative space of man-made light. Water, not development.
San Bruno extension of airport. Connecting transport structures imposed over older small CA town.
San Bruno Regency Inn motel, the room smelling faintly of melted plastic. The details, a perfect piece of installation art about accommodation and alienation, a space created for people to not actually be there, but to be contained and seen to, a bit like the alien studio suite at the end of Kubric's 2001, A Space Odyssey, but of course without the appropriated poshness. The awkward attempts of the aliens to provide a living space, the subtler connotations of which they wouldn't be concerned with. The class implications of the expensive furniture transplanted onto another planet creating much of the alienating upper-class human-pet-hospital-through-the-eyes-of-other-beings vibe.
Low flying airplane sound at night. Amazing bass and treble layers sliding away from each other in the sustain. The depth of the partials. The implied power of the engines a bit too close. Nervousness charged into the sound, beautiful.
Flying into SF at night. Black area of bay water. The negative space of man-made light. Water, not development.
San Bruno extension of airport. Connecting transport structures imposed over older small CA town.
San Bruno Regency Inn motel, the room smelling faintly of melted plastic. The details, a perfect piece of installation art about accommodation and alienation, a space created for people to not actually be there, but to be contained and seen to, a bit like the alien studio suite at the end of Kubric's 2001, A Space Odyssey, but of course without the appropriated poshness. The awkward attempts of the aliens to provide a living space, the subtler connotations of which they wouldn't be concerned with. The class implications of the expensive furniture transplanted onto another planet creating much of the alienating upper-class human-pet-hospital-through-the-eyes-of-other-beings vibe.
Low flying airplane sound at night. Amazing bass and treble layers sliding away from each other in the sustain. The depth of the partials. The implied power of the engines a bit too close. Nervousness charged into the sound, beautiful.
4.04.2004
Will Alexander, Bowery Poetry Club, 4.3.04
Missed Harryette Mullen, but arrived in time to see Will Alexander's whole set. He read with an electric guitar player, who improvised with loops and textures.
Alexander read with the same style and pacing as he normally would without the music, so the overall arrangement was in the free jazz tradition of streams of separate things happening at the same time in phenomenological polyphony. The poetry was read blastissimo, without breaks or pauses, and the guitar player essentially took a supportive role. The music added a lot to the overall performance energy, and I thought there could easily have been a whole band here, at least bass and drums in addition to guitar.
Alexander's poetry is thought provoking and extremely vertical, with vocabularies building and massing into color areas. You could think of this performance a duet for two harmonic instruments. I experienced it as a movement through space, with cloud and particle formations of vocabulary spiraling past. The guitar player also implied movement through a sound space that could have been considered very small or very large, esp. in his loop sequencing.
Alexander's syntax is fairly static, with constructions that fall into an elevated surrealist argument / description voicing. This static syntactical element is a stable structure around which the vocabulary structures are built dynamically (though this dynamic quality happens within a fairly controlled set of registers). The word groups tend to fall within several sets of concerns -- environments, animals, minerals, elements, and mental states. The words pile up with only ostensible syntactical exchange. The vocabulary sequences, and their implied subject matter, linger way past anything suggested by the actual sentence structures, like:
levels / vertigo / hummingbird / omniscience / nostalgia.
Almost any of the words from these concern-sets can be and are plugged into the syntax grid, and this comes off almost as a proposition about ranges freedom within agreed-upon formal arraignments.
It is impossible to even scratch a doodle onto a scrap of paper without invoking the question of what identifiable parts of the past still have a claim upon us. Alexander addresses this question by actively joining in dialogue with the works of Aime Cesaire. I guess it could be argued that anything identifiable as a claim from the past that one could pick to attend to on the basis of one's own tropisms is already more of a function of what we think of as the present, and the more crucial aspect of the past are those things which also have some kind of claim on us but which we are incapable of seeing at present.
Alexander's work also operates as a perpetual motion machine whose function it is to reject any external definition or limitation of identity or experience while refusing to posit an alternative except the ambient motion and particle phenomenon that seem to go along with and exist as the very substance of this rejection. It felt like the embodiment of the wish to be completely uncontained, hence the impact of the work feels ambiant and spatial. The rebellious, speculative, and of course, impossible quality of this embodiment are so obviously related to the work of Sun Ra that I won't belabor the obvious here.
Missed Harryette Mullen, but arrived in time to see Will Alexander's whole set. He read with an electric guitar player, who improvised with loops and textures.
Alexander read with the same style and pacing as he normally would without the music, so the overall arrangement was in the free jazz tradition of streams of separate things happening at the same time in phenomenological polyphony. The poetry was read blastissimo, without breaks or pauses, and the guitar player essentially took a supportive role. The music added a lot to the overall performance energy, and I thought there could easily have been a whole band here, at least bass and drums in addition to guitar.
Alexander's poetry is thought provoking and extremely vertical, with vocabularies building and massing into color areas. You could think of this performance a duet for two harmonic instruments. I experienced it as a movement through space, with cloud and particle formations of vocabulary spiraling past. The guitar player also implied movement through a sound space that could have been considered very small or very large, esp. in his loop sequencing.
Alexander's syntax is fairly static, with constructions that fall into an elevated surrealist argument / description voicing. This static syntactical element is a stable structure around which the vocabulary structures are built dynamically (though this dynamic quality happens within a fairly controlled set of registers). The word groups tend to fall within several sets of concerns -- environments, animals, minerals, elements, and mental states. The words pile up with only ostensible syntactical exchange. The vocabulary sequences, and their implied subject matter, linger way past anything suggested by the actual sentence structures, like:
levels / vertigo / hummingbird / omniscience / nostalgia.
Almost any of the words from these concern-sets can be and are plugged into the syntax grid, and this comes off almost as a proposition about ranges freedom within agreed-upon formal arraignments.
It is impossible to even scratch a doodle onto a scrap of paper without invoking the question of what identifiable parts of the past still have a claim upon us. Alexander addresses this question by actively joining in dialogue with the works of Aime Cesaire. I guess it could be argued that anything identifiable as a claim from the past that one could pick to attend to on the basis of one's own tropisms is already more of a function of what we think of as the present, and the more crucial aspect of the past are those things which also have some kind of claim on us but which we are incapable of seeing at present.
Alexander's work also operates as a perpetual motion machine whose function it is to reject any external definition or limitation of identity or experience while refusing to posit an alternative except the ambient motion and particle phenomenon that seem to go along with and exist as the very substance of this rejection. It felt like the embodiment of the wish to be completely uncontained, hence the impact of the work feels ambiant and spatial. The rebellious, speculative, and of course, impossible quality of this embodiment are so obviously related to the work of Sun Ra that I won't belabor the obvious here.
3.19.2004
Laura Elrick & Barrett Watten, Poetry Project, 3/17/04
Laura Elrick read from a new, longer sequence called Fantasies/Impermeable Structures
32 line, 32 stanza structures. Modeled on 32 bar song structures?
"both the object seen and I that sees"
Started with quiet almost introverted reading style, and gradually warmed up into a more dramatic, declamatory style.
18th/19th century voicings as in recent Jennifer Moxley or Lisa Robertson.
Iambic riffing.
Focus on issues of social justice and subjectivity.
"here's where I commodify my sorrows"
"life with partially-hydrogenated declaration"
Brief portrayals (Reznikov?) and Susan Howeish vocab constructions and blurring
"I wear my sleeve on my heart"
"on the grassy knoll of good PR"
Unique feeling of public/private institutional / internal spaces in which mutually-leaking containers filled with the problems of class warfare and artistic representation mix.
-----
Barrett Watten did a two hour PowerPoint presentation about his own poetry with readings of his poems, and interpretations of and commentary on his own literary history.
I guess it would be possible to dismiss this performance as an outrageous act of self-absorption. Whether this is healthy or not, I'm not sure, but I found the whole thing interesting. One important point of reference was my memory of Bob Grenier's slide presentations in San Francisco, where he discussed his own hand written poems, often talking for extended periods about how a particular letter E was trying to become a letter A and so forth, performances I loved for their craziness and outrageousness. Breton is also, obviously a model here. I tend to like multi-media genre-mixing and almost anything that departs from the standard podium reading.
Watten showed a photo that one of the poems from Bad History is based on, an anonymous Korean shop owner during the '92 LA riots shot from the back as he points his gun to unknown targets outside the frame of the photo-- a photo pushing into Gustony cartoonish abstraction. Watten basically implied that what we're seeing here is actually an image transforming into a module or machine used by power the purpose of which is to destroy information about violence while transmitting representations of it. He didn't come out and say this, but I assumed he was implying that the result of this is to make the conception of violence and it's place in history a kind of digestible abstraction that obviates the more important layers of meaning which would have to be dealt with in a representation that included undeniable particulars, particulars which would inevitably draw the perceiver of the photo into the problematics of the historical scene, into the nets of power and meaning evoked there, and into questions of the viewer's own place in these things. There were several moments like this in the talk where I thought focusing on more basic elements of the issues brought up would have made the performance less daunting and more engaging. As Watten went into increasing nuance and complexity on issues of psychology, representation and power, I kept reasserting basic questions to myself that he was invoking be not addressing -- here esp. the issue of intra-class conflict between the immigrant shopkeeper and the rioters.
Interesting sequence starting with a photo of a car being manufactured, looking exactly like a HR Giger painting. Watten read a description of a car manufacturing area where the identification with these capitalist production means was allowed to come through unrepressed, which was then countered with a quote from the book Rivethead about the destructive triviality of the manufacturing process.
Describes Ford's insight that paying the workers enough to buy the cars is a kind of feedback.
Describes the fantasy that the negativity of profit is loss relative to development and production in the Detroit landscape. This was one of several times I thought of Foucault during this talk….the question what is your relation is to the constructive element of power systems…
Appropriately enough: The morning after the reading, on the C train on the way to work, I picked up a NY Post that someone had left on the seat. On page three was a story about how the CIA had Osama in their sights in 2000. Included was a photo, with a copyright NBC, apparently taken from a unarmed Predator spy plane, of Osama. The picture was nothing but a beautiful smear of abstract green and blue color areas with video pixilation bands.
Laura Elrick read from a new, longer sequence called Fantasies/Impermeable Structures
32 line, 32 stanza structures. Modeled on 32 bar song structures?
"both the object seen and I that sees"
Started with quiet almost introverted reading style, and gradually warmed up into a more dramatic, declamatory style.
18th/19th century voicings as in recent Jennifer Moxley or Lisa Robertson.
Iambic riffing.
Focus on issues of social justice and subjectivity.
"here's where I commodify my sorrows"
"life with partially-hydrogenated declaration"
Brief portrayals (Reznikov?) and Susan Howeish vocab constructions and blurring
"I wear my sleeve on my heart"
"on the grassy knoll of good PR"
Unique feeling of public/private institutional / internal spaces in which mutually-leaking containers filled with the problems of class warfare and artistic representation mix.
-----
Barrett Watten did a two hour PowerPoint presentation about his own poetry with readings of his poems, and interpretations of and commentary on his own literary history.
I guess it would be possible to dismiss this performance as an outrageous act of self-absorption. Whether this is healthy or not, I'm not sure, but I found the whole thing interesting. One important point of reference was my memory of Bob Grenier's slide presentations in San Francisco, where he discussed his own hand written poems, often talking for extended periods about how a particular letter E was trying to become a letter A and so forth, performances I loved for their craziness and outrageousness. Breton is also, obviously a model here. I tend to like multi-media genre-mixing and almost anything that departs from the standard podium reading.
Watten showed a photo that one of the poems from Bad History is based on, an anonymous Korean shop owner during the '92 LA riots shot from the back as he points his gun to unknown targets outside the frame of the photo-- a photo pushing into Gustony cartoonish abstraction. Watten basically implied that what we're seeing here is actually an image transforming into a module or machine used by power the purpose of which is to destroy information about violence while transmitting representations of it. He didn't come out and say this, but I assumed he was implying that the result of this is to make the conception of violence and it's place in history a kind of digestible abstraction that obviates the more important layers of meaning which would have to be dealt with in a representation that included undeniable particulars, particulars which would inevitably draw the perceiver of the photo into the problematics of the historical scene, into the nets of power and meaning evoked there, and into questions of the viewer's own place in these things. There were several moments like this in the talk where I thought focusing on more basic elements of the issues brought up would have made the performance less daunting and more engaging. As Watten went into increasing nuance and complexity on issues of psychology, representation and power, I kept reasserting basic questions to myself that he was invoking be not addressing -- here esp. the issue of intra-class conflict between the immigrant shopkeeper and the rioters.
Interesting sequence starting with a photo of a car being manufactured, looking exactly like a HR Giger painting. Watten read a description of a car manufacturing area where the identification with these capitalist production means was allowed to come through unrepressed, which was then countered with a quote from the book Rivethead about the destructive triviality of the manufacturing process.
Describes Ford's insight that paying the workers enough to buy the cars is a kind of feedback.
Describes the fantasy that the negativity of profit is loss relative to development and production in the Detroit landscape. This was one of several times I thought of Foucault during this talk….the question what is your relation is to the constructive element of power systems…
Appropriately enough: The morning after the reading, on the C train on the way to work, I picked up a NY Post that someone had left on the seat. On page three was a story about how the CIA had Osama in their sights in 2000. Included was a photo, with a copyright NBC, apparently taken from a unarmed Predator spy plane, of Osama. The picture was nothing but a beautiful smear of abstract green and blue color areas with video pixilation bands.
3.10.2004
3.06.2004
Wallace Shawn / Richard Foreman talk at CUNY Grad Center, 3/3/04
This moderated talk about theater was itself like a play, with Shawn exactly reprising his My Dinner With Andre character speaking very slowing and trying to work out something reasonable to say, and Foreman playing a perfect brilliant introvert character coming out with funny, provocative statements.
Foreman: "I have always hated theater."
Foreman suggested that working in theater has been appealing for him because it has allowed him to relate to other people in relation to his own fantasy life.
Foreman: "I like theater because it's real people and real stuff in front of you -- like life." He suggested that poetry is a contrast to this. He's thinking of Mallarme here? If I had stayed for the Q&A I would have asked why language isn't stuff or something in front of you. Later Foreman says his is a language based theater and I again wonder why the the presence language isn't like the presence of the actors or sets...
Both Wallace Shawn and Foreman discuss their respective relation to narrative. Shawn talks about having to have something to follow when he's seeing a play -- and that too much abstraction and lack of narrative create a situation where the play is like a sequence of abstract paintings. There problem with this, he says, is that you can take in an abstract painting very quickly. With abstraction in a play the first few "paintings" are interesting, and then his interest drops off steeply as the play goes on. He also talks about not liking narrative that is too obviously going for a verisimilitude that a theatrical performance can never create the way a movie can -- a character kicking the snow off his boots as he comes in the door, for example. Foreman says that in a film, his suspension of disbelief with the narrative is deep and almost automatic, and that in a play it never happens because the physical presence of the actors and sets destroys it for him.
Foreman spoke of a new play he's working on called "Pancake People" about internet culture and the general effects of information disbursal in the present era. This is something I think about a lot and feel is a important force operating on my generation of writers. I continue to wonder if we are in a period where the artistic phenomena are increasingly vertical (chordal) -- or that the vertical and the horizontal, the synchronic and diachronic are in the process of fusing.
The comically uptight moderator (unintentionally providing a great theatrical performance here) asks both of them how they start a play, a question which makes both of them uncomfortable and a little defensive, as though the maintenance of some kind of mystery in regard to the inception of the creative process is important to them. Foreman says he starts with "sentences" and Shawn says "sentences, including grammar."
The Moderator character asks about politics in plays and Foreman said the way he addresses politics is by exploring his own inner fascist in the plays. Shawn more or less concured and said "When I'm here talking to you or at dinner I'm a progressive guy, but putting the play together, I'm a progressive, I'm a conservative, I'm a fascist, etc. the whole spectrum..."
Foreman also relates this to being adopted and said, "I could have just as easily been adopted by the Bush family, and then I be like them!"
This moderated talk about theater was itself like a play, with Shawn exactly reprising his My Dinner With Andre character speaking very slowing and trying to work out something reasonable to say, and Foreman playing a perfect brilliant introvert character coming out with funny, provocative statements.
Foreman: "I have always hated theater."
Foreman suggested that working in theater has been appealing for him because it has allowed him to relate to other people in relation to his own fantasy life.
Foreman: "I like theater because it's real people and real stuff in front of you -- like life." He suggested that poetry is a contrast to this. He's thinking of Mallarme here? If I had stayed for the Q&A I would have asked why language isn't stuff or something in front of you. Later Foreman says his is a language based theater and I again wonder why the the presence language isn't like the presence of the actors or sets...
Both Wallace Shawn and Foreman discuss their respective relation to narrative. Shawn talks about having to have something to follow when he's seeing a play -- and that too much abstraction and lack of narrative create a situation where the play is like a sequence of abstract paintings. There problem with this, he says, is that you can take in an abstract painting very quickly. With abstraction in a play the first few "paintings" are interesting, and then his interest drops off steeply as the play goes on. He also talks about not liking narrative that is too obviously going for a verisimilitude that a theatrical performance can never create the way a movie can -- a character kicking the snow off his boots as he comes in the door, for example. Foreman says that in a film, his suspension of disbelief with the narrative is deep and almost automatic, and that in a play it never happens because the physical presence of the actors and sets destroys it for him.
Foreman spoke of a new play he's working on called "Pancake People" about internet culture and the general effects of information disbursal in the present era. This is something I think about a lot and feel is a important force operating on my generation of writers. I continue to wonder if we are in a period where the artistic phenomena are increasingly vertical (chordal) -- or that the vertical and the horizontal, the synchronic and diachronic are in the process of fusing.
The comically uptight moderator (unintentionally providing a great theatrical performance here) asks both of them how they start a play, a question which makes both of them uncomfortable and a little defensive, as though the maintenance of some kind of mystery in regard to the inception of the creative process is important to them. Foreman says he starts with "sentences" and Shawn says "sentences, including grammar."
The Moderator character asks about politics in plays and Foreman said the way he addresses politics is by exploring his own inner fascist in the plays. Shawn more or less concured and said "When I'm here talking to you or at dinner I'm a progressive guy, but putting the play together, I'm a progressive, I'm a conservative, I'm a fascist, etc. the whole spectrum..."
Foreman also relates this to being adopted and said, "I could have just as easily been adopted by the Bush family, and then I be like them!"
3.05.2004
Jack Kimball does short takes on Corina Copp, Mark Lamoureux, Allison Cobb, Michael Gottlieb, Tan Lin, Barbara Henning, K. Silem Mohammad, Albert Flynn DeSilver.
3.04.2004
Packed house at the Poetry Project for Michael McClure and Ron Silliman, last night.
Katie and I had been at the Richard Foreman / Wallace Shawn theater dialogue at CUNY grad center, where we ran into Cori Copp. We all split before the Q & A and jumped in a cab, getting to St. Mark's just as Larry Fagin was starting his introduction.
McClure, who I had never heard, read first. He went chronologically starting with his first poem published in a magazine (Poetry). Interesting sestina.
(when I hear the door creak of audience members coming in late, I always have to look -- what am I looking for?)
Stories of beat companions and a haiku about the light show at the Fillmore.
Sing song portraits of consciousness.
Read from Fifteen Fleas, which Larry Fagin edited and published as a stapled book for the reading. Startlingly flarfy work. Based to some extent on comic books. Lovely, energized swirls of insignificance.
"An animal is a mind."
"Be in comfort Chet Baker"
Ron Silliman started out by saying he was more interested in poetry than in poems.
Read from Albany
"I used my grant to fix my teeth"
Descriptions of public spaces / observations of homeless people / statements / puns / autobiographical elements pooling together and building as discrete units rather than strung into a story.
"I began to wonder… is Bob Dole… also … a Muppet"
"the essence of dance is fundraising"
I didn't get a chance to talk to Ron after the reading at the Telephone bar, but I found myself coveting his Howard Dean baseball cap.
Katie and I had been at the Richard Foreman / Wallace Shawn theater dialogue at CUNY grad center, where we ran into Cori Copp. We all split before the Q & A and jumped in a cab, getting to St. Mark's just as Larry Fagin was starting his introduction.
McClure, who I had never heard, read first. He went chronologically starting with his first poem published in a magazine (Poetry). Interesting sestina.
(when I hear the door creak of audience members coming in late, I always have to look -- what am I looking for?)
Stories of beat companions and a haiku about the light show at the Fillmore.
Sing song portraits of consciousness.
Read from Fifteen Fleas, which Larry Fagin edited and published as a stapled book for the reading. Startlingly flarfy work. Based to some extent on comic books. Lovely, energized swirls of insignificance.
"An animal is a mind."
"Be in comfort Chet Baker"
Ron Silliman started out by saying he was more interested in poetry than in poems.
Read from Albany
"I used my grant to fix my teeth"
Descriptions of public spaces / observations of homeless people / statements / puns / autobiographical elements pooling together and building as discrete units rather than strung into a story.
"I began to wonder… is Bob Dole… also … a Muppet"
"the essence of dance is fundraising"
I didn't get a chance to talk to Ron after the reading at the Telephone bar, but I found myself coveting his Howard Dean baseball cap.
3.02.2004
Caught some rare Orson Wells short films at Film Forum last weekend. A lot of magic act material, including Wells dividing Marlene Dietrich in half.
Thinking of why I have an instinctive dislike of magicians. I realized it hits the button with me where I'm pissed at the degree to which the world is fixed, rigged…. Also wondering how much of any art is a sequence of tricks…?
Thinking of why I have an instinctive dislike of magicians. I realized it hits the button with me where I'm pissed at the degree to which the world is fixed, rigged…. Also wondering how much of any art is a sequence of tricks…?
2.27.2004
2.25.2004
The Frequencies, Noah Eli Gordon, Tougher Disguises Press, 2003
I sometimes think of blogging as cross between writing a journal and hosting a radio show.
Noah Eli Gordon, in his first book The Frequencies, takes the writer-as-radio/DJ metaphor and rearranges it in dozens of combinations in a series of prose poems written from the perspective of a kind of DJ/poet/blogger. The poems veer between essay, dream-poem, and quasi-narritive.
Metaphors of broadcasting, sound and signal phenomenon are applied to many subjects, often personal relationships and questions of creativity.
"Is it charming to destroy silence? To glue the bits back together, to appreciate the possibility of selection, to talk with someone in line at the grocery store who gives the standard objection, says it's like a drop in the bucket, this wanting to be heard."
Many details associated with a radio are used to explore some subject matter -- for instance, a series of riffs on time are invoked with a clock radio.
“part suspect, part seduction”
Gordon does a lot with these elements -- light, fun, aiming to please and delivering. Wooing the reader.
Michael Friedman-like voicings crossed with Frank's Wild Years. Waits-esque vibe throughout:
“The station memos were full of roman numerals & everyone in the coliseum had their thumbs pointed down. The queen bee was drinking oil, thought the ticking in her ears was an engine.... Face it, we're all in love with landing gear.“
The few sections of repeated grammatical arrangement don't add much to the book, but there are very few of them.
He implies a lot more interesting material and thought than he develops, a kind of chord building made of implications and hints.
One sentence construction that he handles well is a run on sentence with an argument building tone that doesn't necessarily build an actual argument. This rhythm is combined with figure of speech and cliché mixing and juggling.
The most of this work has a funny, light touch, though Gordon will sometimes orbit closer to a more serious question:
“What we hear off the air is not the radio lying to us, but what we encode to come to terms with our own enclosure.”
There are moments where the identification reverses and the radio become a imitation of sound or a representation of the commercialization of sound, countered here by attending to live sounds coming through the window:
"The windows were open & I could hear people laughing from the roof. It was good. The bed was full. The radio was stiff & prim & explosively still."
I sometimes think of blogging as cross between writing a journal and hosting a radio show.
Noah Eli Gordon, in his first book The Frequencies, takes the writer-as-radio/DJ metaphor and rearranges it in dozens of combinations in a series of prose poems written from the perspective of a kind of DJ/poet/blogger. The poems veer between essay, dream-poem, and quasi-narritive.
Metaphors of broadcasting, sound and signal phenomenon are applied to many subjects, often personal relationships and questions of creativity.
"Is it charming to destroy silence? To glue the bits back together, to appreciate the possibility of selection, to talk with someone in line at the grocery store who gives the standard objection, says it's like a drop in the bucket, this wanting to be heard."
Many details associated with a radio are used to explore some subject matter -- for instance, a series of riffs on time are invoked with a clock radio.
“part suspect, part seduction”
Gordon does a lot with these elements -- light, fun, aiming to please and delivering. Wooing the reader.
Michael Friedman-like voicings crossed with Frank's Wild Years. Waits-esque vibe throughout:
“The station memos were full of roman numerals & everyone in the coliseum had their thumbs pointed down. The queen bee was drinking oil, thought the ticking in her ears was an engine.... Face it, we're all in love with landing gear.“
The few sections of repeated grammatical arrangement don't add much to the book, but there are very few of them.
He implies a lot more interesting material and thought than he develops, a kind of chord building made of implications and hints.
One sentence construction that he handles well is a run on sentence with an argument building tone that doesn't necessarily build an actual argument. This rhythm is combined with figure of speech and cliché mixing and juggling.
The most of this work has a funny, light touch, though Gordon will sometimes orbit closer to a more serious question:
“What we hear off the air is not the radio lying to us, but what we encode to come to terms with our own enclosure.”
There are moments where the identification reverses and the radio become a imitation of sound or a representation of the commercialization of sound, countered here by attending to live sounds coming through the window:
"The windows were open & I could hear people laughing from the roof. It was good. The bed was full. The radio was stiff & prim & explosively still."
2.24.2004
Thoreau's preoccupation with the parallel forms displayed in leaves and in ice crystals led him to suggest a kind of early theory of everything based on leaves. This same observation would be fully articulated, in the 1970s and 80s, in fractals -- self-similarity.
Thoreau is often at his most fascinating at these points where a quasi-mystical theme wrestles itself completely free of its metaphysical connotations and becomes a fusion of empirical observations, speculation about consciousness, and poetic, intuitive leaps. The Journals are full of variations on this pattern.
He is investigating the self-similarity patterning of consciousness and attention interacting with high-detail observation and multiple simultaneous layers of theme and subject matter?
Interesting to get his impressions of New York City when he spent nine months in Staten Island in his mid twenties trying to make it as a writer. The blur of faces. Also the similarities of elements of his bio to many writers I know. The college years, the early affinities and imitaions, the historical forces, the critical alliances, the lack of ways to earn money, the disappointments, developments, growth and decisions. You have to wonder about the patterns of how our live as writers pan out and how much of it might also be described with fractals....
Thoreau is often at his most fascinating at these points where a quasi-mystical theme wrestles itself completely free of its metaphysical connotations and becomes a fusion of empirical observations, speculation about consciousness, and poetic, intuitive leaps. The Journals are full of variations on this pattern.
He is investigating the self-similarity patterning of consciousness and attention interacting with high-detail observation and multiple simultaneous layers of theme and subject matter?
Interesting to get his impressions of New York City when he spent nine months in Staten Island in his mid twenties trying to make it as a writer. The blur of faces. Also the similarities of elements of his bio to many writers I know. The college years, the early affinities and imitaions, the historical forces, the critical alliances, the lack of ways to earn money, the disappointments, developments, growth and decisions. You have to wonder about the patterns of how our live as writers pan out and how much of it might also be described with fractals....
2.16.2004
Jack Wright (sax) and
Reuben Radding (bass), COMA series @ ABC No Rio
Beautiful saxaphone/ bass duet with combinations of negative space, forward momentum and focused self-control, often all at the same time.
This was a half hour of music played almost exclusively with extended technique. The dynamics were mostly quiet, and it's great to be able to listen to acoustic music at close range with no brittle PA in the almost shockingly low-noise ceiling environment offered by a frigid winter night on Rivington St.
There's something about the way Radding and Wright play together that foregrounds the shapes of the collective pauses, the negative space, which, in a way, is the most deeply collaborative musical element at play.
Reuben Radding (bass), COMA series @ ABC No Rio
Beautiful saxaphone/ bass duet with combinations of negative space, forward momentum and focused self-control, often all at the same time.
This was a half hour of music played almost exclusively with extended technique. The dynamics were mostly quiet, and it's great to be able to listen to acoustic music at close range with no brittle PA in the almost shockingly low-noise ceiling environment offered by a frigid winter night on Rivington St.
There's something about the way Radding and Wright play together that foregrounds the shapes of the collective pauses, the negative space, which, in a way, is the most deeply collaborative musical element at play.
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