X Poetics

Poets Theater at SPT: Evening One

2012-01-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

Small Press Traffic held its annual Poets Theater fête in a new location at Counterpulse, a truly professional and fabulous experimental performance space on Market near 9th Street. On Sunday afternoon, the theater was packed to the rafters, all seats taken and people on the floor. The event started fashionably late as Samantha Giles, Sara Wintz, Lauren Shufran and Camille Roy, all SPT board members, performed their introduction to the evening as a mock meeting.

Samantha Giles and Michael Cross

Then Paul Ebenkamp's "You Have to Take Care of My Work Together" emerged as the afternoon's curtain-raiser, with a number of audience members calling out lines in the dark: "My kid could have done this"; "Could my kid have done this?"; "Did I do this?" "Did I have my kid do this?" etc.

Next up Bob Glück and Jocelyn Saidenberg's "Precious Princess, or, Pig Speak" included David Brazil as Sleeping Beauty who has lost her head, but wears a finger crown; and Yedda Morrison was a sock monkey, Brandon Brown, Balso the Knight, and Michelle Ty as the longed for Precious Princess who emerges out of Sleeping Beauty's freshly laid giant pink egg. (Jocelyn tells me that both this exquisite pink egg and Sleeping Beauty's finger were crafted by Bob Glück.) This Precious Princess turns out to be a Precious Pig who wants to roll in the eternal mud and forge a kind of pigology at the intersection of poetry and philosophy. Silly and fun, this play had a kind of tea flower at the center. I've seen pictures of them, those balls in hot water in a clear tea pot; they bloom and look like some underwater anemone.

David Brazil, a departing Brandon Brown, and Paul Ebenkamp

Here are some excerpts:

Balso: Sleeping Beauty, are you going to have a beautiful baby?

Sleeping Beauty: Yes, yes. I am going to have a precious princess. I am going to call her Precious Princess. She is going to be my precious beautiful baby.

Balso: Precious Princess? That’s a lot of p’s.

Sleeping Beauty: Oh, Oh, Oh, I think I am having my baby right now—here she comes! I can feel her moving inside of me. She is coming out, here she comes!

(Sleeping Beauty lifts up the egg.)

Balso: Wow, Sleeping Beauty. I have never seen such a big egg. You may not have a head, but you have a big pink egg to hatch.

Sleeping Beauty: Now we have to wait for my egg to crack. I am so excited! My precious princess is in my egg!

************
Precious Pig: If you are Balso the Knight, where is your nest?

Sleeping Beauty: PIG child, where DO all your questions come from?

Precious Pig: My pink precious pig pate possibly.

Balso: Your pretty piggy piercing porcine patter pleasing platoons of paparazzi?

Monkey: So says simpering saccharine suppurating soullessly slushy susurrating simpletons!

Sleeping Beauty (indignant): Easy for YOU to say!

Precious Pig: Since I was born with a head, let’s begin my education.

Balso: Oh, er, where to start?

Precious Pig: Philosophy!

Balso: The origins of meaning, of space and time. We can call it, Pigology.

Sleeping Beauty: No, no, Precious Pig, I want you to grow up to fan yourself, wear my 12,000 hats, and put your napkin in your lap.

Precious Pig: Royal Mother, I want to learn about caves and shadows, but more than that, I want to roll in the eternal mud.

Sleeping Beauty: You mean poetry? Let’s have an elegant salon. Does anyone have a potted palm? There’s nothing like a potted palm for culture.

**********
from the close of the play, spoken by the Sock Monkey:

You think YOU’VE written a play! You think YOU’RE in a play! You think YOU are YOU!!!! I have written, directed and starred in the movie version, play version, novel version, opera version, torch song version--you name it! I invented plays--and Pigology, before there were even pigs or even lologies. Jeez. I am all versions, my middle name is VARIANCE. Monkey Variarum Monkey, to be precisely Latinate. In Monkey where Monkeys make more Monkey and nothing more, Trippy! The critics made a big fuss when I starred in Titus Monkonicus, and when I was shot out of a cannon in Monkeys on Parade. (He speaks in Sleeping Beauty’s voice.) “This is the very limit of anything that we ever saw or wanted to see or even could imagine.” (sings) Monkeys, on Parade! Talking ‘bout Monkeys on Parade. Hand to hand combat, death and desire, we all just want to be shot out of a cannon by one of our own kind. That is, I created the universe for me! I AM the expanding logic of the Empire, but take it from me, Sleeping Beauty, I am also the ambiguity that rules the depths.

Yedda Morrison

In "The Morton Salt Girl Monologue: NaCl and the Meaning of Her Mark," Wendy Kramer, clad in a yellow slip of a dress and yellow wig, wore white tights and occasionally took up her umbrella as she shared the stage with projections of her collages based on the Morton Salt girl. This piece was astonishing. "It is quiet here under the weather" began Kramer. I loved how Wendy's passion for collage and archival sleuthing met performance in her exploration of how "my mineral morphs into meaning." Quiet and stark with its reference to "dry-eyed tears of industry," Kramer's piece hung in the air, a vibrato in the midst of so much raucousness.

You can see Wendy's collages at her blog.

Here are some excerpts from "The Morton Salt Girl":

The water draws down, the salt falls away like breadcrumbs behind. “When it rains it pours.”

[Rain crescendos a little. MSG steps out, left foot first, and walks to music stand. She faces front, taking
a 1914-girl stance, with both feet forward. Rain dies down and stops.]

There is a self-help book that says, “Where there is loss, there will be sadness, and where there is
sadness there will be tears.” The girl might add: There will be salt in those tears, and anti-caking
compounds to keep the cubic crystals flowing.

.......
and the play closes with:

MSG [turning back to the audience]: They will tell you that the salt is raked from desert beds, or
vacuum evaporated and panned from soaking seas, or mined as rock from the earth-crust; but it comes
from me, as I eke out this living. The organ pressure towards import hurts-- natron preserved the
ancient Egyptian dead; sodium chloride intimates our vitals.

From a negative adage “It never rains but it pours” to a positive advertisement for housekeep
manufacture (you've heard it), my mineral morphs into meaning. Cation plus anion minus frustration
with the present interrupted by the past... eyes downcast... abstracted, pensive, forensic...I look at you, I
look askance...I seek my solution.

[Rain resumes quietly. Screen projects 1968 salt girl in shadow profile with NaCl molecule(image 4).
Exit MSG. Pause 3 seconds. Screen goes blank.]

Wendy Kramer as The Morton Salt Girl

Ronald Palmer, Cynthia Sailers, and Stephanie Young's "Utopia and Other Drugs: Tale of a Pharma-whore," was directed by Brent Cunningham and featured Young as a patient, Palmer as a drug company rep and Kelsa Trom as a therapist. Everyone is looking for an eternal hard-on in this play and the orgasms never stop coming while Jean Genet, Judith Butler and others drop by.

Lindsey Boldt and Steve Orth's "Dating by Consensus" rounded out the first half of the evening. In this witty and humorous play, Boldt and Orth are on a first date, but this date proceeds according to consensus, as if the two were at an Occupy General Assembly meeting: there is an agenda, hand signals, and a third-party arbitrator who also takes notes. Even the waiter has to wait his turn to speak. Boldt's character professes her solidarity with the waiter because "I worked in a coffee shop for six months before going to Sarah Lawrence."

"Dating by Consensus" Steve Orth, Jennifer Manzano & Lindsey Boldt

You can watch Andrew Kenower's video of "Dating by Consensus" here:

I hated to leave at Intermission, but had to. I am willing to bet the second half of the evening was just a satisfying!

Here's the full line-up and the promise for next Sunday:
+Idioterne by Joseph Kaplan and directed by Zach Tuck

+Time’s Machinery; or the Stopwatch written and directed by Brent Cunningham
+Theater (a Thousand Plateaus) written by Kieran Daly and directed by Sara Wintz
+Dating by Consensus written and directed by Lindsey Boldt and Steve Orth
+ You Have to Take Care of My Work Together written and directed by Paul Ebenkamp
+Precious Princess or PIG Speak written and directed by Bob Gluck and Jocelyn Saidenberg
+Utopia and Other Drugs written by Ronald Palmer, Cynthia Sailers and Stephanie Young and directed by Brent Cunningham
+Barber Shop or Butch Realness Meets Real Butchness written by Ryan B. Funk and directed by Kevin Killian
+The Morton Sal Girl Monologue: NaCl and the Meaning of Her Mark written and directed by Wendy Kramer

And then come back on Sunday January 22nd at 5:00pm for :
+Transient’s Theme: a soap operatic etude written and directed by Bethany Ides
+Debt Play written and directed by Lauren Levin, Laura Woltag, Lara Durback, Melissa Mack, Anne Lesley Selcer and Tony Valadez
+Lycanthropes, loup garoux, 28 nov, lean and mean written and directed by C.S. Giscombe
+Charles Baudelaire the Vampire Slayer written by Brandon Brown and directed by Clive Worsley
+One More Time: a play in parts written by Edwin Torres and directed by Sophie Reiff
+BUCKSHOT: A RASHOMON written by Brian Bauman and directed by Kevin Killian
+Werther Live, On the Radio written by Gail Scott and directed by Monica Peck
+What She Said written by Rodney Koeneke and George Albon directed by Lauren Shufran

The Colored Waiting Room

2012-01-08T19:31:00.000-08:00

Check out the latest CD project, "The Colored Waiting Room," by Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, pianist, composer, music historian and professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania. Ramsey's project title is both a "remembrance and a recovery, recalling a time when black passengers were confined to segregated waiting rooms before they travelled by bus or by rail." Ramsey notes that these waiting rooms were spaces of confinement, but also offered a form of freedom as they provided a space for free expression, away from a broader (and racist) public.

The CD is performed by Ramsey's band, Dr. Guy's Musiqology and imagines the colored waiting room as a nightclub. In a short film, Ramsey explains the project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ulNP9ZseD4

Dr. Ramsey being interviewed for "The Colored Waiting Room."

Including everything from jazz, hip hop, gospel, neo sol, classical, latin, r&b, stories, and poetry, the CD features artists from New York, Atlanta, Philladelphia, Chicago, and Memphis. "The Colored Waiting Room "is comprised of Ramsey's arrangements and compositions, and collaborations with Elizabeth Alexander, Jerry Thompson, June Townes, Greg Payne and Ramsey's daughter and son. Poet, critic, and African Americanist scholar, Kathy Lou Schultz, has written three poems for Ramsey's project and performs them on the CD.

Kathy Lou Schultz

Bay Area Asian-Pacific-Islander-Amercan Poets and the Avant Garde Led by Barbara Jane Reyes

2011-12-23T14:27:00.000-08:00

Sunday, December 18th, where were you Bay Area poets?

Small Press Traffic hosted an event curated by Barbara Jane Reyes, the author of Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), recently noted as a finalist for the California Book Award. Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.

Reyes presented a panel discussing Bay Area Asian-Pacific-Islander-American Poets and the Avant Garde. Participants included: Jai Arun Ravine, Margaret Rhee, Eileen Tabios, Truong Tran, and Jean Vengua.

Barbara began the afternoon by telling us of her own ambivalence about discussing ethnicity and poetics. She said she desired to deepen and make more complex the discussion around this intersection. She noted that sometimes a complex discussion is met with resistance. Sometimes avant-garde poetics is not discussed or tolerated within some sections of the APIA poetic community. Class also plays a role as Reyes noted that APIA poetry has its roots in a politics that seeks to speak to the masses. In this context, sometimes the avant-garde is perceived as being intellectual and abstract with political alignments outside of the APIA community. With this background and set of provocations, Barbara turned the discussion over to the panel.

Jai Arun Ravine started us off. Jai is an engaging young writer who communicated enthusiasm and a set of poetic and artistic practices and endeavors deeply engaged with the complexities of identities, particularly at the intersection of multiple trans-identities. Jai's blog describes Jai this way:

Jai Arun Ravine is a mixed race Thai American writer, dancer, video and performance artist. They received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies (English/Creative Writing, Dance, Asian Studies) from Hollins University. They are the author of แล้ว and then entwine (Tinfish Press, 2011), the chapbook Is This January (Corollary Press, 2010) and the graphic poem project The Spiderboi Files. A recipient of fellowships from ComPeung, Djerassi and Kundiman, their short experimental film Tom/Trans/Thai recently exhibited at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Thailand. Jai grew up in Charleston, West Virginia and is currently based in the San Francisco bay area. They are a 2011-2012 Staff Writer for Lantern Review.

Jai treated us to a prezi presentation highlighting the numerous projects Jai is navigating. You can see these for yourself here: http://prezi.com/hxuhhi9qa7h5/jai-arun-ravine/

For a look at Jai's "Fan Christy" Karaoke project, click here.
And the "Tom/Trans/Thai" trailer here.
For even more, look here:

Jai's interest in the body, the multi-voiced, the non-conforming, that which crosses genre and queers categories of all kinds is very exciting and I look forward to reading and seeing more of Jai's work.

Next up was Margaret Rhee who read to us from a piece in progress that discusses two writers who have been important in Rhee's development as a poet. She cited both Fred Moten and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Rhee also made reference to Timothy Yu's amazing book (which I thoroughly enjoyed) Race and the Avant-Garde. Jai might also have mentioned Yu. Rhee noted her desire to move toward a more queer, more discomforting understanding of APIA poetry and suggested Yu was an example of someone headed in this direction.

Eileen Tabios began her talk by explaining that she is someone who tries not to criticize what others say about her work, whether she agrees with their interpretations or not. She noted that she traffics in capitalist kitsch and is interested in aesthetic attempts that seek to widen the boundaries. Tabios also said that some elliptical poetry which marks ethnicity gets categorized and exoticized as avant-garde. In her own work, Tabios noted she wants to write from a more archetypal place, one that might be understood through the image of an indigenous Filipino figure of a human with one hand raised, a figure that when viewed from a particular perspective appears to be connected both to earth and sky. Here the human is understood as connected to all; here there is no unfolding of time. "No one or nothing is alien to me" said Tabios. The avant-garde, she suggested, separates and in its very terms leaves something behind for something else. Tabios does not want to have to discard or leave behind anything. Tabios showed us a piece of artwork by Jenifer K. Wofford entitled "MacArthur Nurses" that she sees as achieving what she herself seeks in art and in her own work.

In this work, Tabios sees Filipino nurses figured as an avant-garde of the Filipino diaspora. She pointed out how the nurses are not presented as individuals but the many.

Eileen has published her presentation from this event. You can find it here

Jean Vengua was the penultimate presenter. Jean, as her blog tells us, has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Gavilan College. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Prau, and a chapbook, The Aching Vicinities. With Mark Young, she co-edited the First Hay(na)ku Anthology, and The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II. In the mid 1990s, Elizabeth H. Pisares and Jean Vengua formed Tulitos Press and published and edited the Debut: the Making of a Filipino American Film by Gene Cajayon and John Manal Castro, and The Flipside, by Rod Pulido. Her poetry and essays have been published in many journals and anthologies. She currently lives and works in Elkhorn, CA, near Salinas.

Jean shared some of her work, from her book Prau , or it might have been from Diario. She also discussed her current project working with U.S. Filipino periodicals. Again, her blog provides a helpful context. Jean's website explains:

Commonwealth Cafe.info focuses on U.S. Filipino periodicals in the early 20th century, their migrating communities of writers and editors, and their influence on the emerging “Filipino American literature” (as it would later be called by the post-WWII generation of writers). The research reflects my interest in recovering U.S. Filipino literary heritage. Denise Enck, multi-talented writer and webdesigner, designed the site. The website is accompanied by a blog of the same name.

Jean discussed her interest in using what she called both the dreaming language of poetry and the utilitarian language of the newspaper.

Lastly, Truong Tran began his talk by saying that he was unprepared, explaining that of late he has been doing work with his hands rather than language. On his blog, Truong explains his current project The Lost and Found:

A Day In The Life

On days when I am not working as a poet and teacher, I try to wake up early. I empty my oversized messenger bag of books and papers and the previous day's half-eaten lunch. I place the strap over my left shoulder, with the bag firmly secured to my back. I begin to walk. I walk for as long as it takes to fill the bag with stuff: branches, findings from the local thrift stores, choice items left in boxes on sidewalks and, if I'm lucky, something I've never seen before. Once the bag is filled, I return home, empty the contents from the bag, creating mounds of what some might consider piles of junk. I see them as source materials and the beginnings to my art making process.

I am committed to using these recycled materials as an environmentally conscious artist but also as an artist who strives to make art accessible through both its practice and use of materials. Quite frankly, I get a kick out of forcing these disparate objects to come together, compromising and accommodating one another in their process of becoming something new, something beautiful.

I refer to what I do as art making because I do not paint, draw or sculpt in a traditional or learned consideration of artistic craft. My craft is founded in the doing. I glue things together. I make things fit. I dip things in wax. I cut. I build. I weave. I think. I fill things up with paint using ketchup bottles. I stare at things in hopes that these things will talk back to me. This is what I do. It makes me happy. It allows me to lose myself in the process of doing. It makes me sad. It allows me to find myself in the process of seeing.

I insist on it being called art at the end of the day (Truong Tran).

Go and visit Truong's blog to get a peek at some of his artwork.

Truong did discuss a current writing project that entails returning to earlier work, specifically his first book with the goal of erasing otherness from the book. He noted that this project strikes some people as deeply problematic but that he sees it as empowering. He is contemplating the design of the book, using a French fold, with the text black-lined on the outside, a design requiring people to cut open the book to get to the language that remains on the inside.

He then read something from Placing the Accents that when erased is transformed into "Placate."

All in all, a great, chilly Sunday afternoon in the Mission with engaging discussion after panel presentations which, sadly, I cannot reproduce here.

_____________

Fraser & Oppen on the Same Day

2011-12-14T20:57:00.000-08:00

All in a Day:

Saturday, December 10th found me at work on the main first floor reference desk at the San Francisco Public Library from 10-2 where I fielded questions about Laughing Sal, Bergman's Fanny & Alexander, and books about Russian spies while also watching numerous Santas troop in and out of the library's bathrooms. They were part of "Santacon," a pub crawl for people who, for some unfathomable reason, enjoy dressing up in holiday Chris Kringle attire.

Then, off to a book party for Kathleen Fraser's newly published and lovely book movable TYYPe from Nightboat Books in New York. Hosted by Hazel White, the gathering was a pleasure. Jennifer Scappettone, Denise Newman, Susan Gevirtz, Steve Dickison, Bob Gluck, Peter Weltner, Michael Cross, Eleni Stecopoulos, Steven Gilmartin, Jamie Robles, and many others were in attendance. Kathleen read a generous selection from her book, about which Bob Gluck has written:

Kathleen Fraser never takes a short cut. In movable TYYPE she asks again, What can a poem be and do?--hanging words in the sky, opening the process collaboratively, turning the page into an environment, an installation. Intimacy is wedded to space and abstraction, and form itself is only a holding place in this spinning world. Her formal eclecticism becomes an expression of the mutability of life "in language under erosion."

Sometimes music takes the lead, "ear hinged forward." Fraser's musical syllables are not so much wrested from silence as they are examples of abundance, of fugal expectation. She casts into the world, tries it on: discomfort and pleasure, balance and awkwardness, trust and mistrust, presence and absence. The poems are not reduced essences but the multiplication of precise choices, including the typographic.

Fraser privileges attention a a gesture outward, even an offering. Precision becomes its own kind of emotion, a longing to be united with the world, to be carried up and held in the infinite patterning, and in that sense these poems are gestures toward connection and union (back cover R.Gluck).

Jennifer Scappettone writes:

Through the pull of collaboration with other artists and with the hours, hours' orologic, crossing languages and species of remoteness, Fraser's movable TYYPE searches time's keening in a material proliferation of Ys as the light (or bakelite shadow) from new coasts of Rome, observed, curves the march of extinction toward rescue instead: in lines exuberant, vigilant and cutting, recovering horizons of disappeared time with the hands (back cover J.Scappettone).

Fraser's book contains three sections:

• 20TH CENTURY 2000
• Orologic
• The Disappeared
• A whodunit, for Barbara Guest
• 20th Century
• Alice’s shoe
• HI DDE VIOLETH I DDE VIOLET 2003
• W I T N E S S 2007
• S E C O N D LANGUAGE 2009
• in the photo day
• cf story
• d spl cd v w l
• II SS 2011

Entitled "20th Century," the first is comprised of the following pieces: "Orologic," "The Disappeared," "A whodunit, for Barbara Guest," "20th Century," and "Alice's shoe." The second section consists of Four Artist Books, texts in collaboration" --and a thrid section includes new work.

Signaling pleasure, play, and attention to language's materiality, the titles of pieces and sections in the book are an invitation to the curious reader. And while the economics of book publishing and the prohibitive costs of color reproduction prevent the visual art from appearing with Fraser's writing, the book does not disappoint. movable TYYPE includes a big chunk of work produced in collaboration with Hermine Ford, JoAnn Ugolini, Gonzalo Tena, and Nancy Tokar Miller. Fraser uses cut-ups, found material, journal responses and a generous receptivity to error to re/work, re/think meaning, relation, scale, perception. I love how Fraser's interest in "extending the graphics of typography," is enabled by an interesting practice of sustainability. By this I mean, she finds a way to return to writing that earlier she'd given "up [on] and filed...away" (172), only to return to it anew "for the pleasure of re/finding the meanings which had compelled me on a scale of arbitrariness." About hi dde violeth i ddde violet, Fraser writes:

I worked non-stop, using every word, letter and punctuation mark in the original and static text. This meant doubling-up on some vowels or consonants and allowing intentional misspellings, the product of which quickly absorbed me in its inventive possibilities. I ended up with 31 texts that I hung--happily--along one wall of my study and invited an audience of 2 to "view" (172).

Looking for a deeply satisfying reading that will urge you to the page? Fraser's movable TYYPE is the book for you.

Swiftly, then,

I scooted home to help my teenage daughter Alex with some review for final exams before heading out, a slice of pizza in mouth, to the Poetry Center's Oppen Memorial Lecture, featuring Peter Nicholls who dazzled all of us with his reading of impoverishment as a formal and political strategy in Oppen's poetics.

The Poetry Center features the following summary of Nicholls' central concern:

In one of his later poems, Oppen speaks of poetic language as, ideally, something "impoverished // of tone of pose." The lecture asks what might constitute a political poetry in a social order in which a literal condition of impoverishment obtains, and how in refusing to adopt any kind of "pose," a poet might provide an adequate answer to that question. (Peter Nicholls)

It is impossible to capture the outline even of Peter's engaging argument, but I've noted down some bits and pieces here:

Nicholls situated Oppen's mobilization of impoverishment by way of Celan, Beckett, Leo Bersani, Robert Duncan, Bernard Buffet, Roland Barthes, and others. I was intrigued by Nicholls referencing Bernard Buffet's painting "Pieta" as an example of an art of impoverishment grounded in social reality.

I think Nicholls was suggesting that Buffet and Oppen share similar projects. We heard Oppen's poem:

SONG, THE WINDS OF DOWNHILL

'out of poverty
to begin

again'    impoverished

of tone of pose that common
wealth

of parlance      Who
so poor the words

would    with      and          take on substantial

meaning handholds footholds

to dig in one's heels        sliding

hands and heels beyond the residential
lots       the plots          it is a poem

which may be sung
may well be sung              (Selected Poems 129)

Reading "Song, The Winds of Downhill," Peter pointed out that Oppen here begins by quoting Charles Simic's poem "White" (which you can read here) and from there went on to discuss the tension between poetry and politics in Oppen's work and life--given the well known fact of his hiatus from writing, or at least publishing, for 25 years while the Oppens were politically active and then for a period, living in Mexico.

Exploring Oppen's dialectic negotiation of Marxism and existentialism, Nicholls suggests that for Oppen, poetry must recover something to stand on, for being in the world and being political, which is, for Oppen, a mode of social being. Predicated on a "social vision" rather than a dogmatic politics, a poetics of impoverishment enables Oppen to work within the impossible confines of discourse which is already always being absorbed in order to test what a poem can do, even if failure underwrites it all.

We also read a portion of Oppen's poem, "The Book of Job and a Draft of a Poem to Praise the Paths of the Living," a poem written "in memory of Mickey Schwerner," one of three civil rights workers killed by the Klan in Mississippi. Schwerner had lived with or rented a room in the Oppen's home. Part of what Nicholls focused on here is Oppen's resistance to enabling some kind of easy identification with the victims as well as the poem's formal and tonal impoverishment, Oppen's refusal of metaphor (in particular places, I think) as an act of negativity.

In the question/answer session after the talk, Michael Davidson suggested that what Nicholls was describing might be related to Adorno's negative dialectics. In response, Nicholls suggested that in Oppen there is more optimism for Oppen seeks a kind of plenitude, but situates it on a different ground, in dialectic, in which nothing is left behind.

From The Poetry Center, here's a bit about Peter Nicholls and some interesting quotes both from and about Nicholls' work:

PETER NICHOLLS is Professor of English at New York University, where me moved in 2009 after many years at the University of Sussex in Great Britain. His publications, that emphasize connections between American and European poetry, and the political and economic dimensions of literary works, include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing, Modernisms: A Literary Guide and George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, as well as many articles and essays on literature and theory. Nicholls co-edited with Laura Marcus The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature and with Gianni Cianci Ruskin and Modernism. He is US editor of Textual Practice, and lives in New York City.

“Oppen’s allusion to Blake... — ‘I must make no system, or I will be enslaved by another man’s’ — reflects his late fascination with Blake’s grasp of a vivid ‘actuality’ and his handling of the ‘little words’ in the Songs of Innocence and Experience: ‘Blake’s Tyger in the small words. They burn. The nouns are the visible universe, the night sky burning’. This ‘burning’ is the force of disclosure and revelation — the blazing forth of the ‘actual’ — but it is also, for Oppen as for Blake, a light which both illuminates and destroys, much as the divine creation gives birth to both the tiger and the lamb (‘One had not thought / To be afraid // Not of shadow but of light’.)...”

—Peter Nicholls, from George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

“…the biography Nicholls is most interested in is not the record of the external events of Oppen's life, but the narrative of his intellectual and poetic development, and it's here that George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism proves itself most valuable. Simply put, as an account of the development of Oppen's poetics and of the influences on his thought, and as a series of illustrative readings of some of his most important poems, Nicholls's book is an exemplary piece of scholarship.” —Mark Scroggins

LeftWrite! 30 Years Later

2011-12-11T21:55:00.000-08:00

Kaplan Harris. Photo: Andrew Kenower

On December 4th, 2011, Small Press Traffic continued its look back at the Bay Area Poetry scene by revisiting the LeftWrite! Conference of 1981 organized by Steve Abbott, Bruce Boone, Bob Gluck and others. Attended by some 300 writers of diverse backgrounds and poetics, the Conference had the goal of building a coalition of writers from a variety of Leftist perspectives. The conference proved to be contentious; throughout it the participants wrestled over how to bridge their differences and work together though they consistently disagreed about the core issues of class, sexuality, and gender.

Bob Gluck. Photo: Andrew Kenower

Kaplan Harris began the evening by situating the Conference in its historical moment while he also described how it was organized, who did what, and then went on to outline the substance of the event. You can read his notes here. Bob Gluck and Bruce Boone each provided their own recollections and located the conference in the context of their lives and political and poetic commitments while also discussing the current Occupy movements. Providing a sense of the variety of people and voices, Bob read a series of quotes from a number of the participants. You can read these here. Bruce remarked upon the enormous generosity of all the Conference participants, while also noting "the great divide, like the Rocky Mountains" that lesbian, gay, and women's issues constituted against the backdrop of a continuing struggle between the Old and New Left. Bruce also referred to the homophobia that reared its ugly head, igniting anxiety, anger and fear. Both Bob and Bruce discussed how the conference organizers and participants attempted to answer the question: how do we maintain differences and yet work together? A Left Writers Union was established during the conference; however, the prioritization of class over all other frameworks for analyzing and responding to oppression ended up with many--including Gluck, Boone and Abbott--feeling frustrated and outraged with the project. The life experience of organizing a Left writers’ movement erupted into a fragmented and polarizing endeavor, as identity categories were plotted along a hierarchical structure

The LeftWrite! Conference constitutes an important moment in Bay Area literary and political history and it was a treat to get to hear Kaplan, Bob and Bruce talk about it.

Bruce Boone. Photo: Andrew Kenower

Thanks to Andrew Kenower for his fabulous photos. Andrew maintains AVoice Box: Bay Area Recordings of the Recent Past

Bob Gluck's Selection of Quotes from LeftWrite!

2011-12-11T21:50:00.000-08:00

Left/Write Conference 1981

I hold myself accountable to several communities: working class, gay, lesbian, feminist, leftist. Judy Grahn.

Art is not a way out. There is no way out. There’s only what we’ve got and how to turn it around to reinforce our fighting genius. Judy Grahn

Just because Cuba isn’t advocating lesbianism or homosexuality, it’s because they’re trying to solve problems 100 times more acute and more important to the people. Aljendro Murguia

In the USA, when we say something takes time, it means we’re not going to do it. Robert Chrisman

The left has done its best to hide behind the skirts, or actually jockstraps, of patriarchy and has made a fetish out of “great men” to look up to. Ted Matthews.

“the single most common accusation made about left writing is that it’s rhetorical. In 1930’s magazines such as New Masses and Partisan Review, cultural analysis and political strategy were seen to be closely interrelated. ” David Plotke

Native American writers:

Wendy Rose: reviewers say they are not qualified to review this writing because they don’t have an anthology background. Bookstore put our novels in the anthropology department,

Also the juvenile section, in libraries too, as though they had to be kids stories.

[Bob's aside: just as they put mine in Human Sexuality, Gay Sexuality etc.]

Black writing

Sha’am Wilson Hayes

I see three basic resources for financial assistance. First is self-help. Second is “relative assistance” or assistance from your relatives. The third is manna from foundations which is of course rapidly drying up. There few new blooms in site, under the leadership of Shah Reagan.”

Discussion of how Black Nationalism and Lesbian Separatism have conservative elements. Discussion of black vs African American. “You try things out until they work”

A workshop on Translation as a Political Took against Poundism

A poem travels language to language and across time as common property, a portion of a greater text still to be elaborated, and “otherness that fecundates the commonplace, a translation turns us toward the original and beyond. A process that of both paraphrase and invention, it modifies the metabolism of the imagination, the earth’s intangible tilt. Michael Kotch

The question is not whom to translate but how. Do you want to preserve the cultural uniqueness of the poem or do you want to make it understood in San Francisco. Somewhere the potatoes is common, elsewhere it may be a luxury. Woman with German accent

There hasn’t always been an opportunity to read works by women of color. In some bookstores I still see their books in the “race” section separated from the woman’s section. Gabrielle Daniels

There is a moneyed establishment that feels if you write about El Salvador it’s not feminist writing but if you write about Tampax it is. Unidentified woman.

Discussion of new technologies as a means of publication.

Fewer podiums, more dialogue.

I see the cassette tape recorder as a lethal weapon. Vanguards of us should go out with radio cassette players and play some consciousness. Kush

Well, native people got poems from other planets. David Moe

In 1947 the California Labor School conducted the last conference in San Francisco like this one. But the school and the movements it launched was smashed by McCarthyism. What we are here today for is to make sure we are not smashed by Reaganism.” William Mandel.

This is one of the most exciting days of my life as a writer. Ron Silliman

In 1977 168,000 volumes of poetry sold, fewer than the 192,000 rapes reported that year. Ron Silliman.

We live in a class society. There is a bourgeoisie, lumpen proletariat and distinctions between peasants and intellectuals. RV Cottam

She found it odd that sexuality and the Soviet Union were the cutting edges of the conference and felt, therefore, gays and lesbians needed to rethink their relationships to the Left. Amber was more convinced now that ever we have to maintain autonomous movements or we’d be lost.

An unhealthy dose of militaristic politics both east and west has created a milieu of transfigured decadence, lunatic humor and bizarre behavior that defies American Tradition. It is an encircled phenomena with its roots in dada, futurism of fascistic Italy, constructivism of revolutionary Russia, surrealism, nihilism, anarchism, and film noir of Hollywood in the thirties. Richard Irwin

Ecology as a common denominator David Moe.

Excerpts from Kaplan Harris on LeftWrite: 30 Years Later

2011-12-11T21:48:00.000-08:00

Kaplan set the scene:

30 years ago, Christian Fundamentalism was creating a monolithic message-controlled media empire using the very tools of technology that had previously been seen as signs of a godless modernity. 30 years ago advocates of social programs were besieged again and again by the red baiting of Cold War rhetoric. 30 years ago the film Cruising brought audiences the silver screen fantasy of a serial killer who targeted gay men in S&M bars of New York. 30 years ago Kramer vs. Kramer swept the Academy Awards after it dramatized the changing gender roles wrought by second-wave feminism – never mind that the show's host that year, Johnny Carson, mocked President Carter in front of his live television audience for the ongoing Iranian hostage crisis. 30 years ago a secretarial revenge fantasy called 9-5 was the second-highest grossing movie. But 30 years ago adventure stories about white men dominated weekend box office returns: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman II, Escape from New York, and yet another installment in the James Bond 007 saving the world from communists.

30 years ago Thatcher and Reagan were swept into office by a wave of free market ideology that dominated economic superpowers of the West. 30 years ago an army of conservative think tanks and industry lobbyists were hard at work preaching the virtues of privatization. 30 years ago during the first year of his administration Reagan nominated Milton Friedman to his Economic Policy Advisory Board. 30 years ago the Reagan and Thacker administrations launched an all-out coordinated attack on labor and social welfare programs that had been established since the 1930s. 30 years ago was the moment that Paul Harvey has called the "turning point" in neoliberalizing of the U.S. economy.

30 years ago Time magazine named Ayatullah Khomeini its Man of the Year. Ronald Reagan won the honor the following year. 30 years ago Arnold Schwarzenegger won Mr. Olympia for the fifth and final time. 30 years ago IBM introduced the IBM PC. 30 years ago computer geeks were on the rise. 30 years ago the mystery of who shot J.R. was solved. 30 years ago John Lennon was murdered. 30 years ago the start of the fall television season was delayed by a 3-month strike of the Screen Actors Guild. 30 years ago Derrida published The Post-Card (1980), Foucault wrote his history of sexuality, and the Oakland Raiders won the Super Bowl (in January of the new year). 30 years ago when the clock was ticking down to the start of a pandemic that would be called AIDS. And 30 years ago gay bashing and anti-feminism were very much part of the American vernacular.

Changes in the culture. Change in the political economy. Where would the battle be fought?

And then introduced the conference:

It was against the backdrop of these events that Steve Abbott and Bruce Boone organized the LeftWrite Unity Conference at the Noe Valley Ministry in February 1981. Their goal was to bring together diverse writers with heterogeneous, often competing aesthetic agendas. In imagining a more democratic, inclusive agenda for the Left, the conference was far ahead of its time. There were workshops for “Radical Asian-American Writing," “The Political Impact of Lesbian and Gay Writing,” "Translation as a Political Tool," "Native American Writing," and more. What today is sometimes called ecopoetry was the main topic of a workshop titled, "Take It To the Streets/Living Leaves of Grass." [Schedule] The conference steering committee was comprised of several familiar names: Robert Gluck (logistics), Bruce Boone & Denise Kastan (Finance), Steve Abbott (Agenda), John Mueller (Publicity). Denise Kastan was then the director of Small Press Traffic. Workshop coordinators: Robert Gluck, Wendy Rose, Deborah Major, Jack Hirschman, Ann Finger, Francisco X Alarcon, Ricardo Mendoza, Rosa de Anta, John Curl, Susu Jeffrey, Merle Woo, and Bruce Boone.]

The attendance numbers vary depending on the different accounts. Hilton Obenzinger wrote a conference report describing 250 attendees. Conyus wrote a conference report describing 150 people in the audience for the opening panel. He added, "There was a noticeable absence of blacks, Asians, and Latins present" (Conyus 91). Robert Glück has written about the conference. He recalls, “To our astonishment, three hundred people attended Left Write, so we accomplished on a civic stage what we were attempting in our writing, editing and curating: to mix groups and modes of discourse” (LN, 33).

The LeftWrite conference was visionary for mean reasons but not least because it brought these groups together under one big roof. In the decade before the conference, the different coalitions held many rallies and protests for their individual causes. The reading schedules and announcements in Poetry Flash can provide a brief survey:

February 1973 - Farmworkers Reading

March 1973 - Poetry Celebration for International Women's Day (at Jewish Community Center, SF)

March 1973 - Benefit reading for the People's Community School (at Berkeley Art Center)

8/31/1973 - Benefit Reading with Creeley and Kyger (Unitarian Church at Geary and Franklin)

Chilean Refugee Benefit Reading - with Fernando Alegria and Michael McLure (SF Museum of Art, spons. Poetry Center)

12/2/1973 – Benefit reading for the Greek Resistance at the Berkeley Unitarian Church.

2/13/1976 Benefit for the Balasaraswati Music and Dance School (with Gary Snyder at the SFSU Poetry Center)

April 1976 - Tin-Tan Benefit reading took place at Intersection;

6/5/1976 - Pro-Prop 15 reading/rally (Stricter regulation of Nuclear Power Plants – Prop. 15 – Measure was defeated.)

10/02/1976 - "Cotati Freedom Poetry Festival" - "88 poets" for the Folsom Prison Poetry Workshop (at Caberet Club)

11/19/76 – "Poetry from Violence Against Women – (at Glide Memorial Church)

3/7/1977 - "Doc" Stanley Defense Fund Poetry Jam - (at Earth People's Palace, Berkeley)

7/3/1977 – Prisoners' Benefit Reading with poems of San Quintin Prisoners (Burlingame Public Library)

12/23/1977 - Amnesty International Benefit reading

4/2/1978 - Women Writers Film Festival: A Benefit for Women's Building (SFSU)

6/6/1978 – Benefit for Tassajara (at Intersection with Philip Whalen)

6/17/1978 – Benefit for Native American Treaty Rights (against "nine bills in Congress abrogating all Indian Treaties," held at Grace Cathedral with nine poets, two speakers, light show, and music.)

6/27/1978 – Benefit for Small Press Traffic Bookstore (at Intersection with Leslie Scalapino, Mary Oppen, Tom Mandel, Bruce Boone, and Michael Palmer)

8/10/1978 – Benefit Reading for Cassandra Peten ("facing 7-10 years in prison on an attempted murder charge after shooting" abusive husband, held at Women and Women's Writers Union with Peten, Gloria Anzaldua, Sukey Durham, and others.)

12/10/1978 – Benefit Reading for New World Press (at Intersection with Ishmael Reed and nine other poets)

12/15/1975 – "Giant Performance Benefit for Native Americans in Jail" (at South of Market Cultural Center with more than twenty poets, slideshow, and music)

4/7/1979 - Anti-Nuke Rally with Artful Goodtimes Poetry Sideshow

2/11/1980 - “A poetry benefit to aid the Committee to Stop the Movie ‘Cruising.’ The issue: Violence against Gays in the Media," held at Small Press Traffic.[i]

Kaplan also provided the LeftWrite Conference Program (see below) and he explored the impact of homophobia and competing visions of the Left on the conference's work and outcomes.

LeftWrite 1981

Panel 1. "How Does Our Writing Arise From And Affect Our Communities?" (Nellie Wong, Alejandro Murguia, Judy Grahn, Robert Chrisman).

Workshops:

1. Past Political Lessons: An Overview of Left Writing (George Benet, David Plotke). Transcribed/edited by Calvin Doucet.

2. Native American Writing (Wendy Rose, Frank La Pena, Jack Forbes, Janet Campbell, Maurice Kenny). Transcribed/edited by Murray.

3. Black Writing (Deborah Major, Sha'am Wilson Hayes, Darryl Gauff, Clyde Taylor). Transcribed/edited by C.T. Hall

4. Translation as a Political Tool Against Poundism (Jack Hirschman, Stephen Kessler, Kosrof Chantikian, Michael Koch, Charles Belbin, Doreen Stock, Peter Kastmiler, Csaba Polony). Transcribed by Michael Koch

5. The Politics of Feminist Writing (Ann Finger, Gabrielle Daniels, Margo Rivera). Transcribed/edited by Steve Abbott

6. Chicano Latino Writing (Juan Felipe Herrera, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, Yvonne Bejarano-Yarbro, Alejandro Murguai). "Rethinking Mobilization: Thoughts on the Left/Write Conference" by Juan Felipe Herrera.

7. Take It to the Streets/Living Leaves of Grass (Leslie Simon, Kush, Artful Goodtimes). Transcribed/edited by Steve Abbott.

Panel II. "How Can Writers Best Join in a Unified Political Struggle?" (William Mandel, Amber Hollibaugh, Ron Silliman, Diane DiPrima). Transcribed/edited by Steve Abbott.

Workshops:

8. Writers as Workers (R.V. Cottam, Inez Gomez). Transcribed/edited by Allen Cohen.

9. Radical Asian-American Writing (Merle Woo, Spencer Nakasako, Vicki Geraro). Transcribed/edited by Paula Herbert.

10. Political Impact of Lesbian and Gay Writing (Jeff Escoffier, Eric Garber, Roberta Yusbah, Amber Hollibaugh). Transcribed/edited by Calvin Doucet.

11. Criticism as a Political Tool (Al Richmond, Mirtha N. Quintanales, Richard Irwin). Transcribe/edited by Ken Weichel.

Steering committee: Robert Gluck (logistics), Bruce Boone & Denise Kastan (Finance), Steve Abbott (Agenda), John Mueller (Publicity).

John Curl (Conference Coordinator).

Workshop coordinators: Robert Gluck, Wendy Rose, Deborah Major, Jack Hirschman, Ann Finger, Francisco X Alarcon, Ricardo Mendoza, Rosa de Anta, John Curl, Susu Jeffrey, Merle Woo, and Bruce Boone.

Many thanks to Kaplan, Bob and Bruce for an engaging evening!

Three Poems from Matt Longabucco

2011-11-30T20:56:00.000-08:00

These three pieces are from Matt Longabucco's manuscript of poems written in the voice of Juan Garcia Madero, the 17-year-old Mexican-born narrator of parts 1 and 3 of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. In the novel, Madero's work appears to be lost.

Last August at Bard College, I heard Matt read from this manuscript and invited him to send me some work for xpoetics, and he gaciously agreed. Gracias Matt!

All Shook Up

The troglodyte in leathers,
the cartes de visite in the library display case,
the strange action of balloons in drafty rooms,
the rust on the car’s white paint job
           that makes the machine-nature of the car
           overpower its beast-nature,
the poem that can never be written—
            the one called “Teens on the Beach.”

To share my thoughts with others
in this odd, frankly historical way
is bliss. Four-times-folded pages.
People who don’t know when to shut up,
or who seem insensible to their own slightly
bad odor, fill me with tenderness (after all—
my beastly odor, yesterday),
but it’s a tenderness I must nevertheless
go home and stub out
like a cigarette
in a dish.

Do not go inside police stations or lawyer dens,
do not bathe in public fountains
           till after midnight,
do not snatch up the beautiful children
           in the square to augment the audience
           at your poetry reading or workshop,
do not tell someone they stopped making
           sense an hour ago just as they reach
           the climax of their murderous harangue.

I can take a pounding,
emotionally, and have learnt to grasp
from the spine, like a creature.
I don’t mind fucking up my good looks
with drugs and sleep deprivation
and lack of proper nutrition.
As if I were not already invisible,
like the man in Kierkegaaard
who leaves no footprints.

Five Finger Discount

He evinced a vast multiplicity
as safeguard against ironic twists.
What a mentor, degenerate, and friend.
I his subaltern and pet cricket.
When you steal away what do you steal?
Getting high in the field, close
to the ancient places, those chakras
of the earth, and feeling nothing,
not the surprised plaintive nothing of the tourist,
nor the resolved bemused nothing of the commandant,
but the nothing of a child at a funeral,
or the nothing of a prostitute
whose sadness before the act is the sadness
of freedom, the freedom to arrange sprigs
of blossom in a peaceful room,
a room of almost Swedish calm and proportion,
in the world wrapped around this one,
torus-shaped world,
the very one Socrates stands in the courtyard
visiting, in the Symposium, and even though
dinner’s ready they don’t dare call him in.
I spent the day reaching out to others,
but the slogans stood between us
like a cheval de frise,
and even in the mirror of the puddles
the slogans, and even on the legends
of city buses the slogans,
not the radio ads of the true poet
Robert Desnos but the slogans
of the pitiless cigarette-strewn streets,
the atom bomb for
atom-bomb junkies, look,
there are some things worse than atom-
bombs, there are neighborhoods so bad
even atom-bombs won't drop on them,
because the motherfuckers there
will steal anything and will steal
the atoms right out of an atom bomb,
though what on earth could they want with them
but they do. Then drifting back,
together, to the outskirts, the arm’s-length
of the city, and someone: the maxim:
limit your wanting to what your arm
can reach. Trying to maintain.
I couldn’t eat a thing, thanks.
I’m sick with health, whichever philosopher
proclaimed moisture the element of the world
is the one you’d want to date.
In the park two girlfriends held hands,
so skinny their socks were loose,
heads together shooting out a bolt of laughter,
and an old lady on a bench looking like
“That’s the way it is.” “The world
is for consciousness” says Unamuno,
but the stain of enthusiasm is on it,
like sticking your face under the water
running from the jagged mouth
of the great gaping corrugated drainpipe
where it empties into the trench
and drinking some.

The Hunters

Are watchers alive?
Depends: what do the living talk about?
In the café, in the daytime
or else at night,
I heard that unruly friend of mine—
who loves me, or doesn’t—
discourse, in shredded voice,
upon the nature of a virtue
she felt sure we’d all dismiss as merely quaint,
it being neither insight nor stamina nor political engagement
but trust,
trust even among,
and here her fork quivered in the plausible
and thunder shook the windows
and rain spattered the glass like blood
from a cut jugular,
even or especially among the friends assembled there,
trust that makes time as real as concrete pouring,
trust that leaves all parties to it exposed
like, what else could she say,
like vaginas,
those organs of trust
for which trust is a flowering,
and everyone’s face flushed, like labia,
and drinking drinks wondered what,
in 20 years, would become of the assembly
or more correctly of the bonds that joined them,
bonds that already seemed, this day or night,
as fragile as spiderwebs,
and when finally they all turned to me I realized
I was the one caught,
and when confronted would I reveal
that an act waits caged within me
like a half-crazed wild boar?

Matt Longabucco’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Clock, With+Stand, Painted Bride Quarterly, Conduit, Pleiades, and Washington Square. He teaches writing and literature in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University, and co-curates the POD reading series in Park Slope. He lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn.

Grand Piano Reading at Small Press Traffic

2011-11-23T14:06:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday, November 20, 2011, Timken Hall at the California College of Arts was plenty full as eight of the ten Grand Piano authors, including Barrett Watten, Ted Pearson, Tom Mandel, Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson, Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, and Carla Harryman, participated in a group discussion moderated by David Buuck. Sadly, Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman were not in attendance.

photo: Camille Roy

I walked in a bit late and so missed the framing for the discussion that David provided, but the audience was very much interested in talking about the Occupy movements and asked a number of related questions. Joshua Clover started off with a question that set up a reflection on the social movements of 1968 and the Occupy movements, asking if the current moment was less theoretico-critical. He also pondered the relation between political projects and representation. Barrett responded that the Grand Piano moment was all about non-representational strategies and Kit discussed the very different economic conditions that prevailed in '68 and into the 70s, noting that it was somewhat easier to live with less then than it is now. Carla challenged Kit's premise, saying that some people were indeed worried about money and health care, etc.

Various people in the audience noted the Occupy movements' absence of celebrity, of someone acting as a representative of the movement, and how this very lack, along with the absence of unifying or singular narratives (as pointed out by Camille Roy) is serving the movement well while confounding the media and others. They don't know how to "read" or respond to the rhizomatic nature of the Occupy movements.

Somewhere along the line, Carla cited Adorno's "Let no one represent you!"

Carla also mentioned Steve McCaffery's 1985 Poetics Journal article (for the special Non-Narrative issue) entitled "And Who Remembers Bobby Sands?" and his exploration of the resulting problematics when resistance is located in one person, one body.

Tom Mandel pointed out the power of "not making demands" as a tactic when the making of demands has continually failed.

The conversation also focused on other differences between "then" and "now," including how in the 70s people were rethinking Marxist constructions of class and the tremendous importance of theoretical literature from Europe and elsewhere finding its way to the US in the form of translations and publications of the work of Barthes, Derrida, Benjamin. Carla noted that on the train to San Francisco State, you would see everyone reading Barthes' S/Z and how incredible it was that so many people were reading the same thing simultaneously. Something was in the air. Barrett said that Badiou and Rancière were not having as momentous an impact now.

There were questions and discussion about community, collectivity, collaboration.

I asked about the question of form re the Grand Piano, as compared to an earlier multi-authored article ( the 1988 "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto” from the journal Social Text, co-authored by Silliman, Harryman, Hejinian, Benson, Perelman, and Watten) and the way the Social Text article refrained from demarcating individual "authors," whereas the Grand Piano preserves the individual and includes a larger set of them (and could have included others). I am interested in the practical, formal, and political implications of these choices.

Carla noted that the earlier article was written collectively by people who were in the same physical location and so the process of writing enabled a collectivity; with the Grand Piano project this was physically impractical since now everyone is dispersed, many living in different parts of the country.

Lyn noted the Grand Piano's attempt to be "anti-monolithic (emphasizing parts rather than any totality or whole)," articulating that "the modular character of it (so that order of appearance changed with each volume) should suggest the possibility of other orders and other ways of ordering," enabling remixes. Such a structure, someone said, shows that not everyone was "singing the same song," In this way, no ONE person or volume represented "Language Writing."

Another audience member--Kate ?-- talked about the poetics of the human mic and its usage in the Occupy movements. David Buuck noted the human mic's association with collective speech, with Quakerism, and consensus building. He noted the "poetics of enjambment on the spot" it engenders, and he and Kate highlighted the somatics of taking the words of another into one's body, words that one might not agree with, but that one nevertheless takes into one's body and, rather than merely repeating, projects them onward. Joshua reminded people, though, that Zizek had shown up at Zuccotti Park and projected his "speech" or talk via the human mic and thus corrupted its rhizomatic quality.

Barrett wondered if the human mic was "post-memic"?

Eirik Steinhoff talked about the human mic being like Gertrude Stein's becoming genius, her "at the same time talking and listening." Someone else in the audience described the human mic as "non-mechanical reproduction."

The conversation was lively and engaged and everyone participated though I have not quite captured that here. Memory is a faulty thing and note-taking in the dark a challenge! Any misquotes are my own.

The panel then transitioned to a scripted performance in which each person read various selections from writing that appeared in the ten volumes of The Grand Piano. The performance was orchestrated. There was polyphony, overlap, chorus and solos, and perhaps even improvisation, a reading that formally and performatively marked the individual and collective porosity of the conversation that is the text and the lives of all involved.

You can read my take on the first volume of The Grand Piano entitled "Hive and/or the Dark Body of Friendship: A Response to The Grand Piano Volume 1," at HOW2

Celebrating the life and work of Steve Abbott

2011-11-15T12:54:00.000-08:00

Steve Abbott 1943-1992

Sunday, November 6, 2011 Small Press Traffic continued its Fall 2011 focus on Bay Area poetry history with an event celebrating the life and work of Steve Abbott--writer, editor, hippie, political activist, cartooner, gay father, and all around rabble rouser. Abbott co-edited Poery Flash (from 1979-1984) and produced and edited 4 issues of the influential SOUP magazine. He was the first person to use the term New Narrative to describe the work of Bay Area writers Robert Gluck and Bruce Boone and he organized the historic Left Write conference in 1981. Alysia Abbott, Steve's daughter and muse/accomplice (and now writer herself) shared a moving collection of photos, writings, and anecdotes from Steve's life.

RTM & Alysia Abbott
photo: Camille Roy

The afternoon began with an overview from me as I recounted my accidental encounter with Steve's work, how in the course of researching the Bay Area poetry scene in the 70s-80s, Steve's name came turning up.

The written record convinces me that Steve Abbott was an integral and important force in the Bay Area writing scene in the late 70s and into the 80s.

In his tenure as the co-editor of Poetry Flash, Steve was not afraid to take on controversy, to provide an arena for engaging in debates about the pressing questions of the time. Steve seems to have had an uncanny ability to read the contemporary even though as Gertrude Stein wrote,

Everybody is contemporary with his period….and the whole business of writing is the question of living in that contemporariness….The thing that is important is that nobody knows what the contemporariness is. In other words, they don’t know where they are going, but they are on their way.

As the editor of SOUP, Steve was on his way and seemed to have the ability to see that it was worth tracking some of the most exciting contemporary writing that was “on its way.” New Narrative found a home in SOUP as did Language Writing, including Bob Perelman's poem "China." (See Jacket Magazine here for Rob Halpern's insightful account of this important context.) Steve produced a number of special issues of Poetry Flash, including those on West Coast Black Writing (September 1979), American Indian Poets of California (October 1980), profiles of Helen Adam and a spotlight on the Grand Piano reading series (February 1981), Gay Writing (March 1981), and a focus on Poets Theater (November 1982).

In addition to running reading series, producing cartoons and journals, parenting, and more, Steve wrote a number of books including: Wrecked Hearts, Stretching the Agape Bra, The Lizard Club, Lives of the Poets, Holy Terror, Skinny Trip to a Far Place, and others. My favorite is the 1989 View Askew: Postmodern Investigations, a book that collects Steve's essays from The San Francisco Sentinel, The Advocate, Mirage, and elsewhere. In it, Steve ruminates about life in the US, in the Bay Area, from the 70s and into the 80s; the book “documents the blurring of boundaries I’ve seen since moving to San Francisco in 1973” (Preface). It consists of three sections: Sexual Panic and the Arts, Mixed Messages in Daily Life, and Alternative Lives; and an epilogue about AIDS and the future entitled “Will We Survive the 80s?” The book also discusses performance art, Barbie dolls, phone sex, Stonestown, Kyoto condoms, commercialism (in an article in which he mentions angry protesters bombing the Bank of America (75) I might add!); he writes about such various artists and writers as Robert Arneson, Steve Benson, Julian Schnabel, Bob Kaufman, Judy Grahn, Diamanda Galas, Odilon Redon, and New Narrative writers Bob Gluck, Bruce Boone, and also Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker. I highly recommend it.

Steve at the Jardins des Plantes 1991

The question--will we survive the 80s?--was an urgent one. AIDS was devastating the gay community and the Bay Area generally. While Tom Clark and Ed Dorn created the "AIDS Awards for Poetic Idiocy" in the 1980s and "awarded," or rather, targeted Steve Abbott with one of these, Abbott in his epilogue in View Askew wrote:

To fight AIDS and the conditions that threaten us we need more than scientific research, more than money, more than leadership. We need to rethink America's spiritual, political, social and cultural systems at the most fundamental root level. How do we use power? How do we use language? It is clear that what we are doing now--as bosses and workers, as men and women, as gays and straights, as whites and nonwhites--is killing us all. And as we project these attitudes onto other species and towards the Earth's ecological system, we are jeopardizing our very planet. I would argue that today we can no longer afford to see anything--as a separate issue needing a separate cultural, political or spiritual agenda (173-74).

There's more to say about Steve and there was lots more said on Sunday. Kevin Killian read selections from Steve's work and Bruce Boone and Bob Gluck (via a letter read by Alsysia) shared some writing about Steve. Bruce noted Steve's childlike and vulnerable qualities, his nagging, mentioning how Steve introduced Bruce to George Bataille, a writer who would become very important both to Bob Gluck and Bruce. Bob noted that Lives of the Poets is his favorite of Steve's books, one that he and Bruce published in 1987 as part of their Black Star Series. Bob wrote that "...more than any of us, Steve was the exemplary New Narratrive writer, maybe because his Buddhism allowed him to empty without violence both fiction and lived experience."

It was a lovely afternoon with a standing room only crowd and Alysia Abbott held the crowd with her photos and stories of Steve's amazing life, a life that Alysia was made an integral part of--her work appeared in SOUP, she was taken to the One World Poetry Festival in Amsterdam and hung out with Richard Brautigan and had tea with William Burroughs. And when Steve was very sick with AIDS, Alysia returned from a life in Paris to take care of Steve until he died at the Hartford Street Zen Center.

I eagerly await the publication of Alysia Abbott's memoir Fairyland. Here's an excerpt she has generously shared with us.

from FAIRYLAND

My father was a rich man in Paris. In San Francisco we skimped and saved. No piece of furniture was bought new, everything found at garage sales or at a markdown somewhere, as were his clothes. But in Paris my father was loose with his Francs, buying me any blouse or dress that caught my fancy. “I like to see you in nice clothes,” he’d tell me as I posed and turned in front of the shop mirrors. We went out every night and he barely looked at the check before spreading his money like monopoly money across the tabletop.

And what he didn’t spend that week of his visit, he put in an envelope and handed to me before taking a cab to catch his flight home. There was a feeling that We’re in Paris. This world is not our world. This is not real money. Why worry? Let’s let the money go.

We met for a coffee at Place d’Abbesses in Montmartre his first afternoon in the city. I explained to him how it was cheaper to take a coffee at the bar than to sit at a table. I still was tight with money, still used to being a student. But he wanted to sit. His legs were tired. He was easily tired that trip. So we sat outside on the terrace. The summer sun was shining so every other seat on the terrace was taken. The cobblestone streets were stacked with parked motos, the vespas the young Parisians liked to drive, their high-pitched engines echoing through the narrow alleys and hills. We sat at Café d’Abbesses across from a blinking merry-go-round. The trees were in bloom. The air warmed me and I felt good.

Our plan was to walk up to Sacré-Coeur but Dad didn’t know if he was up for the hills and many flights of stairs. “It’s not far from here,” I said splitting a cube of sugar for my espresso. He sat tapping the saucer of his café crème with his narrow cigarette stained fingers.

“That’s okay,” he said.

I suggested we go to Musée d’Orsay, my favorite Paris museum the next day. That semester I’d studied 19th Century history and the realists Flaubert and Balzac. I enjoyed seeing the art of that period against the literary and historical context I now knew so well.

“That’s okay,” he said.

He’d already seen Musée d’Orsay. Just as he’d already seen Notre Dame and Musée Picasso and Place des Vosges and everywhere else I suggested we visit.

“I’ve seen them all,” he said then, after a pause added, “I’m here to see you.”

He spoke his words calmly as he sipped on his café crème. And for a moment I felt uncomfortable just as many times in my life, my father’s love left me feeling uncomfortable. The way, at thirteen, I reacted to him grinning at me with big eyes from across the dinner table: “What are you smiling at?” And he responded, “I’m just amazed that I’ve raised this beautiful young woman.”

His love surprised me. It could be jarring, because it always seemed to spring from nowhere, and certainly seemed to have no relationship to my actions. It was as though he loved me just for sitting there in front of him, before his eyes and returning his gaze, listening to him and speaking.

This was how he looked at me that day at the cafe. It was too easy. (Alysia Abbott)

Bruce Boone
photo: Camille Roy

Kevin Killian
photo: Camille Roy

Alysia Abbott’s writing can be found at Time Out, Salon, and Babble and in essays about her relationship with Steve Abbott on Atlantic.com and in two anthologies: Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing up with Lesbian, Gay and Transgendered Parents, St. Martin’s Press (2000) and Only Child, Random House (2006). Abbott also maintains a web site about Steve here.

Thanks to Alysia Abbott, Kevin Killian, Bruce Boone, Bob Gluck, Jim Brashear for technical assistance, Kush, Samantha Giles of Small Press Traffic, and to all who came out for this event.

Stay-Tuned: Thirty years after the LeftWrite Conference: December 4th Kaplan Harris will talk with LeftWrite Conference organizers, Bruce Boone and Robert Glück to revisit some of the motivations, fractures and legacies of this seminal moment in Bay Area History.

Judith Goldman and Brandon Brown

2011-11-06T11:20:00.000-08:00

Friday night at the Green Arcade in San Francisco Krupskaya Books celebrated the publication of two new books: Judith Goldman's l.b.; or, catenaries and Brandon Brown's The Poems of Gaius Valerious Catullus. I missed it! However, I have the books and eagerly await time to dive into them. They are hefty tomes; Brown's book has 189 pages and Goldman's 212. They will make for winter reading.

In the meantime, here are some selections from each book, including what others have said about each.

First up, Judith Goldman:

Stop questioning my average

Like I can't even represent myself

Like jury duty I never ejaculate anti-socially

Judged by a jury of my fears

my congress in line-item defeated

my forest floor porn twitches

withholding---

thinks it's raising the dead

but Sclerical fidelity cannot be

reduced to facts

facts is timely and seems to imply
You can get the same effects

defendant
calls prosecutor
to its defense,

Are you my god

Whereas conventions down-boy
The tally, they argue

Paradise can be entered from the other side

Supposedly, Nobody tries that hard        (106)

General Scholium: "In the Beginning"

In the beginning was the worm, long unstymied stomach

In the begged were the warm stigmata whittled in the stick
Innocently wagging a carrot
Intensive care bigged the hole, stuck. Ow, ow, my hamstring!
Unstringed, to crawl I chug, dressed up as

jocund company

I wandered lonely as a clod

These condensations slung

O'er my shoulder

We the pebble, formidable, soldier,
                                              than onion's perfect domino
We connote wayfare to the wayfarer
We the altar-wafer leaving
                                                       no waifish soul unaltered
We the peephole look through ourselves securely to instablish there's just-us
We the peeping chick assure you how wee the peehole

By God! your bigotry's big!

This one goes out to the precedent
Got its claws in you

Likewse my, my, my

My cavalry got bogged down, the critters
Ain't fending for me no more

Send reinforcements but
don't last--

ounce-of-humanity yourself

Lost the manual, managed to do it
Manually, de
spit
e the manhole's unmanning
yes, yerr honor
yerr grave spit on me
sharing its curse, spitty

If the case sweats to serve as precedent
Chugging

All systems go, but

Where does that get you?

A faint crackle of paper still swells the ranks

The same glint sparkles Out the blue

tossing its head in a sprightly dance

Flashing upon my inward I (you)

Pensive, push the cork in--

O ham it, my climate Climbs

Chugging uphill to flow into its coffers

Dusk me into this stricken empyrean else I
Frag this figment, fuck it, don't
Kindly my kinlessness, I'm not kindling
Mankind, I'm just ham with ante upped
I wear my strong suit and Online accreditation
I stick to stick figures with my sticky back
Decalcked, but lacking off, keep onned

What do you mean exactly?

Yes

Yes

No

Ok

Thank you. I know my way out. [bumps head]

If only I were the lacy edge of a fried egg

Slapstick

Slap it

/Then close the wicket                (87-89)

Craig Dworkin on Goldman's l.b.

The concatenated series of poems in Judith Goldman's l.b. chart the narratives formed by texts of uniform density hanging freely from two fixed readings not in the same semantic line. On the one hand, the book dramatizes language under the regimes of contemporary communication--the protocols and phatics of privatized and publicly traded language--with all the false and inescapable sociality of networked media and commercial memoranda. On the other hand, the motivated material play of the signifier points to the paths of greatest resistance: chance, ludic laughter, and the recalcitrant residium of the body.

At the level of composition, l.b. is also a kind of catena patrum: a series of extracts from earlier writings, forming a commentary on some portion of scripture. Goldman's finely sutured microcollage of forms and phrases moves from Aristotle to Andy Warhol, Kathy Acker to William Wordsworth, Abu Ghraib to Thomas Wyatt. Where the traditional catena is also a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine, here the discrepant result is a more thoroughly, honestly, chronic text: not the false time of doctrine and tradition, but something more true to its own time, and to linguistic time itself.

From Brandon Brown:

This is from the section entitled "Sparrow":

43

Catullus is a poet with no job, so hoards mucho otium, makes it obvious there is the tablets: leisure, convening (so delicious!), writing verses about writing verses with his phallus on the door of a bar, etc. Ludic numbers that make young Victorian Latin students blush and not from too much wine. Not incensed, I do sense discrepancy about the sleep and the quiet and the limitlessness of the time Catullus has to hang with Licinus, trading licks (both verse-ish and tongue-ish.) If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I'm probably at work. Bummer patrol! Catullus in bed, his members post-poesy, half-dead like writing in a book. Dolors make him sweat, but it's for dollars I perspire and expire. No bombs drop on my head except incendiary malinheritance. Beware the bombs brought on by gum disease: too much wine, not enough otium. Beware of do. Beware of poor attendance at the play. (51)

an excerpt from 65

The sixty-fifth poem in the corpus of Catullus is addressed to his friend Hortalus.

The poem is in the vocative and is usually read as essentially epistolary, a letter to accompany a translation that Catullus has made of a poem by Callimachus. This work of translation has been incredibly difficult, because there is a crisis in the life of Catullus that has made prosody frustrating.

The crisis in the life of Catullus is that his brother is lying on the beach dead in Troy and a wave licks his little pale foot.

The death of this brother has made it impossible for him to "produce the sweet fruit of the Muses." As if prosody were a redemptive tactic against the total loss effected by death.

I find it interesting that Catullus, who remains associated with the anachronistic but persistent mode of the lyric, constructs a practice almost always including appropriation. Translation, and certainly as Catullus himself practices it, is an artwork of appropriation. And yet much of contemporary translation as much as contemporary works of appropriation purport to cancel the somatic vehicle for lyric material.

That is, the conventional picture of translation, in which the translator is invisible, which excludes her body from the scene of translation, does not suggest a space in which the translator's desire--or grief--can find any entry into the imporous mimetic activity they understand as "translation." (93)

The back of Brandon's book includes this unattributed piece:

Ever since the poems of Catullus were discovered in a wine cask in Verona in the 13th Century, translators have returned to them over and over, insisting on their continued relevance. These troubling poems have scandalized and delighted generations of readers in translation, as they apparently scandalized and perhaps delighted the literary coterie surrounding Catullus in pre-revolutionary Rome. Brandon Brown's The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus is a translation in which the decadent excesses of ascending Roman hegemony meet the decadent excesses of collapsing American domination. The meeting is staged as half confrontation, half party. And this confrontation/party monster goes down in the overdetermined and hyper-privileged site of translation: the translator's body. Instead of reduplicating what Lawrence Venuti calls the "translator's invisibility," Brown is all too visible, exposing himself in various costumes: abject hero, demonic oaf, pathetic provocateur, swaggy braggart. These poems exploit the specificity of times and places to their maximal debasement, so the Gods of ancient Rome can't be distinguished from Brad Pitt watching Avatar, finally. And such spectacular cultural force doesn't just live in the sky, but irrupts into this sustained act of interpretive reading. 'Imagine if Brad Pitt came to your wedding. No, seriously.' Dead serious and impossibly fraught, Catullus's poems lurch in the hallways of the social networks in which we live. The time just before the machines become part of our bodies. Dazzling and devastated.

Alan Clinton on Tsering Wangmo Dhompa Reading at Santa Clara University

2011-10-20T20:15:00.000-07:00

Who: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

What: Poetry Reading

When: 4 pm, Oct 13, 2011 (already past, but as Dhompa writes, “I leave today and will see you yesterday”)

Where: Santa Clara University

Life of bows
--Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

The plan to keep contained within easily defined needs.
The forms we aspire to. The bow as a source
of accomplishment (if you are a hunter). The bow
on a wall, without a specific task is malleable content.
A singular sigh may yet uproot all. But here we are
stacking sentences like a nervous habit. Now rising,
now sinking within the cordiality of our defenses.
The indentations of tongue made and then given
to lose in such and such a pursuit. But ah, memory
to secure at will. And poetry before the hour of silence.
Your aperçu making trees grow taller. Actor and spectator.

(from In the Absent Everyday)

Why:

There is a moment sometimes when, on a walk, you go for a little longer than you should (because of the weather, or because it is “useless,” or it will get dark soon, or because the streets suddenly become unknown----which can happen in a single block!) and that is the space Dhompa’s poem “Selvage,” indeed all her poems, puts me in. At the end I feel like I’m at the turning point of that walk and want to turn back, but I’ve forgotten where to turn, and feel completely exposed and invisible simultaneously, like I need to find a voice, which won’t be there, or won’t be mine. I think it is a good place to be, to start a new year, the familiar key of entering the uncomfortable space of selvage.

Reportage:

Dhompa read an assortment of selections from all of her major works to give the audience of around 50 students, faculty, and members of the community a sense of her poetic career to date.

Tsering’s first book, Rules of the House, which is the most biographical of her works in form if not content, gave the audience a sense of the Tibetan poet’s communities in India and Nepal where she lived as a refugee before moving to the United States. Dhompa’s next two works, especially her most recent book My rice tastes like the lake, explore more philosophical themes related to temporality and selfhood, though they are always grounded in everyday experiences, especially the things she overhears or that people say to her. The new “style” works in two directions, towards disorientation and towards the essay.1 This duality allowed for a sort of wandering that left the audience intrigued, just unanchored enough. It also helps that, unlike many poets who write “avant-garde,” paratactical, or digressive work, Dhompa reads her poems slowly, so that the audience can linger on the phrases and so that their afterimages can layer themselves onto subsequent lines and leave the reader moving along in the particular essay poem she happens to be reading. One of the reasons this layering is important is that it creates a “de-sequencing effect” that allows Dhompa to truly render her poems as explorations, so that while My rice tastes like the lake is divided into eight titled sections, the individual poems are neither titled nor even numbered. I commented to her after dinner that this allows the poems to be experienced like clouds, the sequencing uncertain or potentially simultaneous as they float off the page into a an exploration with no specific starting or ending point. Dhompa, generous towards all interpretations, enjoyed this one.

This generosity was extended in a “question and answer” session that followed the reading. At first it had not occurred to me to have one because the reading was so hypnotic that I felt it should just be what it was, but when Dhompa asked me if we should open things up for questions, I thought, “Of course.” The questions were diverse and perceptive, and Dhompa’s answers were illuminating. Often she answered as if someone were helping her think about her work in a new way, an attitude which never seems contrived in Dhompa. “We” talked about everything from gender to culture to using initials instead of names to her use of various levels of colloquial and “high” diction to the difficulties she personally faces as a writer. In retrospect, I am not surprised at the number and range of conversations that arose in response to Dhompa’s reading.

As Dhompa and I packed our things and she caught up with some of her Tibetan friends who had come to the reading, a student had run (she must have literally run) across to the bookstore to buy Dhompa’s latest which, of course, our bookstore does not carry (SCU memorabilia more important than literature), and met us on our way downstairs asking Dhompa if she would sign her poetry journal. I don’t know what Dhompa wrote inside, but she signed for me, on Oct. 13, “To be continued,” a humorous allusion to the difficulty of knowing how to sign a book on the spot. But I think, if this student’s response to the reading was any indication, “To be continued” will take on a more literal reading for those present.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa was raised in India and Nepal, and has received MA’s from University of Delhi,
University of Massachussetts and her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is the author of three books of poetry available from Berkeley’s Apogee Press: Rules of the House, which was a finalist in 2003 for the Asian American Literary Awards, In the Absent Everyday, and most recently, My rice tastes like the lake. Tsering worked for the American Himalayan Foundation for 10 years, then quit to finish her memoir Imagined Country (forthcoming from Penguin) which, as she notes, “is not a usual memoir really. . . It’s sort of like talking about Tibet, through my mother. It traces my mother’s journey out, and my journey in, and the nomads themselves, the culture of the nomads. . . the way they think, how they see the land, and really also discussions of politics in terms of identity as seen by a nomad, as seen by me. So all those discussions happen within the book.”

1. I plan to undertake a more extensive analysis of Dhompa’s more recent work in its relation to the genre of the essay in a subsequent review of her latest book.

As Reported By: Alan Clinton

Alan's Bio:
Alan Ramón Clinton is a poet, novelist, and scholar of poetry and writing pedagogy who lectures at Santa Clara University in San Jose, CA. Clinton is the author of the monograph, Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics (Peter Lang), a volume of poems, Horatio Alger’s Keys (BlazeVOX), and a collection of short fictions entitled Curtain Call: A Metaphorical Memoir (Open Books). His novel, Necropsy in E Minor, published by Open Books in June 2011, was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize.

Second lesson

The newspaper showed a boy drinking from the sky. Water rested
in his clavicle.

M said he was not the kind her daughter would marry. Tashi
wanted to know if rain had harmful elements in it. M said decent
girls stayed clear of rain.

When it is hot, undress in the dark. Go to the roof. If the monsoon
clouds appear, wish farmers well.

Mothers teach their daughters to pick the best tomatoes. Shy to
the touch. Surface of cement. Tashi asks if husbands are picked the
same way.

Sunspot on cheeks. Wash with rose water. Pluck under your arm.

S held his penis and ran around the tree saying he was blessing it.
The elder roared with laughter and said he would grow up to be
a 'wild' one.

S was blessed. Free from the cycle of female births.

M taught us to peel an apple without disturbing it, saying time and
again how important it was to concentrate on the knife.

This is an example of a good woman:

(from Rules of the House)

Celebrating the Revolutionary Journal HOW(ever)

2011-10-17T21:55:00.000-07:00

On October 2, 2011 Small Press Traffic hosted a celebration of the groundbreaking feminist journal
HOW(ever), published between May 1983 and January 1992. All of HOW(ever) and its second generation journal HOW2, available online here.

During this period two dozen print-on-paper issues were created. Kathleen Fraser, Beverly Dahlen and Susan Gevirtz were on hand to talk about the journal's genesis, describing its origins in the lack of attention to modernist women poets and contemporary experimental feminist poets and poetics. The journal was launched by Fraser, Dahlen and Frances Jaffer (who died in 1999). Gevirtz became one of the editors in 1985 when Beverly Dahlen left the editorial board.

Myung Mi Kim and Meredith Stricker assumed guest co-editorship of HOW(ever) for Vol. VI, Nos. 1-4 from January,1990 through January 1991.

HOW(ever) was a revolutionary and exciting journal that was smart, challenging, and seriously engaged. For many of us, it changed the context we were working in; it provided a context for our own experiments, a community with which to share our forays into the unknown. I was a student of Kathleen Fraser's in the mid-80s at San Francisco State University and I recall that many of the women in my cohort at State--people like Sally Doyle, Mira Pashikov, Megan Simpson, Lori Lubeski, Talli Ebin, and others, were jazzed about, changed, and charged up by HOW(ever). I know it has influenced me and each of the three other
women--Camille, Yedda, and Norma--who spoke at the event. Thank you HOW(ever)!

A lively and free-form discussion, the celebration is impossible to capture here on the blog. But, I've included notes, commentaries, and writing from the three editors and from each of the four women who read and spoke at the event.

Kathleen Fraser
Beverly Dahlen
Frances Jaffer: "Why HOW(ever)?"
Excerpts from Jaffer's obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle
Susan Gevirtz

Four contributors to HOW(ever) were invited to read from work that appeared in the journal's pages. These women included:

Norma Cole
Yedda Morrison
Camille Roy
Robin Tremblay-McGaw

Kathleen Fraser on HOW(ever)

2011-10-17T21:50:00.000-07:00

The following excerpts are from Kathleen's book: Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity from the University of Alabama Press, 2000. Kathleen read some material on October 2nd, but also spoke extemporaneously. These excerpts cover some of the founding adventure, the innovative necessity of HOW(ever). Enjoy.

Kathleen Fraser

Kathleen Fraser
photo courtesy of Camille Roy

By the Seventies, my evolving hybrid poetics—and my former perception of myself as a unique and private (read isolated) poet—began to be shattered by the compelling and unavoidable questions of gender and how these entered one’s writing and individual situation in a politicized world. The freedom to explore innovative forms seemed even more necessary and exciting as a condition for the imagination’s activity and architect-poet’s expression of that. Yet, it was just around this same time that I began to discover how many exploratory works by modernist women writers had been either quietly removed from anthologies and textbooks…or were simply never acknowledged by those empowered to create these documents.

This awareness and witness brought me to troubled silence; but within the stifled place, I began to discover an even more powerful urge to help break down and dismantle the concrete wall. Teaching in three significantly different university writing programs, between 1969 and 1974, underlined that need with increasing urgency. Women students constituted the majority of writers present, but they seldom spoke unless called upon and, in their writing practice, tended to follow a safe and limited model of prosody learned in earlier classes.

It became clear that this performance anxiety—in the charged field of authority and fluency—was not confined to a few “problem” individuals. The inability to enter into public conversation was pervasive. One experienced it in the lopsided post-panel exchanges often held among writers after community literary events: women were seldom heard from. The mandate for a more equitable participation was clear, but the ability to carry it out was waylaid: I, too, was convinced that I did not have the scholarly training required to speak with sufficient authority in public exchanges where writing practice and theory were being tested and defined. Although I valued analytical skills necessary to thinking and writing, I did not feel comfortable pursuing the combative tone that often accompanied the arguments I imagined as necessary to these public exchanges.

This well-defended position began to shift as I immersed myself in the new feminist/modernist scholarship of the Seventies and Eighties and recognized issues and insights that focused and helped to authenticate my own concerns. I began to see how useless an isolationist position could be. I wanted a more concerted acknowledgement of the under-appreciated modernist women innovators, as well as more focus given to the significant body of work being produced by contemporary experimentalist women poets, that is, a two-way street between poets and scholars. But is seemed that this dialogue was not going to happen unless women poets initiated the conversation. Taking on such issues—through the editing of HOW(ever) and occasional written talks and essays—became a part of that practice.

--from the Introduction (2-3)

****
The following is an excerpt from the chapter "The tradiatio of marginality...and the emergence of HOW(ever)" from Translating the Unspeakabe (34-36)

“...in the fall of 1981, I was scheduled to teach a course called “Feminist Poetics,” which I’d introduced into the Creative Writing curriculum at San Francisco State University in order to consider—within the community of a classroom—the very questions that had been pressing upon me for years. Why was there no specifically acknowledged tradition of modernist women’s poetry continuing out of H.D. Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Woolf, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Laura Riding, Lorine Neidecker, and Marianne Moore as there clearly was for men working out of the Pound-Williams-Olson tradition or the Stevens-Auden lineage? Why had most of the great women modernists been dropped cold from reading lists, anthologies and university curricula? And why were most feminist and traditional critics failing to develop any interest in contemporary women poets working to bring structural and syntactic innovation into current poetic practice?

Then there were also the puzzling questions of language and gender, which were being argued convincingly, often from opposite positions. Did female experience require a totally different language, as Luce Irigaray seemed to suggest? How was that difference located in usage, a usage that had perhaps occurred and been ignored, dismissed as insignificant, or dropped out of the canon and quickly absorbed—at times, actively appropriated—by powerful male figures in the writing community? How was gender expressed and imprinted socially?

Teaching this class raised my distress level as it simultaneously gave me strength of purpose. Something more had to be done. There was a conversation with my writer-friend Bob Gluck, that sticks in my mind. It began with the above symptoms of distress and finished, for me, with his gentle but clear statement: “Kathleen, you must decide who your audience is and then address it.” He was not talking about the private act of writing.

I went away again for the summer with that sentence dogging me, and my resolve became clear. I began formulating a tentative plan for a modest-size journal, which I hoped to lure my writing-group colleagues into being a part of. I missed our particular way of talking and the feeling of support that came from it. There was no longer any question in my mind. I had to give time to making a place where our issues could be aired and some new choices put forward in women’s poetry—asserted and selected by women—including a revival of modernist figures and a closer look at contemporary work discounted by critics. I wanted a serious yet informal conversation among poets and scholar/teacher/critics.

I wrote to my scholar friend, Annette Kolodny, and asked her if such a project seemed of use to her. I wanted to know if she thought it would be taken seriously by the feminist critical community, whose books we poets were reading but whom we imagined as a fairly insular group with minimal interest in what were, for us, burning issues. I suggested to her that perhaps women critics simply didn’t know how to begin thinking or talking about the more innovative compositional work going on and the seriousness of its quest. Perhaps there was some fear?

I wondered if it would be of help to scholars if each poet were asked to write “Working Notes” about her particular writing process. It might also be useful for the poets—as well as the formally trained scholar-critics—to do informal commentary on books by other women. Perhaps new insights and descriptions coming directly from the poets might provide useful clues for the careful detective work in which scholar-critics are engaged?

Annette agreed with all these speculations and assured me that she would welcome such an attempt. Her letter was the final encouragement I needed. I returned to San Francisco and talked with Frances [Jaffer] and Bev [Dahlen], who both agreed to give it a try. I suggested that we enlist, as contributing editors, two feminist scholars whose essays we’d been reading and discussing in our writing group and who had become friends in the process: Carolyn Burke and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Two years into our venture, when Beverly could no longer continue as an active editor, a poet-scholar, Susan Gevirtz took her place, adding new perspective to our enterprise.

That’s the gestation part. But to show what a collective labor it was to name our journal, let me share my notes on our first meeting, in which we were searching for a name that would identify us clearly. The ideas came flying fast, as in a jazz improvisation of three instruments, where one voice comments on the phrase played by another, a movement of call and response, until some new resolution of the classic tune has been achieved. The suggestions started with Parts of Speech, then Feminine Endings (after Judy Grahn’s poem), then Indefinite Article, the Text/ure, Alice Blue Gown, Red Tulips, and Para/phrase. Next came Where (we) are, the I (too)—as in Marianne Moore’s line about poetry: “I, too, dislike it”—and, finally, HOW(ever) from her next line; “However, there is a place for it.”

First However was one word; then we broke it into its typographical and parenthetical components. The name represented for us an addendum, a point-of-view from the margins, meant to flesh out what had thus far been proposed in poetry and poetics.

There were problems in asserting a point-of-view that defined itself as female and often feminist, and in making a journal devoted solely to the publication of women writers. Some people inevitably felt excluded, as seems to happen whenever a new aesthetic is asserted publicly. Given the territorial bias we’ve all been subjected to in Western culture, the expectation of exclusion seems to be almost automatically programmed. But rather than seeing ourselves as exclusionary or here to displace or replace anything or anyone, we hoped instead to be an added source of information and stimulation. One thinks of Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Black Mountain, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School and recent Language-centered propositions and knows that there is plenty of room for exploration of multiplicity in poetry and theory being practiced by women, with out destroying our basic support of one another. The reward for asserting a vision is to become visible, to participate actively in the wider literary conversation, and to help in creating a community that has been waiting to come into view. It turns out, in our case, that there had been many women like us, feeling isolated for years—excluded from the aesthetic or political mandates of existing poetics.

Beverly Dahlen's "The Naming of How(ever)"

2011-10-17T21:40:00.000-07:00

The Naming of HOW(ever)

To Frances Jaffer in memory
by Beverly Dahlen

Beverly Dahlen
photo by Camille Roy

I met Frances Jaffer sometime in the mid ‘60s when I was working at The Poetry Center at San Francisco State. Mark Linenthal was at that time the director of the center and Frances was his wife. They used to entertain visiting poets at their spacious home on Jordan Avenue. Of course, I went to those parties and found Frances a charming hostess, but there was discontent beneath the surface. What came to be called the “second wave” of feminism was well underway: Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique had been published in ’63. That was followed by many other titles, but Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had been the book that launched the movement.

When Frances and I became friends we began to talk about this new feminism. We had seen the small periodicals that were beginning to appear—one from a group in Boston who called themselves the “bluestockings” for example, in honor of the original 18th century English group of literary women. And I recall that Mary Wollstonecraft—she who was the mother of Mary Shelley---was the author of a tract called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (1792)

In the late 1960s women all over the country were meeting in what were called “consciousness-raising” groups. Frances and I attended one of these groups in which women met privately to talk among themselves about their lives: everything was on the table--- frustration, fear, ambition, all the feelings which had been kept hidden, but also ideas for organizing politically. It was the beginning of “the women’s rights movement” or “women’s liberation” and it generated support for new laws, “equal pay for equal work,” among them, and campaigns for women candidates for public office. I note that it is an unfinished revolution. The proposed ERA has never been passed and Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to choose an abortion, is still being fought over to this day.

All of this was important, but Frances and I wanted to explore other aspects of feminism.

When Kathleen came to San Francisco in 1972, she, Frances and I began meeting to read and discuss our own work. Frances had begun writing poetry again after a long hiatus. Sometimes there were visitors to the group. Marilyn Hacker dropped by, Tamara O’Brien, Gloria Frym and others were members for awhile.

During this time hundreds of books having to do with the theory and practice of feminism were published. I was particularly interested in salvaging psychoanalytic theory for women and read Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate, which was my introduction to the school of French feminism. These women had embraced Freud and Lacan and their work; the essays of Julia Kristeva (Desire in Language) became important, in fact, foundational for me.

Reading and writing: they feed one another. We began to turn our attention to the “buried” women writers, particularly the modernist women like H.D., whose work was barely in print. I had read a couple of her poems which were anthologized, but knew nothing beyond that. Women writers had simply not been taught when I went to school in the mid ‘50s. By the time of our meetings many books were being published not only about the politics of feminism but the works of literary women were becoming available again. H.D.’s poetry and novels came back into print, as well as an account of her psychoanalysis called Tribute to Freud. Her book-length poem Helen in Egypt is a direct source of my own Egyptian Poems and her Trilogy, an account of her survival of the blitz in London during the Second World War, is a work that opens one to meditation on the powers of destruction and resurrection.

It must have been the early ‘80s when Kathleen suggested publishing a small newsletter to share our enthusiasms with others. We agreed, but what would we call it? We brainstormed a bit and landed on “however.” It’s the “however” from Marianne Moore’s poem called “Poetry.” It’s there, even in its redacted form:

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.

This is what we were looking for: a place for the genuine. A modest place for women writers who had for whatever reasons become discouraged, to turn again to thought, to interpretation, to innovation, to poetry. And for those who had never doubted, who had always written, to share their work with new audiences. Finally, it was always a pleasure to read the manuscripts of the young poets and to be able to represent them in the pages of HOW(ever).

October 2, 2011

Susan Gevirtz on HOW(ever)

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Here are some excerpts from Susan Gevirtz's notes for her part of the conversation about HOW(ever). Not all of these things actually got brought up during the conversation as the discussion had a life of its own. I've tried to indicate in asides (in green) what appears in Susan's notes but did not get discussed on October 2nd.

Susan Gevirtz and Kathlee Fraser
photo by Camille Roy

From Susan Gevirtz:

Some of you were there, but for those of you who weren’t, I wish I could thoroughly invoke the world of November 1985 when I began working on Volume II No. 4 of HOW(ever).

There are a few things that may at least summon aspects of it :

First : the 2 words: feminist and poetics. [Susan wondered why she was NOT finding these two words together, anywhere!]

Susan, who was a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness Program, was alerted to a flier at San Francisco State with those two words together--"Feminist Poetics." The flyer was for a class taught by Kathleen Fraser. Susan sought out Fraser's telephone number and called her cold. Kathleen invited her over and they had scotch and cheese and talked. Susan ended up being a Teaching Assistant for Kathleen and got credit for it because her UCSC professors Donna Haraway and Jim Clifford were already subscribers to HOW(ever) before Susan even knew about it.

Being Kathleen's TA and then being made an associate editor (not even an assistant!) on How(ever) were life changing events and informed everything that followed. I can never express enough gratitude to Kathleen for this -- and of course also for introducing me to the work of Dorothy Richardson

I don't think Susan got a chance to talk about this conference (below) at the SPT event, but it is in her notes. I wish we had talked about this because I too went to this amazing event. My friend Sally Doyle and I were there. It was my first serious intellectual conference and it was thrilling!

Second: Emily Dickinson, H.D Dual Centennial Colloquium , October 1986 at San Jose State – Perdita was there, memorable talks by Beverly, Ann Friedberg about H.D, Richardson and others and Close Up, Susan Howe, … and more
The Poetry Center sponsored "Women Working in Literature Conference" at San Francisco State in April 1985: Monique Wittig, Olga Broumas, Jayne Cortez

Third: The low-tech nature of it all: i.e. bulk mailings that took hours to assemble on one of our floors and tables – which meant that we had a lot time to talk and argue . One thing Susan appreciated among many others about Frances is that she was always willing to disagree --about the writing being published in that issue, under consideration, our own, favorite new restaurant. Also we were laboring to send out an issue but we were not united under the banner of one common poetics. We disagreed a lot but one thing I’d risk saying we probably all agreed on was the oppressive nature of “the dream of a common language.” That book was published in 1978. It was compelling. Rich was brilliant and charismatic. But our project deviated from a kind of unity while attempting to make a place for devaitors to come together and converse

I want to say that the issues and concerns that fueled my passion for HOW(ever) haven’t waned in urgency but have maybe become more integrated into other urgent concerns. Sometimes investigation into these issues continues for many of us in ways that may not look obviously like continued investigation: –in writing poetry for example – or in more overt ways: like in Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s A Megaphone; without HOW(ever), I'm not sure I would have thought about poetry and cross cultural issues in the way that compelled me to start the translation symposium in Greece that I started … and the desire to continue to think about writing and form as kinds of politics in places outside of the U.S.

Some of the things we might have talked about while folding and stamping and labeling HOW(ever)s remain abiding unresolved questions and conversations –mattering more or less or differently than they did at that time:

+ What do we or does anyone mean by “experimental” ? Is the word “innovative” any improvement on all the problems with “experimental”?

+ Cross genre – what counts as poetry or experimental? -- issues of race, class… and why are so many we publish white?

+ How does what counts as “convention” change from one context to the next? For example…Greece and many other places… Convention as a fluid, impossible to fix, category

[Note: not all of these points were discussed at the SPT event.]

Why HOW(ever)? by Frances Jaffer

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Frances Jaffer's note (below) appears in the first issue of HOW(ever) in May of 1983. You can read it here. Kathleen Fraser also has a note on this site as well. Since I am posting a longer work of hers here on xpoetics, I encourage you to read Kathleen's note at HOW(ever) here.

A vehicle for experimentalist poetry--post-modern if you will, to be thought of seriously as an appropriate poetry for women and feminists. The poetry feminists usually eschew, believing that now is the time for women to write understandable poetry about their own lives, and with feeling, with the heretofore undeveloped self in prominent display.

But the myths of culture are embodied in its language, its lexicon, its very syntactical structure. To focus attention on language and to discover what can be written in other than traditional syntactical or prosodic structures may give an important voice to authentic female experience. Certainly one should be read side-by-side with the other.

Unhappily, most feminist publications have ignored the experimentalist work which women are writnig now and have been writing since early in the century. And unhappily, most publications of "new" writing have had little interest in feminist language issues, although some of the women who appear in them have written brilliantly and movingly about their lives asw women. We want to publish an exception, however.

Frances Jaffer and husband Mark Linenthal

Yedda Morrison on HOW(ever), Theresa Ha Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim

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Yedda Morrison on
Theresa Ha Kyung Cha

Yedda Morrison
photo by Camille Roy

When Kathleen Fraser asked if I could say something about the work of Theresa Ha Kyung Cha for an evening discussion of How(ever), I said I simply didn’t have time to do this astonishing work justice. To which Kathleen replied, “Please allow yourself to recall from your heart any memory of how you came to Cha’s work and why it was important to you.” This struck me as such an unusual and generous request and so in keeping with Kathleen’s work as a feminist and as an editor, that I couldn’t say no. So, briefly from the heart…

I was first introduced to How(ever) and subsequently to Cha’s work when I was assisting Margy Sloan in putting together her anthology Moving Borders; 30 years of Innovative Writing By Women (Talisman House,1997). Still in my twenties, access to all of the back-issues of How(ever) (and the women included in the anthology) was wildly exciting and helped plant the seed for the launch of Tripwire; a journal of poetics with David Buuck, a year or so later.

Around the same time, I encountered Cha more formally in Myung Mi Kim’s class “The Work of Silence” at SFSU. Myung’s own experience coming to the US from Korea as a child closely mirrors Cha’s. As a graduate student in the creative writing department with an undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies (though I still couldn’t open my mouth in class) I was particularly drawn to Cha’s work for different but also very personal reasons.

Cha’s writing was the closest I’d yet come to finding a poetry that cohesed and expanded my own sense of the tenuousness of language. Cha’s minute recordings of the often violent struggle to acquire language in her 1983 book Dictee, exposed the possibility of struggle as language and opened a way to engage the silence and silencing factors (class, physical isolation, illness) that had so shaped my own young life.

And while the acquisition of language for “us” (my brother and myself), had the relative ease of happening within our mother tongue, we hovered on the flip side of Cha’s equation; the place where she tracked the cultural, linguistic and physical erosion of the old through the acquisition of the new. Or, as in our case, the loss of language and the acquisition of “no language.” For my brother, over the course of three days, lost his ability to speak and has, for the past thirty-eight years, remained silent save guttural noises that I, and to my mind Cha, was trying to make sense of. Wasn’t Cha exploring a continuum of expression as mediated by mouth, nation-state and textbook? Wasn’t she/I trying to write into meaning/history the spits and silences resulting from profound loss?

Dictee affirmed my sense that the ability to speak let alone write couldn’t be taken for granted (especially in poetry- a physical space where things might happen), that we must acknowledge the privilege of fluid, recognizable speech and the silence(s) it betrays. That the fits and starts of acquisition and of loss are in and of themselves a language, a violence and a possibility. And that the discrepancies between interior life/language and the externalization/vocalization of language was a legitimate, even essential field for poetry.

A brief biographical note on Cha by Myung Mi Kim

DISEUSE- from Dictee (as published in How(ever), 1988)

Norma Cole on How(ever)

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Norma Cole
phto by Camille Roy

Norma Cole began her contribution by marking three historical events:

The 1980 New French Feminisims edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle De Courtivron published by the Univeristy of Massachusetts. In this book, Norma and others "found in translation many of the great writers we know and love, e.g. Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Marguerite Duras. Duras talked about women, writing and embodiment." Cole then linked this feminist work to current cutting-edge neuroscience--"it's all about embodiment."

The 1986 The Poetics of Gender edited by Nancy K. Miller after a colloquium at Columbia.

Then, Francis Fukuyama's The End of History published in 1992.

Norma then read to us from her Postcard Review (How(ever) Jan. 1988, Vol. 4, No. 3) of Dennis Baron's Grammar and Gender :
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Grammar and Gender
Dennis Baron, Yale University Press, 1986

For any of us who have been wondering about the ontology of "her" speechlessness and that d' "alliance of speechlessness and powerlessness." (1) that, we are assured, is individually based-- your own timidity --here is a helpful source book. Grammar and Gender is a thorough, informative narration on how we've been named strangeness, other, alien; how that's been built into the language we use(d), lodged in legitimacy. It is a book bearing witness to the man-made structure of events and political facts behind the word-set we know, "the powerful are dedicated to the investiture of speechlessness in the powerless."(2)

What becometh a woman best, and first of al: Silence. What seconde: Silence. What third: Silence. What fourth: Silence. Yea if a man should ask me til' dowmes day, I would stil crie, silence, silence, without the whiche no woman hath any good gifte, but hauing the same, no doubt she must haue many other notable giftes, as the whiche of necessitie do euer folow suche a vertue.--Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, 1553.

"You can make your eyes, your smile speak for you and say more, perhaps, than words could express" --Harriet Lane, in The Book of Culture (1922)

Vives asserts that silence is a woman's noblest ornament, and he warns his female readers not to speak when men are present, for verbal intercourse leads inevitably to sexual intercourse. Vives explains that a woman can defend her chastity "stronger with silence than with speche"-- De Institutione Christianae Feminae , Juan Luis Vives (1523)

--Norma Cole

1. Michelle Cliff, "Notes on Speechlessness." Feminist Poetics: a consideration of the female construction of language. Ed. Kathleen Fraser. San Francisco State University, 1984. pp. 103-7.

2. ibid.

From the San Francisco Chronicle Obituary for Frances Jaffer, one of the three founding editors of HOW(ever)

2011-10-17T21:24:00.000-07:00

After the Small Press Traffic HOW(ever) event, Beverly Dahlen sent an email to all the participants and quoted Stephen Schwartz on Frances Jaffer. Dahlen highlighted Schwartz's comments about Jaffer and HOW(ever):

"A Chronicle review of the latter volume described her as ``one of a number of feminist poets whose questions about language remain largely unanswered but rigorously investigated.'

[Jaffer]served as an editor of HOWever, a major journal of innovative women's writing. She was especially interested in the work of such female poets as HD and Marianne Moore."

You can find the full obituary here.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/Chronicle/a/1999/01/30/MN81680.DTL#ixzz1azbApgly

Camille Roy's "Theory" from HOW(ever) 1988

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Theory

Theory.
   The theory states that the perfect sentence can be made to
   disappear by following a set of rules backwards. The theory
   is a jar, and the sentence is a fluid which can be poured out. It
   is part of your job to duplicate the theory indefinitely.

With practice, duplication becomes entrenched, like lifting weights.

   Breast-high partitions cover the linoleum floor, creating a
   maze through which workers stroll and softly talk. At either
   end of the vast warehouse are sealed rooms whose roaring
   ventilation systems cool the computers. You are allowed in
   these rooms, because you wear a special identification badge.
   Between the computer rooms stretch two rows of windows,
   that face twin lines of young olive trees whose leaves are
   covered with fine greyish hair. Beyond these trees the work-
   ers go to sleep and have sex.

   You receive a letter from a man you haven't seen in years. "I
   think of you fondly" he writes, and tells you about his wife
Melody and her recent miscarriage. You remember with pleas-
ure a pair of soft sandals and the notes he used to leave on
your pillow. The notes have fallen out of the journal you
stored them in, or the journal has disappeared.

"It's happened already," you complain to a co-worker. "First I was a young
girl and now I'm a 'woman with a past'."

   Your response time slows. For the first time you experience fa-
   tigue because the literal size of your understanding has in-
   creased, and other workers have begun to line up with ques-
   tions. The answer to the latest question requires a flow of
   logic outside your control. You close your eyes and your under-
   standing settles over the problem like a falling tissue. A sul-
   len crack reveals itself, a niche of wrongness. You announce
   your discovery, and the questioner goes away.

   You are lying side by side when she lays a hand on your sore
   breast. "You enjoy leaving me in the lurch," you complain.
   "No I don't," she says. As you lie quietly askew there is
   something tropical about your half-hold on sleep. Finally she
   says, "Tell me you never want to see me again."
   You say "I never want to see you again."
   "Don't say that." Her voice is so small you can hardly imag-
   ine her lips moving in the dark.

You pass a nil index to a routine which causes it to indiscriminately gobble
up the symbol table. You watch, drinking tea with milk and sugar, as a ser-
ies of fatal and non-fatal errors occur.

   The grated parmesan is as soft as flour, and radiant on a
   white saucer. This happens whenever she abandons you and
   the hours go by in which you could have had her. You feel
   lit up, uncontained. On the street bodies which fix your desire
   dissolve past the hard edge of your eye. Everyone looks hol-
   low. The background is a vivisectionist, a series of lacerating
   points in a fluid. Laminating.

Sometimes the work demands great agility and you feel you are twisting
and shaking while remaining mute. You and another worker do this
in front of one another, a demonstration of technique, as you have
learned the facts intimately and can now walk upon them. There is
a tangle of questions all over the floor, stepped upon. In the corner
of the cubicle lies a briefcase, and upon it is a blueprint with one
corner ripped. Therein lies a solution, you think. The engineer folds
up her eyebrows and walks away with the briefcase.

Working Notes, Camille Roy:

I wrote this piece from notes in my journal composed on the one-hour commute down Interstate 280 to and from work. That time is nothing time, a period before & after transformation by work, a period of silence, dissociation, minor playfulness on the page. What happens at this border truly doesn't "matter," because it doesn't occupy "time."

But down there, where I am an engineer in the suburbs, I feel I have to not only speak a different language but become one. I am translated. The notes I take in the commuter van are the notes of a woman becoming a different language. Further, my work involves computer languages, which themselves are a sort of translation between a formal logic, expressed in sentences, phrases, paragraphs, and a computer performing tasks. But what is left over, surplus, both unwanted and autonomous, is the sexual. Eroticism as a non-reducible term (or ghost? in a [missing text]

See the poem in HOW(ever) here:

Fictions, a poem by Robin Tremblay-McGaw from HOW(ever) 1989

2011-10-17T17:26:00.000-07:00

Robin Tremblay-McGaw
photo by Camille Roy

fictions

this time he's leaving her teetering
in a skiff pushing
off into mist lake
sounds other world
her scarf
trails in the water of her own boat
a woman leaning her hair
washes lilies leaving
a scarred surface silent
after you he plunges in below
the surface is gutsy enough to
swim beneath the raft
barnacle covered can
grazes his back at the spine a fish
frightens him with its sudden
appearance while bodies cannonball by him
he's tan and you can see
the outline of him beneath the
flimsy barrier of swim trunks
reef she thinks
hot summer boy black curls
press into her as they dance
she leaps into grass
another boy she steals into the twilight
for us the boy (was he really
a boy wasn't he) hung
himself from the oak
in his parents' frontyard the school
bus passed and we all saw him only
a white sheet covered
body but we saw and then
the erasing he kisses
a girl in jail puts
another boy's cock in his
mouth she paints her nails
yellow with a marker he
bicycles everyday to
work his mother fixes cheeseburgers a quart of milk
in his ear a woman whispers push off
from the shoreline he tells
his mother old man P__'s gravestone
moves a little on its base each
year he says he's marked
the change himself it is
morning tufts of hair curl into his ears
the press of fluid on his bladder forces him
from the bed across the cool
wood floor to the bathroom a
lizard slips over
the flagstone in another country an elderly
woman has her tea smears
her pink ice lipstick on the cup her
white cloth napkin her hand on
the mirror when she leans too
close lean close comes to him and
fishing is the order of the day sunstroke
breaststroke her thighs expanding
and then snapping shut venus flytrap
infectious ivy spreads over them and they
are fixed for certain one spot
where anyone can see can
point with ease comfort something
that is known a tree
in the wind creaks only
which one is it they move
together just as you get your I'm
sitting on this bridge
no way for him to get
past me somehow he appears on the other
bank water trickling and trees
bursting in the wind she
thinks they're real

Working Notes, Robin Tremblay-McGaw:

I'm interested in the disallowed. Experience, dream, memory, time, vision, lies overlap. become indistinguishable. part of the text. of our lives. suspension in. a state between sleep, wakefulness. other. a mystery. the desire to write/explore. the ineffable brings me the page.

from HOW(ever) Vol. 5 No. 3 April 1989

Brashear, Bernheimer and Sonbert at Small Press Traffic

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On Sunday September 16th SPT had its first Fall 2011 event in our new space at ATA on Valencia. We are so thrilled to be collaborating with these folks. Many events will happen at ATA on Sundays at 5pm though we will continue to have some events at CCA’s Timken Hall.

Jim Brashear with art from ATA
photo by Camille Roy

Our opening day couldn’t have happened in a more vibrant way. ATA’s theater was nearly full. Jim Brashear inaugurated the season with a sound piece. He stood at the front of the room and began talking into a microphone as if by way of introduction. But soon, audience members became aware that other sounds were emerging from elsewhere. Music from other spaces in the building contributed an aleatory element to the performance. At first, I wasn’t sure what was Jim’s work and what was ambient sound from busy Valencia Street outside.

This “not knowing” actually activated some panic for me. I worried about the unfolding of the piece, how it related to all the sound around it. But then, it became clear that Jim’s in-person improvisation was in conversation with that emergent and increasingly audible timeline of sound, and I was relieved. Of course, it isn’t uncommon for certain performance pieces to begin without the performer marking the beginning. The audience understands retrospectively that the piece has begun and so in some strange way there is no beginning or there is indeed a very clear commencement but it is lost to us since we didn’t know to look or listen for it until later. I found the piece engaging. Jim’s rich, sonorous voice, accompanied by the timeline of sound filled ATA. I was conscious of my body immersed in the space and sound and of the fact there were other bodies in the room. Invisible to us, sound waves moved around us, bounced off us, made a sonic network of us all.

I asked Jim if he wanted to include some information about his piece here on the blog as a number of people were interested and how he did what he did. Here it is, ever so graciously provided:

I've done a couple of versions of this elsewhere, and each time the looks of surprise make it worth the effort. When you're using technology for performance (particularly for sound, I think), everyone seems poised for the beginning, for the ON button to be pressed, for the needle to drop. My particular program (Kyma) allows me to circumvent that convention so that the seemingly impromptu (or rather, improvised) speech at the beginning is pulled forward into the performance and blurs the boundaries between, so that you're always looking back, or listening back, over your shoulder in time, wondering
how you arrived inside the field of sound. This does include a familiar performance art intention of emphasizing the everyday, pedestrian quality of performance, but also an attempt to activate the musical qualities of even the most seemingly non-musical speech (and could that be a potential definition of "sound poetry?). The structure of the program gives me the option (among many) of fading in the effects very slowly, because the whole project exists on a timeline, the same software metaphor found in most audio and video programs, in which the user arranges events that a cursor passes over in real time and activates them. My particular arrangement of them focuses as much control and modulation as possible on the voice, so that every vocal gesture is amplified to more dramatic levels. Speaking might already be musical, but why not bring out as much of its music as possible?
--Jim Brashear

Montage from Sonbert films
photo from Bright Lights Film Journal

By way of introduction to the showing of Warren Sonbert’s 1983 film A Woman’s Touch, Alan Bernheimer gave a brief and wholly interesting talk about Sonbert and his films. Alan said that Sonbert was an artist who, to an enviable degree, integrated his daily life and artistic practice. In fact his daily life provided the materials for his art. Sonbert’s films have been shown around the world and were included in 6 Whitney Biennial events. Wherever he showed his films, he also shot footage. Born in New York, Sonbert studied film at NYU and was very much influenced by Warhol, Rene Ricard, and Gerard Malanga. He came to San Francisco some time in the 1970s. Sonbert was prolific, making many films and writing extensively on film and other matters. A Woman’s Touch is a silent black and white visual pleasure; Alan told us it is an homage to Hitchcock’s Marnie. Oddly, some years ago, I read Sonbert’s piece “Narrative Concerns” in the Poetics Journal special issue on narrative before I had ever seen any of his films. They are hard to come by and have not been digitized. Alan generously provided copies of Sonbert’s Poetics Journal piece for the audience members. Here’s a few excerpts:

Alan Bernheimer
photo by Camille Roy

“The strengths of narrative as well entail its limitations. On one level narrative could be defined as the eventual resolution of all elements introduced. This classical balance is always satisfying: when the various strands are climactically tied together. But this also implies a grounding that may often enough be deadening”

“At this moment when anything can happen, narrative is at its most fascinatinog. (In my own films I generally try to include an image of a forward motin on train tracks in which several lines converge but cut before any actual track or direction is taken—it’s a metaphor for possibilities open.)"

“In my last completed work, A Woman’s Touch (1983), which lasts 23 minutes, there is a given and then a series of qualifications, almost like a Theme and Variations. The initial set is a number of images of women involved in solitary action. All is presented positively, benignly, almost too complacently: women at work, at play, constructing, striving, succeeding—a paean to their independence.”

Sonbert goes on to explain that in the end, the film closes this way: “The lines of the driveway converge in a path that leads to the door. The lines of the driveway converge in a path that leads to the house: but it is a cul-de-sac, a dead end. The man does have the last word. All the independence that the women in the film have throughout evinced, and as well the straining towards home and domesticity, here both converge in a narrative summation of tying together the threads within a devastating conclusive context.”

It is interesting to me that it is not the conclusion of the film that I recall. What remains for me is some of those images of the many women, among them, Johanna Drucker, Carla Harryman, Anne Waldman, Melissa Reilley. In some of the shots, their faces and bodies are radiant with pleasure and a kind of joy.

Melissa Reilley
photo by Camille Roy

Here are some links to things online about Sonbert and his films.
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/SonbertL.html

Warren Sonbert's Films by Jon Gartenberg

Brief Candles: The Films of Warren Sonbert

Wrong Love by Litia Perta

2011-10-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

I heard Litia read this piece last August and I was green with envy; I asked her to share it here, and graciously, she agreed.

Wrong Love
for Sam M.

So, I have been thinking lately about the relationship between loving and writing—and about the relation of both of these movements that I think of as creative ventures to the experience of failure. I keep returning to the etymology of the word writing—a strange word, one not related to the Latin scribere (from whence we derive our script, scribe, inscription, description).

Writing, the word itself, arrives to us through Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old Norse, tribal languages, and it means literally to draw the figure of something by carving it out, to form an outline by cutting into the surface of something, to score or mark through the gutting movement of making an incision.

To carve, to cut, to incise.

The early movement of writing engaged knives as the ancestors to our pens. And something in this brings much to my mind of loving—an experience that also carves itself into being, making a mark that cuts deeply so it may seem, at first, indelible. But like marks carved in ancient stone that must have seemed at first so clear, as soon as these lines are forged they open themselves to the dulling, softening, fading of time, perhaps one day (after many storms) to be smoothed over all together, to disappear.

There is a moment in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red when the red‐winged monster Geryon’s whole body forms “one arch of a cry—upcast to that custom, the human custom of wrong love.”

Wrong love. Thinking of this phrase as having many skins, the top one, surely, is the idea that the love between two people, or the love that one person has for another, can be bad or wrong or ill‐fated which maybe just means that it doesn’t last, or causes pain, or doesn’t make room for a person to live conventionally. But I wonder, of all these things, are these bad? And this has made me wonder whether wrong and bad can actually be said to be commensurate or whether we are in fact thinking through two very different qualities. What lasts? What causes no pain? What is lost when we live conventionally? This led me to think of the many ways in which being wrong can move a person both toward her own depth as well as, perhaps one day, towards a notion of what might be right.

As I sat to write this piece, a second skin of the phrase caught my attention and that was the notion of love itself as a mover through the world, alighting on certain heads, certain moments, perhaps herself trying to find a stable ground on which to rest. So she lands somewhere, thinking it looks good and finds quickly that she was wrong, wrong love, that the ground there was not stable, that she could not set down roots, much as she may have tried. Wrong love here not of a person or of two people but of the quality of wandering love herself, simply looking for a safe place to be, thinking she’s found one, and being wrong.

What has all this to do with knowing, and with writing—and what to do with failing? Seems like everything and again, being wrong seems the only path—at least the only path I have ever known—toward learning.

When I was twenty years old, I was obliged to write a senior thesis in order to graduate from college. I spent the weeks of spring break alone on my campus wandering through the strange landscapes of my mind to eventually produce 160 pages of text that I thought, initially, opened up a new kind of epistemology, a new kind of working inside language around nothingness and negation, a new way of being in words.

My two advisers were old men. Lovely men. One was stiff and tight and white haired and slim and elegant and lived in New York and stood when we met in his office and often pointed his finger to the sky when he made a point. The other shuffled when he walked and wore a straggly gray pony-tail, had grown up in Berkeley, wore turquoise rings, and his tweed jackets were enormous to fit over his ever-widening body. He wore spectacles and spoke rarely and had in his eye the most kindred glinty mischief spark I had at that point ever seen. I trusted both of them as guides and knew that somehow their oppositional qualities would balance out so that my work would be even-keeled and strong.

One morning, in the middle of writing my conclusion, I had a moment that was the opposite of blindness--the kind of moment where the universe cracks open and breathtaking light is let in, a kind of light that, for me, actually hurts. I saw that the entire path I had been on was wrong--that my idea didn't work, that my theory was crumbling beneath me and all I could think, with this new found sight, was that I was surprised it had taken so long to realise. I cried like a child and had no other recourse but to turn it all in anyway.

I was given honours for my thesis, was commended in all the ways my college allowed. Privately, this made me angry, I thought of it as consolation, a way in which they could acknowledge that I had worked so hard and failed.

When I met my two advisers, the pointy and the vast, in the soft gray basement of the philosophy building, they asked me how I felt about my work. I cried fresh tears. And told them, shamefacedly, that I saw now--that I realised--what they must have realised all along: that I was wrong.

The vast one smiled wide, and the pointy one shifted to his toe tips and they both agreed with me--and then welcomed me to the project of philosophy.

This early lesson is one that in love I am still learning. That it need not last or feel good or be right. But that even wrong love, perhaps only wrong love, can lead to knowing.

Litia Perta is a writer and a teacher currently living in Brooklyn. She emerged from UC Berkeley's doctoral program in Rhetoric exhausted but unscathed and has been processing her institutional training ever since. She is interested in transformation and in collaborating with others to develop ways (both pedagogical and spiritual) to support the transformations we came here to live through.

Dodie Bellamy's the buddhist

2011-09-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

We spent the long Labor Day weekend on the western shore of Lake Tahoe. I plunged into its icy waters everyday for four days in a row. Even after 15 years of returning to the lake, I never tire of the view and the many hues of blue it flashes.

An additional pleasure this year included gobbling up Dodie Bellamy's the buddhist from Publication Studio. The book begins with a bang--the details of which I will leave you to discover for yourselves--as it unleashes its garrulous alchemy, turning Bellamy's blog posts on the fireworks and subsequent fallout from a relationship with "the buddhist" into a book that pushes all kinds of literary/aesthetic/social boundaries, all the while maintaining a running commentary/meditation of and on its coming-into-being. Boundaries and how they get pushed around, wadded up, shoved aside, pierced, pummeled, and sometimes, maintained, are always central to Bellamy's writing.

For lots of different reasons, I tend to keep some pretty firm walls between different parts of my life, but I revel in how Bellamy and most New Narrative writers mess with these walls and what they have to do with writing.

Bellamy is unafraid to parade and take apart what Sianne Ngai has called "ugly feelings." She names their gendered/political frameworks:

This is what I was getting at in my post on public display and operatic suffering--an in-your-face owning of one's own vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don't see how anyone can really write from a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power. To deny behaviors and experiences gendered as weak or "feminine" is not feminist or queer, it's heteronormative to the hilt. Like Kathy Acker, I long to quiver and terrify in the same gasp (35).

Image from Belladodie website. Bellamy googled "operatic suffering" and this is the first image that came up. (I love that all the participants appear to be women!)

Bellamy's book is full of a wide array of references to writing, the writing community, to other writers, artists, film-makers, musicians, and an array of Hollywood films, to spirituality, meditation, the death of Bellamy's mother, academic interview committees, Buddhist sex scandals, Ambien, Culver City hotel stays, and more. I love that this book includes a whole host of images, some taken by Bellamy and others snatched from elsewhere (like the one above).

Here's one of my favorite passages:

Hotel Retreat Day 6

The nightgown I brought with me is getting funky so I bought another one at the Nordstrom Rack at the Howard Hughes Center. Being a Princess and the Pea type person, I cut out the tags so they wouldn't scratch my delicate nature as I slept.

You gotta love the middle, WARNING: KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE tag, and its lame attempt at a comforting afterthought: ALL FABRIC CAN BURN. Like they're trying to convince you that this nightgown isn't particularly flammable—it's more of an existential thing, more like every time you go to bed you're in danger of combusting into yet another Anima Sola, running through the night, heartbroken over the buddhist, engulfed in tonguey orange flames. She must have bought her nightgown at Nordstrom Rack too (100).

The Buddhist begins with its title all in capitals on the cover but by the time the book closes, the buddhist has shrunk to all lower case. The book begins with engorgement and ends post-sex, "with printed love" (145). But, it takes awhile to get there. Throughout the book, Bellamy suggests that she will stop writing about the buddhist, as here:

...that's what it feels like with the buddhist, those final musculature contractions of a dead thing. I'm tired of writing about him. Back in the early days of New Narrative, when we were all wanting to be in one another's work, I complained to Kevin, why don't you write about me, and Kevin said he didn't write about me because writing was an exorcism, and he didn't want to exorcise me. Writing about the buddhist here has been a sort of exorcism, but the time for that has passed--no more soap opera narrative for this blog, time to return to random bleeps of experience and observation (39).

But of course, he keeps turning up, however much he is denied and/or newly buried:

"The unhooking from the buddhist now feels complete; I'm ready to open the door and step out into the rays of my sunlit future" (49).

"I wish I could erase the buddhist from my consciousness, I'm sick of thinking about him, but my writing brought him into my life, and it seems he's going to stay there in spirit, if not in flesh, until the writing's through with him" (56).

"So, I'm saying goodbye to the buddhist vein here" (71).

"Based on this blog, I'm sure it sounds like I talk about him all the time, but I don't. I was feeling melancholy about the whole situation today--and there it was again, the unshakable longing that I keep thinking I've shaken--like the eternal return, it comes back again and again, its quality essentially unchanged. When the longing strikes, I get this romantic sense that the buddhist is feeling it as well..." (104).

Bellamy is aware of this constant return, of course, and works it as much as it works her. She includes in the book a section in which Colter Jacobsen, artist, friend and publisher of the buddhist, remarks upon this recurrence:

Colter added:
I thought of you when i read this [a quote from Proust]...I hope I wasn't insensitive when I said that i like the constant return in the blog of the buddhist. It was also meant to be an observation that while you are editing the buddhist blog, it also seems to be growing....I think it is brave and vulnerable....I think people appreciate this because we can so relate to it; there's always someone in our life whose relationship was left unresolved and complicated and so much time is spent weighing what happened...till it becomes almost and abstraction. (129).

I think Bellamy's constant return to the buddhist makes for a kind of abjection that is uncomfortable for the reader. Our identification with it might not be uncomplicated; or we might deny any identification with it. There's something particularly interesting to me in this display and working with and in this space of abjection; it is all about discomfort, distances, contagion. It seems to be the source of writing, writing as intense content but also intensive formal practice and investigation, abjection and writing that both undoes and remakes a person and a person's work.

Here are some other selections from the book:

Of course it ended badly. Recently I tried to smooth things over with The Buddhist. It was disastrous. Bradford Nordeen on my efforts: 'Aren't these awful experiences best when they're funneled into the work so that heartache is turned into a piece, made productive? That piece is written (and lovely) so why on earth would you get back into the sandbox?" Bradford's referring to the 1000-word story/memoir I recently completed called "The Buddhist," a piece so obscene it makes my soul blush. 1000 words sounds right; I have no desire to write any more "real" writing about him. I enjoyed working with brevity--layering subtlety into such a raunchy, blatant blip. I even created a character arc for the protagonist, just like they do in real fiction. The "now" takes place within a few minutes, but the content extends and swirls way out, the now being like the eye of a tornado, and everything else racing around that. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how personal or vulnerable my subject matter, at a certain point in writing it all boils down to formal concerns, I become this slightly mad biologist panting to herself as I pin a butterfly, alive and writhing, to a cardboard background. Of course I'm thinking of Nabokov here. Is 1000 words and a community who's been entertained for 5 months worth the pain? And, yes, there was pleasure as well. It was like being in a cult, a strange narcissistic Buddhist sex cult. I wouldn't have passed it up for the world (34).

Throughout I've tried to use my babbling about loss and betrayal as an opportunity to refine and promote a political/aesthetic position (49).

...after poopooing divisions, I made a distinction between blog writing and Real Writing. That's a hard one, for I don't know what I'm doing here, why I'm putting all this energy into these posts. I think of poets who speak of their 'writing practice,' meaning it's all part of the process; they don't separate out precious, discrete poems as real work and letters and journals as lesser work. Thus the fetishization of George Oppen's daybooks for example. I've always considered the whole Writing Practice idea as yet another example of some poets' insufferable egotism, a total guy thing, like they think they're such geniuses their shopping lists should be bronzed. Would these guys consider a woman blogging about her heartbreak as part of a serious writing practice? I doubt it. Is my refusing to consider this blog Real Writing an internalized misogyny? My posts are too slight, too femmy, too sloppy (I'm a compulsive reviser), too easy. So Rainer's right: I'm conflicted (73).

This section follows a passage Bellamy quotes from Helen Molesworth's "Me, You, Us: Eva Hesse's Early Paintings." Bellamy writes:

Art writing doesn't get much better than this--Molesworth's willingness to engage in such a personal, intimate relationship with Hesse's work, while never losing her analytic eye. This idea of the image looking back feels key here. It's as if the effort made to create a work invests the work with its own personhood--an otherly personhood that stares back at its creator, a stare fed by the psychic bleeding of the creator, that results both in relief and a slap of the uncanny. If the work doesn't stare back at you, you haven't invested enough energy in it. The buddhist once asked me if writing was my religion, and I said no, writing is not my religion. I don't know what religion is for me. Writing is my calling (80-81).

Dear Potential Readers out there: This books looks back and it is calling to you!

Jocelyn Saidenberg and Brandon Brown in the Condensary Reading Series

2011-08-03T21:10:00.000-07:00

Saturday night, after work at the library and after working through confusing carpooling plans, Camille Roy and I practically flew across the Bay Bridge, traffic having wondrously evaporated; We missed our exit, but were back on track in a moment, arriving in Oakland for the Condensary Reading Series, hosted by Jack Frost and Zack Tuck, just as it was beginning. The house was jam-packed. Brandon Brown read first though I hesitate to call what Brandon does reading. It is more of a performance. As an audience member, you're always a little unanchored, never quite sure where the performance begins or ends, or when Brandon is improvising, or when he's reading what's on the page. His references traverse a whole array of sources--Greek texts, pop culture, politics, the body, sex, appetite, hip hop, poetry, the personal. This is all part of the pleasure of Brandon's writing, writing that Camille described as juicy, or was it, tasty? It is great stuff, raw and intricate, bawdy and scatological, high pitched and searing.

photo by Camille Roy

Here's a bit of what Brandon read:

STAR WARS
Ugh, I would never go to Burning Man in a million
years. You guys have fun with that one. The window
for my going to Burning Man shut tight
in 1983 when I turned five and my cerebral system started
sloughing off the gilt pillars of progress.
Given the Tarkovsky-shot brain death I’ve suffered
since, I don’t need to fiddle mushrooms under a Pepsi
sign in Nevada. What little pop sensibility still fires
bursts via pre-Homeric river-rhythm mimic.
My performance reviews just barely adequate. My chapbooks
barely streaming across the scarred surface of a heaving prosthesis.
I’m talking about the Internet, and I’m referring to Burning Man. Okay,
I’ll go to Burning Man. So I can blaze in an incendiary nostalgic
anti-Jacobinism, since Burning Man is a nationalist display of
saturated mores. You know how that band Crass made flyers in 1978 that read Germany got Baader-Meinhof, England got punk? If I wasn’t busy packing the back of the Saab with psilocybin and Ciroc I’d bend over a Xerox, engrave the relevant apodosis: America got Star Wars. Both Burning Man and Star Wars express something fundamentally true about our culture ,which is that given the choice between collective activity ensuring the lessening of worldwide violence in the name of equalite, we’d rather burn one and wallow in the most gloriously degraded archetypal representations of such violence history has ever considered. Germany got an organized cell of native revolutionaries determined to stage a protest which would induce true trauma to the ruling classes and still engage the sympathy of the ruled. England’s poor and wayward bourgeois youth faced a literal crisis, a bifurcation by which cultural choice was demanded between fealty to the party of order or insurrectionary semiotic praxis. In the United States, if you were white and loaded and could tear yourself away from listening to Fleetwood Mac’s catastrophic LP Rumors for three hours you were most likely either watching Star Wars or waiting in line to watch Star Wars. I know you think this is an empty and raunchy satire. Actually, like every other white and wealthy person born between 1958 and now I’m deeply, disarmingly, madly in love with Star Wars. Rumors too.

PIGS

I would never hold hands with a pig.
But as a vitamin-deprived crackerlet,
my rearers were obsessed with a symbolic
play in which the little stubs hanging off
my palms were pigs. Doing typical pig shit too.
Going to the market. Gumming roast beef.
Slurping trash out of a trough like it was lamb
kidneys in shallot sauce. I’m not above seasoning
my own shapeless chemical dinners with a
little pork product. Inhaling sodium ennui glutamate.
Listening to the lachrymose squeals of an angered
Kardashian, luving its peal across the bereft
orchard of my machinery. But I am going to
call a pig a fucking pig. This blonde Franz-type
stalks the halls of my office building.
He nods up with his whole cleft so I can see
the breezy blonde hairs inside his snout shake.
Sparkling honky eyes. He licks his lips
spying spine. Hot lard for a cold
baton. Wild boars still roam the woods
of Marin, but in the streets of Athens
all you can see are pigs. Saying something sort of
shitty to a garbage collector. I got a ticket for smoking
on campus and the pig thanked me, handing
over carbon copy. Smudging my enduring
dermal affability. I grabbed his tail and pulled
it Botox taut. That’s not
compost staining the wrinkles in my fingers, pig.
It’s what degrades this beautiful salt-lick
I put clothes on every day: white but pig-hating,
full of lovable rancor. It smells a little yesterday.
Backdated fish. Big potato. What goes
in the garbage. Cognac for pigs.

photo courtesy of Camille Roy

Following Brandon's raucous reading, Jocelyn Saidenberg began hers by saying that after Brandon's performance, she felt like the "straight man," though she is neither. The work Jocelyn read from is new; in "Silent Resistance," she writes through/with Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, attempting to occupy that "impossible subject position" that is Bartleby's. We heard several sections from this new project and the writing throughout is precise, the syntax elastic, abject, and exquisite. I look forward to reading more from this tantalizing project.

Silent Resistance

On the Dead Letter Branch, or, Sheep

At dusk, the gray zone of my disappearance, drugged by a still unknown drug, the hour that mourns the loss of day, cast down, but I go, neither melancholic nor stupid, I am the dawn, faceless possibility, impersonal, slipping beyond my form into the dazzling light of a world that says “no” to depth. At this moment, this dusk that is dawn, I am named as such, named as one. I had been given notice, as all subordinate clerks, myself named one, were given notice. After scores of years of reading through undeliverable correspondence, no one more suited to this avocation than I, vested with that authority to open and read the dead letters, I am to be removed. Not a rumor, not whispered speculation, is yet my sudden removal, due to an incoming administration, all posts, save the ex-clergy, are being removed. I would have rather to have declined their offer, but they have already asked that my keys be returned. I am the most trustworthy dead letter man handling the dead letters, yet I am to be removed, most likely today.

I was hired for my ability to decipher handwriting. To sound out the correct intention, to sleuth a destination. Stiejt Kanedeka means State of Connecticut. I could smell it. The rest we fed to the flames. Faithfully I have sorted through them, lived through them, the unreceived, prone and silent, I have worked, burned cart loads yearly. By nature and misfortune, prone to a pallid hopelessness. Within I have found rings, infolded in paper—the finger it was meant for molders in a grave. I have found bank notes, sent as swift charity to whom it would not relieve, who nor eats nor hungers anymore. I have read pardon for those who died despairing, hope for those who died unhoping, good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. I have read just enough, nor more than necessary. A business so fitted to me. I have sorted the mail of the bereft, errands of life who speed yet faster to death. My surrogate hand unsealing, tender and mild and serene, continually. Now suddenly, I am to be removed from circulation. This my home, my eternal dusk, invaded only by shadows, I am cast out. Where, as formless, who, as unrecognizable, when, am I capable of such exit, how to break the bonds of such weariness, tiredness, this silent disaster, a figure without form. This event will have happened. I repeat: I am to leave my post in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. I am to leave as if possible to publish myself, even as an anonymous dead letter man, as an instinct, unformed and atmospheric, as if I come or go from without, as if this could be thought, formed. I am as weather shadow cloud, and as weather shadow cloud, I depart.

Celebrating the Re-Publication of Bruce Boone's The Truth About Ted!

2011-08-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers---Lucky You! Now, thanks to Steve Orth and Lindsey Bolt of Summer BF Press, you too can have your very own copy of Bruce Boone's The Truth About Ted, complete with a new cover by Colter Jacobsen. You can buy a copy from them, here.

photos courtesy of Gerard Koskovich

On Friday, July 29th, a crowd of Bay Area writers and Bruce Boone enthusiasts gathered in an elegant historic home on Guerrero Street as we fêted Bruce and he read the entirety of The Truth About Ted, a new narrative text originally published in 1984 by exempli gratia of Berkeley.

I am a big fan of this slender but significant text. Years ago when I worked at Meyer Boswell Books on Mission Street, I was lucky enough to stumble upon an original copy at the very cool store next door, Bolerium Books. Thank you Bolerium Books! The Truth About Ted performs a multitude of storytellings, desires, interpretations, readings and misreadings. It is poignant, smart, and funny. If you are interested, you can read a short critical piece on it here.

Thanks to Bruce's friend Gerard Koskovich (about whom you can find out more here), you can watch this short video of Bruce reading.

Congratulations Bruce and thank you Lindsey and Steve.

Poetry at the Headlands Center for the Arts

2011-07-27T14:52:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, a classic Bay Area summer day (foggy-turned-sunny-in-late-afternoon ), Kathleen Fraser and I headed out to Marin for a reading at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Miraculously, the reading started on time, and equally miraculously, we arrived with some time to spare. The place is stunning and since it was the Summer Open House, there were a good many people there visiting artists' studios and eating the organic chef-prepared food at the cafe.

The reading happened on the second floor in the East Wing of Building 944. I wish I had my camera with me! The room is enormous and light filled; the walls were, I think,a kind of wasted white with yellowed cracks running all over them and the ceiling still had its decorative tin work which had been sand-blasted and left unpainted, a gun-metal gray.

Here's what the Headlands' web site says about the site's history:

Originally inhabited by the native Miwok, the area was used for military installations for more than a century before the army withdrew in 1972 and turned over the land to the National Park Service. This combination of wilderness and urban environments is a fulcrum for Headland's creative investigations into the relationship between human and natural systems.

The Headlands Campus Headlands is housed in a cluster of nine historic, 1907-era military buildings at Fort Barry. Residency studios, offices and public rooms are located in two four-story former army barracks and feature 13-foot ceilings, large windows, oak balustrades, maple floors and redwood wainscoting.

Since 1985, Headlands has renovated these remarkable historic structures through granting commissions to artists. Major American artists, including Ann Hamilton, David Ireland, Bruce Tomb and John Randolph, have designed and supervised the renovation of the public rooms in our main building.

In 1998, artist Leonard Hunter and architect Mark Cavagnero led the award-winning rehabilitation of a nearby 1907 Army storage depot, which now houses the Affiliate Artist program studios.

_______________________________________________________________
The Reading featured a number of writers, including some I know such as Brian Teare (who is finishing up his residency at The Headlands before moving to Pennsylvania to teach at Temple University) and Elise Ficarra of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University (though I had never heard Elise read her own work before this), and a bunch more--Maw Shein Win, Emily Meg Weinstein, Emily Jane Wilson, Steven Gilmartin, and Genine Lentine--all entirely new to me.

While the acoustics and the great many people moving about made listening sometimes difficult, the audience of 50+ people found much to enjoy. I asked some of the writers whose pieces I most responded to, to send me some of their work, and they did. Here they are for your reading pleasure.

The first is a poem by Brian Teare who prefaced his reading by saying that he had been reading Robert Creeley and Wang Wei on top of one another, in part, as a way to work on cutting or opening up his work.

The Natural World

i.

past the decommissioned fort
past the former nike missile site

past the abandoned battery
past the empty gun platform

past dugouts lined with concrete
sandbags
the ocean

ii.

living in former military housing my body

occupies space designed to mold a soldier’s
into one mess hall bunk latrine landscape

war-born they planted invasive eucalyptus
to hide the fort man-made forms a camouflage

wounding the cloth that held their bodies

iii.

each evening the house leans shadow
against the ridge we curl into the way

during a different war without trees
to shade their names soldiers did too

ocean on the other side of our sleep

The next excerpted piece is by Steven Gilmartin, a Bay Area writer who was once a student of Kathleen's. Steven has been translating Emily Dickinson's work into German and then back into English; he has also translated Cesar Vallejo, though the work he read on Sunday was from a piece on the Hoover Dam. He describes the writing as "a condensation of a significantly longer work-in-progress, as yet untitled, that had turned into more of a work-not-in-progress." Steven noted that "the reading really helped me sharpen the piece and has renewed my interest in working on it and developing it further." Let's hope so!

Untitled

The area that drains water into the place where the dam will be built is called the watershed.
—James E. Kelly and William R. Park, The Dam Builders

Birth of the New
Positioned using front loaders and lifted with the aid of a wire matrix, art deco lips are installed on either side of the canyon.

Employees
From the Department of Labor’s Employee Analysis Section: “High-altitude dryland shelf-perch types ‘think things through’ but then rise with a loud whir and a ringing, high-pitched call. This almost never develops into true musical production, for the type is easy to locate. Rapid turnover can be achieved by following the gravity dam model. The type remains an ideal worker profile and, given the current economic climate, is rather easily obtained.”

Construction: An Oral History
Too many got fried in the early months. You’d come to a point were your brains just about dropped out of your ears. The boys in the hole would haul in almost blind from dehydration, and dumb after acres of hub-tendered concrete. That would set the signal punks scrambling; it’s what you got for history. They’d put your name in and off you’d go about their business.

We learned there’s a vocabulary of industry where words are sure-fire and mighty. They range far as rivers and pool on the tongue, looking out calm and pretending their gazing purrs. Big-cat words. Their mouth runs like heaven just decided to descend and do nothing but power their cities. And you’ve got to work blind, sensitive to tone like an animal, and just as easily confused. But then it comforts you and you lie in it.

The high-scalers would rappel down the canyon face then pull themselves back up like furious spiders. You could hear their shouts above the dynamite sculpting, the jackhammers, dodging stripped rock, crescent wrenches slipping and plummeting, drill steel come unslung, bodies of men cascading through beds of air...

It was good, tho, when the sound rang down the backbone, with the magic from on high--those stiff, flat, endless desert gravel lodes, but swung there as if shot slow-mo from the finger of the god of wet, superheating high mix, low mix. And if you were buried, there were plenty more. Was what was conveyed to puddlers and the rest by well-graded shifters.

Contractors
Contractors’ profits were monumental and required the most sophisticated pneumatic excavators, hydraulic movers, and concrete-placers available. And, as they’d done for generations, executives danced after-hours to the more traditional payroll deduction reels and company scrip breakdowns.

Natural Correspondence
Letters addressed to the hydraulic engineers flowed in from Nature. Her handwriting was hard to decipher, but “Assume a virtue if you have it not” was one of the fancier constructions. This brought a possible corollary: “No one can be natural anymore.” Who knew that Nature would be such a quoter. But the consensus was she was cryptic. Or a whiner. The idea that she was a stone cold bitch was also popular.

The next piece is an excerpt from Elise Ficarra's poem "Endangered Species." Elise explains that the piece "was written as part of a collaboration with the installation artist Karrie Hovey on the Vanquishing Terrains Broadside exhibit that will show at Intersection for the Arts in May 2012. Part of the text will be excerpted for a traditional 11x17 broadside, and the rest feeds into a "21st Century" conceptual broadside, which will be an installation made by Karrie Hovery, Evelyn Ficarra (composer and sound artist) and me."

Endangered

faint points of light signal black beyond the sky’s pale din 
my body a plot of land  a boat slowly plows  dark water   
i am making a boat of sinew and flowers 
shards of bone pinked with salt       
a boat i curry across a desert  
a sky boat a worn path    a vector’s fertilizing force


  i become a butterfly in a time of limited options    
            my body a sordid chrysalis of rust and limbs 
             it isn’t easy giving up human form
 condors stick their bald heads into my cavern and feast 


we do not remember our initiation to wings
ants’ tippy feet plucking our honey
the carapace we chew through  
carrying our terror our thoraxes taut mechanisms of flight 
we row the sky 
zig    hop &
zag    

     turn

                                              scattering light into color

buildings push us into smaller vacancies
insuperable quarries  


 when we can do nothing we become a colony

Last but not least, is a tiny little bit of a poem entitled "PRAISE SONG FOR A STATE OF MIND THAT NO LONGER FEELS VALID OR, A VALEDICTION: FORBIDDING DISCOURAGING PATTERNS OF THINKING," by Genine Lentine.

In March, all I could was write praise songs to you.
Now, it's more like this: "A Praise Song for What no Longer Matters."

Maybe everything matters.
Maybe, as Agnes Martin says, Fate is Kind.

    I no longer have my copy of her Writings.
    But I think what is Kind here
    in German was Freundlich
    Friendly. Fate is friendly.
    I have lent and given the book
    to many friends so I would have some company
    in sclaing this althletic proposition
    This book now costs $450 used on Amazon
    so only by unforseen grace will I come
    into a copy again myself.
    When I first read this book,
    it felt like a manual for the forsaken,
    and I figured I alone
    needed its strict consolations.
    Then it started cropping up in stacks
   in Spoonbill and Sugartown,
   and soon people were quoting passages to me
    and now the book has its own Facebook page.

Anyway, what if I say:
"A Praise Song For What I thought Mattered, but Doesn't Now"
with the parenthetical subtitle, (which does not negate its mattering once,)

or "A Praise Song For What Seems to Matter Now, but Won't in One Week,"

or "For What You're Afraid Will Happen, and Will Actually Happen,"

there's more to this poem but you will have to wait for it to appear elsewhere!

All-in-all, a satisfying way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

from Spicer's Love Poems

2011-07-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

I know summer isn't over and that the Giants have had some success in recent years though I'm unsure about what is happening in baseball right now....I reveal my lack of baseball enthusiasm, I know. However, I do know that I quite enjoy Spicer. A little film made by Cole Heinowitz and shared on Facebook has sent me here and I'm sending you here too!

Love Poems

1.
Do the flowers change as I touch your skin?
They are merely buttercups. No sign of death in them. They die
    and you know by their death that it is no longer summer.
    Baseball season.
Actually
I don't remember ever touching your back when there were
    flowers (buttercups and dandelions there) waiting to die.
    The end of summer.
The baseball season finished. The
Bumble-bee there cruising over a few poor flowers.
They have cut the ground from under us. The touch
Of your hands on my back. The Giants
Winning 93 games
Is as impossible
In spirit
As the grass we might walk on.

2.
For you I would build a whole new universe around myself.
    This isn't shit it is poetry. Shit
Enters into it only as an image. The shit the ghosts feasted on
    in the Odyssey. When Odysseus gave them one dry fly and
    made them come up for something important Food.
'For you I would build a whole new universe,' the ghosts all
cried, starving.

from Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian's My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Go to the book to read more!

after * life

2011-06-10T18:40:00.000-07:00

lush limb cells squander nothing in moving into hickory or baobab or palm atomic frisson of epidermis becoming wave, pulp, iron that learns to be tong for barbecue or pan to fry up fish, fish whose scales were bone or finger nail what erotic cellular migrations riff the body now bodies thoughts beam nest fodder synapses across universes scatter

[RTM. from Language & thinking writing prompt 06.05.2011]

The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics

2011-05-24T07:05:00.000-07:00

Xpoetics rarely posts announcements of upcoming events. There are just too many of them.

However, there are a few exceptions, and here's one that I'm tremendously excited about. Joan Retallack will give the inaugural talk in The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics here in San Francisco on Friday night May 27th at 7:30 pm in Timkin Hall at CCA, 1111 8th Street. Admission is $8-15 (Members Free). You simply can't miss this one!

The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics is an annual lecture series with a focus on critical analysis of innovative poetry, essays, plays and cross-genre work primarily by women poets. The series invites contemporary writers to present their work in the spirit exemplified by Scalapino’s own critical writing and editorial vision as publisher of O Books.

Joan Retallack’s most recent publication Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d / (Roof Books) was named by Artforum as a best book of 2010. Other poetry includes Memnoir (Post-Apollo, 2004), How To Do Things With Words (Sun & Moon Classics, 1998), Afterrimages (Wesleyan, 1995), and Errata 5uite (Edge Books, 1993), chosen by Robert Creeley for the Columbia Book Award. Her critical books include Gertrude Stein: Selections (2008) and The Poethical Wager (2004)—both from University of California Press. Poetry & Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) was co-edited with Juliana Spahr; MUSICAGE: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack (Wesleyan University Press, 1996) won the America Award for Belles-Lettres. She is a recipient of a Lannan Poetry Award, two Gertrude Stein awards, and National Endowment for the Arts funding for an artist’s book project—Westorn Civ Cont’d, An Open Book. Retallack lives in the Hudson Valley where she is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

Small Press Traffic's Reliquarium!

2011-05-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

Saturday, May 21st, You Can Be There!

Some people think that May 21st is the end of the world! Regardless, we'll be partying down at Small Press Traffic's 2nd Annual Reliquarium. You can bid on mysterious bottles filled with secret ingredients from some of your favorite authors and artists. There will be music, dancing, drinks, apocalyptic film scenes, and more!

SPT's Reliquarium! Don't Miss iT!

2011-05-12T09:41:00.000-07:00

Saturday May 21st You Can Be There!

n't Miss It!

Sherwood Forest by Camille Roy

2011-04-12T09:04:00.000-07:00

Camille Roy’s Sherwood Forest, from FuturePoem is a startling book of poetry.

While Sherwood Forest is not mentioned anywhere in Roy’s book, it serves as a fitting title. It demarcates a space of revolt, both mythic and potential. Sherwood is, of course, the forest in the legends of Robin Hood, the earliest of which seem to derive from the 12th century. In Sherwood, Robin—in the early versions of the myth a commoner, only later a nobleman who is deprived of his land and title—is an outlaw who plots and conducts acts of revolt, re-scripting the social order by robbing the rich to give to the poor. We might argue that the figure of Robin as outlaw is problematic given that in most versions of the legend he serves as a loyal subject of King Richard the Lionhearted. So, his revolt against the established order ends up being temporary and contingent. The politics of our time has secured—apparently permanently—wealth and power in the hands of the very few: “As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth” (Domhoff. “Who Rules America”).

Roy’s titling of her book Sherwood Forest mobilizes this history, these associations. Roy has said that her book is the forest. Instead of a band of Merry Men, Roy’s Sherwood is chock full of brassy girls, queer subjects, and a variety of marginal characters. Her writing is Rabelaisian, carnivalesque, full of shit and sex, murderous desires, and yet one that opens out onto something generous.

Sherwood Forest begins with two epigraphs that are also suggestive. One is from Will Alexander’s “Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat” and it reads:

“Revolt is its bread, its exclusive respiration, its soil. From this evolves its sinews, its glinting explorational fiber. This being the mode of its disruptive English, its anti-memorials, its slow motion lighting…”

The second is from J.C. Johnson’s “Black Mountain”:

“I’m bound for Black Mountain, me and my razor and my gun. Gonna cut him if he stands still and shoot him if he runs.”

Johnson was born in Chicago (where Roy grew up) and his song “Black Mountain Blues” was recorded by Bessie Smith.

The choice of these epigraphs, like those that precede some of the poems themselves (from writers and artists such as Celine, Blanchot, Simone Weil, and Arnold Kemp), is significant. The book begins with quotes from Black artists who cite revolt, and who sometimes use language wrought from figures of hyperbolic violence. These two quotes also speak to historical struggles and violence in the world, but also suggest the linguistic pleasures of high and low diction, disruption, sexuality, the figure of the outlaw, and eroticism. They also provide possible architectures for exploring feeling. Roy will add to this mix, the thrills of the way her writing takes her readers in; you are caught in a snare from the get-go.

The first poem “My Play” begins

You are dead, imagine it.
So I should speak as one possessed,
grim & miraculous. Your word startles
the process: killer.

…The unborn occupy the dead, like some relationships.
Still, the appalling, almost feverish discomfort we cause each other—
this is our science story, which I place
in the safe deposit of your butch heart.

Our audience arrives as voyeurs with a wish, a natural desire
to be transformed into masochists. Not because they want to be
overwhelmed by suffering; quite the contrary. They seek an actual
possibility, not an actualized one.
Yet they suffer from the fact that the body is effeminate (that the asshole
is speaking).
This isn’t shit, it’s poetry.
Shit enters into it only as an image.

…My rather elastic neck droops, hips flatten, skeleton begins its grin.

But it has a bad smell, this play: the aroma of nothing happening.
Then I become aware of the theatrical quality of sex shows, porn, politics.
“The show” is everywhere. Theater is a quality
not a place.

…I want to write Eileen but I’m feeling guilty, I’m too high.

I fold my muscles into wads and sleep soundlessly.
I can’t remember my dreams, they crumble a soft cake.
A picnic with Carla. She brings rosemary bread and surprising pistachios.
She reads to me about utopias.
So touched and happy I float right up into the sky.

This opening poem initiates the reader into the poem’s play, where roles are shifting. The reader is a voyeur but also made a participant, strapped into the game of playing dead, until perhaps she realizes that the poem both speaks to her and is also a dialogue between two others, the “I” of the poem and the “you” with the “butch heart,” but it is already too late. The game has been entered and the poem will speak of us, its readers in the third person : “Not because they want to be/ Overwhelmed by suffering; quite the contrary.” The poem asserts that “ They seek an actual/ Possibility, not an actualized one,” suggesting that it is the theater of the poem itself and possibility per se, not some imagined “real” referent outside its words that its readers are after.

Words, in fact, elsewhere in a poem entitled “Cinderfella” will be called “voyeurs” themselves:

“We have to get to work,
stopping for soldiers & checkpoints
as we stumble over those
voyeurs called words” (8).

The opening poem gives readers a peek into the obsessions, pleasures and violences the rest of the book will explore: death and the dead, aging, masochism, voyeurs, the eerie turning of the poem’s tables, so that the reader is both taken in and ejected out of the poems themselves; there’s story’s relation to S/M, theatricality, feeling, the problem of plot, the beauty of lines like “the safe deposit of your butch heart.”

Roy’s book is full of lush and arresting language. She continually surprises and disarms her readers—and that is hard to do. In her poem “Crime Story” she writes:

“Cool moist air enveloped my skin. Nature so almost perfect. I saw the camellia bush right under my window, hot pink blooms amidst dark leaves that shone like washed dishes” (29)

and later,

“I went to my room. I scraped my cunt until I came…Outside my
window brilliant pink camellias nodded in the dark” (31).

There’s something about the beauty and exactness of description of the camellia leaves “that shone like washed dishes” juxtaposed with lines like “I scraped my cunt” that is wonderfully jarring—The unexpectedness and violence of “scraped” and the way the scraping of cunt is repeated several times.

This poem continues to explore the themes of masochism and sado-masochism that recur throughout and that have to do with the structure of the book and its projects, its exploration of narrative across language, character, theme, gender, sexuality, boundaries of all sorts, discreet and indiscreet poems!

“I perceive this as a problem…feelings have a structure, which is not sentiment. Certain emotions are structurally sadomasochistic—for example, suspense. Even now, writing this, I feel that pained warp, as though someone whipped my brain tissues…Last time we had sex my beloved made me sit still, which got me so hot I could hardly stand it. It was one of those times I felt ravaged by love” (31)

“Restraints seem to promise that someday the body will arrive, which means I’m waiting for something real: orgasm confirmation: of belief. I’m still waiting! waiting…” (19)

The following linguistic gems occur in a series of epistolary poems between two characters, Camille and Lucy:
“I read somewhere that dialog is tongues-in-a-nest” (40) and “that’s my feeling. It’s invented & pleasurable & underage” (41)

Or from “The History of the Slut in My Relationship”:

“That sentence
is a sort of dildo” (47)

But as I said, these poems have a generosity too, one that makes itself felt particularly here:

“I love the cloud
Around speech
We call the body…
House of sensation.
Built crud wrapper”    (“Parade” 74).

And here:

“As Scott talks, he’s witnessing, & I am thrust in his life. We have some affinity that’s bloody—genetic. Back in the swarm of old Kentucky days we gnawed on the same bone…Now isn’t that a strange thing to think. I must be in a mood. It’s the methods he tells me about. Though they’re not the point. The information hurts my tissues. The air I breathe contains it. Scott leans back, dazed. Smell of black coffee on his breath” ( “Artifact” 72).

I want to leave you with one last poem because it is another piece that performs that magic of taking the reader into the poem as it rewrites Little Red Riding Hood:

Red Hood

Little Red skips through the outback
trailing a red balloon:
I-trial, her floating word.
When she crosses the stream
she falls in.
Tumult under the bridge.

Worlds withdraw from the rushing water.
Names & letters: goners—
With Little Red tumbling after,
To the beat of her grass heart
As all roads disappear
& ruin geometry.
Alone, without politics,
She’s swept from mother to night.

My body is every body, she cries,
Startling a wolf.
“Your proper being is potential,”
he corrects, taking up a trot
along the shore. Other words
of his bad conscience:
“Poor little chick!
Hiding behind spicy red lips.”
(Flapping apart
neither will be saved).

Your house of skin is all wind,
          Sings the wolf, as he swims.
My body is every body,
          She cries, again & again.

O tender bite—!
His one accurate art performs
like a tongue, splitting right from left
in flat out songs.
Finally snacking on the grass heart
(even as she still squeals)
he is no longer embarrassed.
Distrust, disconnection, dishonesty—
he licks the dishes. Takes a nap.

Little Red regrets how she did love it
Or not exactly.
As reddish puckers, the ballerinas,
melted into her skin, our red
mistress tasted throat burger.
Wolf story gleamed under her cloak.
It was so beautiful, that minute.

The “our red” and “wolf story gleamed under her cloak,” subtly rework the entire poem and mark our complicity, seem to let us in on its project, its secret, even if it is hard to say what that is. Delicious.

Camille’s book will be out soon and you can catch her reading with Robert Gluck for the Poetry Center at San Francisco State on Thursday, April 14th. The reading will be held at the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco.

“Bob” appears in a number of places in Roy’s book, including in her thanks where Roy acknowledges that this book “is the product of a context….San Francisco.” She writes: “The Bay Area writing scene has been a rich source of friendships and intellectual life.” Roy singles out Gluck when she writes: “I would like to especially thank Robert Gluck for making me a better writer, and for all the dimensions of our long association.” A line/quote attributed to “Bob” in Roy’s poem “Properties of Criminal Girls in the String Universe” is another delight: “A secret of life is that it’s fine to be dead. Getting there is the problem” (65).

Indeed!

Interviews with Camille:

I interviewed Camille in "Torquing the Erotics of Attention," in November 2008 here, and in Poetry Flash in 1991. A reprint of that interview "Words in the Mouth" is available here.

You can read an excellent three-part interview that Michael Cross recently did with Camille here:

Part I here

Part II here

Part III here

Words in the Mouth: Camille Roy interviewed by Robin Tremblay-McGaw in Poetry Flash 1991

2011-04-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

Cover of Roy's Cold Heaven with Gina Hyams as Fear
and Dey Ehrlich as Technique from Bye, Bye Brunilde

In honor of Camille's new book Sherwood Forest, I thought I would reprise this interview with Camille, Gina Hyams who played Fear in Roy's play Bye Bye Brunhilde, and director Zack. For some reason that day, Dey Ehrlich was not able to be there. This was the first interview I ever did and I remember it clearly because we did the whole interview and then I discovered that something was wrong with the cassette recorder (yes, I said the cassette recorder!) or rather, my operation of it, so we had to do the interview all over again! It was alarming and fun.

Words in the Mouth: A New Look at Poet's Theater

ROBIN TREMBLAY-McGAW
published in Poetry Flash August 1991

BYE BYE BRUNHILDE is an original Poet's Theater performance written by poet/playwright Camille Roy, directed by Zack, designed by Rodney O'Neal Austin and Robert Hold and performed by Gina Hyams and Dey Ehrlich, originally co-presented by The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University and New Langton Arts in March 1991. The play will run at the Studio at Theater Rhinoceros, San Francisco, August 15-25.

There is an active. fruitful, difference of opinion in the air which has encouraged many of us to take another look at the possibilities of poetry in performance; that is, theater used as a vehicle for poetics and language theory, as written by poets, not playwrights, usually practiced by poets unconcerned with narrative conflict and action, the traditional values of theater. The play becomes a setting for language, instead of a vehicle for plot. Literature and theate, as we are used to thinking of them, are based on a dialectic, and don't necessarily reduce to one voice. But experimental Poet's Theater has challenged these viewpoints, blurred the borders, as demonstrated by poet/playwright Camille Roy's Bye Bye Brunhilde, a play about two lesbians who share an apartment and have a 'non-representational' tug of war between "identity politics and language theory" as they act out their "tender dance and brutal wrestling match. As Robert Gluck, poet and writer, has said,

"Bye Bye Brunhilde is a gorgeously perverse valentine about two dykes, Fear and Technique.

Fear says. "We're compatible in a way. I like you and you like my looks.' Technique replies. "You're right. I do like your looks. Camille Roy has put a lesbian spin on poet's theatre. Her characters entirely embody their sexual give and take while, on another level, their roles are dismantled by star-struck language."

Bye Bye Brunhilde premiered to sold out houses earlier this year, and returns to the stage in August with the original cast, Dey Ehrlich and Gina Hyams. Camille Roy has published poems and stories in ZYZZYV A and (HOW)ever; her work has appeared in anthologies such as Women On Women and Deep Down; her first book is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press. She is also editor of Dear World, a "queer art & lit magazine." Bye Bye Brunhilde grew out of a collaboration with film and video maker Abigail Child on "pornography, narrative, and community” in a lesbian context. ..

- Joyce Jenkins, Editor, Poetry Flash

The following talk was conducted by Robin Tremblay-McGaw with Camille Roy, Gina Hyams, and Zack.

RTM: Who are the writers that interest you, Camille?

CR: In this play, I think my two reference points were the plays of Carla Harryman and Frank O'Hara. They are both writers that I really admire; they're very different, vivid in different ways as well as both being poets writing for the theater. Other writers that I've been influenced by include Robert Gluck and Kathleen Fraser. I've been influenced by both poets and narrative writers quite a lot. So I've had to reconcile those diverse influences in my own work. Writing for voices, writing for theater, is one way to do that, to combine narrative and highly charged language. I can have the freedom and flexibility that I want and still keep these elements of recognition with an audience that creates a kind of intimacy that is valuable to me.

RTM: Zack and Gina, what do you see as different, if anything, in the work that poets produce for theater in comparison to what other writers produce?

Z: I think the clearest difference is the amount of steps you, as a director, need to go through to have a feel for the script or text. In most plays the analysis is pretty limited to the motivations and the psychological behavior and how that's manifested through the actions of the characters, whereas all those kinds of modes of interpretation go out the window when you're looking at a script that's abstract or convoluted or, at times, even nonsensical. You cannot break this script down according to the 'rules' of traditional drama. That's one big difference. Another difference is that it's not always clear from the words what should or could be happening visually. The words do not point to definitive stage action. They may suggest something, but there is no one-on-one relationship. Ten different directors will give you ten very different Bye Bye Brunhilde.

GH: Right. When we were starting, when we first rehearsed it, Zack and Dey and I sat in a cafe. Our first impulse was to try to pin it down in some way. What does this line mean? What do these characters mean? We found that that's not a helpful way to deal with this language because the language leaps all over the place. And that's the joy in the language, that you can go all these different places.

Z: Sometimes there's subtext and sometimes—there isn't—and to jump on the assumption that there's always subtext can be misleading. Or to throw subtext out the window can also be a faux pas. In traditional plays, generally, there is a lot of subtext, but it's of a simple nature. The character says, "I want you to leave!" when they really want you to stay. But in a play like this the character says, "Milk-white pebble stone'" and maybe it's not productive to spend half an hour saying "What are those milk-white pebbles there?"

GH: Except that as performers we needed to find those moment-to-moment kinds of truths and meaning. There is an arc to the play, but there's not a linear progression in the play that is immediately discernible. It's a much more intuitive progression that happens in the imagination of these characters.

CR: This play is kind of a meeting point for a set of collaborations that began in a collaboration, and it took in other collaborations as it moved to the stage of being performed in a theater. That was very exciting for me as a writer. The way the play was actually written invited collaboration, and I think it also invites that from the audience.

Z: Oh. definitely! I think that most plays, when they reach the stage of production, have been refined to the point of being almost fascistic in the sense of one vision, one clear, digestible, easily and quickly understood unit or moment or statement or message, or something. This play requires a lot from the audience in terms of interpretation. They must go through the same thing: do I want to spend thirty minutes looking at the milk-white pebbles, or do I want to go on and find out what's going on with the relationship?

RTM: So it's very process-oriented for everyone involved right from the very beginning?

Z: Yes, and I think that can make certain audience members uncomfortable, to realize that they have a responsibility or... an opportunity to participate in this way and invent along with us –that it is not a sealed, closed system that they are watching as if it sits under glass existing outside of them. They are really in the moment with the performers as well as the characters, as well as the writer. It's all [being worked on] at the same time rather than being something that has been finished and made, and now just needs to be consumed.

RTM: Well, who is the audience for this?

CR: I think that this play is in many ways quite recognizable by people who are not necessarily experimental writers, although experimental writers get every line, and often other audience, members do not.

GH: It's not that they get every line. They get something else. They may not care about these narrative arguments at all and have no interest in literary theories. But it really doesn't matter with this play because these characters, these entities are so physical and sensual, and they do have a relationship to each other and to the space and to the audience and to the language—which is almost a third character. It's funny; and there's a lot of story without a lot of plot.

CR: There's story, and there's character, but there's not narrative in the traditional form. The character and the stories are there because they give a certain kind of pleasure, and not there because they're part of an organization that's desired to reproduce somebody's idea of what reality is. It's much more open-ended than that.

RTM: It's interesting that it's such a pleasurable piece. How do you see the lesbianism of the characters relating to the play?

CR: It's that intimacy theme again. The lesbian community is a sort of hothouse for intimacy, as any group that is all women can be. Possibly the private life of couples is played out a bit more in front of friends and others than in the straight community.

Also Fear and Technique have very different views of sexual identity, that is, their identity as lesbians. To Fear it is a riddle that undoes itself. For Technique it is a lyrical expression of a kind of logic. Fear is more innovative, really, because she's not only lesbian, she's femme. This is a location with more than one source of knowledge.

Also, sexuality. Their sexual relationship is metaphorically realized in the play. The context for this is the explosion in play and discourse concerning sex in the lesbian community over the last twelve years. It's almost a kind of community cannibalism, feasting off the body.

RTM: But this was an intellectual idea before it became these characters in the language that they're aspiring to.

CR: That's true, but I was also wanting to look at the intersection of theory and sexuality, theory and relationship; to look at story and character to see what kind of pleasure they can give.

Z: I think you've also jumbled the balance which most people are used to in the theater, in terms of how much they are feeling with the characters or for the characters, and how much they have to think about how this piece is being made, or what are the conscious steps we go through when we assemble experience, for example. The audience has to put those words together with those images, and they might not necessarily fit or be as clear as what we encounter in our daily life; I mean, that's if you don't have any imagination.

RTM: There is a deep sense of recognition, though, in this piece for the audience members. What is it that the audience is identifying with?

CR: I think this is a very intimate relationship and the characters have a strong presence. It's not an experimental piece in the sense that there is no character. Some of the dynamics of intimacy are what people recognize. They recognize the misunderstandings, the lying interpretations of reality, and the comedy of that.

Let me put in something here about writing the dialogue. That, to me, was just like an explosion, it was so much fun, and provided a whole new set of directions: to imagine the 'words in the mouth' rather than on the page, and part of that was being willing to eliminate descriptive writing. When you're doing dialogue a lot of descriptive setup just gets dropped, and that means that you have a certain kind of multiplicity; you have many perspectives rather than one; you have constant relationships rather than a solidified view of the world. That was tremendously exciting to explore—It's still exciting. There's a way that images in writing function to contain desire, to turn it into something static. If you take that out, then you have this interesting field of possibility that's very physical.

RTM: There isn't an imposed authority or particular view. As you're saying, this validates all perspectives.

Z: There's no omniscience.

CR: Right, and what you have instead is this complex relationship which is like a system rather than a point of view. It also has a kind of organic body of its own. It parallels what Gina was saying - the language is a third character.

RTM: If your experience is that there is not an omniscient point of view, that there isn't a single consciousness or 'correct' or single personality, then does that change the form of your writing?

CR: I think that it's a simplification to try to reduce everything to one voice. It's understandable that people would attempt to do that, but I don't think that it's very accurate. When you have groups of people - a couple or any group - that are relating together, there are certain patterns that they have that are part of, not each one individually, but of their relationship as a complex whole. That's the level of reality that this play is working with. The more traditional view is that there is an objective point of view that can describe what's going on that's outside of those dynamics.

GH: There's no outside in this play.

Z: Very confusing! What you are saying here is, this conflict between the two characters is not a resolvable one, and what one character may consider a resolution won't be for the other one. I think that's much more realistic than the traditional way we approach drama - what happens to the conflicts, who gets what in the end, and blah blah blah. In a way, it's open-ended; the only possible conclusion can be some kind of balance which includes both kinds of realities.

RTM: There are irreconcilable differences that you live with.

Z: Right. Something that would happen frequently when Camille and I first started talking about the script would be: I would pose a question and say, "Well, is it this or is it this'!" and she would say, “Well, it's both," and I would say, “Uh, huh, okay." There was a lot of me trying to make sense of things. It became clear that this was not the kind of world where anything goes, but the kind of world that could assimilate different points of view simultaneously and different realities simultaneously. There was a lot of work for me at the beginning about distinguishing points of view because there was the possibility that it was objective reality, or that it was in Fear's mind or just the way Technique saw what was happening. There's a lot of shifting going on, and it's not all clear. Sometimes it's clear to the audience through lighting or something, but even then many of these people don't get it. There's a lot of shifting, and the play is exciting that way.

RTM: Fear has a very powerful imagination.

Z: And inspires us, too. I think the beauty of that character is that we can go with her and not question things the way we might if we encountered her on the street—where we might think, “This woman's out there!"

But in the theater we can enter her.

RTM: Would you say that she is poetry, and Technique is more prose in style?

CR: That's an interesting point of view. I think that Fear and Technique tell different kinds of stories, that Technique tells stories that are not like Fear's. She constructs explanations. But when you see her operate you realize that a lot of what prompts her to do that is her imagination; Fear is driven by her imagination. So in this play one can't say that Technique is the more realistic character. One thing that's revealed about her over the course of the play is how she fails to really get the control that she wants to have through her theories, and so there's an equality in her relationship to Fear that you might not think would be there in the beginning.

Z: It's very interesting: what's set up as given at the beginning is pulled totally into question by the end of the play, in terms of the characters. But I also think that each of them are poetry by themselves in their own self-worlds, but in encountering each other, in seeing each other, they see prose.

GH: As a performer encountering Fear, it was very important that I understand her as poetry and not as a character who grew up in the suburbs and who had ten brothers. The play gives little hints in fits and starts about what her past could have been or was in her mind. But there's a fluidity that poetry can have and that Fear is.

Z: I think Fear is who we all want to be, in the sense she is someone who has taken creation to the max, which we're so conditioned to be afraid of. But she is really in the moment and is willing to follow her mind.

GH: And her body.

Z: . . . and her body, right, in a way that can be very alarming to people who are looking for logic. Because we're so trained to look for that logic and use it to understand what is happening: point A goes to point B. So it can be threatening or disconcerting to see someone who is not connecting the dots.

GH: Well, I think some people get scared for her too.

CR: I think that's primary, that people get scared for her, but they also feel very attracted to her. She is really an attractive character in the play.

RTM: I think one recognizes oneself, sort of .the dark-self, the self of excess, in Fear. She articulates things that to the rest of us, as you say, are a little bit dangerous. She wants an enemy, and she says that she wants one. I find that interesting.

CR: Another paradox is that, in some way, because she's been overcome by the world, she's more in and of the world than are other people who are more 'competent'. Somehow she's not just in touch with what's going on, she is what's going on.

GH: Well, I find it actually liberating and wonderful to be her because she is very different than I am in many ways. Fear tells stories differently.

RTM: What do you mean she tells stories differently?

GH: Well, before I was Fear, I felt in some ways awkward telling stories. I'd feel as if I was either taking up too much room in telling a long narrative story about my past or feel like I had to know someone very, very well before I would reveal in that way. Fear takes up all kinds of space with her language. What gives her the most pleasure in the world is to see where her stories take her, both in her own mind and in her speech and in her adventures.

RTM: One of the things that interests me, speaking about space, is the kind of space someone takes up in language. That seems to be a particular issue, I think, for women more than men.

CR: That's an interesting point. I think that the kind of space that Fear takes up is somehow very feminine. She tells a story full of power and experience; we tend to think that feminine stories will not have those qualities.

RTM: And that they should not take up so much space. I think that men are allowed more space than women when it comes to speaking and the kinds of space that they take up in that way.

CR: Technique, in a way, in being theoretical, has some resemblance to the way men take up story space, and yet what becomes of her character is very different than what you would expect, given that. There's a surprise there that I won't give away. The way those two things playoff of one another is interesting, too.

RTM: What hasn't been done in theater that you would like to see done? What kinds of things would you like to exploit or work with yourself?

CR: I'm tremendously interested in the mind of multiplicity that's available and the conflict that you get from having different voices without a single narrator in the background who is basically setting everything up. The other thing is that, when I'm writing, I feel that I'm writing for the mouth rather than for the page, and that really makes the process of writing more physical for me and also I feel that more of my body is involved even though less of my body is described. It's an interesting contradiction; it's something that I like a lot. I think that when you have live performance, you have a lot of leeway to be very experimental with the language and not lose your audience because you have the characters on stage who give all the physical clues. To me that's an opportunity to really go someplace different in terms of the writing.

RTM: It requires the audience to come in with an open mind, without expectations.

Z: I wouldn't say that—because you're not going to get one coming in without expectations, but I think the play gives the audience credit for being able to take in something that might not be immediately consumable. It is so often the case nowadays that people think they can understand something in a split second; whereas this requires a little more processing; I find this kind of art pleasurable.

CR: It involves letting go of understanding every little thing as a goal.

Z: Or putting them together in that way, "If I miss this piece, then I won't get the next piece."

CR: Right, this is a piece where you can miss one thing and get another thing and get another thing and miss something, and that's really fine. There's no sense that you're excluded as an audience member because of that. For some members of the audience, it takes them about halfway through the show before they really realize that that's how it's going to be. At that point I noticed, particularly on one night, they just opened up; they just all got a lot looser.

RTM: So, the play sort of shatters, then, the hierarchy of meaning?

CR: Well, what is the hierarchy of meaning? [laughter]

Z: That's the whole point.

GH: It's definitional.

CR: It shatters the idea that there's one right answer.

You can read a recent a 2008 interview with Gina Hyams published previously on this blog here. Among other things, Gina discusses Fear's blood red velvet spandex mini dress!

Wendy Kramer's "Diagrams & Examples"

2011-04-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

It is my pleasure to share with you one of Wendy Kramer's recent comics poems. This one is Called "Diagrams & Examples" and was created for fellow artist and archivist Tanya Hollis.

Here's what Wendy says about it:

This collage is a comics poem that I made for Tanya Hollis's birthday last year. Comics poems are my attempt to make visual poems that have multiple panels, with meaning moving both within and across the panels. While I did use some actual cut-outs from comics, a comics poem doesn't have to have traditional or found comics in it. Also, a comics poem doesn't have to be a collage--it's just the medium I'm used to working in. I hope at some point to draw some comics poems too.

The jagged pencil drawings in the piece are from an exercise I did from Betty Edwards' book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The drawing of the hand is my drawing of my own hand.

Wendy Kramer is a collage artist, poet, and public librarian/archivist living in San Francisco. She owns a digital camera and image editing software but uses them rarely, because she prefers the feel of cutting and pasting with scissors and paper and paste. She also prefers writing poems with a pen in a notebook instead of on her laptop. You can see more of her work at her web site here.

Steve Farmer & Ron SIlliman at Moe's Books in Berkeley

2011-03-31T10:25:00.000-07:00

Last night Jim Brashear and I dashed over the Bay to Moe's Books in Berkeley to catch Steve Farmer and Ron Silliman's reading. Steve, whose work I've reported on here before, read from a collaborative anagrammatic project with Nathan Johnson. Some of this work has appeared on Thom Donovan's always engaging blog Wild Horses of Fire. Here's what Thom posted about this meeting of words and play:

Check-out the latest Others Letters, featuring poems and correspondence by Steven Farmer and Nathan Johnson, who via an anagram generator called "Anagramania" mediate a current semiotic terrain of NeoCon fascism in the US, with warm and exuberant interludes about baseball, friendship, and much else.

The words and names Farmer inserted into the online anagram machine here included everything from John Boehner and Christine O'Donell to the names of baseball teams. Farmer extracted gems such as "tobacco guy nuking Troy" and composed poems from lines the anagram generator spat out at him.

Next up was Ron Silliman whose work I've written about in my dissertation; some of this will see the light of day in other forms soon, I hope. Silliman is on a x-continent reading trip, making his way into Canada and through various U.S cities and towns. His reading at Moe's marks the temporal mid-way point of the trip. Ron read from some short poems composed on cell phones and PDAs. He mentioned a digital sign near a bridge somewhere in the mid-west (I think) that was going to broadcast poems for all the truckers who travel across this route. I didn't catch all the details and perhaps his short cell phone poems were composed for this sign or with it as inspiration. Anyway, I like the idea of a digital sign (it might even be solar powered) broadcasting brief poems into the sky, across bridges, over highways.

Ron then launched into reading a portion of a new ongoing work called Revelator. Like much of Ron's work, Revelator is a long poem with an epic scale. I'm impressed by its sheer capacity to keep moving, collecting details, observations, bits of dialogue, landscape, and conjecture. Its mode is full of verve and energy. There were moments of humor, lines that made me crack a smile, and others that reminded me of themes and stances from the earlier books, Tjanting and Ketjak, though Revelator seems to have made what I might call a kind of "peace" with the idea of the person as it might be mobilized in the poem. It is also clear that Revelator, a poem containing and constructing a capacious fabric of language, experience, and the world, is written by a poet in his 60s whose perspective on the future and the work at hand is marked by a sense of the limit of a human life against the backdrop of a speeding and long-lived universe.

It is pretty impossible to keep up with Ron's reading and transcribe any of his lines at the same time. But some phrases and lines I did manage to jot down include:

bumble bee wonders
am I his flower?

I pause two poems three
pages before book's end

we all scream for what is unnameable

words themselves learn to resist

always make mistakes is the program

air syntax out

hum means mosquito right at ear

how many words do I have left

scribbling anything to be free*

Ron was handing out his "baseball" type cards. I've included pictures of the front and back of these. For all of you who might have collected baseball cards as a kid, wouldn't it be fun to collect poet cards?

*as always, my note-taking at readings is compromised by failures in hearing and who knows what else, so you, dear readers, should never take these notes as exact transcriptions!

M. NourbeSe Philip at Mills

2011-03-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

Tuesday was a crazy day for me, running from one thing to another, but it was gloriously sunny after weeks of rain here in the Bay Area. An hour before I was to leave to venture across the Bay Bridge to hear M. NourbeSe Philip read at Mills, I got a call from Sally Doyle and invited her to come with me. Our afternoon impromptu adventure entailed getting a little lost on the serpentine drives through the pastoral campus of Mills in Oakland. Who knew it was such a lovely campus, even if the bell tower across from Mills Hall where Philip read is a little tacky, a tiny version of a monumental bit of architecture, a cracker jack toy (though I will concede that the sound of the tolling bells in the background of Philip's reading was eerily apt).

We arrived right behind Erika Staiti and Cynthia Sailers, Samantha Giles, following us, just minutes before the reading started. The room was hot and packed with one of the more diverse poetry audiences I've encountered in a while.

Juliana Spahr introduced Philip, noting that Philip's book Zong! is one of the most provocative and haunting that Spahr had ever read.

I have not yet read Zong! in its entirety though I long to. Sadly, it is difficult to get. The local and consortium libraries from which the San Francisco Public Library can borrow don't own it. I've tried to borrow it from friends, some of whom lent their copies to others and never got them returned. You can read excerpts printed prior to the book's publication in various places, such as here at Fascicle. and here at Facture. It is also available in boundary 2 (2006) but to access it online you have to have a subscription. You can buy the book here.

Zong! is a book created using constraint. Philip, who is also, I believe, an attorney, used as a source text the legal document Gregson v. Gilbert which details how the Captain of the slave ship Zong threw overboard 150 slaves in order to collect insurance money. From this text which excises the horror and trauma from the historical fact, Philip used its 500 words to create what she calls "dictionaries," lists of words that she has then written notes and comments on. Culling from her dictionaries, she wrote Zong!

Interestingly, she discovered that the white male European voice (the writer of the legal document, I presume) comes through her text. At the same time, the language of her text bodies forth the pain of the murdered Africans. Language opens, is flayed, tumbles about in a slow cacophony of syllables, bits of (I presume) various African languages, disintegrating English, language and human beings swallowed and suppressed by water, legal discourse, privileged subjects.

NourbeSe Philip's reading was transformative. In the Living Room of Mills Hall, she arrested us, held us suspended in sharp and rapt attention, which several audience members called trance-like. After her reading, Philip mentioned the evolution of the work not only on the page but in performance, noting that she has come to score the silences, and indeed I felt that. The careful articulation of sound and silence. I have the sense that the earlier versions of some of the Zong! pieces published in the places noted above don't quite capture how the work has evolved and is probably printed in its book form. Philip pointed out that as the printed version developed, she made a point to insure that no words or clusters of words were located directly above others, as the words (like the slaves drowning in the ocean) "are all seeking the space/air above." She also explained that as she reads/performs this work, a work which in some ways can't be written or performed, a story that cannot be told, she has allowed herself to improvise, to read whatever words and phrases her eye falls upon, so that the reading and the text are different every time.

As I said, her writing and reading brings forth the body, linking language and the human body and the violence enacted on it, marking that which the law denied: the fact that Africans were human beings not things. In her pieces published in Fascicle, Philip writes that:

In its potent ability to decree what is is not, as in a person being no longer human but thing, the law approaches the realm of magic and religion. The conversion of human into chattel can be considered an act the equal of transubstantiation which converts the eucharistic bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

NourbeSe Philip's Zong! attempts to use the law's denial of its own recourse to magic and religion not to restore the facts or experiences of those on board and those thrown overboard--since that seems impossible--but to raise the spectre of what the legal text buries, what happened to the 150 human beings murdered for profit.

The writing we heard Tuesday was mesmerizing. I can't reproduce the text here faithfully because I have not seen it and had I, I still could not score it as it was read, because the reading departed from the text. But some evocative pieces, some shards that stood out include these:

the sum of Negroes
over
board

the rest
exist
ed
not

in themselves

preservation

obliged
frenzy (from Zong! 3)

*

suppose
the law
is
not
does not

would

not
be

not

suppose the law not

a crime

suppose the law
a loss

*

no one bears witness
for the witness

*

Of course, these line breaks are wholly inadequate and inaccurate. These are recorded lines as I heard them, but I can't capture here the sonorous tangling and disentangling that Philip channelled with shards of languages, with moans and resonant hums that almost felt like they were inside us.
Amazing work.

Here's what Cristanne Miller has to say about Zong!

“Zong! pushes its readers to understand the Zong incident in the complex contexts of both African spirituality, languages, and regions and the British (Western) slave trade and law, with its assumed racism yet sincerely attempted pursuit of justice. The poems work powerfully at the individual level and even more powerfully as a sequence to call attention to the scantiness of our knowledge of the history of African enslavement from any perspective but that of slave holders or legal documents and to question the assumptions about ‘fact’ and ‘value’ assumed by that perspective. Like reconstructed archaeological shards, Philip’s poems give us pieces combined in different orders and to different effects, building a story in such disjointed terms that it implies the tale cannot be simply known or told. As Philip herself says, she is finding ways ‘to “not-tell”’ the story of the Zong—just as Toni Morrison both relates Sethe’s story in Beloved and declares ‘This is not a story to pass on.’”—Cristanne Miller, Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature, University at Buffalo SUNY

You can read a piece about Zong! by Kate Sutherland here. You can visit M. NorbeSe Philip's web page here.

Our Beloved Lena

2011-03-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

Ocean Beach, San Francisco December 2010

Lena & Alex December 2010

Lena, part of our family for the last 10 years, passed away on Sunday March 20, 2011. She will be missed more than I can say.

Lena, Clay and Robin Bernal Hill Dec 2010

Lena w/ Buena Vista Elementary Soccer team 2001/02?

SPT's The Document: Field, Morrill, Cobb

2011-03-14T20:39:00.000-07:00

Monday morning, quick, before work: Queen Helene’s “Energizing Avocado & Grapefruit” masque on face, steel cut oats with blueberries to the side of the keyboard, bites in between words and keyboard. The need to tell you about Friday night: Courtesy of Small Press Traffic, Thalia Field, Allison Cobb and Erin Morrill at Macky Hall, Oakland Campus of California College of the Arts

Miranda Mellis introduced Thalia Field, whose work I'd first heard about from Emily Abendroth. Earlier this year I checked out of the San Francisco Public Library, Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard after having photocopied (sssh! )most of Point and Line (2000) last summer. Field is endlessly inventive. She re-enters and imagines the possibilities of form and formal investigation, producing playful crossings that revel in critical assessment and coagulate with linguistic and witty pleasures. Miranda has written a bright and insightful piece using one of Field's lines. It is called "Are you sure species exist?” Mellis writes:

Field’s book is, among other things, science translated into the discourses of poetry and theater. There is an ethical, interdisciplinary vision underlying the recursive image of a gang of students milling around Bird Lovers, Backyard, replete with notebooks and saddlebags, doing amateur science. They ask questions, connect dots—they’re a chorus. And Field’s books are staged as much as written.

You can read the full piece at the Brooklyn Rail here.

It was great to hear Field read several pieces I am familiar with from her Bird Lovers book and to hear a selection from A Prank of Georges, a collaborative piece she wrote with Abigail Lang, a product of Cole Swensen's Paris Translation workshop.

It was also eerie to be listening to Field read about Bikini island and to be thinking about toxicity and tragedy and the politics of it with the earthquake in Japan and its compromised nuclear facilities on all of our minds.

Field's "Apparatus for the Inscription of a Falling Body" from Bird Lovers, Backyard can be read here.

Here's a little snippet from her book Ululu Clown Shrapnel:

YOU'RE NOT MAKING THE MOST OF ME!
the audience grows intrigued: a husband making millions from selling copies and yet she critizes him for not making more? "You Warhol! You Apellos! You Kostabi!" What exactly is she after? His art factory already fakes her precious alchemy  To weakened knees a violin solo  more agonizing than a hyena screeching "Lap at  my genitals, lay in my lap"  "lapis"   "lazy she offers inspiration, not organization.  "This marriage be   this bondage   this border this lounge act"  "Here, drink!" ULULU says, "Drink this Elixir!"  And so many men turn their heads, mouths dry and they step over, cupping their imaginary hands on ULULU's bosom, despite themselves, liquid stone flows through the silk of breasts, one loud midday Hypatia feeding thoughts of immortality (despite the frigidity of the rage)

        ULULU: Now that's how to sell a painting.


                                Audience: Sold!(63)

Field was followed by Erin Morrill’s performative investigation of the archive, privacy and public space, a meditation on living and dying, travel and documentation, loss and accumulation. Her piece consisted of a slideshow of 260-some-odd images culled from her archive of daily photos. Morrill stood behind the screen, her body obscured from view, her voice rushing out as she told us she is an amateur photographer who has been taking pictures for some years now. The performance was simultaneously haunted by the loss of Morill’s archive of her personal and family life, once stored in a public storage facility, but now gone, I can’t remember why, something about payment of fees? Or did I just make that up??

Morrill began by announcing that her piece should not be documented or recorded in any way, expressing frustration about the public documentation of events and people’s lack of participation in the event itself. Like a good narcissist, I felt stung by this and immediately put down my pen and notebook, having been aware since the inception of xpoetics, that reporting on events in order to offer a bit of the event for those not present compromises me. I am an as-yet-again-split, split subject as I multi-task trying to be in the events and also recording some sort of “faithful” version of them, to be transcribed and re-envisioned later (as in right now--though "now" has now become evening, work and daily life intervening).

After the event, I complimented Erin and assured her I would not document her piece at which point she said she did not mind people writing about it but had in mind friends who chose not to come to the event because they figured it would be recorded and they could experience it digitally. So, as I discovered, much of what we take to be directed at us (perhaps particularly a problem in the worlds of writers and artists, those worlds of fragile and soaring egos!), has nothing, or very little, to do with us-- often, anyway. And I’m in agreement with Erin in her frustration with people somehow equating the recorded event with the event itself. My friend Jim tells me that this is a huge issue in the world of performance and performance studies, particularly with dancers, who often do not want recordings of their performances, which can never capture an art absolutely predicated on three dimensional space, not to mention the depths of sound that porously enter our bodies during such a performance. I suppose there are also the facts of temperature and the olfactory to account for. The uncomfortable wooden or steel or cushy plush chairs we might be sitting in, the microscopic forms of life that might also inhabit those chairs, the carpeting...……Anyway, I enjoyed Merrill's performance which also acknowledged the recent death of Akilah Oliver.

Lastly, but not least Allison Cobb closed out the evening with a reading from her book Green-Wood, named after a 500-acre cemetery in Brooklyn. Cobb’s book is an investigation into history, etymology, poetry, landscape architecture, the dead. In a way, the cemetery and Cobb’s book is yet another take on the archive.

From Green-Wood

Author’s note: Green-Wood is named for a 478-acre Victorian cemetery across the street from me in Brooklyn, NY. It opened in 1838 as only the second “rural” cemetery in America, after Mt. Auburn in Boston. The piece is a poetic meditation on my experiences in the cemetery, and on the history surrounding it. *

** 

I walk through fall and winter. I walk through spring. I walk against the backdrop of war, the toppling of the Hussein statue, declaration of end of hostilities. Continued bombings. NAMES OF DEAD in paper. I walk by bulldozers, mowers, pesticide sprayers with yellow warning placards: KEEP OUT FOR 24 HOURS. 

                       Tree I trace 
                       from the root spelled "rot"     
                       to “worm” a proto-word 
                       subtracting wildness

let earth conceal them from our sight 

A few fine old Brooklyn families—the Lefferts, Schermerhorns, and Bergens—traced their title to land on the Gowanus Hills back to their Dutch ancestors. The depression of 1837 spurred them to sell out to the cemetery. 

Smaller landowners refused to relinquish their holdings, a vexation that kept the cemetery at first from deeding for burial a single rood. An echo of “wild wood” reduced to “twig” or “rod,” a measuring stick, a measure of land, then the cross, an instrument of execution. 

Weeping Beech 
London plane tree
Cedar of Lebanon
Austrian pine 
American holly, female
Yoshino cherry
Mulberry from China 

each tagged with a metal I.D. number

You can read more from Allison's fine work here

Read more about these authors on SPT’s website:

.

from Sally Doyle's Kafka Psalms

2011-03-04T18:26:00.000-08:00

Kafka's Butterfly
made out of paper and transparency by Sally Doyle

DECIPHER THE SCRIPT WITH OUR WOUNDS

(On writing Kafka Psalms)

Recently in my struggle with illness and despair, I happened to take a book of Kafka’s journals off my bookshelf and I immediately became absorbed in this work in a different way than I had been in the past—I felt as though I was reading my own journals. My journal entries and Kafka’s journals and letters connected through the themes of abuse, illness, self-torture, writing, and a longing for love and an other in life.

Intuitively I began linking our voices together on the page. This manuscript is the result. Kafka’s words are italicized, and mine are not. I feel awe and wonder because the reading and writing happen together at the same time. This book is so much about reading. It is a testimony of the most intimate exchange a writer and reader share. Kafka’s words become my words, part of my text. His words tangle with mine, blossom in my poems, and cut into my poems. Sharing the page with Kafka has given me strength to write. Kafka has helped to carry the weight of my burdens.

This is the power of literature that I know he understood too. Writers “come to us” or we to them, at the times in our lives—when we need them. Kafka has come to me now, and somehow I think in our coming together we’ve made something different from our isolated, individual despair. This book is my testimony that finding the “other” through suffering is part of the “meaning” of suffering.

Scarlet Butterfly, Screen printed on xray by Sally Doyle

_______________________________________________
LITTLE FRIEND, POUR FORTH PSALM

Gradually my excitement underwent a transformation,
my thoughts turning to writing,
I felt myself up to it,
wanted nothing save the opportunity to write,
considered what nights in the future I could set aside for it,
with pains in my heart crossed the stone bridge at a run,
felt what I had already experienced so often,
the unhappy sense of a consuming fire inside me
that was not allowed to break out, made up a sentence—
‘Little friend, pour forth’—
incessantly sang it to a special tune,
and squeezed and released a handkerchief
in my pocket in accompaniment as if it were a bagpipe.
                        This inexhaustible running girl--
   physical sensations of hammering and sparks
linking brim to overflow,
ache of words refusing to cross
immensity of either way.

_______________________________________

PSALM 1

This psalm begins with
the more delicate, more distracted, 
more hopeless noise
led by the voices of the 2 canaries.
I have lost in the mist of life
the hills I walked upon before waking.
[I have lost] the gleam of yellowish light 
around my body.

________________________________________

PSALM OF SAD INSTRUCTIONS

This is why I cringe before you
with sad requests…
 The debris from an ordinary day is enormous.

I want to give instructions to my sad body,
the thin breath of a page

                          From the dash on---


divine 
dirty little barefoot girl
running along in her shift

____________________________________

PSALM 95

Under these diary pages
                  galoshes slosh.
A chill pursues me.
Whispering
A woman pulling me to school,
a hand pushing me through
the doorframe.
The round table of nervous people
Begins to tremble.
I have probably caused a disaster.
A car door slams.
Light comes too soon.

____________________________________

REFUSAL

The hole refuses the pin.
But it makes no difference—
                             this refusal—
pin pushes through anyway—
precise   careless 
 the suffering it causes.

_________________________________

ENCLOSED

Why have you enclosed butterflies 
with brackets and parenthesis?

[Complete standstill ] (Unending torments)

___________________________________

PATTERNS

Butterflies born  
in the dark poem,
if we could see,
we’d read patterns 

words 
opening 

then gone


]

_________________________________________

DIARY PSALM

It has become very necessary 
to keep a diary again.
The uncertainty of my thoughts,
 F.,
the ruin of the office,
 the physical impossibility of writing
 and the inner need for it--
Trying to push myself 
through the pen 
to the tip 
of existence.

_____________________________________________________

Sally Doyle and James Joyce

Sally Doyle is a poet living in San Francisco. She received her MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She teaches poetry through California Poets in the Schools. Her chapbook, Under the Neath was published by Leaf Books. She has also published her poetry in Temblor, Central Park, Avec, How(ever), O Anthology, five fingers review, Lipstick 11 and recently in Rattle. She is currently working on her manuscript, Kafka Psalms.

Having Missed David Wolach

2011-03-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

When David was in the Bay Area recently, I was at home, on one side of the rainy traffic-jammed Bay Bridge and David was on the other reading for Small Press Traffic in Oakland, and then Saturday found me fielding questions on the reference desk at the library while he gave his nonsite talk, so alas, I missed him. Twice.

But I have his powerful book Occultations, and I am posting some excerpts of it here. Throughout this collection which consists of the following sections/poems: transit, riverfire, modular arterial cacophony, your nerve center taxonomy, book alter(ed), body maps & distraction zones, Wolach stages various experiments and interventions in language and action. His is an art of appropriation, material & social palimpsest, somatic experiments, archaeological & political excavation, performed remixes, embodied imaginative flourishing and decay, all in an astonishing variety of active poetic experiments. David's book strikes me as a primer on how to write, right now, in doubt and in common.

from transit

q:

who are you who embraces our poisons?

mouth stuffed nearly i can see the smoke

bracket evening were i to see you, who

with faith in the receding pines,

certain the wailing trees will

recuperate our gains and losses,

turn ash into act, you wishper i hear

you whisper, breath into breathe (45)

from your nerve center taxonomy: eight staged distraction zones in miniature

Distraction Zone Staging: one person reads from two different texts; another person writes in response and reads what they are writing; a third person (me) writes in response to both audio inputs. Texts used: 1) Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and 2) leaked torture memorandum from Assistant A.G. Bybee, 2008.

6. (under_standing abu ghraib purchasables_)

I

A photo isn't a leg blown off
a struggling contradiction isn't yr Adorno's dialectical acrobatics
A text working overtime isn't working overtime
A crystallized conundrum isn't yr deep painterly meditation
A language rammed up against silence isn't what I witnessed
A happy garden isn't yr flaunting the chrysanthemums between
misplaced have-to's
A replica of yr washing machine isn't the imagerie of this either/or
tea trade in failures

II

Cramped, we expectation
Cramped, we complicit our techniques in a
Cramped, we verb the stress
Stressed, as water needed
We grasped
We body-farmed
We faxed sea-collar mines
Cramped, we mouth-sounded alarms
Cramped, we spread fingers spread
Spread, we wall the nameless several laughter
Shuts off & this is guilt's mechanism
Cramped, we muscle fatigue so many nouns tonite
Cramped, we nounds our open-eyed apology posture
("The body" is defined by capture of an incommensurate
Absence, of the area not yet wounded)
Wound, an archive archived
Wound, a side effect
Cramped, we insect
Cramped, we redaction brackets the loudest in hiding
Cramped, we water the eyes
Water, the blood when red is read as dying
Water, we comply with incipient panic
Panic, we does not breathe for seconds need
Breathes, we lift
Lift, we repeat
Lift, we review a they in a warmth kitchen wrapped
Cramped, no harm resolute goes the written as times sinking alibi
Harmed, without incident
Harmed without pulsing his leave is our evening (124-125)

about your nerve center taxonomy, David writes:

your nerve center taxonomy is a series of "staged occultations," where, owing to somatic practices a la ca conrad and others, work here uses both filters--repeating phrases or, in this case, conceptual frames--and rituals--predetermined activities/procedures--in order to be(come). they are, like "modular arterial cacophony,' poets theater pieces, intended to be reciprocally performed by others. in contrast to some of conrad's (soma)tics, which belong to a hugely important lineage of embodiment writing practices most profoundly associated, i think, with hannah weiner's work, these poems desire to be occulted (punished?) along with/ as extensions of their bodily environments, to be partially drowned out by their rituals (or vice versa?), rather than to emerge from their rituals.

all movements here seek to remain partially occulted, and the poetic writing is part of the ritual itself--where the ritual, or activity, divides the poem-space's attention, such that one does not write from notes afterwards, but one's notes are the poem, and the poems are the notes of the body signing in space and time. unlike the transcription practices of williamson or goldsmith, these "notes" are not jottings, descriptions, or pure dictation, but are rather staged writing acts in which the body seeks articulation thru a poetic mode from the outset, the transcriber attempting to write the poem on the spot, to, in a sense, claim itself, as mediated by and contiguous with its environment. this is to say that though the poems in this section are transcriptions, the object was to create an environment, a "distraction zone in miniature," part of which would be the "subject-body" attempting to voice thru signing, thru lyric, thru direct address, its struggle to "enunciate" or "speak" or "articulate" its fractures, multiples, constrictions, and, it turns out under such circumstances, its univocality, not to compile or to shape what has been compiled.

**

I plan to carry this book around with me for some time. You should too. It is available, as are most books mentioned on this blog, at Small Press Distribution.

Glissant's Revelatory Wanderings

2011-02-04T11:10:00.000-08:00

L'écrivain Édouard Glissant est mort.

Édouard Glissant is dead. A great loss.

From Glissant's Poetics of Relations:

However, and this is an immense paradox, the great founding books of communities the Old Testament, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Chansons de Geste, the Islandic Sagas, the Aeneid, or the African epics, were all books about exile and often about errantry. This epic literature is amazingly prophetic. It tells of the community, but, through relating the community's apparent failure or in any case its being surpassed, it tells of errantry as a temptation (the desire to go against the root) and, frequently, actually experienced. Within the collective books concerning the sacred and the notion of history lies the germ of the exact opposite of what they so loudly proclaim. When the very idea of territory becomes relative, nuances appear in the legitimacy of territorial possession. These are books about the birth of collective consciousness, but they also introduce the unrest and suspense that allow the individual to discover himself there, whenever he himself becomes the issue. The Greek victory in the Iliad depends on trickery; Ulysses returns from his Odyssey and is recognized only by his dog; the Old Testament David bears the stain of adultery and murder; the Chanson de Roland is the chronicle of a defeat; the characters in the Sagas are branded by an unstemmable fate, and so forth. These books are the beginning of something entirely different from massive, dogmatic, and totalitarian certainty (despite the religious uses to which they will be put). These books are of errantry, going beyond the pursuits and triumphs of rootedness required by the evolution of history.

Some of these books are devoted entirely to the supreme errantry, as in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The very book whose function is to consecrate an intransigent community is already a compromise, qualifying its triumph with revelatory wanderings.

In both L'Intention poétique (Poetic Invention) and Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse)--of which the present work is a reconstituted echo or a spiral retelling--I approached this dimension of epic literature. I began wondering if we did not still need such founding works today, ones that would use a similar dialectics of rerouting, asserting, for example, political strength but, simultaneously, the rhizome of a multiple relationship with the Other and basing every community's reasons for existence on a modern form of the sacred, which would be, all in all, a Poetics of Relation .

....Sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself (15-18).

....The horizon seaweed is interwoven in variations of gray tinged blue with black, where space increases. Their fern makes a rain that does not peel away from the heat of the sky. With the dove gray of thought you touch a tousle of vegetation, a cry of morne and red earth. Glowing fires scarcely sparked by dizziness. Rainshower motionless. Dwindling echoses. A tree trunk silvers against the rim of the sun, stubbornness, stiff but melting. Call the keepers of silence with their feet in the river. Call the river that used to spill over the rocks.--As for myself, I have listened to the pulse of these hot spots. I have bathed there beside friends, attentive to the volcano's drums. We have stood bent against the wind without falling. One lone bay; whatever name it had evaporated. Also endeavouring to point out this blue tinge to everything...--Its sun strolls by, in the savanna's silver shuddering and the ocre smell of the hounded earth (209).

A video of a Glissant interview ici: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x81q9n_edouard-glissant_news

Dear Reader

2011-01-31T10:15:00.000-08:00

Check out a post on reading by moi on the Language and Thinking blog.....HERE

10th Annual Poets Theater Performances at Small Press Traffic

2011-01-30T16:02:00.000-08:00

This weekend Small Press Traffic held it's Tenth Annual Poets Theater event. While the dailiness of daily life and an attempt to put the lid on a cold kept me away from Friday night's events, I had the pleasure of selling tickets, pouring drinks, and enjoying the second evening's dynamic selection of performances.

But first, here's the line-up for Friday January 28th:

ACT ONE

Episode One from "Feel Your Media--Bitch"
(four episodes for SPT Poets Theater 2011)
Written by Rodrigo Toscano
Directed by Sara Larsen & David Brazil
with technical assistance by Andrew Kenower
Featuring David Brazil (D), Sara Larsen (S), Taylor Brady (X), Erin Morril (Y), Zack tuck (Z)

"You wanna see Cultural Marketers--doing it?"

Draft 101: Puppet Opera
Written by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Directed by Lara Durback
with technical assistance by Lauren Shufran
Featuring Green Box (Marcel Duchamp), Alex Cruse/Kate Robinson (Hung/Suspend Woman), Leah Clark/Lara Durback (Another Puppet, Male), Loretta Clodfelter/Kate Robinsno (Lights)

Perhaps make
a hinge
picture.
(folding yardstick, book...)
develop
the principle of hinge
in the displacements
1st in the plane 2nd in space

find an automatic description
of the hings
___________________________________
perhaps introduce it
in the hung/suspended woman ---Marcel Duchamp

Episode Two: "Feel Your Media-- Bitch"

INTERMISSION

ACT TWO
If You want to See Flying Go to the Circus

Written and directed by Brent Cunningham

The actors for this improvisatory play will be selected from the audience at the start of the evening by a chance procedure. It features plays-within-plays stacked like Russian nesting dolls. In the end, everyone dies.

Episode Three: "Feel Your Media--Bitch"

I Can See You but I Know You're There
Written and directed by Tom Comitta and Steven Trull
Featuring Samantha Boudrot, Ashley Brim, Tom Comitta, Jessamyn Cuneo, Paul Montes, Reece McGowen, Antonio Iannarone and Steven Trull

Timken is to Timpani as________is to________.

Episode Four: "Feel Your Media--Bitch"

Tell Only One
Written and directed by Corina Copp
featuring Corina Copp, Julia Jarcho, and Jacqueline Waters

Goethe wrote, "Tell it to no one, tell it only to the wise"--an admonition of sorts that is repeated via letters from squirrels to two doomed lovers in Ingeborg Bachmann's radio drama, "The Good God of Manhattan" (1958). This piece, "Tell Only One," should look like a curtain splashed in mauve variations and described many times, eventually uncovering a singular, bare face that is wise, if wise means hoping we won't expect it, it being what faces tell when they are reading messages that say don't tell anyone.

I believe that Carol Mirakove and Jen Benka provided crazy antics before the plays and at intermission!

On Saturday evening, January 29th, we were treated to the following:

ACT ONE

Ascidian Play
written by Laynie Browne
and directed by Erin Morrill
featuring Stephanie Young (Ascidian A), Bill Luoma (Ascidian B), Davide Brazil (Ascidian C), Lindsey Bolt (Ascidian 1), Kevin Killian (Richard Foreman), Erin Morrill (Director of Play), Brandon Brown (Ernst Haeckel), Taylor Brady (Charles Darwin), Stacy Doris (Gertrude Stein), Erin Wilson (Seastar) and surprise guests! (one of whom was Denise Newman as a crab.)

Ascidian Play chronicles the existential preoccupations of three larval Ascidians contemplating what type of Ascidians they will become as they mature. This play is one in a collection of plays about the misadventures of marine invertebrates called Invertebrate Plays.

"Remember, we're still larval, be careful what you say!"

This play was finely staged with hippy VW bus-driving-guppy-gurgling larvae on the road.

The Photographers Photo Detritus Without a Camera
Written and directed by Ariel Goldberg
This is all for Sale with models Jackqueline Frost, Ted Rees, Matt Runkle, and Cassie Thornton

Immerse yourself in a fusion lecture liquidation of accessories that keep cameras and pictures flowing rapidly. What do photo objects become when accumulated and outdated--what do you become owning these objects?

The Salesperson/Models did the runway strut with their unwieldy collections of frames, packaging and other photographic detritus while Goldberg narrated the story of these materials. On screen, a slideshow. Remember, this is all for sale!

Ambergris Desktop Vocalist
Written and Directed by Christine Choi and Drew Fernando

This piece called for audience participation--prompts provided on-screen via the old-fashioned (!) technology of the overhead projector, drinks were requested and proffered, sonic pleasures and narrations passed back and forth.

INTERMISSION

Antics abounded: Zack Tuck provided tarot readings, (alas, I didn't have a chance to have my done!) and the lovely duo of Samantha Giles and Stephanie Young performed on-request interpretive dances, more like friezes, from various movies--Heathers, Flashdance, Annie Hall, etc. Food and drink.

ACT TWO

Lycanthropes/Entre Chien et Loup
written and directed by C.S. Giscombe
featuring Madison Hardy (as Marcella), Ryan Schaefer, George Spelvin, and Emmar Tome. Music by Anthony Bellow. Based on a true story.

From Naked Translations: "Entre chien et loup is a multi-layered expression. It is used to describe a specific time of day, just before night, when the light is so dim you can't distinguish a dog from a wolf. However, it's not all about levels of light. It also expresses that limit between the familiar, the comfortable versus the unknown and the dangerous (or between the domestic and the wild). It is an uncertain threshold between hope and fear."

Cecil's play featured excellent wolf masks and great atmosphere. Marcella, a white girl, had stories to tell, questions to ask, issues of race and gender to probe, while the wolves prowled and paced about a park-like setting (a park bench on stage). One of the wolves played a guitar and sang. A hapless, monotone man happens upon the scene and there is screaming. Loved it.

I Confess! An Adaptation of the Confessions of Saint Augustine
written and directed by David Brazil and Evan Kennedy
Costume Designer for Ms. Bellamy (who played an angel decked out in wings and halo courtesy of a shower head, pole, and toiletry container/apparatus ): Matt Gordon

featuring David Brazil (Good Augustine), Evan Kennedy (Bad Augustine), Monica Peck (Monica his mother), Lidsey Boldt, Jack Frost, Jenn Hoff, Erin Morill, Steve Orth, Ted Rees, John Sakkis (The Eversores), Taylor Brady (Pear Tree, Fig Tree), Ted Rees (Bishop), Brandon Brown (Alypius, Augustine's closest friend), Brent Cunningham (Faustus, a Manichee), Kevin Killian (Ambrose, Bishop of Milan), Bob Gluck (Ponticianus) and Dodie Bellamy (Continency, an angel).

An aging saint recounts his past life as a debauchee. Dramatic accompaniment will honor the chronology through its greatest hists: Infancy! The infamous pear theft from adolescence! Screwing around with a crew of horny debauchees! The life-altering break from the weirdo cult of Manichees! The caress of saving grace from Ambrose! A celestial vision and garden conversion! The death of a mother!

This play was a delight--the writing both funny and beautiful. The ensemble of actors really fed off of one another. I've just written a little short thing about Augustine's Confessions so it was fun to see what David did with the material. Brazil narrated Augustine's life while Kennedy in silver sneakers was dazzling as the Bad Augustine. Lindsey Boldt and others a great punky band of debauchees! Cunningham an excellent Manichean. Gluck a fabulously ponderous Ponticianus.

Poets Theater--always a fun evening out. Why would anyone miss it!

Re-reading Madame Bovary

2010-12-31T15:39:00.000-08:00

I have just finished reading Lydia Davis's new and thrilling translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, published by Flaubert in 1856 in six installments in La Revue de Paris. I first read Madame Bovary many years ago, maybe twenty. I no longer have the book and probably didn't then, having, in all likelihood, read a library copy, so I don't know which translation I read. What I do recall is that, for me then, it was unremarkable.

This time around I am dazzled. While the translation is of paramount importance, in my own case, I suspect that there is something about reading and having grown as a reader that is relevant to my new appreciation. And, since Madame Bovary is in fact in many ways, about reading, what could be more appropriate. There is more to reading than learning to recognize words. Or, to quote (and then revise) a Latin phrase that the pharmacist Homais uses, Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis. Davis provides a note about this phrase as follows: "Practice makes perfect." or, more literally, "It is by making that you become a maker, whatever it is that you do." It is by reading that one becomes a reader.

Madame Bovary (MB) begins with the first person plural pronoun: "We were in Study Hall, when the Headmaster entered, followed by a new boy dressed in regular clothes and a school servant carrying a large desk." This mysterious "we" soon disappears into the third person, but is one of the many contributing strangenesses of the novel, the oddities that make it difficult to locate the source(s) of narration. It begins with Charles Bovary's childhood, a childhood unlike Emma's. While at school, Charles "work[s] conscientiously, looking up all the words in the dictionary and tak[es] great pains" though "he had almost no elegance in his constructions" (5). While Emma read novels at home and religious texts at the convent where she also listened to sermons, Charles' grew up in a household with a father who "little concerned with literature, said it was not worth the trouble!" (7). Emma, on the other hand, 'had read Paul and Virginia" and Balzac and George Sand, and at the convent, "the metaphors of betrothed, spouse, heavenly lover, and marriage everlasting that recur in sermons stirred unexpectedly sweet sensations in the depths of her soul" (31). Emma is a reader; Charles is not, though we read that as a student he sometimes picked up the Anacharsis; Davis writes that this is possibly Jean Jacques Barthelemy's The Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, "a learned imaginary travel journal and one of the first historical novels." Instead of considering Emma's reading as a weakness, a liability, the source of her trouble, perhaps it is worth wondering what Charles might have understood or imagined had he read more....

When Emma and Léon meet for the first time, the discussion turns to reading:
"My wife doesn't take much interest in that [gardening]," said Charles. "Even though she has been told she ought to exercise, she'd rather stay in her room all the time and read."

"Like me," replied Léon; "what could be better, really, than to sit by the fire in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the windowpanes, and the lamp burns?..."

"Oh, yes," she said, her great, dark wide-open eyes fixed on him." (72)

For Léon, Emma "was the beloved of every novel, the heroine of every drama, the vague she of every volume of poetry" (235).

Later, at Emma's deathbed, Homais and the curé argue about religion, largely through reference to various texts:

"'Read Voltaire!' one was saying; 'read d'Holbach, read the Encyclopeida!'"

"'Read the Letters of Some Portuguese Jews!' the other was saying; 'read The Proof of Christianity, by the former magistrate Nicholas!'" (294)

Madame Bovary is constructed around disparate understandings of words, reading, and the world, but enmeshed in all of this, too, are the strange and mobile materials of gender. Famously , there is Flaubert's claim, "Je suis Madame Bovary!" Of course, it was Charles Baudelaire who first identified Emma Bovary's strange androgyny in his review of the book. He wrote:

Il ne restait plus à l'auteur, pour accomplir le tour de force dans son entier, que de se dépouiller (autant que possible) de son sexe et de se faire femme. Il en est résulté une merveille ; c'est que, malgré tout son zèle de comédien, il n'a pas pu ne pas infuser un sang viril dans les veines de sa créature, et que madame Bovary, pour ce qu'il y a en elle de plus énergique et de plus ambitieux, et aussi de plus rêveur, madame Bovary est restée un homme. Comme la Pallas armée, sortie du cerveau de Zeus, ce bizarre androgyne a gardé toutes les séductions d'une âme virile dans un charmant corps féminin.

You can read Baudelaire's review here. There is much to say about the way gender structures and unravels distinctions between characters, the project of the novel and its deployment of narrativity. But, for now, these little observances:

"Charles was not a wit by nature, he had not been brilliant during the wedding festivities....the next day, however, he seemed another man. It was he whom one would have taken for the virgin the day before..." (26).

"Then, a hundred steps further on, she stopped again; and through her veil, which fell obliquely from her man's hat down over her hips, her face could be seen in bluish transparency, as though she were swimming under azure waves" (139).

Later, it is Léon who seems to be Emma's mistress: "She wanted him to dress all in black and grow a little pointed beard on his chin so that he would resemble the portraits of Louis XIII. She wanted to see his rooms....She asked for verses, verses composed for her....He did not question her ideas; he accepted all her tastes; he was becoming her mistress more than she was his" (246).

There are also various markers of race: what Tisa Bryant calls unexplained presences:

"She had read Paul and Virginia, and she had dreamed of the little bamboo house, the Negro Domingo, the dog Faithful, but most of all of the sweet friendship of a good little brother who goes off to fetch red fruit for you from great trees taller than church steeples, or runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird's nest" (30).
"But not being very well versed in these matters once they were beyond certain bounds, he wrote to Monsieur Boulard, Monseigneur's bookseller, to send him something particularly good for a female of high intelligence. The bookseller,with as much indifference as if he were dispatching cheap trinkets to black Africans, packaged up a hodgepodge of everything then current in the religious book trade" (188).

Check out this passage in which the church in Rouen is figured by Leon's active, romantic imagination, as a gigantic boudoir:

"Leon, with a sober step, was walking close to the walls. Never had life seemed so good to him. Any minute now she would appear, charming, agitated, glancing behind her at the eyes that were following her,--in her flounced dress, her gold lorgnette, her thin little boots, all kinds of elegant refinements he had never had a taste of before, and with all the ineffable seductiveness of virtue yielding. The church, like a gigantic boudoir, was arranging itself around her; the vaults were leaning down to gather up, in the shadows, the confession of her love; the windows shone resplendent to illuminate her face; and the censers burned so that she might appear like an angel, amid clouds of perfume" (213).

I borrowed Davis's Madame Bovary from the library, but it is a book, really, one wants to own. Enjoy.

Fiona Templeton: "Medea sings a skin of language"

2010-12-22T12:59:00.000-08:00

What: Small Press Traffic hosted a reading by Fiona Templeton

The Setting: The Graduate Writing Studio of the California College of Arts on De Haro in San Francisco. Saturday night, December 18th, 2010. Darkish. Wind-swept. Moody. Japanese maples trembling outside the glass doors in front of which the petite Fiona Templeton stood, in black, her auburn hair pulled back, glasses on her head. Beginning with breathing. The small contemplative pond outside a black sheen. Inside: expectancy.

Thus began The Medead, Templeton's long performance piece about Medea; she called it a recuperation of the many Medeas that exist in literature and history. For example, Fiona noted that she had visited Georgia and that there Medea is associated with medicine. She skipped the reductive infanticide.

"It is a journey of the figure, not a person," Templeton told us.

How can I tell you about how the room seemed to breathe along with Templeton, how her language split and soared, whispered, squawked, joked. Hers is a Shakespearean inventiveness. Syntax reorganized. Words uncloaked, uncorked and cast out anew, "a winding tongue."

Here's how Templeton's web site describes The Medead:

*as a very different figure to the evil foreign woman shown by the Greeks, including little-known versions from her origin at the east of the Black Sea.

*Me Dead: a journey down into the language and action of dream and the subconscious.

*Me Dead: not myself.

*Me Dead: the price of war.

*Medea: measure, mother, mindfulness

*Medea: nobody (in the feminine)

*Medea: the genitals.

*The Medead: a night and day, a life, a journey of culture through history.

Some of the many lines that caught my attention, demanded notation follow; any mishearings and misquotations are mine own ears'. And of course, what line breaks there are here are heard or intuited and will need correcting once the text can be seen/read.Templeton is going to let xpoetics put up some of The Medead and I am looking forward to it and offering it up to all of you. So, stay-tuned. In the meantime, you can find out more about it on Fiona's web site here: FionaTempleton.

"Medea sings a skin language"

"restored to pieces
hung in trees"

"birds birds birds
the word birds flies around
look at you
look at you"

"singing danger meat"

"prosody arrays what wheat
we have"

"how the nightingale orphaned
of her tongue"

"words come up but
she's taken the genital idea"

"Let's ram away"

"tails spread like a fan of knives"

"whose thicket
whose thicket"

"let go your breath
and aching things"

"choral ardor
coming up from air"

Templeton's reading was one of the highlights of Small Press Traffic's recent season. Check out the forthcoming Spring season here: Small Press Traffic

Rob Halpern: "Becoming a Patient of History"

2010-12-15T07:20:00.000-08:00

Saturday night, December 11, 2010, San Francisco welcomed home Rob Halpern at the Unitarian Center in San Francisco where Rob gave the Poetry Center's 27th George Oppen Memorial Lecture, entitled "Becoming a Patient of History: George Oppen's Domesticity and the Relocation of Politics." The room was full to capacity.

Rob's talk was thrilling and offered much to ponder.

Locating his fascination with Oppen's work in the way the poems "refused to settle into difficulty or transparence," Rob noted his coming to Oppen's poetry during the late 90s, a time of "terminal cynicism" when a number of Bay Area writers found themselves between crises, the devastation of AIDS, the flowering of neo-liberalism, and the emergence of the dot com boom. Rob suggested that he and other young writers found themselves "living melancholic lives," characterized by a sense of loss and "terminal belatedness." It is in this context of disaffection that Rob and a number others--David Buuck, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Yedda Morrison, Dana Teen Lomax, and others--found themselves reading Oppen's poetry and Selected Letters.

About reading Oppen's letters and having noted the phrase “cries havoc in a small voice” from one of the letters, Rob said that:

there remains something so appealing in those words together: “cry” “small” and “havoc”— something vulnerable and adamant, uncertain, and committed to what might seem entirely unclear. It was as if there were potential dangers everywhere, dangers which the language at one’s immediate disposal often seems inadequate to name. This appealed to my own uncertainty and doubt as well as my desire for something other than what seemed at the time to be a terminal cynicism....We were “between crises” as one might speak of being between wars, but there is never really any such “between”—just the spell of an interregnum when everyone is holding breath, and waiting, and pretending to adapt to a set of conditions that seem entirely fake and everyone’s just going through the motions of being ok, while living interminably melancholic lives, having identified, on the one hand, with too many personal losses—losses I myself had not yet learned how to mourn; and on the other, with a feeling of terminal belatedness, when it didn’t seem possible to believe in anything long enough to respond to it.

Rob talked about the complex array of feelings, sincerity and ambivalence, that one finds throughout Oppen's Selected Letters. He noted that,

the [Oppen] letters provided a whole catalog of what Sianne Ngai would call weak affects, which work to register or resist the ideological saturation of social space, as well as the distortions in relation and perception that Oppen was confronting in the 1960s. But Oppen’s feelings seemed anachronistically to offer a response to the disaffection that was so infectious during the late 90s. Any one of Oppen’s weak affects seemed to offer an antidote: but the whole gamut was like an arsenal.

With this, Rob set the stage for discussing gender in Oppen's work,

...This question concerning gender has since opened many unexpected avenues of inquiry, and has led me to believe that one can feel the work of Oppen’s middle period thinking sensually through the many submerged contours and tensions of an intensified post-war biopolitics, that is, the form politics assumes when the human condition itself, its biological and psychic substrata—from atoms and plasma, to desire and subjectivity—become the terrain of conflict, work, and investment. My sense here is that these contours and tensions become the material of Oppen’s work, from The Materials through Of Being Numerous, as they find themselves mediated—muted and amplified, clarified and distorted—through the longing and remorse of a very particular lyric subject. All this ends up making certain historical conditions of the moment audible, as Oppen himself emphasizes in his poem “Route:” “The purity of the materials, not theology, but to present the circumstances […] The context is history / Moving toward the light of conscious.” To present the circumstances and the history means to make conditions and struggles legible—and these, of course, are never pure—and I believe Oppen’s poetry was very much a part these struggles, against the grain of his repeated insistence on making his writing politically unavailable. These are biopolitical struggles: organized around the production and administration, the transformation and destruction of subjectivity and life, and they underscore what Hannah Arendt refers to as the confounding of the household and the polis in The Human Condition—a work published in 1958, the same year as Oppen returned to poetry in earnest after a notorious 25 year hiatus, during which time he sought exile, avoiding HUAC in Mexico where he raised a family. Arendt’s work echoes Oppen’s concerns, sometimes with uncanny precision. For her, the erosion of the public realm, or the common, at mid-century has everything to do with the wholesale absorption of “the household and housekeeping activities” into a sphere of social activity once referred to as politics. Arendt goes on to elaborate how the unstable border between the political life—organization of the common—and the household—care of family and self, basic necessity, survival—conditions the corporate management of so-called private interest, which then emerges as the most public of all concerns. And it is this instability I believe that one can feel in Oppen’s mid-century writing: in the “new structure of space” the work creates, conceptually and syntactically, through all its hesitations and declarations, its opacities and lacunae, its contradictions and impossibilities, all its conflicting affects and emotions. As Oppen pressures, worries, and amplifies what he refers to as his political non-availability, the work, as a sensory organ capable of cognizing material we otherwise can’t access discursively, registers precisely what he was refusing: the whole shifting terrain of what one might think to call “politics.”

Rob explained that he had developed an "indexical key" and that he is "using the archivist’s finding aid as a model, or maybe it’s more like one of Roland Barthes’s alphabetized books, or the convolutes of Benjamin’s Arcades Project" as a structure. Here is a list of his table of contents for the larger Oppen project he is working on:

Anemones, Antigone, Arendt, Bad Things I’ll Never See, Baldwin, Baudelaire, Biopower, Black Nationalism, Caregiving, Chaos (Chance, Contingency), Clarity, Common Grave, Common Place, Common Sense, Community Histories, Containment, Disclosure, Dolphins, Domestic Dysphoria, Enemy, Eternity, Experience of The The, Failure, Feminine Distances, Feminine Light, Fiddling Again, Frances, From Disaster, From the Polis to the Household, Future Anterior, Hamlet, History (or What Is Not Autonomous In Us), Homecoming, Housing Crisis, Human Capital, Human Condition, “I Could Not See To See,” Incorporating Private Interest, Know Yourself, Mallarmé, Mauvais Vitrier, Natural History, The Neo-Liberal Imagination, Not a Dialectic, Not Some Manly Toughness, Note to Myself, Nothing, Of Ethics, Outside Light, Pathos of Distance, Patiency, Pedigree, Penetration, Popular Front, Preponderance of Objects, Post-historicism, Realism, Riot, Self-Possession, State of Exception, That Women Have No History, The Difference Was What Love Was, The Little Hole, Undead, Violence, Vision, Zed.

Unfurling a few of these meditative, critical, poetic inquiries (Domestic Dysphoria, Paitency, From Disaster, Failure, Penetration, What does it mean to see Nothing), Rob laid out a complex array of large and expansive arenas for thinking anew Oppen's work; here's a small bit from Domestic Dysphoria:

...a certain gender trouble that haunts the poetry of Oppen’s middle period, and it may be inseparable from the deepest concerns moving through the work itself—concerns about nature and history, time and politics, what it means to act in the world, and what it means to be acted upon. The dysphoria registers a crisis in masculinity, if not a catastrophe in the very idea of historical agency.

He continues:

“I can see nothing at all,” Oppen writes in a Daybook, “except that one encounters the thing. And, it is impossible not to say, encounters oneself.”

“I can see nothing at all,” can almost be taken as a positive assertion, an achievement. And while this statement in itself is not an unusual one for Oppen, what follows is quite unusual:

“And encounters in himself the passion of logic which, like the young man’s desire to sleep with the latest movie star, is unlikely to be satisfied, but can lead to crimes of violence.” (142)

Now that’s an unusual comment, and it isn’t just a random squib that Oppen cribbed in a less than heady moment: but something he entertained and rewrote on another occasion, replacing the phrase “the latest movie star” with the proper name “Debbie Reynolds” only to continue: “Tho I am not altogether opposed to crimes of violence […] since I am not altogether pleased with the idea of standing still.” (143)

The image—of a woman, of the latest movie star, of Debbie Reynolds—displaces and haunts the thing one encounters, or longs to encounter, if only in order to know oneself. This note in the daybooks reads like the back story of “Of Being Numerous:” The whole technique of the self Oppen seems to promote—self-knowledge—would be a masculinist prerogative that finds its negative resolve in the image of a woman, the latest movie star, encountered by any young man: and because this encounter is nothing more than an occlusion of sense on a collision course with a passion of logic it can lead to a crime of violence.

As serendipity would have it, earlier in the day I had been reading Rachel Blau DuPlessis's article, "Manhood and its Poetic Projects: The Construction of Masculinity in the Counter Cultural Poetry of the U.S. 1950s" in Jacket Magazine. DuPlessis reads the work of Creeley, Olson and Ginsberg, exploring the reconstruction of masculinity performed in the poetry of these poets. Pointing out that it is masculinity only that is undone, to use a Judith Butler term, and not the binary construction of gender, DuPlessis notes that,

Further, one might see the manhood they were collectively, and differently inventing as an imperial expansiveness in the counter-cultural mode. Allegorically speaking, the center claims the goods of the periphery but ignores the periphery’s co-equality and right to power. Thus, to “gender” Edward Said’s work on culture and imperialism and construct a mechanism for feminist reception, we could say that these male poets “deconstructed and demystified” the male “center” but neglected to continue the critique by inventing “a new system of mobile relationships” to change power relationships between center and periphery that might moot those terms entirely (DuPlessis quoting Said 274-75).

Rob’s work on Oppen shares something in common with DuPlessis here.

In a portion of Domestic Dysphoria that Rob did not read Saturday night but which he has graciously sent me, he references DuPlessis's article:

In her essay "The Construction of Masculinity in the Counter-Cultural Poetry of the U.S. 1950s," Rachel Blau DuPlessis draws attention to the way "certain elements of stereotypical feminine compliance were, at least in theory, necessary to normal men in the 1950s" (Jacket 31 October 2006, 11). While specifically treating Allen Ginsberg's "orgasmic homosexuality," Robert Creeley'as "hyper-scrupulous male self-consciousness," and Charles Olson's "hyper masculine heroes" as three ways male poets found to negotiate gender, DuPlessis questions the ways these poets challenge dominant masculinities, while simultaneously preserving a regime of unequal sexual difference (37)." DuPlessis is quiet on the question of Oppen and gender, perhaps because of her particular closeness to Oppen's work. My sense is that while Oppen's "case" is implicated in these historically situated negotiations, his gender difficulty can't be matched point for point with these other poets' interventions into the social organization of sexual difference at mid-century. What complicates the specificity of Oppen's gender troublein contrast to say Olson's, Creeley's and Ginsberg's is his actual role in the historical events that conditioned the mid-century transformation of masculinity.

I look forward to seeing how Rob unfolds Oppen's difference from these other three mid-century male poets, particularly because I sense all kinds of prickly gender problematics in Oppen's work and in fact just for that very reason, among others, a couple of years ago I started work on an as yet uncompleted series of poems that enter into Oppen's poetry, writing through them. But this is all another matter.

For now there is this question: if it is historical circumstance that produces too this failure in Oppen (I don't think Rob is arguing that there is such a failure, but rather something quite to the contrary), what significance does this failure have for the undoing that Oppen does attempt? If hegemonic masculinity is critiqued, shifted, but within an unchanging binary structure, might this actually preserve (with a terrible vengeance, and thus the violent crime of ) a binary gender construction and hierarchy? In "What does it mean to see Nothing," Rob writes,

World historical agency returns here, but in the form of collective participation in unacknowledged events, or events whose form of consensual acknowledgement—the image—keeps us from acknowledging anything at all. And this may be the terrible meaning of being numerous.

There is too much in Rob's amazing and provocative talk to begin to parse. I look forward to reading more of his always capacious and generous work. Rob closed the evening with this section:

This is how Oppen links the lyric ‘I’ and its vision to the conditions of possibility of the war crime itself. And this is “all we have made of the universe by looking at it.”

“Occurrence, a part / Of an infinite series, // The sad marvels;” but one can’t see them with clarity, because they cohabitate with every thing we see; they may even create the light by which we see these things.

The worldly light Oppen needs to see by is so easily confounded with the bright light of encounter itself. And he’s on guard not to be among those of Rimbaud’s “Cities” in the Illuminations: “where savage gentlemen seek distraction beneath the light they made.”

One might seek simple things to see, instead, things that are uncontaminated by these occurrences, uncompromised by the light they generate, outside the world they made. One might seek things like sea, sky, hill, house, girder, street. One might seek these things while avowing the risk that one might fail, that one might not see them, or that one might succeed in seeing them, and in doing so, see nothing. One might seek these things in order to reassure oneself that one is here, too. But one can’t see the thing for the feedback, and everything feeds back. So then one seeks the stone, the mineral fact, the “nothing place,” but even these quaver in the glare. Nothing can reassure one in the way one needs to be reassured. Nothing can -- for the circumstances may not be credible.

Still, one might be pierced by the things one can see, and touched by the things one can’t.

Here are some excerpts from Oppen's Of Being Numerous that Rob quoted and provided on a handout at the talk:

(from section 1)

There are things
We live among 'and to see them
Is to know ourselves.'

Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series.

[...]

2.

So spoke of the existence of things,
An unmanageable pantheon

Absolute, but they say
Arid.

A city of the corporations

Glassed
In dreams

And images--

And the pure joy
Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter
Is impenetrable.