A Selection of Work from David Wolach

Xpoetics is pleased to present a selection of work from the writer David Wolach.








**from Hospitalogy

**excerpt of "your nerve center taxonomy," from Occultations

**{eulogy for lyric} from Prefab Eulogies

**from Prefab Eulogies


David (Michael) Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, & new media at The Evergreen State College, and visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking. Prior to teaching, for seven years Wolach was a union organizer with the United Auto Workers, and served as consultant for the AFL-CIO. His most recent books are Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVOX, forth. 2009), Occultations (Black Radish Books, forth. 2010), Hospitalogy (Scantily Clad Press, forth. 2009), Acts of Art/Works of Violence (SSLA/Univ. of Sydney, forth. 2010), The Cutting Room: Recovery Project Fairy Tales (Differentia Press, forth. 2010), and book alter (ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). Wolach’s poetry has appeared most recently in Dusie, 5_Trope, No Tell Motel, Ekleksographia: An Imprint of Ahadada Books (Amy King ed.), Little Red Leaves, Venereal Kittens, and Bird Dog. Often performative & employing multiple media, Wolach’s work has been performed or will be performed soon at venues such as Buffalo Poetics Series, The American Cybernetics Conference, The Stain of Poetry Series, The Tangent Reading Series (The Econovergence Conference), The Spare Room Reading Series, and PRESS Literary Conference. Wolach is also the editor of the journal and press, Wheelhouse. http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com



Poetics Statement (power point)

· Most of the poems in Prefab Eulogies: Nothings Houses are improvisations recorded into a microphone while performing some other activity. The work was then shaped onto the page thereafter. All improvisations are inter-poetical responses to work, sometimes individual lines, sometimes whole books, that, just prior to improvising, I’d worked through.

· Where, here, poetry is assumed to have use value beyond itself.

· Where the poems I’m in conversation with share the common assumption that artistic practices are contiguous with sociopolitical intervention.

· At some point I began to think of poetic practice as divorced from “poetry” often construed. I began thinking of most contemporary poetry as a power point presentation.

· Of, on the one hand, derivative structures left wanting, where de Certeau’s “poaching” has been stripped of its politics & become eulogy of the spectacle, forms empty

· Of faith in their impetus, dissensus (some “flarf” e.g.). And on the other hand

· Of occulted poetic practices.

· Of militant sound & site investigations (CA Conrad’s PACE comes to mind, as does work that’s come out of NONSITE COLECTIVE).

· The power point presentation 1) implies but does not ultimately signify (it admits of, and revels in, its emptiness, or hopes to con us into a system of belief external to the subject) and 2) is the evidence of prior activity.

· Prefab Eulogies is presented as poaching in the extreme, evidence of a prior integrated activity, some spontaneous movement between the poem and. So it manufactures its own target of critique.

· As I become less mobile thru systemic illness, the written becomes means & necessity: how can I “perform” the written text in ways that re-claim or re-locate this mobility (having in my work thought of the written as means—“score” or “shaped data”—rather than ends in an artistic practice, one that’s involved site-specific movement & gesture)? Occultations preoccupies itself with this question, a question that ultimately widens into how to matter.

· Hospitalogy is a book of poems written in hospitals or hotels (switching between the two when traveling long distances). Voice as sublation, the multiple subject in this setting in constant constrained mode of confession becomes my fixation. It occurs to me that the doctor-patient discourse is not diagnostic, nor can it be in our current healthcare system—it is confessional. Of what, & who is confessing turns into the exploration that are these poems. The letter-form as evidence of a wandering thru (derive of sorts) the hospital complex make up the rest of the book.

· And wandering, poaching, confessing, statistically fonding - all these procedures born of the urge for the page to move (in both senses), to be a form of protest, to re-narrate & witness occulted structures. This narrative comes under inter-textual, polyvocal scrutiny in Occultations. This book is a sustained conversation with the poetics of the body, with disablement, with the graven in relation to catastrophe. So, it’s the most optimistic, or maybe the fullest, of the three.

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