I know what reading suggestion I'll be making to any stray RNC delegates I run into this weekend:
"The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity."
--Bakunin, Federalism, Socialism, and Anti-Theologism
8.26.2004
8.12.2004
8.07.2004
"Now people pursue rock music, and they go, 'I have something important to say, and here's what it is, and ooh, I'm singing it from my heart, too.' And it's all too serious. And people totally miss out. They totally miss the fun, Jabberwocky, fun-with-language, fun-with-poetry."
Charles Michael Kittredge Thompson IV, aka Frank Black, in the Sunday Times
Charles Michael Kittredge Thompson IV, aka Frank Black, in the Sunday Times
7.15.2004
people in a flaming basement room / a giant anteater licks an ant off a hit-and-run victim's cheek along a tree-lined road / Ed Begley Junior's face / elevator cables snap / corny sentimental explanations of changed alternate time-realities / two people hold hands, causing a drawing of a fire extinguisher to become real / dark clouds move slowly as a girl's face appears in a starry night sky.
Final fifteen minutes of Kingdom Hospital. Knowing nothing about the show, and seeing it totally out of context really liberates the images from the narrative....
Final fifteen minutes of Kingdom Hospital. Knowing nothing about the show, and seeing it totally out of context really liberates the images from the narrative....
7.14.2004
Schema, Alli Warren, Housepress, 2004
Reading this chapbook, I kept finding some little nuance or charm I had missed in the previous take. My similarity-reference-needle kept wildly jumping around, one minute the poems possessed an Alan Davies-grade morphed intensity of differed eros, the next they felt like what might happen if Elizabeth Robinson started writing flarf. My conclusion: these are the early voicing of a highly distinct writer.
There are instances of sense here framed within a feeling for mental space which is allowed to remain partially distanced while also magnetizing along vectors of curiosity, humor, and warmth. The poems keep moving toward, and refracting through, different series of questions -- carefully arranged, funny, slightly inappropriate in an unpredictable way, and possessed of a charged and balanced intelligence.
self-production
& negation
here & there
your little lazy sex
immoderately expands
great pleasure from
watering the garden
with a hose
the larynx
is smaller than
emotionalism
& I am
resolved
to make resolutions
Warren's line can be blunt and delicate at the same time:
On the subway
trumpet sounds,
dragonflies screw
in the air above us
A correspondence inherent in the psychic energy required of word arrangement and the ability to both process sense perception and navigate a scrutiny of emotive states becomes, in her work, a poetic space of allowance with a vacillating rhythm of hiding and disclosing that connects it with the poetic tradition of Emily Dickinson. There are places where it glows with the energy of unspoken wishes and unspoken complaints fused at the moment where they manifest in a string of words.
There are some poems in Schema, where, within a certain limit of warmth they becoming almost Olson-like lyrically honed motions of perception, without losing any of the humor or oddness:
Velle non discitur
did you mean or
terra cotta I meaning
the hair in my eyes
smelling like "beer"
have you seen my dictionary
looking like "underpants"
are we the polis eyes
still awaiting fever
however subjunctive
the intention
in our starry air
naked error how to say
a sedentary peninsula
we can't go out and play
on the mainland
the surrounding area neither
yet known as phenomena
we are loaded full of fruit
I mean not conclusively.
The feelings, circumstances, and thinking are all handled with great care and verve in this work. Warren can handle both impossible and ordinary situations between people as well as situations which occur between the conflicting layers of oneself.
Reading this chapbook, I kept finding some little nuance or charm I had missed in the previous take. My similarity-reference-needle kept wildly jumping around, one minute the poems possessed an Alan Davies-grade morphed intensity of differed eros, the next they felt like what might happen if Elizabeth Robinson started writing flarf. My conclusion: these are the early voicing of a highly distinct writer.
There are instances of sense here framed within a feeling for mental space which is allowed to remain partially distanced while also magnetizing along vectors of curiosity, humor, and warmth. The poems keep moving toward, and refracting through, different series of questions -- carefully arranged, funny, slightly inappropriate in an unpredictable way, and possessed of a charged and balanced intelligence.
self-production
& negation
here & there
your little lazy sex
immoderately expands
great pleasure from
watering the garden
with a hose
the larynx
is smaller than
emotionalism
& I am
resolved
to make resolutions
Warren's line can be blunt and delicate at the same time:
On the subway
trumpet sounds,
dragonflies screw
in the air above us
A correspondence inherent in the psychic energy required of word arrangement and the ability to both process sense perception and navigate a scrutiny of emotive states becomes, in her work, a poetic space of allowance with a vacillating rhythm of hiding and disclosing that connects it with the poetic tradition of Emily Dickinson. There are places where it glows with the energy of unspoken wishes and unspoken complaints fused at the moment where they manifest in a string of words.
There are some poems in Schema, where, within a certain limit of warmth they becoming almost Olson-like lyrically honed motions of perception, without losing any of the humor or oddness:
Velle non discitur
did you mean or
terra cotta I meaning
the hair in my eyes
smelling like "beer"
have you seen my dictionary
looking like "underpants"
are we the polis eyes
still awaiting fever
however subjunctive
the intention
in our starry air
naked error how to say
a sedentary peninsula
we can't go out and play
on the mainland
the surrounding area neither
yet known as phenomena
we are loaded full of fruit
I mean not conclusively.
The feelings, circumstances, and thinking are all handled with great care and verve in this work. Warren can handle both impossible and ordinary situations between people as well as situations which occur between the conflicting layers of oneself.
Glenn Branca, Lesson No. 1, AcuteRecords, 2004
Listened to the first track at the uptown Kim's listening station for about forty seconds and realized I needed to get it right away. Recorded in 1980 during the Rhys Chatham Kitchen era, this is a Pre-Sonic Youth minimalist art-rock band with Anthony Coleman playing organ. New wave/no wave/punk channeling of Terry Riley's in C with a beautiful balance of tonality, dissonance, and looping rhythms.
Listened to the first track at the uptown Kim's listening station for about forty seconds and realized I needed to get it right away. Recorded in 1980 during the Rhys Chatham Kitchen era, this is a Pre-Sonic Youth minimalist art-rock band with Anthony Coleman playing organ. New wave/no wave/punk channeling of Terry Riley's in C with a beautiful balance of tonality, dissonance, and looping rhythms.
7.09.2004
Metropolis 16-26, Robert Fitterman, Coach House Books, 2002
A remarkably flarfy procedural poem, Metropolis 19, entitled Dream Cuisine: Neo-Colonialism, Nouvelle Cuisine, Lewis & Clark and the Union Square Café, is a spare cut up of the journals of Lewis and Clark mixed with the menu copy from the Union Square Café in New York City.
The poem goes beyond a simple distanced ironic equating of pretentious urban dining with colonialism because the actual attraction of the food (and of the descriptive food-language) and the appeal of equating Lewis and Clark with self-exploration are both intact in the work, despite the intentionally flat arrangement/critique. This sets up funny, contradictory energies in the poem, and makes for a tone of fused lament and absurdity:
Elk skins, I was obliged
to leave my celery root
coconut chutney of self-
discovery
…
a fine morning bejeweled
pulsating with Mexican seasoning.
…
we had the trumpet sounded, and fired several shots
but he did not join us, the evening 's growing influence
of a black root; a kind of Liquirish
social fabric
croquetted wontons
…
the birnt hills, down the lolo trails
the lower part of the Cove, gusto
the same sleeping crepe.
A remarkably flarfy procedural poem, Metropolis 19, entitled Dream Cuisine: Neo-Colonialism, Nouvelle Cuisine, Lewis & Clark and the Union Square Café, is a spare cut up of the journals of Lewis and Clark mixed with the menu copy from the Union Square Café in New York City.
The poem goes beyond a simple distanced ironic equating of pretentious urban dining with colonialism because the actual attraction of the food (and of the descriptive food-language) and the appeal of equating Lewis and Clark with self-exploration are both intact in the work, despite the intentionally flat arrangement/critique. This sets up funny, contradictory energies in the poem, and makes for a tone of fused lament and absurdity:
Elk skins, I was obliged
to leave my celery root
coconut chutney of self-
discovery
…
a fine morning bejeweled
pulsating with Mexican seasoning.
…
we had the trumpet sounded, and fired several shots
but he did not join us, the evening 's growing influence
of a black root; a kind of Liquirish
social fabric
croquetted wontons
…
the birnt hills, down the lolo trails
the lower part of the Cove, gusto
the same sleeping crepe.
Rodney Koeneke, Rouge State, Pavement Saw Press, 2003
feelin' Albigensian?
wild, friendly baroque wackiness and serious intellectual warmth.
"Mammogram the bildungsroman, induce
dingbat hexameters in the heldentenor's
yeasty Hornitos. Queen Ixnay to the E-bay
goes Braxton-Hicks on mother's bad milk day.
Computer's at last completely stewy--
picked up the bug at the honor bar. Citizen Quiggley
from the Gun and Doll Commission seeks flap
with pointillistic gabardine. Bad weekends for
two straight quarters--look inward and talk
to the polygraph: Have you grokked
Hampton Hawes today?"
Comedic/absurd virtual memoir improv riffing
"our Mordor grows more porous"
"here at the garden's hot marges
events soften into fire ants"
"in a moment of vast inattention
where everything happens together, a glimmer"
"when did the world tree, Yggdrasill, get so decorous"
"The body removed like a vacuum bag
from that chrome gleam
consciousness--
the dead part touches the live part and then
The whole thing, it pivots or turns."
"ego is an autopsy
at which you're a guest but also its theater"
feelin' Albigensian?
wild, friendly baroque wackiness and serious intellectual warmth.
"Mammogram the bildungsroman, induce
dingbat hexameters in the heldentenor's
yeasty Hornitos. Queen Ixnay to the E-bay
goes Braxton-Hicks on mother's bad milk day.
Computer's at last completely stewy--
picked up the bug at the honor bar. Citizen Quiggley
from the Gun and Doll Commission seeks flap
with pointillistic gabardine. Bad weekends for
two straight quarters--look inward and talk
to the polygraph: Have you grokked
Hampton Hawes today?"
Comedic/absurd virtual memoir improv riffing
"our Mordor grows more porous"
"here at the garden's hot marges
events soften into fire ants"
"in a moment of vast inattention
where everything happens together, a glimmer"
"when did the world tree, Yggdrasill, get so decorous"
"The body removed like a vacuum bag
from that chrome gleam
consciousness--
the dead part touches the live part and then
The whole thing, it pivots or turns."
"ego is an autopsy
at which you're a guest but also its theater"
6.29.2004
Jemeel Moondoc
Revolt Of The Negro Lawn Jockeys, Eremite, 2000
Moondoc (alto sax); Khan Jamal (vibes); Nathan Breedlove (trumpet); John Voigt (bass); Codaryl Moffett (drums)
Beautifully integrated swinging polyglot soundspace. Jamal's playing central in unifying the band sound. A tonality from the vibes like light piercing the darkness of a room: permeating, major/dominant tonalities. Now loping, now swinging, now staggering -- so much is allowed. He blurs the boundary between comping and a slow, patient soloing.The awkwardness, oddness, wackiness allowed to exist with the beautiful, cool and darker tones. Jamal's solo on You Let Me Into Your Life sounds like weather. Each bar of the vibraphone being an instrument in itself, collected in a row. How much the world is the interacting of groups of particles in space.
Moondoc: relaxed, Dolphyish, warped, good humored... some chord changes even! It is as though the tunes were left alone, to be themselves. Swing and awkwardness and humor together, liking and leaving room for the other players – as you would like and leave room for the people in your life....
Revolt Of The Negro Lawn Jockeys, Eremite, 2000
Moondoc (alto sax); Khan Jamal (vibes); Nathan Breedlove (trumpet); John Voigt (bass); Codaryl Moffett (drums)
Beautifully integrated swinging polyglot soundspace. Jamal's playing central in unifying the band sound. A tonality from the vibes like light piercing the darkness of a room: permeating, major/dominant tonalities. Now loping, now swinging, now staggering -- so much is allowed. He blurs the boundary between comping and a slow, patient soloing.The awkwardness, oddness, wackiness allowed to exist with the beautiful, cool and darker tones. Jamal's solo on You Let Me Into Your Life sounds like weather. Each bar of the vibraphone being an instrument in itself, collected in a row. How much the world is the interacting of groups of particles in space.
Moondoc: relaxed, Dolphyish, warped, good humored... some chord changes even! It is as though the tunes were left alone, to be themselves. Swing and awkwardness and humor together, liking and leaving room for the other players – as you would like and leave room for the people in your life....
6.27.2004
Fung Wah to Boston, schlepping piccolo snare, cymbals, kick pedal, stick bag, and a new blank book. Several fellow passengers eating chinese food in the still dormant bus.
Lots of congestion coming out of NYC. Five hours up. Walked to Boston Commons and down into the Red line. Tokens for entrance. Everyone wearing white sneakers / baseball caps. Sunflowers seeds on the train floor. Charles river out the subway window. Out at Porter Sq. Up the hill to Dan's. Across the street a crazy house with religious rant lines all over it, like lines of poetry. That's publishing.
Dan's sitting on the steps. Two studies in the Kate/Dan household. I dream of getting my books out of storage.
Lovely back yard bbq involving portabellos and kielbasa. I get the skinny on Kate's theater career and a report on Dan's recent reading with Ron Silliman.
Into the car and out to Zeitgeist, where there some kind of poetry reading is just finishing. The house drumset turns out to be excellent. One minute of downtime before the set starts and I meet Cristina Strong. Cross draft coming through with the back and front doors open. Brief sound of rain. The set goes well.
Back to Dan's with Christina for post gig hanging out and talking. Asked about Christina's poetry origins and time in SF, where we overlapped but never met. I shake Dan down for reports on how Gerrit Lansing, Patrick Dowd, Jim Behrle, Joe Torra, Jack Kimball are doing. Hit futon at 2:45.
Woke at 6 am to a beautiful, restrained mocking bird. Really picking notes carefully. Back out till 11:00, dream of car crash where I berate the driver afterwards for carelessness. I am uninjured in the dream.
Dan gives us a copy of his new chapbook, Sound Swarms and Other Poems, Slack Budda Press.
Book hunting with Kate and Dan. Pulled a rare upgrade and got a hardback vers. of John Wieners, Cultural Affairs in Boston, which I have in paper. At The Brattle Book shop I find Emerson, the Mind on Fire, Robert Richardson and Karen Horney, New Ways in Psychoanalysis, both cheap.
Burgers before we get on the bus. Goodbye to Dan and Kate.
Best Fung Wah Driver ever, though he talked on his cell phone at near yelling volume for most of the trip. At the gas station rest stop he refueled at the diesel self serve. It came to $230.
Lots of congestion coming out of NYC. Five hours up. Walked to Boston Commons and down into the Red line. Tokens for entrance. Everyone wearing white sneakers / baseball caps. Sunflowers seeds on the train floor. Charles river out the subway window. Out at Porter Sq. Up the hill to Dan's. Across the street a crazy house with religious rant lines all over it, like lines of poetry. That's publishing.
Dan's sitting on the steps. Two studies in the Kate/Dan household. I dream of getting my books out of storage.
Lovely back yard bbq involving portabellos and kielbasa. I get the skinny on Kate's theater career and a report on Dan's recent reading with Ron Silliman.
Into the car and out to Zeitgeist, where there some kind of poetry reading is just finishing. The house drumset turns out to be excellent. One minute of downtime before the set starts and I meet Cristina Strong. Cross draft coming through with the back and front doors open. Brief sound of rain. The set goes well.
Back to Dan's with Christina for post gig hanging out and talking. Asked about Christina's poetry origins and time in SF, where we overlapped but never met. I shake Dan down for reports on how Gerrit Lansing, Patrick Dowd, Jim Behrle, Joe Torra, Jack Kimball are doing. Hit futon at 2:45.
Woke at 6 am to a beautiful, restrained mocking bird. Really picking notes carefully. Back out till 11:00, dream of car crash where I berate the driver afterwards for carelessness. I am uninjured in the dream.
Dan gives us a copy of his new chapbook, Sound Swarms and Other Poems, Slack Budda Press.
Book hunting with Kate and Dan. Pulled a rare upgrade and got a hardback vers. of John Wieners, Cultural Affairs in Boston, which I have in paper. At The Brattle Book shop I find Emerson, the Mind on Fire, Robert Richardson and Karen Horney, New Ways in Psychoanalysis, both cheap.
Burgers before we get on the bus. Goodbye to Dan and Kate.
Best Fung Wah Driver ever, though he talked on his cell phone at near yelling volume for most of the trip. At the gas station rest stop he refueled at the diesel self serve. It came to $230.
6.11.2004
MS, Michael Magee, Spuyten Duyvil, 2003
Playfulness, jokiness and serious engagement. Focus and then letting go of focus. To get the contradictions of life and presentation up front, rather than evade or hide or refuse to have a good time.
Most people are like trees, they are caught between competing sets of counterproductive /destructive forces. Between gypsy moths and being make into paper. Magee understands this.
"this is a fact check
from the girl at the hat check with the hatchet"
People places and things in these poems are constantly becoming each other. As in the ecosystems we are part of. The writer and reader and language and materials and experiences linked. As in ecology, the linkages have to be dealt with one way or another.
Goofy thematic fugue-like development. Ronald Johnson in science of perception mode if he had gone through the poetics of Jackass.
"the rest of the brain is barley"
Partly on nerve, partly on riff energy, partly on schtick, partly genuine interest in who might be listening. With his guard partially down. No transparent formal procedures or formalistic distancing to shield the poetry from the threat of the reader. A critical acumen operating from within. Letting the forces run openly through the poem, not screening out the contradictory stuff, not sidestepping the social phase cancellations.
The tension between the layers half the point. Dealing w/ it. Riffing, goofing, figuring, addressing, reapplying, and re-developing, The vectors of thought and playfulness. The light improprieties. Puns, rearrangements, cliches turned inside out. Figures of speech turn around.
Satirical suburban landscape as one of several enviornmental objects of address. Development as in the Duncan Doughnuts sense vs poetic development.
"the way to a man's heart is through his sternum"
References to Ayler, SunRa
Jazz voicing in dada mode- like Hans Bennink...
Riff-based Paratactic sequencing with active morphing.
Sweet/smart. Strong when deflating things.
MS is slop ala Mingus.
How much sampling?
"The 'I'm Tiger Woods, Motherfucker!' of indecision"
Dear P- Blog like epistolary prose dropped into the middle. Implying that the poet is doing a similar investigation of Globalization -- Capitalism -- Race from a different angle.
Readers hungry for more should check out My Ange Dickinson.
Playfulness, jokiness and serious engagement. Focus and then letting go of focus. To get the contradictions of life and presentation up front, rather than evade or hide or refuse to have a good time.
Most people are like trees, they are caught between competing sets of counterproductive /destructive forces. Between gypsy moths and being make into paper. Magee understands this.
"this is a fact check
from the girl at the hat check with the hatchet"
People places and things in these poems are constantly becoming each other. As in the ecosystems we are part of. The writer and reader and language and materials and experiences linked. As in ecology, the linkages have to be dealt with one way or another.
Goofy thematic fugue-like development. Ronald Johnson in science of perception mode if he had gone through the poetics of Jackass.
"the rest of the brain is barley"
Partly on nerve, partly on riff energy, partly on schtick, partly genuine interest in who might be listening. With his guard partially down. No transparent formal procedures or formalistic distancing to shield the poetry from the threat of the reader. A critical acumen operating from within. Letting the forces run openly through the poem, not screening out the contradictory stuff, not sidestepping the social phase cancellations.
The tension between the layers half the point. Dealing w/ it. Riffing, goofing, figuring, addressing, reapplying, and re-developing, The vectors of thought and playfulness. The light improprieties. Puns, rearrangements, cliches turned inside out. Figures of speech turn around.
Satirical suburban landscape as one of several enviornmental objects of address. Development as in the Duncan Doughnuts sense vs poetic development.
"the way to a man's heart is through his sternum"
References to Ayler, SunRa
Jazz voicing in dada mode- like Hans Bennink...
Riff-based Paratactic sequencing with active morphing.
Sweet/smart. Strong when deflating things.
MS is slop ala Mingus.
How much sampling?
"The 'I'm Tiger Woods, Motherfucker!' of indecision"
Dear P- Blog like epistolary prose dropped into the middle. Implying that the poet is doing a similar investigation of Globalization -- Capitalism -- Race from a different angle.
Readers hungry for more should check out My Ange Dickinson.
6.02.2004
Ken Jacobs & John Zorn
Nervous Magic Lantern Live Collaborative Performance
Celestial Subway Line 3
Anthology Film Archive, 5/29/04
"AIRY NOTHINGS would be a way of describing the illusion of moving through and about places that aren't there. I can understand not wanting to throw away hard-earned (by somebody) money on such frivolity, like riding a cloud through the heavens solely to gawk in wonder. The Nervous Magic Lantern opens before us an unsuspected cinema, without actors and their fascinating problems (movies are about actors, they allow common people to learn something of the problems of exceptionally beautiful people). While only recently acquiring the Nervous tag, it is a technique that could've been employed before the advent of film, and way before electronics. As soon as light could be concentrated and focused through a lens in a surrounding darkness against a reflective surface, and a shutter could be made to spin, it was at hand. I figure it had to've given evidence of itself during the time of optical toys and experiment but got pushed aside, was skillfully shunned as extraneous to the inventing of cinematic mimesis. Recognition of its potential required a mind primed by Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. A mind also willing to turn its attention away from human strife, hi-tech barbarity, stupidity, venality, needless pain and waste in the service of God or The Nation. This dream world is a deception of another order, modernist deception, stating itself as such in the same way Houdini attacked priestly miracle-makers and spiritualist con-artists by performing tricks and saying so. Now if you as viewer wish to join in and lend substance to the work via your own depth projection, well, that's okay. Let us tangle." - Ken Jacobs
Met Brian and Marianne at Anthology.
Zorn doing a laptop score of some kind. Relaxed unnerving tamboural movements.
The Nervous Magic Lantern projection system does seem like it could have just as easily have been done with candles and a hand crank in the 19th century. The operation and design was intentionally obscured by pieces of cardboard (don't pay an attention to the man behind the cardboard?) Different objects/photos of some kind, including slides covered with colored granules and half-deflated balloons, seem to be placed under a moving projection lens /strobe -- or maybe the objects themselves were moved. The system allowed for the improvisation of different effects -- radial blur, a panning effect, maybe even some kind of stereoscopic effect or simulation.
Most of the material looked like a helicopter-eye view of a barren / alien landscape, like opening shot of The Shining or the planet surface sections of Solaris. The point of view was a disembodied watcher floating over nightmare landscapes, looking for something. Endless variations within the sameness of the surface textures. An alienation effect created by the disembodied viewer pespective, as in the monster-eye view in horror movies, not frightening, but unnearving, since the monster is no longer unknown: we are a spectator watching powerlessly from within it. Seeing this flim is like watching someone else play a video game designed by an evil shaman.
Shifting blurred forms and powerful strobing. Made me think of a Butthole Surfers concert I saw in a small building on the campus of Bard College in 1987 where there were two separate epileptic seizures from the strobes.
The Nervous Magic Lantern strobe is relentless and slightly nausea and headache inducting. Add to that the constant panning and blurring and it becomes mild torture. The darkened theater becomes a dungeon. Constant hallucinatory texture of mineral surfaces. Some kind of suggestible state / hypnotic state induced by the strobe? Seeing things in the mineral surface forms -- faces mostly, and skulls, but also a pair of vice grips? What does that say about me? That I project issues of identity, death, and agency onto what I see? Brian and Marianne later reported also seeing faces.
At one point a 19th century family portrait of some kind was the photo source, and the people became a nightmarish shifting landscape. The surface of human historical record or memory rendered into a morphing lava-like fabric...
Maybe if we worked out our nightmares more in virtual realms we would export them less to other countries...
Nervous Magic Lantern Live Collaborative Performance
Celestial Subway Line 3
Anthology Film Archive, 5/29/04
"AIRY NOTHINGS would be a way of describing the illusion of moving through and about places that aren't there. I can understand not wanting to throw away hard-earned (by somebody) money on such frivolity, like riding a cloud through the heavens solely to gawk in wonder. The Nervous Magic Lantern opens before us an unsuspected cinema, without actors and their fascinating problems (movies are about actors, they allow common people to learn something of the problems of exceptionally beautiful people). While only recently acquiring the Nervous tag, it is a technique that could've been employed before the advent of film, and way before electronics. As soon as light could be concentrated and focused through a lens in a surrounding darkness against a reflective surface, and a shutter could be made to spin, it was at hand. I figure it had to've given evidence of itself during the time of optical toys and experiment but got pushed aside, was skillfully shunned as extraneous to the inventing of cinematic mimesis. Recognition of its potential required a mind primed by Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. A mind also willing to turn its attention away from human strife, hi-tech barbarity, stupidity, venality, needless pain and waste in the service of God or The Nation. This dream world is a deception of another order, modernist deception, stating itself as such in the same way Houdini attacked priestly miracle-makers and spiritualist con-artists by performing tricks and saying so. Now if you as viewer wish to join in and lend substance to the work via your own depth projection, well, that's okay. Let us tangle." - Ken Jacobs
Met Brian and Marianne at Anthology.
Zorn doing a laptop score of some kind. Relaxed unnerving tamboural movements.
The Nervous Magic Lantern projection system does seem like it could have just as easily have been done with candles and a hand crank in the 19th century. The operation and design was intentionally obscured by pieces of cardboard (don't pay an attention to the man behind the cardboard?) Different objects/photos of some kind, including slides covered with colored granules and half-deflated balloons, seem to be placed under a moving projection lens /strobe -- or maybe the objects themselves were moved. The system allowed for the improvisation of different effects -- radial blur, a panning effect, maybe even some kind of stereoscopic effect or simulation.
Most of the material looked like a helicopter-eye view of a barren / alien landscape, like opening shot of The Shining or the planet surface sections of Solaris. The point of view was a disembodied watcher floating over nightmare landscapes, looking for something. Endless variations within the sameness of the surface textures. An alienation effect created by the disembodied viewer pespective, as in the monster-eye view in horror movies, not frightening, but unnearving, since the monster is no longer unknown: we are a spectator watching powerlessly from within it. Seeing this flim is like watching someone else play a video game designed by an evil shaman.
Shifting blurred forms and powerful strobing. Made me think of a Butthole Surfers concert I saw in a small building on the campus of Bard College in 1987 where there were two separate epileptic seizures from the strobes.
The Nervous Magic Lantern strobe is relentless and slightly nausea and headache inducting. Add to that the constant panning and blurring and it becomes mild torture. The darkened theater becomes a dungeon. Constant hallucinatory texture of mineral surfaces. Some kind of suggestible state / hypnotic state induced by the strobe? Seeing things in the mineral surface forms -- faces mostly, and skulls, but also a pair of vice grips? What does that say about me? That I project issues of identity, death, and agency onto what I see? Brian and Marianne later reported also seeing faces.
At one point a 19th century family portrait of some kind was the photo source, and the people became a nightmarish shifting landscape. The surface of human historical record or memory rendered into a morphing lava-like fabric...
Maybe if we worked out our nightmares more in virtual realms we would export them less to other countries...
5.27.2004
5.20.2004
5.19.2004
Peter Gizzi, talk on Jack Spicer. Poet's House 5/6/04
I came in late to this talk as Peter was discussing After Lorca. It occurred to me that having Lorca introduce you is a great deflationary comical rearrangement of Whitman's "stealing" his introduction from a private letter of Emerson's without asking him for permission. Could Spicer be considered a negative or reversed transcendentalist? My mind kept going back to the arena of poetic social manifestation were the poet attempts to associate their work with artistic status figures…. what is this process? What does it reveal?
Gizzi in this talk made a pitch to see Spicer as a traditional poet in the good sense, that is -- keeping basic poetic gestures alive (by morphing them) in one's time and according to the demands one's experiences in the world call for. Great to have Spicer described not as some magically depressed hermeticly private crank, but as a reflection of the larger history happening around him.
Discussion of basic Spicer moves -- puns, degraded sources, etc., leading up to a comparison of Spicer with California funk art and assemblage, and, in particular, Bruce Connor.
Gizzi showed the Connor film Report, which was totally riviting. Repeated (sampled you could say) news images of the Kennedy assassination that never get to the actual moment of violence, but seem to be infinitely approaching it. Against this disorienting permanent deferment of the moment of truth a news voiceover continues uninterrupted, the temporal continuity of public language seeming to flow and change even as historical meaning is frozen. I thought more than once of Sept. 11th, and the nightmarish media repetition than followed.
I felt in the audience a fascinating rift between the older audience members who had lived through the assassination and the younger ones to whom it is all more distanced media and myth. The older man sitting in front of me kept shaking his head and quietly saying, "why…why…" not understanding what this has to do with Spicer or why a filmmaker would do such a thing.
More than once I thought of JG Ballard during the course of this film, and I realized there may be strong connections between Ballard and Spicer… the use of repeated media/myth images and their fetishistic aspects, the deflationary use of this material which also invokes the dynamics of individual fixation that these myth/history/image systems involve.
Talking with Steve Evans afterwards we both agreed that the deflationary power of Spicer's work is one it's most valuable qualities.
The poetic movement not from unknowing to knowing, but from believing to not knowing? Not art that destabilizes myth but art that reveals an unstable reality from beneath a myth, or, one could say, a wish for stability.
I came in late to this talk as Peter was discussing After Lorca. It occurred to me that having Lorca introduce you is a great deflationary comical rearrangement of Whitman's "stealing" his introduction from a private letter of Emerson's without asking him for permission. Could Spicer be considered a negative or reversed transcendentalist? My mind kept going back to the arena of poetic social manifestation were the poet attempts to associate their work with artistic status figures…. what is this process? What does it reveal?
Gizzi in this talk made a pitch to see Spicer as a traditional poet in the good sense, that is -- keeping basic poetic gestures alive (by morphing them) in one's time and according to the demands one's experiences in the world call for. Great to have Spicer described not as some magically depressed hermeticly private crank, but as a reflection of the larger history happening around him.
Discussion of basic Spicer moves -- puns, degraded sources, etc., leading up to a comparison of Spicer with California funk art and assemblage, and, in particular, Bruce Connor.
Gizzi showed the Connor film Report, which was totally riviting. Repeated (sampled you could say) news images of the Kennedy assassination that never get to the actual moment of violence, but seem to be infinitely approaching it. Against this disorienting permanent deferment of the moment of truth a news voiceover continues uninterrupted, the temporal continuity of public language seeming to flow and change even as historical meaning is frozen. I thought more than once of Sept. 11th, and the nightmarish media repetition than followed.
I felt in the audience a fascinating rift between the older audience members who had lived through the assassination and the younger ones to whom it is all more distanced media and myth. The older man sitting in front of me kept shaking his head and quietly saying, "why…why…" not understanding what this has to do with Spicer or why a filmmaker would do such a thing.
More than once I thought of JG Ballard during the course of this film, and I realized there may be strong connections between Ballard and Spicer… the use of repeated media/myth images and their fetishistic aspects, the deflationary use of this material which also invokes the dynamics of individual fixation that these myth/history/image systems involve.
Talking with Steve Evans afterwards we both agreed that the deflationary power of Spicer's work is one it's most valuable qualities.
The poetic movement not from unknowing to knowing, but from believing to not knowing? Not art that destabilizes myth but art that reveals an unstable reality from beneath a myth, or, one could say, a wish for stability.
5.15.2004
It's hard to imagine that the patriotic denial of national guilt is stronger anywhere in the world than in the USA now, esp. relative to the ostensible level freedom of speech we're suppose to have here. And esp. considering that we could just be getting started with this neo-imperialist shit. This is something traditional that happens in all countries with power, because patriotism, along with it's sibling, religion, are the primary ways leaders switch off the critical thought of the population in order to exploit them, and to use them to exploit others. (my thoughts return to the obvious again!) So it's been for 2000 years with empires, but I do think the USA has cornered the market!
Our corporate media broker state apparatus themselves broadcast these picture of war crimes day after day and Bush's approval ratings stay the same. Rumsfeld's defense is basically that war crimes are no big deal, and people should shut up about it -- he should be able to do as he pleases without the interference of "the world" knowing what he's doing. As if we could hide the meaning of our actions from anyone except ourselves!
There must obviously be guilt in the population (of the paralyzing variety not of the "okay now how are we going to make it right" variety), but it goes with an equal helping of denial. Paralyzed /unprocessed guilt and denial, those are two great American tastes that go great together. The current leaders are clearly beyond the reach of guilt feelings -- these people are expressions of narcissistic tendencies so extreme that guilt is no longer a possibility.
Our guilt about the history within the USA, which is about genocide against Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and the cast system and repression of our underclass, all operate here in a strong but deeply sublimated domestic guilt/denial system. The powers of denial here are ten times stronger than the powers of guilt as conscience. In the USA, morality operates as an opinion you have about others, it's not something you would apply to what you actually do, or to what "your country" does.
Americans, on the surface, are infantile in their understanding of what it's leaders are doing and why. We look for images of fathers in a president, trust our government, and we "get mad" at people in other countries when they "don't like us." That's how many Americans think. We're not stupid. This is a tactical suppression of intelligence.
American guilt is a guilt that makes us more violent. We think -- what if somebody tried to do this shit to US? We'd want to kill them and torture them. So then we have to be more violently repressive towards them because we're afraid they would want to kill us as much as we'd want to kill them in the same circumstances. That's how the real white guilt works.
It seems that only in academia is historical guilt allowed to be a topic of conversation for extended periods. Because it is contained there, like a protest march route set by the NYPD is contained. When Goering has his own show on Fox the topic is not going to be historical guilt. "You're just having white guilt" means shut up. It's a reactionary statement. I have to admit, though, that saying "we are all complicit " and just leaving it at is a drag and rings false. If it's not elaborated on it can come off as saying "please watch me wringing my hands."
The guilt incurred through imperial repression of other countries is not quite on the mental radar of Americans yet , though I think we project our domestic guilt onto foreign others. The Abu Ghraib prison pictures are reminiscent of American lynching photography. Think of the treatment of Aber Louima got in jail after being falsely arrested in New York City.
Will these fragmented country/ gulag zones be allowed to flourish? Will they grow? The pictures show a tiny sliver of what's going on over there. They also show just a tiny lighted corner compared to a lot of the things we know about foreign policy/CIA/MI history and what it was done over the past 50. America has been such a quick learner. We were able to learn so much from the Nazis and their innovative ideas about counter-insurgency, and to make sure that that Nazi culture didn't die out, didn't go to waste after WWII.
When Rumsfeld was questioned on the armed services committee was very angry about digital photography, and how easy it is to distribute. He was complaining about this when he was being questioned about why 60 minutes was asked not to show the pictures. This was his main concern.
Funny, I remember all these newspaper articles about the digitizing of photography when it was just starting years ago, how it would mean that no one will be able to believe media or history anymore. Looks like it (combined with networking of computers) is going to have the opposite effect. Information leakage may be a lot harder to contain than the Bush team thought. You can bet they will now redouble their effort to control it now.
Our corporate media broker state apparatus themselves broadcast these picture of war crimes day after day and Bush's approval ratings stay the same. Rumsfeld's defense is basically that war crimes are no big deal, and people should shut up about it -- he should be able to do as he pleases without the interference of "the world" knowing what he's doing. As if we could hide the meaning of our actions from anyone except ourselves!
There must obviously be guilt in the population (of the paralyzing variety not of the "okay now how are we going to make it right" variety), but it goes with an equal helping of denial. Paralyzed /unprocessed guilt and denial, those are two great American tastes that go great together. The current leaders are clearly beyond the reach of guilt feelings -- these people are expressions of narcissistic tendencies so extreme that guilt is no longer a possibility.
Our guilt about the history within the USA, which is about genocide against Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and the cast system and repression of our underclass, all operate here in a strong but deeply sublimated domestic guilt/denial system. The powers of denial here are ten times stronger than the powers of guilt as conscience. In the USA, morality operates as an opinion you have about others, it's not something you would apply to what you actually do, or to what "your country" does.
Americans, on the surface, are infantile in their understanding of what it's leaders are doing and why. We look for images of fathers in a president, trust our government, and we "get mad" at people in other countries when they "don't like us." That's how many Americans think. We're not stupid. This is a tactical suppression of intelligence.
American guilt is a guilt that makes us more violent. We think -- what if somebody tried to do this shit to US? We'd want to kill them and torture them. So then we have to be more violently repressive towards them because we're afraid they would want to kill us as much as we'd want to kill them in the same circumstances. That's how the real white guilt works.
It seems that only in academia is historical guilt allowed to be a topic of conversation for extended periods. Because it is contained there, like a protest march route set by the NYPD is contained. When Goering has his own show on Fox the topic is not going to be historical guilt. "You're just having white guilt" means shut up. It's a reactionary statement. I have to admit, though, that saying "we are all complicit " and just leaving it at is a drag and rings false. If it's not elaborated on it can come off as saying "please watch me wringing my hands."
The guilt incurred through imperial repression of other countries is not quite on the mental radar of Americans yet , though I think we project our domestic guilt onto foreign others. The Abu Ghraib prison pictures are reminiscent of American lynching photography. Think of the treatment of Aber Louima got in jail after being falsely arrested in New York City.
Will these fragmented country/ gulag zones be allowed to flourish? Will they grow? The pictures show a tiny sliver of what's going on over there. They also show just a tiny lighted corner compared to a lot of the things we know about foreign policy/CIA/MI history and what it was done over the past 50. America has been such a quick learner. We were able to learn so much from the Nazis and their innovative ideas about counter-insurgency, and to make sure that that Nazi culture didn't die out, didn't go to waste after WWII.
When Rumsfeld was questioned on the armed services committee was very angry about digital photography, and how easy it is to distribute. He was complaining about this when he was being questioned about why 60 minutes was asked not to show the pictures. This was his main concern.
Funny, I remember all these newspaper articles about the digitizing of photography when it was just starting years ago, how it would mean that no one will be able to believe media or history anymore. Looks like it (combined with networking of computers) is going to have the opposite effect. Information leakage may be a lot harder to contain than the Bush team thought. You can bet they will now redouble their effort to control it now.
5.10.2004
5/1/04 4:30
Deirdre Kovak, Kamau Braithwaite, Bowery Poetry Club
Deirdre Kovak
Strong sound-based orientation. Dense, meticulously controlled phrases and sentences carefully smashed together, operating in a intentionally attenuated spectrum of variation, not unlike Bruce Andrews in these respects.
"love it or leave with it"
Much deadpan humor and riffing off of self-discomfort and social discomfort in a look / look away pattern.
"The lack of siblings has contributed to my lack of emotional growth."
"Smoking is not speech."
It feels as if the negative psychic energies of living on this side of empire are being transformed into something constructive, a persona processing system mowing itself down in a sequence of downwardly curved starts none of which, in and of themselves, are allowed to develop, but which nonetheless build into larger thematic images. Information, energies and structures emanate as this system is pummeled with gobbets of decaying contradictory truths.
"like your hand against the squeamish of history"
"tomorrow is touching itself in public
"heaven is a do-over"
Kamau Braithwaite
The excavation of history from one's present moment is epic poetry is it not?
"it it it is not. It is not enough to be. To be free of the red white and blue."
Drumming lightly on the table. Half sung.
"to be semi-colon, to be semi-colony"
"95% of my people poor. 95% of my people black. 95% of my people dead."
This poetry moves beautifully away from mysticism. The necessary opposite of mystery. The articulation of why we have trouble understanding.
"there is an absence of truth, like the good tooth drawn from the skull"
"out of the Coney Island of our mindless architects"
"this perturbation that does not signal health"
Halfway through this increasingly riveting reading, Braithwaite went into an extemporaneous explanation of the origins of the Limbo dance, that it comes from the torture of the middle passage, the vertical space of the slave ship decks. How during the dances the tourists always bend over forward, the easy way, not understanding. Braithwaite's reading was so patiently developed that his story telling skills snuck up on me at this point in the reading, before I even realized what was happening. The story and improvised explanatory information fused beautifully and powerfully with the overall body of poetry being read. It felt not like an interruption of the poetry, but like the opening of a related dimension.
"to negotiate this passage and rise on the other side,
rise like the sun to the wonderful glow of the drums."
Deirdre Kovak, Kamau Braithwaite, Bowery Poetry Club
Deirdre Kovak
Strong sound-based orientation. Dense, meticulously controlled phrases and sentences carefully smashed together, operating in a intentionally attenuated spectrum of variation, not unlike Bruce Andrews in these respects.
"love it or leave with it"
Much deadpan humor and riffing off of self-discomfort and social discomfort in a look / look away pattern.
"The lack of siblings has contributed to my lack of emotional growth."
"Smoking is not speech."
It feels as if the negative psychic energies of living on this side of empire are being transformed into something constructive, a persona processing system mowing itself down in a sequence of downwardly curved starts none of which, in and of themselves, are allowed to develop, but which nonetheless build into larger thematic images. Information, energies and structures emanate as this system is pummeled with gobbets of decaying contradictory truths.
"like your hand against the squeamish of history"
"tomorrow is touching itself in public
"heaven is a do-over"
Kamau Braithwaite
The excavation of history from one's present moment is epic poetry is it not?
"it it it is not. It is not enough to be. To be free of the red white and blue."
Drumming lightly on the table. Half sung.
"to be semi-colon, to be semi-colony"
"95% of my people poor. 95% of my people black. 95% of my people dead."
This poetry moves beautifully away from mysticism. The necessary opposite of mystery. The articulation of why we have trouble understanding.
"there is an absence of truth, like the good tooth drawn from the skull"
"out of the Coney Island of our mindless architects"
"this perturbation that does not signal health"
Halfway through this increasingly riveting reading, Braithwaite went into an extemporaneous explanation of the origins of the Limbo dance, that it comes from the torture of the middle passage, the vertical space of the slave ship decks. How during the dances the tourists always bend over forward, the easy way, not understanding. Braithwaite's reading was so patiently developed that his story telling skills snuck up on me at this point in the reading, before I even realized what was happening. The story and improvised explanatory information fused beautifully and powerfully with the overall body of poetry being read. It felt not like an interruption of the poetry, but like the opening of a related dimension.
"to negotiate this passage and rise on the other side,
rise like the sun to the wonderful glow of the drums."
5.09.2004
5/1/04, 3:00
Sound Cube, Charles Morrow, The Kitchen.
Short pieces by Olivia Block, Nicola Green, Shelley Hirsch, Martyn Ware/Vincent Clark, Miya Masaoka, Steve McCaffrey, Charles Morrow, Phill Niblock, Michael J. Schumacher, Scanner, Stephen Vitiello, and Pamela Z .
A sound cube is a three-dimensional multi-channel surround sound system, a frame holding eight speakers. There were two separate cubes here, one with enough room for about 15-20 people, another smaller one, with room for 6 or so. With this system, the sounds can be positioned and moved anywhere within the cube, vertically and horizontally. The larger cube made for a more communal listening experience, and the smaller one had sharper sound images, because there was less reflection. The best possible position for clarity of image was for a single listener sitting on the stool in the center of the smaller cube. The tension here between clarity of sound image and space that allowed for social listening was interesting. The social connotations of reverb….
Phil Niblock
Beautiful, thick, undulating drone. Slow microtonal variations in the drone layers. This piece was ending just as I came in, so I didn't get a sense of the how the sound cube and 3-D positioning was interacting with this signature Niblock sound.
Charles Morrow
Not surprisingly, this piece best captured the feeling of object three dimensionality the sound cube is capable of representing. Sawing wood, tapping sounds. Vivid feeling of the substance of wood.
Shelley Hirsch
A kind of sound theater/installation poetry. Back yard sounds, connotations of suburban childhood. Mouth sounds.
Scanner
Also used backyard sounds. Riffing off remembered suburban sound space. Yard/space art/space. containment. Birds / synth tones.
Stephen Vitiello
Mesmerizingly beautiful organ tones mixed with particle movement sounds. Gravel sliding off a metal surface. Tonality and texture mixed, as with many of these pieces. The sound of tarps being pulled over wood. Digital delay.
Miya Masaoka
Sounds recorded from a three-dimensionally mic'd koto, as though the listener were inside a giant koto. Eight microphones on a single instrument. Texture sounds, scrapes and taps. Small-scale timbre sound events and drone.
Steve McCaffrey
A marvelous digital arrangement by Charles Morrow of McCaffrey's poem Cappuccino, in which words are taken from mathematical language and given Italian suffixes. Here his voice has been multi-tracked, spacialized and looped -- a single voice recording made into a percussion orchestra, Varese-like rhythmic structuring and development.
Nicola Green
Layers of laughter panning around. Most interesting when there was a overlapping of several layers of laughter. The decontextualization of laughter from the source of humor created an odd drama. Are we being laughed at? Is the laughter sincere? What made this person laugh? Who are these people? Henry, Katie's parrot, almost always considers laughter as a musical event worthy of a response, even laughter on the television or radio. He can imitate it quite well.
Had to leave before I got a chance to hear all the pieces. Adeena and I bumped into Charles Morrow on the way out, said hi, and jumped in a cab to go hear Deirdre Kovac and Kamau Brathwaite read at the Bowery Poetry Club.
Sound Cube, Charles Morrow, The Kitchen.
Short pieces by Olivia Block, Nicola Green, Shelley Hirsch, Martyn Ware/Vincent Clark, Miya Masaoka, Steve McCaffrey, Charles Morrow, Phill Niblock, Michael J. Schumacher, Scanner, Stephen Vitiello, and Pamela Z .
A sound cube is a three-dimensional multi-channel surround sound system, a frame holding eight speakers. There were two separate cubes here, one with enough room for about 15-20 people, another smaller one, with room for 6 or so. With this system, the sounds can be positioned and moved anywhere within the cube, vertically and horizontally. The larger cube made for a more communal listening experience, and the smaller one had sharper sound images, because there was less reflection. The best possible position for clarity of image was for a single listener sitting on the stool in the center of the smaller cube. The tension here between clarity of sound image and space that allowed for social listening was interesting. The social connotations of reverb….
Phil Niblock
Beautiful, thick, undulating drone. Slow microtonal variations in the drone layers. This piece was ending just as I came in, so I didn't get a sense of the how the sound cube and 3-D positioning was interacting with this signature Niblock sound.
Charles Morrow
Not surprisingly, this piece best captured the feeling of object three dimensionality the sound cube is capable of representing. Sawing wood, tapping sounds. Vivid feeling of the substance of wood.
Shelley Hirsch
A kind of sound theater/installation poetry. Back yard sounds, connotations of suburban childhood. Mouth sounds.
Scanner
Also used backyard sounds. Riffing off remembered suburban sound space. Yard/space art/space. containment. Birds / synth tones.
Stephen Vitiello
Mesmerizingly beautiful organ tones mixed with particle movement sounds. Gravel sliding off a metal surface. Tonality and texture mixed, as with many of these pieces. The sound of tarps being pulled over wood. Digital delay.
Miya Masaoka
Sounds recorded from a three-dimensionally mic'd koto, as though the listener were inside a giant koto. Eight microphones on a single instrument. Texture sounds, scrapes and taps. Small-scale timbre sound events and drone.
Steve McCaffrey
A marvelous digital arrangement by Charles Morrow of McCaffrey's poem Cappuccino, in which words are taken from mathematical language and given Italian suffixes. Here his voice has been multi-tracked, spacialized and looped -- a single voice recording made into a percussion orchestra, Varese-like rhythmic structuring and development.
Nicola Green
Layers of laughter panning around. Most interesting when there was a overlapping of several layers of laughter. The decontextualization of laughter from the source of humor created an odd drama. Are we being laughed at? Is the laughter sincere? What made this person laugh? Who are these people? Henry, Katie's parrot, almost always considers laughter as a musical event worthy of a response, even laughter on the television or radio. He can imitate it quite well.
Had to leave before I got a chance to hear all the pieces. Adeena and I bumped into Charles Morrow on the way out, said hi, and jumped in a cab to go hear Deirdre Kovac and Kamau Brathwaite read at the Bowery Poetry Club.
5.08.2004
Breeze, John Latta
Themes and thoughts in a connective tissue of images. Closely controlled almost formal feel. Frank O'Hara / Robert Duncan echos.
Latta gives equal importance to following perceptions and to following the shapes of the poem's construction and associative turns, even when these elements come into conflict.
"rhythm, unavoidable, makes a ratio"
A few separate modes at work here, I prefer the lighter poems that juggle particulars, rather than the ones that come to conclusions.
Interestingly uncomfortable and distinctly crafted rapture-textures.
At moments the poems push into an almost mystical over-expansiveness as a way of resolving tensions, just when I'm wanting him to go deeper into the tensions....
"lines of distress and conjecture"
Themes and thoughts in a connective tissue of images. Closely controlled almost formal feel. Frank O'Hara / Robert Duncan echos.
Latta gives equal importance to following perceptions and to following the shapes of the poem's construction and associative turns, even when these elements come into conflict.
"rhythm, unavoidable, makes a ratio"
A few separate modes at work here, I prefer the lighter poems that juggle particulars, rather than the ones that come to conclusions.
Interestingly uncomfortable and distinctly crafted rapture-textures.
At moments the poems push into an almost mystical over-expansiveness as a way of resolving tensions, just when I'm wanting him to go deeper into the tensions....
"lines of distress and conjecture"
4.29.2004
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?
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?
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