11.30.2005
11.28.2005
11.20.2005
Friday
from Packet One -- 1st Hybrid Poetry Class, Poetry Project.
Bernadette Mayer from Midwinter Day.
"The Three Little Pigs ... Two of them got eaten by the wolf because they built their houses out of flimsy materials. The third pig who has a brick house which he got by posing as a cripple, winds up boiling the wolf alive and eating him. Admiral Byrd was the first person to spend the winter alone at the South Pole. For a while he did well and wrote a lot of speculations on the nature of the universe, then the stove in his hut began to poison him with fumes."
Rumi, A. J Arberry Trans.
"And even if you turn your back to the water, the water runs hurrying before you. How shall the shadow save its soul from the sun, seeing that its soul is in the hand of the sun? If the shadow stretches forth it's neck, the sun's face that instant is shrouded. Brave Sun, in which this sun in heaven quivers with fear like quicksilver!"
Charles Reznikoff, Testimony
The man at the wheel turned. / with his flashlight: / everybody was turning and pushing against each other; / those near the window / were trying to break them, / in spite of the wire mesh."
New York Times Nightly Television Schedule listings:
"Fire In the Sky (1993) Arizona lumberjack abducted by aliens. Polite to the point of boredom."
"Convoy (1978) Truckers in trouble. Churning but vapid."
from Packet One -- 1st Hybrid Poetry Class, Poetry Project.
Bernadette Mayer from Midwinter Day.
"The Three Little Pigs ... Two of them got eaten by the wolf because they built their houses out of flimsy materials. The third pig who has a brick house which he got by posing as a cripple, winds up boiling the wolf alive and eating him. Admiral Byrd was the first person to spend the winter alone at the South Pole. For a while he did well and wrote a lot of speculations on the nature of the universe, then the stove in his hut began to poison him with fumes."
Rumi, A. J Arberry Trans.
"And even if you turn your back to the water, the water runs hurrying before you. How shall the shadow save its soul from the sun, seeing that its soul is in the hand of the sun? If the shadow stretches forth it's neck, the sun's face that instant is shrouded. Brave Sun, in which this sun in heaven quivers with fear like quicksilver!"
Charles Reznikoff, Testimony
The man at the wheel turned. / with his flashlight: / everybody was turning and pushing against each other; / those near the window / were trying to break them, / in spite of the wire mesh."
New York Times Nightly Television Schedule listings:
"Fire In the Sky (1993) Arizona lumberjack abducted by aliens. Polite to the point of boredom."
"Convoy (1978) Truckers in trouble. Churning but vapid."
Thursday
Sally Silvers: Puppy Skills, PS 122.
25th Anniversary string of pieces including a remixed series of solos choreographed for group dancers. The first piece had a playful vibe, with three of the more seasoned dancers engaged in humorous activities with wearable sculpture and window door/shadow prop. Family dynamics? Sisters? Friends? Maturity? This was followed by the most grueling piece (in a good way) involving the youngest dancers - complex athletic group movement like a Benetton commercial that has been transformed into a extended gender role nightmare from which you cannot escape. A nightmare of youth?
The dancers were all-female, and the complex element in Silver's work of repurposing gender stereotype material was interestingly splayed across the evening in different ways. Every piece had different manifestations of this mixing with her other major dynamic: a drama of characters interacting, stepping in and out of the stage of power, with the relationships changing, and power dynamics between individuals and groups of players constantly shifting positions. The virtuosity of the choreography and dancers somehow ups the ante on the feeling of conflicts in these social themes, which is opposite of what I would normally expect.
Excellent sound collage by Bruce Andrews with Michael Schumacher -- clear, decisive texture switching maintaining intensity without distracting attention away from the dance. I was struck by the similarity in thematics between Silvers' dance and Bruce Andrews' poetry, that they both deal unreservedly with negative social emotions/perception/dynamics and that in both cases these things are transformed into energized dramas.
Sally Silvers: Puppy Skills, PS 122.
25th Anniversary string of pieces including a remixed series of solos choreographed for group dancers. The first piece had a playful vibe, with three of the more seasoned dancers engaged in humorous activities with wearable sculpture and window door/shadow prop. Family dynamics? Sisters? Friends? Maturity? This was followed by the most grueling piece (in a good way) involving the youngest dancers - complex athletic group movement like a Benetton commercial that has been transformed into a extended gender role nightmare from which you cannot escape. A nightmare of youth?
The dancers were all-female, and the complex element in Silver's work of repurposing gender stereotype material was interestingly splayed across the evening in different ways. Every piece had different manifestations of this mixing with her other major dynamic: a drama of characters interacting, stepping in and out of the stage of power, with the relationships changing, and power dynamics between individuals and groups of players constantly shifting positions. The virtuosity of the choreography and dancers somehow ups the ante on the feeling of conflicts in these social themes, which is opposite of what I would normally expect.
Excellent sound collage by Bruce Andrews with Michael Schumacher -- clear, decisive texture switching maintaining intensity without distracting attention away from the dance. I was struck by the similarity in thematics between Silvers' dance and Bruce Andrews' poetry, that they both deal unreservedly with negative social emotions/perception/dynamics and that in both cases these things are transformed into energized dramas.
11.15.2005
11.13.2005
Last night I heard Peter Cully read a long, far-ranging, swinging mid-tempo poem-sequence in Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn's living room. Peter delivered the poem from a throne-like wooden chair, surrounded on all sides by cake-eating, wine drinking poetic revelers. His vocal intonations mixed nicely with sound of the airplanes coming in through the window. The poem included a gentle rebuke directed toward Albert Ayler: "It is about me."
11.11.2005
11.09.2005
11.04.2005
If there is a lump in the throat feeling gotten from this poem, it is the same kind of feeling gotten from a phone company TV commercial. Other people might value that feeling, but I don't -- it's just business exploiting easy emotional triggering. Can you say certain phone company commercials are well crafted? Sure, you could say the well crafted phone company commercial is successful when it gives you that lump in the throat feeling AND leads you to pay money for the service. Is that un-impeachable? If you're a formalist or have formalist tendencies, I suppose you have to give props to any piece of art that reproduces an agreed-upon template. In this country, tacky, lazy, dishonest workshop treacle is a dominant template. So is smooth jazz. This poem is at a level of like, Special EFX, that is, at or slightly below Kenny G.
11.03.2005
Kasey does an extreme sports version of the standard debate team trick of exaggerating and warping what someone has said in order to score points in opposition to a stance not actually being made. It's not that he's intentionally being dishonest, it's that he wants to get his argument over so badly that he's not responding to what I'm actually saying. He's projecting onto to my statements the position he wants to debate against. For instance he says:
"Drew seems to mean something other by this than simply that he does not appreciate the poem: he implies a quantifiable mechanical deficit on the poet's part (in another comment, he uses the word "ineptitude"). That is, he implies that Oliver literally doesn't have basis syntactic competence, that her metaphors are literally incoherent. Maybe he doesn't really mean this, but if that is the case, this is a perfect example of the way in which dissatisfaction with a poem's general raison d'etre can slide into a hazy use of craft-based terminology."
Clearly he knows he's on shaky ground here. In fact, I went to some lengths to make it clear that I was providing a subjective response to the poem. "So what am I feeling when I read this?" may have been a clue to this. "I see it as a kind of" usually indicates that the speaker is framing their position as a subjective opinion, not the statement of a provable, objective fact. Ditto "The poem seems like total BS to me." Later he backs off the obviously unworkable direct proposition that I'm positing my perceptions and opinions as objective facts, and he substitutes the weaker and vaguer point that some of my vocabulary was enough to imply this. Then we get this:
"First, he invokes the specter of bad craft by denouncing Oliver's supposedly awkward syntax and inert metaphors. Then he says that these defects are not actually indices of Oliver's craft ineptitude at all, but rather that her "attitude toward reality" and toward her own "role" as poet have somehow "resulted" in bad craft. But then isn't her craft the problem on one level after all?"
These solipsistic rhetorical switchbacks don't really address my point so it's hard to comment on them.
"My suspicion here is not that Drew has failed to give coherent expression to his idea, but--more radically--that there is no idea there to give expression to. When we dislike what we believe a poet or poem stands for, too often we convince ourselves that on that basis alone we may assert that the poet's "craft" is lacking."
There's no idea here for Kasey because, at this point, he's finally wriggled free from what I was saying and is peaking on the trip he had set out for from the beginning: this bit of preaching.
"Drew seems to mean something other by this than simply that he does not appreciate the poem: he implies a quantifiable mechanical deficit on the poet's part (in another comment, he uses the word "ineptitude"). That is, he implies that Oliver literally doesn't have basis syntactic competence, that her metaphors are literally incoherent. Maybe he doesn't really mean this, but if that is the case, this is a perfect example of the way in which dissatisfaction with a poem's general raison d'etre can slide into a hazy use of craft-based terminology."
Clearly he knows he's on shaky ground here. In fact, I went to some lengths to make it clear that I was providing a subjective response to the poem. "So what am I feeling when I read this?" may have been a clue to this. "I see it as a kind of" usually indicates that the speaker is framing their position as a subjective opinion, not the statement of a provable, objective fact. Ditto "The poem seems like total BS to me." Later he backs off the obviously unworkable direct proposition that I'm positing my perceptions and opinions as objective facts, and he substitutes the weaker and vaguer point that some of my vocabulary was enough to imply this. Then we get this:
"First, he invokes the specter of bad craft by denouncing Oliver's supposedly awkward syntax and inert metaphors. Then he says that these defects are not actually indices of Oliver's craft ineptitude at all, but rather that her "attitude toward reality" and toward her own "role" as poet have somehow "resulted" in bad craft. But then isn't her craft the problem on one level after all?"
These solipsistic rhetorical switchbacks don't really address my point so it's hard to comment on them.
"My suspicion here is not that Drew has failed to give coherent expression to his idea, but--more radically--that there is no idea there to give expression to. When we dislike what we believe a poet or poem stands for, too often we convince ourselves that on that basis alone we may assert that the poet's "craft" is lacking."
There's no idea here for Kasey because, at this point, he's finally wriggled free from what I was saying and is peaking on the trip he had set out for from the beginning: this bit of preaching.
10.30.2005
Ange Mlinko and Richard Hell,
St. Mark's Poetry Project, 10.26.05
Before the reading, I was struck by the beautiful crepuscular light of Soho -- the gigantic, uncanny face of Marvin Gaye hovering above Houston St. on a billboard.
Ange Mlinko
The strongest reading I've heard Ange give -- "transformation vs. encryption" -- family and memory -- Duchamp's Etant Donnes in the Philly art museum -- reacting with anger to the piece -- that the figure looked to her like a crime victim -- trying to remember a nightmare -- "an imagination which produces folklore and science alike." -- "Orpheus near store front"
Richard Hell
Hell started with twenty minutes of extemporaneous stories about being one of a couple of "knuckleheaded" punk kids hanging around the periphery of the 1970s St. Mark's poetry scene -- he followed this up with forty-five minutes of amateurish, sloppy, tedious fiction.
St. Mark's Poetry Project, 10.26.05
Before the reading, I was struck by the beautiful crepuscular light of Soho -- the gigantic, uncanny face of Marvin Gaye hovering above Houston St. on a billboard.
Ange Mlinko
The strongest reading I've heard Ange give -- "transformation vs. encryption" -- family and memory -- Duchamp's Etant Donnes in the Philly art museum -- reacting with anger to the piece -- that the figure looked to her like a crime victim -- trying to remember a nightmare -- "an imagination which produces folklore and science alike." -- "Orpheus near store front"
Richard Hell
Hell started with twenty minutes of extemporaneous stories about being one of a couple of "knuckleheaded" punk kids hanging around the periphery of the 1970s St. Mark's poetry scene -- he followed this up with forty-five minutes of amateurish, sloppy, tedious fiction.
10.27.2005
Dreamt that Jordan Davis and I were playing a game of chess, and in the first series of moves, all of our major pieces were mutually destroyed, leaving only pawns, kings and queens.
10.25.2005
Steve identifies the possibility of a new prose genre based on a the script of I Walked With a Zombie.
10.21.2005
My favorite moment of Juliana Spahr's reading at St. Mark's was a lovely, compelling list piece using all manner of species native to the area of Ohio where she grew up. These things were plugged into set phrases like "I let the (raccoon) into my heart, and "(crabapple), don't add to heartache." This localized, highly diffuse environmental information about Ohio (and really much of the northeast US) included poisons as well, "I let the (chloride) into my heart."
Another set phrase was "I didn't even say goodbye to (pumpkin)," where the implication is that a childhood connection to natural environment is gradually and unconsciously replaced by an adult social and sexual environment. The piece would almost fit into Technicians of the Sacred.
She introduced the poems as "sappy." This work did activate a simple, and, in a way, traditional mechanism of sentiment -- feelings associated with connection to the natural environment, but not at all of sentimentality -- displacing actual feelings with formalized, strategic clichés of feeling based on a projection of audience expectation. The poem was a kind of retrospective coming of age poem and environmental protest piece.
Another set phrase was "I didn't even say goodbye to (pumpkin)," where the implication is that a childhood connection to natural environment is gradually and unconsciously replaced by an adult social and sexual environment. The piece would almost fit into Technicians of the Sacred.
She introduced the poems as "sappy." This work did activate a simple, and, in a way, traditional mechanism of sentiment -- feelings associated with connection to the natural environment, but not at all of sentimentality -- displacing actual feelings with formalized, strategic clichés of feeling based on a projection of audience expectation. The poem was a kind of retrospective coming of age poem and environmental protest piece.
10.20.2005
Jennifer Moxley, Often Capital, Flood Editions, 2005
Two early serial poems.
The First Division of Labour:
Themes of partnership / work / love (and estrangement)
"desire returned as topiary"
The poem proceeds though an assembly of vocabulary and detail from a text we’re not necessarily privy to, transforming it, but without rorschaching the material, without rendering it’s interpretive horizon open-ended.
"The minor, graffiti / in / Atlantis"
Enlightenment Evidence:
Excess creativity in humans was possibly evolved as a result of sexual selection?
"Let sweetness be the creator of moments, building revolution / one kissing at a time."
The poet/speaker of this dramatic monologue associates her love life w/ a famous historical character and imbues this dramatic framework with political grandeur. Not a historical take on writing as straight documentary, but using history as cognitive reverb setting for one’s immediate situation. Something both Olson and Creeley do.
"the paramour trades beauty for silence"
Attachment to historical figures and amorous attachment. The problems of attachment -- Sorting through the significance of attachment through the filter of another text/aura -- sorting/attachment/association.
Two early serial poems.
The First Division of Labour:
Themes of partnership / work / love (and estrangement)
"desire returned as topiary"
The poem proceeds though an assembly of vocabulary and detail from a text we’re not necessarily privy to, transforming it, but without rorschaching the material, without rendering it’s interpretive horizon open-ended.
"The minor, graffiti / in / Atlantis"
Enlightenment Evidence:
Excess creativity in humans was possibly evolved as a result of sexual selection?
"Let sweetness be the creator of moments, building revolution / one kissing at a time."
The poet/speaker of this dramatic monologue associates her love life w/ a famous historical character and imbues this dramatic framework with political grandeur. Not a historical take on writing as straight documentary, but using history as cognitive reverb setting for one’s immediate situation. Something both Olson and Creeley do.
"the paramour trades beauty for silence"
Attachment to historical figures and amorous attachment. The problems of attachment -- Sorting through the significance of attachment through the filter of another text/aura -- sorting/attachment/association.
10.19.2005
10.17.2005
It finally stopped raining after a straight week of downpour. I thought I might never see sunlight again.
The mysterious repaving of the East Village continues with the top layer of many streets ripped up and left that way. The dust from the uprooted asphalt gets kicked up by the recent wind, making Ave. B look like the old west.
The mysterious repaving of the East Village continues with the top layer of many streets ripped up and left that way. The dust from the uprooted asphalt gets kicked up by the recent wind, making Ave. B look like the old west.
10.16.2005
The artist must have wanted this footage to be about the surveillance cameras, but the compelling thing about this fox loose in the National Portrait Gallery in London is that the fox is sleeping overnight in the museum. Looks like he found himself a comfy chair.
10.09.2005
Anselm Berrigan and Marianne Shaneen, Bowery Poetry Club, 10.8.05
Marianne Shaneen
Funny, information-rich poetry fused with a poetics of film.
She started with a sequence focused on, and wildly riffing off of, dolphins. Specifically the history of American... uh, use of Dolphins in covert operations. It was sloppy in a good way, that is it was Charles Mingus sloppy: with a relaxed open gangliness capable of accommodating a large amount of elements, all of which were allowed to act with a certain independence, while maintaining an upbeat overall forward momentum.
"The CIA was concerned about a looming 'Dolphin gap' with the Soviets."
"Wealth is a form of violence."
The second series was organized around themes of oil / petroleum, ranging over the politics of oil production, inescapable plastic based objects/ commodities, body fat, flensing boots etc.
We also heard about "cans of liquefied ravens and hawks" and "nostalgia for dinner table alienation"
The delivery was sometimes a little stumbling. With poetry this good, I couldn't help but think Marrianne should read through the work once or twice before getting on stage with it.
Language stretched across a historical, filmic membrane.
"Carl Marx stars as the Lone Ranger."
Anselm Berrigan
"regurgitation means birdie love"
The lines have a unique consistency and forward momentum. Almost every line has a high tensile strength, and therefore, the feeling of a certain weight, but the overall tempo and pacing moves with the kind effortless momentum that is normal accessed though a much lighter line strength.
"I know the bottled water isn't fooling anyone."
Beautifully interdependent language play and full-on subjective personal responsiveness embracing it's own ambiguities. This is as information-rich as Marrianne's poetry, but in a much differnt way, or using a different take on drama.
"Fear of looking normal but in fact being a wack-job"
Graceful, sinuous riff-switching between perception and declaration.
Marianne Shaneen
Funny, information-rich poetry fused with a poetics of film.
She started with a sequence focused on, and wildly riffing off of, dolphins. Specifically the history of American... uh, use of Dolphins in covert operations. It was sloppy in a good way, that is it was Charles Mingus sloppy: with a relaxed open gangliness capable of accommodating a large amount of elements, all of which were allowed to act with a certain independence, while maintaining an upbeat overall forward momentum.
"The CIA was concerned about a looming 'Dolphin gap' with the Soviets."
"Wealth is a form of violence."
The second series was organized around themes of oil / petroleum, ranging over the politics of oil production, inescapable plastic based objects/ commodities, body fat, flensing boots etc.
We also heard about "cans of liquefied ravens and hawks" and "nostalgia for dinner table alienation"
The delivery was sometimes a little stumbling. With poetry this good, I couldn't help but think Marrianne should read through the work once or twice before getting on stage with it.
Language stretched across a historical, filmic membrane.
"Carl Marx stars as the Lone Ranger."
Anselm Berrigan
"regurgitation means birdie love"
The lines have a unique consistency and forward momentum. Almost every line has a high tensile strength, and therefore, the feeling of a certain weight, but the overall tempo and pacing moves with the kind effortless momentum that is normal accessed though a much lighter line strength.
"I know the bottled water isn't fooling anyone."
Beautifully interdependent language play and full-on subjective personal responsiveness embracing it's own ambiguities. This is as information-rich as Marrianne's poetry, but in a much differnt way, or using a different take on drama.
"Fear of looking normal but in fact being a wack-job"
Graceful, sinuous riff-switching between perception and declaration.
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