Barometric Pressures: Cubicleland -- Laura Winton

Barometric Pressures: Cubicleland -- Laura Winton: Download Laura Winton's Chapbook Here Laura Winton  is a poet, writer, and performance artist currently based in Minneapolis...

New Dada-inspired poetry

Here are some new poems I have been working on recently.

Glossolalic Angel Dada won the Midwest Writing Center's Iron Poem contest.

These poems are all saved as graphics due to their enjambment. I didn't want them to lose their spacing.

Hope you like them. Leave me a message and tell me what you think.

Days of the Last Straw

Found this in some journals I had written a few years ago.


I.

I am tired of being sad. Tired of being mad. Tired of being fearful, afraid of the phone, afraid of conflict, afraid to talk to anyone because they might recriminate me—is that the right word? Tired. Tired of being offensive, defensive, unacknowledged, overly noticed, of coming out with my hands up, with my dukes up, with my fists in front of my face ready to strike, protect. I just want to be in love with two people, the 2 out of 9 billion – is it 9 billion yet, or still only a puny little 8 billion? We’re not special anymore, being 1 out of 9 billion, and anyone who you can love out of 8 billion – or nine – that makes two less lonely billionaires. But I’m too sad to love anyone right now, to show affection or love and I really just want to be alone among 8 or 9 billion people, but I am also afraid. I am afraid to leave and afraid to go, like so many other people, maybe most people, maybe at least 6 billion other people are afraid of this right now, or maybe only 5. I am . . . I am. Period. I am. Tired. And I want. To be happy. It is all I have ever wanted. I don’t want to fight with my landlord my student loan officers bill collectors my father my friends my lovers. I want no argument no last straws no ultimatums no broken dishes no hurt looks no pride injured.

II.

The Days of the Last Straw are both followed and preceded by a seemingly endless but imperceptibly elliptical cycle known as the Days of the (Temporary) Peace, also known to many, women in particular, as the Days of Danger. These are the days when things appear to be normal. When you joke and laugh without incident, without argument, and you lull yourself into believing that everything can be alright, that it can be normal, that you can go on like this and that this time it will be different, the way you have always wanted it to be. It will take many many repetitions to remove yourself from this vortex.

III.


These are the Days of the Last Straw, when the weight of the world, our destinies, rest upon every single repetition of every fight over the years Every bottle, every wrapper left open, every toilet seat left up, one wrong move could set the whole thing off, trigger the end of the world. An exaggeration, but definitely the end of worlds that we know, the end of a way of life, sending each of us off in a different direction, paths potentially parallel for a while, only to wildly diverge, to wildly wander, to deviate at some future unnamed point in time.

IV.

I lack
time
distance
the will

to walk away. I don’t want to walk away. I can’t make it better and I can’t walk away. I will say something that I cannot take back

V.

The Days of the Last Straw are both followed and preceded by a seemingly endless but imperceptibly elliptical cycle known as the Days of the (Temporary) Peace, also known to many, women in particular, as the Days of Danger. These are the days when things appear to be normal. When you joke and laugh without incident, without argument, and you lull yourself into believing that everything can be alright, that it can be normal, that you can go on like this and that this time it will be different, the way you have always wanted it to be. It will take many many repetitions to remove yourself from this vortex.

Is there a mechanism to have this break and not repeat every break that every one else has ever had through time? Is it possible to have a break that is not the same as every other break that I have had? Is it possible to do it all originally, without the use of a thesaurus to try to avoid the break up clichés? Can one stay with someone long enough to discover the originality in breakups, or are we doomed to repeat them, performatively, performing the exact same phrases that came before us, as in a ritual, as in an un-marriage.

And so in our grief, even then, we are modern, worried about how to have an original thought, an original feeling. Perhaps this is what gets us through the process, distracts us from what matters or makes us see that in our clichés, this is what happens to everyone and it isn’t as tragic as we had originally thought.

VI.

After a fight, the need to connect with someone else, the desperate need to prove that someone can still love you. That you are still worthy., The fear of losing others, of losing everyone. I want to break up with the whole world at once.

VII.

Don't read anything into this. Just read it.

Review of Carole Maso's Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo

For the new year, let's revisit a great writer and a great painter:



Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo
by Carole Maso
2002, Counterpoint Press
hardcover
170 pp.


Whenever I read Carole Maso, I start writing like her. And so it’s the words and impressions that linger, hovering above the page, insistent, repeating: Broken. Fragment. Meditation. Accident. Votive.

Composed in Maso’s unique poetic and fragmentary style, Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo is many different things at once: a highly condensed biography of Kahlo’s life, a voice for her words, and Maso’s artistic “conversation” with Kahlo.

Beauty is Convulsive samples freely from biographies of Kahlo among Maso’s own writing and impressions. We’ve become used to this style from filmmakers and rap artists, but it is still unusual in books, where we’re accustomed to more singularity of voice, clear quotes and citations with footnotes and page numbers. Maso’s rendering of Frida Kahlo requires a certain suspension of disbelief, a willingness to experience Kahlo’s life as we abandon our usual literary constraints.

The book focuses on three defining elements of Frida Kahlo’s life. The first is a serious bus accident in her adolescence which had repercussions throughout her entire life, including chronic pain in her back, legs and feet, and an inability to have children. Her subsequent miscarriages make up another recurring theme. And the third is her marriage to fellow painter Diego Rivera.

Maso’s sometimes halting, disjointed writing style suggests a life lived in fits and starts, as in Votive: Child:

“Its birth certificate filled out in elegant scroll His mother was
Frieda [sic] Kahlo

take this sorrow: child

I would give you fistfuls of color
if only
alegria

I would have given you.

Because I wanted you come to me

the cupped butterfly, painted black.” (19)

One of the hallmarks of Carole Maso’s writing is repetition of words and phrases, and Votive features in the title, as well as in the text, of many of the pieces in this book. Votive: Vision, Votive: Courage, and Votive: Sorrow, are among the pieces that lead the reader on a meditation, a wish, a prayer on elements of Frida Kahlo’s life, almost as if you are walking the stations of the cross. In between the Votives and other pieces are short epigrammatic quotes from Frida herself, each entitled “Accident”, which serve as interludes:

“I am not sick. I am broken.
But I am happy as long as I can paint.” (65)

“Nevertheless I have the will to do many things
and I have never felt “disappointed by life”
as in Russian novels. (75)

In her choice and placement of text from her journals, Maso not only gives voice to Frida Kahlo, but also highlights Kahlo the poet, particularly when writing about Diego:

“From you to my hands I go all over your body, and I am with you a minute and I am with you a moment, and my blood is the miracle that travels in the veins of the air from my heart to yours. . . Diego, nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes. . . .”(34-35)

Lest you start to believe that Maso is merely a collage artist, arranging the words that Frida has written and what others have written about her, Maso intertwines her own meditations on the artist’s life and her work:

“She remembers when her mouth -- pressed to the ear -- to the
hum of the paint the blood:
don’t kiss anyone else
magenta, dark green, yellow
And she watches him.” (91)

Add to this quotes from others who knew Frida Kahlo, including Diego himself, Alejandro, who was involved in the accident with Frida, and notes from her doctors, and gradually, contemplatively, you get a picture of the woman and the artist, and the effect she has on those who wish to enter her world.

Review of An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers

An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers
Franklin Rosemont
Chicago: Surrealist Editions

Just as misspelling is the least appreciated genre of creative writing, the Wrong Number is the most despised form of oral poetry and storytelling (75).

Surrealism is generally thought of as a thing of the past: Andre Breton holding court in pre-war Paris Cafes discussing Freud and Marx and writing poetry.

Franklin Rosemont, editor of Chicago’s Black Swan Press and (one of) the leading (contemporary) (American) Surrealists has taken his longstanding fascination with misdialed phone numbers as an occasion to write a contemporary surrealist manifesto of sorts, a reaffirmation of the presence of Surrealism as a force in our daily lives.

The wrong number: an exquisite corpse shared by strangers; a visit from the subconscious; a political opportunity; a symbol of sexual repression; an indicator of xenophobia. Rosemont’s often fanciful, sometimes exaggerated meanderings offer up the misdialed number as a seemingly comprehensive and insidious marker of our current social condition.

As an unconscious attempt to speak to . . . an Other, a stranger, every wrong number corresponds to the latent but unmistakable desire . . . for . . . radically non-alienated way of life (131).

The book begins as a treatise on modern society and on the Surrealist liberation of desire and imagination as the antidote to the “miserabilist world order.” Rosemont then lays out for us his “methodology” for researching wrong numbers. He shows how wrong numbers have been basically ignored, gone unstudied, despite their ubiquity in our culture. The wrong number soon moves from being the object of study itself to becoming the framework through which life can be explained.

In the second chapter Rosemont uses the conceit of wrong numbers to frame autobiographical anecdotes ranging from his family in Chicago and California to his meetings with Breton and several Surrealists in Paris in the 1960s. The stories in these chapters are charming and almost unbelievable in their chance encounters and fortuitous accidents.

From there, we move to a meandering mix of philosophy, psychoanalysis, gnosticism, linguistics and politics, all understood vis-à-vis the experience and analysis of wrong numbers. The result in these later chapters can be somewhat uneven. Like Surrealism itself, the book is at its best when it forgets itself, gets lost, and stumbles onto fragments of unexpected poetry. Some of the best moments are when Rosemont veers off into the performative, invocational language of manifestos.

The text becomes weighted down in places when Rosemont begins protesting too much. What can be fanciful at first starts to feel forced. One notable example is the discussion of sexuality, which starts off as an interesting and amusing contemplation. Rosemont goes to great lengths to compare the wrong number to every possible Freudian permutation of sexual dysfunction, ultimately stretching credulity. Attempting to keep the metaphor of the wrong number on task, the book often retreads, repeating itself--a worthy poetic device in a shorter piece that here creates a sense of redundancy and sometimes impatience. And in his desire to undertake a kind of serious and comprehensive “study” of the wrong number, the text, particularly in the later chapters, becomes dry and begins to read more like an academic paper than a paean to Surrealism.

Wrong Numbers also features drawings by Artur de Cruzeiro Seixas. The artwork is classical or “old school” surrealist, the cover art featuring a human body rising out of a telephone with images and figures that immediately place the book within that artistic framework.

Ultimately, the work is not only a call to openness (to chance, to strangers, to joy) but also a worthy contemporary analysis of our culture that, in its more playful moments, offers surprise and insight. It serves as a reminder that Surrealism is a force that remains afoot in the universe. We come to appreciate the smallest irritant as an opportunity for delight.

The struggle for a ‘poetic politics’ takes place on many levels . . . outburst of hilarity, generous gestures, impossible chance encounters, creams that haunt one for weeks on end, fits of delirium . . . inspired slips of the tongue, stunning coincidences that irrevocably alter the whole course of one’s life. . . . Immune to the forces of repression, they are themselves forces of poetry and therefore of freedom (137).

Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas

I have done book reviewing for Rain Taxi for over ten years. I have decided to repost some of my older reviews here. I am fortunate in that Rain Taxi gives me books that I request or in areas that I request, so these are all books that I have really liked. I hope you will check some out after reading these.

Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas
Margaret Hooks
Princeton Architectural Press


As a long time devotee and student of Surrealism, it came as something of a shock to be handed a book on an artist and patron central to the careers of several prominent surrealists that I had never heard of before, Edward James. How was it possible that I had never read his name in any other biography or group history of Surrealism, had seen him in no exhibitions, no bibliographies I had ever encountered? What kind of Surrealist “pedigree” could this person possibly have?

A writer and artist, James’ first novel, The Gardener Who Saw God, received critical acclaim and even went into multiple publications. Despite consistently solid reviews for his work, one negative review, accusing him of attempting to “also buy himself a reputation as a poet” caused James to become discouraged and cease publishing under his own name. “I could have had anything I wanted,” James laments, but because I was rich, no one accepted me or thought of me as a poet.” (36) James focused his energies for a time on other artists. Behind the scenes, he was one among many key players in the production and distribution of Surrealism, underwriting the Surrealist journal Minotaur as well as the Surrealist Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He supported Salvador Dali financially and by helping materially to coordinate exhibitions for Dali as well as for Rene Magritte (whose Le Reproduction Interdite is said to be one of two portraits that Magritte did of James, showing him from the back). Despite James’ involvement with many prominent Surrealists throughout his life, Hooks points out that James never claimed the label for himself, understandably so, given the legendary infighting over the purity of the name Surrealism, held tightly by Andre Breton, and his tendency to “excommunicate” artists, along with James’ own sense of exclusion from the literary world.

From his break with Dali, Hooks takes us briefly through what might be described literally and figuratively as James’ years “in the desert.” He travels through the American southwest, through Taos, New Mexico and Mabel Dodge’s artistic community therein, and ultimately landing in California, where he continued to circulate among artists and intellectuals including Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, who introduced James to the Vedantic movement, of which he became a follower. In this time, James also began to travel back and forth to Mexico, and it was during these travels that he found what would become not only his home, but the site of his greatest artistic creation of all, his legacy of a surrealist environment and estate, among the hills, waterfalls, and lush vegetation outside of the small town of Xilitla. From here, the book diverges from the standard artist biography to give us the blow-by-blow history of the creation of Las Pozas.

If Surrealism represents a way of looking at, thinking about, and moving through the world, Las Pozas, James’ Surreal Eden, is a surrealistic world in itself to be lived in. Hooks articulates in detail James’ vision as well as his challenges and triumphs in realizing his works of art. He finds a kindred spirit and lifelong friend in Plutarco Gastelem Esquer, a man who is able to translate James’ ideas and sometimes seemingly impractical sketches into actual objects. James employs many of the people of Xilitla in the building of Las Pozas, not only providing patronage to artists this time, but bringing an economic infusion to the entire town. It is in the project of Las Pozas itself, as well as his friendship with Plutarco, that James finds the society and artistic acceptance the eluded James in his younger days.

If there is one shortcoming to the book, it is possibly not even a problem of the text at all, but with the difficulty in capturing visual and visceral artistic experiences that are so central to this story. Hooks provides photos of and also describes in detail many elaborate and fascinating pieces created by James throughout his life, many of which would be considered installations or even performance art pieces today, from Monkton House in England, with its purple façade and self-designed wallpaper and carpeting to the structures, sculptures, and edifices of Las Pozas. It’s a daunting, if not impossible task, to fully appreciate these pieces without being able to experience them. And perhaps this daunting task also explains, in part, James’ low visibility in the narratives of contemporary art history.

The book’s extensive photographs helps a great deal in this regard, but cannot fully ameliorate the situation. The photos include detailed photos and close ups of many of the pieces from Las Pozas, which hint at the scope of the project. This scope includes not only the size of the pieces and structures themselves, such as the Bamboo Palace the Stairway to the Sky, which completely dwarfs the cabin it stands behind, but also includes the space occupied by Las Pozas itself. Hooks does provide a map that shows the layout and area of Las Pozas, but it is difficult to appreciate on a visual level without being able to see the pieces in relationship to each other or to the larger landscape. Likewise, the book opens with a description of the current city of Xilitla, but we see only one photo of the town, taken in 1940, just before James’ arrival. I found it difficult to not only hold in my mind the building of these amazing works of art, but also to visualize the context in which is was built and now stands, a context and often contrast, which Hooks tries very hard to describe for us.

That said, Surreal Eden does what many good art biographies and histories do: remind us of what gets forgotten and left out of “official” canons. Hers is not the first biography of James, but adds to a body of work that includes two previous biographies as well as James’ own writings. Through these, and through the potential to renew interest in Las Pozas, which still stands today outside of Xilitla, James has the chance he always desired to be taken seriously as an artist in his own right.

Teaching English Composition with Surrealism

This is a paper that I did while at the University of Minnesota. I have been using many of these techniques in my own composition classes with some success and I am also presenting some of this at the SW/TX PCA Conference in Albuquerque this February (2015).


Surrealist Applications for Composition-Related Activities


These are just a few potential applications of Surrealism to composition. These are some that I have produced and practiced myself and some that are classic Surrealist techniques. There are many more.

I. Exquisite Corpse, Group Processes and Brainstorming

The most famous of Surrealist writing techniques is the exquisite corpse, which got its name from a line of poetry. “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” In the exquisite corpse, a sheet of paper is passed around. Every person contributes to it one line at a time and sees only the line written right before theirs. I have also seen artists contribute to an artistic exquisite corpse, adding to a drawing bit by bit. There are several ways that this could be put to work as a method for brainstorming.
As a brainstorming session or a free write, everyone passes around a sheet of paper, folded or unfolded, writing suggestions on it. Alternatively, each person can take turns putting his or her potential topic in the center of a group and everyone in the group writes down suggestions on that particular topic, and then move on to the next student’s idea. Group work in that case would take on the valence of shared knowledge. Often we tell students during a brainstorming session to write down everything they know about a topic. What if they could be inspired by what their classmates also know about a topic? In this way, brainstorming becomes not a solitary act, but an act of shared knowledge, in which student remind one another of what they already know or help to point one another in various fruitful directions for their research.

II. Chance Operations as a Form of Organization


Is there only one way to organize a paper? Chance operations, most notably rolling dice or drawing cards that relate to certain sections or paragraphs, have been used by a number of writers like William S. Burroughs, musicians like John Cage, and choreographers such as Merce Cunningham. This technique can also work for students of composition, in this case to determine paragraph topic order in their papers. In doing so, it can teach students that there are any number of ways to organize their texts that can produce different results for the reader. Sometimes students organize their papers in the way that is most obvious – such as chronological – but may not be the most effective or even the most interesting. At other times, students may be writing about a series of three subtopics (the most common number in composition) in such a way that it does not matter which one goes first. By playing with the order of their subtopics and paragraphs, they become accustomed to doing rewriting and see it as a form of experimenting with their texts. It also adds an element of play, and therefore of fun, that might encourage more rewriting from students.

III. The Many Uses of Collage Techniques in Writing


A. Collage as Brainstorming and Research

The technique of collage, which the Surrealists borrowed (stole) from the Dadaists, lends itself very well to “spontaneous research.” Having chosen a book or an article to cite, students can close their eyes and point to a passage. Have the student free write on what that passage may mean. Have them do that several times throughout the article or book. Then, to make it a true collage, students may string together what they have written to create a whole, spontaneous text from the day’s class, to see how it all of their writing fits together. This exercise will stimulate their thinking and may also make them more enthusiastic to go back and read the whole article. At the same time, it will help students to generate thoughts and ideas to react to small parts of the text before they respond to the text as a whole. It often helps students if they can jump into a text in the middle, where they might find something that catches their attention, and then go back and read it from the beginning. rather than seeing a book or article as something they have to get through from beginning to end, which may or may not hold any interest for them. In this age of Internet, Twitter, etc., in which most people have very divided attention, it also corresponds to the way that many people actually do read. At the same time, once they respond to a portion of the article, students are encouraged to go back through and see how their understanding of the excerpt that they wrote about corresponds to the overall text, which can also teach them about the pitfalls of quoting part of a text out of context.
B. A Variation on Collage Techniques as a Way to Respond to Texts

This technique can also be used during in-class writings as a way to respond to texts. When a text has been assigned, have everyone point to a passage quickly (don’t think about it) and write for five minutes about that passage. They can do a free association or write directly on the passage. Again the point is for the students to be engaging with what they have read, and also be able to engage with any part of a text.
C. Collage as a Form of Sentence Combining

Many instructors still advocate sentence combining to teach style or to eliminate wordiness. A different form of collage is one where the student/writer literally cuts up a passage and then puts different parts or different sheets of papers together. Beat writer William S. Burroughs is best known for developing this technique as a way to (re)generate texts, but it originated with the Surrealists. This exercise is fun and may give students some energy to do more “traditional” and straightforward sentence-combining to achieve sentence variety. It can also be done with a little more direction, taking a small section of the paper for example, or even cutting apart sentences and then combining them.
A more literal form of artistic collage can also be used, such as cutting apart sentences and then gluing them onto a sheet of paper either in a different order or with sentences overlapping. Theoretically students can do this with a computer, but takes on a different feel and function when it’s done using paper and glue and can shake students out of their usual way of writing and editing. As with a number of other exercises, these can be done as individual or group projects.

The Manifesto as a Form of Argumentation and Group Work

A. The Manifesto Form

In some of my class assignments, I have students work up to writing a research paper by writing a complaint letter, a letter to the editor of a paper, and writing to a the company. This scaffolds learning and teaches the students about writing they do in their everyday life. The manifesto is another form of persuasive writing, a bombastic form of expressing opinions and can be done as a group or individual activity. Mary Ann Caws, in the introduction to Manifesto: A Century of Isms, says that the manifesto “generally proclaims what it wants to oppose to leave, to defend, to change” (xxii). Many students have a strong sense of injustice or at least indignation for what they consider to be unfair. The manifesto, as a form, allows them to express their own opinions, with no need to defend that opinion with research. “Generally the manifesto stands alone, does not need to lean on anything else, demands no other text than itself. Its rules are self-contained, included in its own body” (Caws xxv). As both a text to respond to as well as a text to be produced, it is particularly fruitful in helping students to write their initial ideas out and present them to one another. In addition, the manifesto has a sense of flair unlike any other form of writing and is fun for students to write.

B. The Manifesto as a Step Toward Argumentation

Writing a manifesto can be a good intermediate step, where students think about and state explicitly what their position is on a given subject. Students can then start thinking about social context that this issue fits into. Was this situation merely a one-time slight or oversight, or does it point to a more general problem within society? Having written out their complaint with society or their idea on how things ought to work, students can begin to think about what kind of support they will need down the line for their arguments. Their peers will be able to comment upon their manifestos and argue with them, thereby showing the holes in their arguments through friendly discussion and debate.
C. The Manifesto and Group Work

Generally speaking, manifestos are the expression of a group, although examples can be found of individually-written manifestos, such as those written by the Unabomber or the Discovery Channel Gunman. This can work, then, as either an individual project or as a group project. As a group project, I would recommend small groups of three students, which is a little better than just a pair, but not so big and unwieldy as to create insurmountable problems or disagreements. Ask the students to present potential paper topics to their group and have the group decide on which project they will write a manifesto. If they are really fortunate (or crafty) it might be possible for students to combine their topics of concern into one manifesto. Other techniques described above, like an exquisite corpse or collage techniques, can be used to generate the initial text. D. The Manifesto and Critical Reading

For those who want to teach an aspect of critical reading in their classroom and to introduce alternative texts to students, the manifesto is an outstanding form. Whereas many people think of manifestos in terms of artistic movements, they were also employed extensively by AIDS activists in the 1980s and 1990s as well as those in the environmental movement, the women’s movement, etc. Allowing students to read such texts, to examine the claims made in the texts and the way those claims are embedded and expressed, and to agree or disagree with them encourages them to read critically. Because the manifesto’s style is so “in your face,” manifestos can be good beginning texts to help students begin to examine and test the claims made.

Review of I’m Your Man, a biography of Leonard Cohen, by Sylvie Simmons

I picked up Sylvia Simmons’ I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen because, frankly, I didn’t really know much about Cohen, although many of my poet friends love him and I thought it was time that I learned something about him. So , being a junkie for artist biographies, I thought I would find out a little bit more about this poet, songwriter, and musician.

However, it seems that Simmons book is not for the casual reader. Rather, this ambitious books attempts to cover his entire life in great depth, sparing no detail. And that is the book’s problem as well: it tries to do too much.

I put the book down and picked it back up again several times, thinking that maybe I just had too much on my plate and was impatient to get through it. Try though I may, my impatience with the book did not ever fully vanish.

The book starts off with his upbringing in a Jewish part of Montreal where Cohen started writing and gained some early fame as a writer. This is difficult terrain for any biographer, as it is necessary to give some background into the artist to tell where he came from. It is the rare biographer who manages to make this material interesting. Simmon’s problem isn’t that this material isn’t interesting, but she lingers on it longer than she should. There is much in Cohen’s future that the reader is anxious to get to, and as with any biography, although that material is important, it is not the main event.

I think it might be because Sylvie Simmons has thrown every single detail she apparently came across into the bio, no matter how small and only tangentially related to the narrative. Also, she appears to have places where she has interviewed friends and associates and she loses sight of the focus of the interview. For example, Along with this comes a tendency to repeat details, such as her emphasis that Leonard was not the depressed kind of poet that repelled people, but rather was always funny and kept his depressions to himself (or poured them into his songs.)

All of these things seem like an interruption. So for a reader like me, who doesn’t know much about Cohen and so isn’t in to all of those kinds of details, it can become tedious. It seems like this is a biography more for the die-hard Leonard Cohen fans or for obsessive-compulsives who are into minutiae.

A lot of this information could have been put into appendices and footnotes so that it is there, but it doesn’t bog down the main narrative.

The switches in voice also take some getting used to. We are used to those kinds of abrupt switches in fiction, but we still are not accustomed to it in biographies and other works of non-fiction. This feels like Simmons’ attempts to play with narrative and in doing so, you risk turning off a certain number of readers. As I got more involved in the narrative, these became less bothersome to me, but they also were just less frequent as the book continues.
Along the same lines, there were some odd descriptive phrases. For example:
Although it might not have won an arm-wrestling contest with Greenwich Village, the Montreal folk music scene was thriving.

Again, these attempts to transform the genre of musical biographies are hit and miss. Sometimes they work and sometimes they are puzzling and inadequate and distract from the subject.

This brings us to another aspect of the biography. It is trying to do a little too much. At times it goes back and forth between an ethnography, a cultural history, a personal biography of the artist, and a work of literary criticism as well as of music criticism. To write any one or two of these successfully is hard enough. To try to do all of these at once, switching back and forth between the necessary voices and tones in this book makes it unwieldy to say the least.

Just as bad art is instructive, so is bad writing. This is not a bad biography, but it is distracting enough in the writing of it that it draws more attention to the wizard behind the (biographer’s) curtain that it does to the artist himself in places.

An example of really stellar writing is the chapter A Long time Shaving. This chapter is engaging because you can see Simmons’ own facility in talking about the novel Beatufiul Lovers and her own engagement with other biographers and critics in talking about the book. It is really in the literary/music criticism that Simmons shines.

This book probably speaks to the conditions of publishing today, too, with its greater emphasis in putting out more books with fewer editors. With some editing a paring down and some rearranging to put the less critical details into footnotes and appendices, this ambitious biography could really sing.

Kansas City Fringe Festival July 19 - 26, 2014

Losing Words

Losing Words


I hate losing things. You would think I'd be used to it after all these years, but it never gets easier. I try to be philosophical, to be anarchic and anti-materialistic and shrug it off. I focus on how little it would cost to replace the lost object, if it even needs to be replaced at all. or I treat it like a dying acquaintance, grateful for the short time we've had together. Misplaced, stolen, permanent loan, left in a hotel dresser or on a restaurant table--makes no difference. Keys, jackets, cassette tapes, purses, words . . .

I hate losing words most of all. It's not a problem of losing objects full of words. I keep my notebooks and scribbles closer to me than my wallet. Money can be earned or borrowed. Every dollar bill is interchangeable-- crisp or wrinkled, ripped, laundered in a jeans pocket, with a love note or government conspiracy theory scribbled on the front. I'm no robber baron, industrialist, or fledgling shopkeeper, and one dollar is the same as another, not suitable for framing.

But a lost word is a tragedy. It's a tender moment with a lover that you'll never have again the same way. You'll never get the exact color and combination of touches and whispers. Losing words is worse than having to climb through the back bedroom window without your keys. And most words are lost to sheer callousness, not innocent forgetfulness. They are lost because I am unwilling to stop in my tracks, pull out my notebook and scribble in the middle of the sidewalk. I don't want to be inconvenienced.

I watch parents in Burger King with their five year-olds. The child wanders around, exploring the concept of orange plastic & vinyl furniture, which clearly does not exist at home. She looks out the window, slowly pulling individual french fries out of their small paper sacks, discussing the color of birds, while mom or dad admonish her to "hurry up. We've got to get to the mall."

I never wanted to be that kind of parent. But I am. I won't give my words the time to make mistakes, to take in everything around them. Instead, I drag them down the street without looking behind me to notice that their feet are barely touching the ground. When they run away, I run around looking for them, call the authorities, worry promiscuously, and promise each thought, each infant word, that I will eat more slowly, contemplate orange plastic seats and small brown birds and give them time to nourish themselves. Next time.

Trip so far: unsuccessful!

Chicago Thursday -- Chicago must have the worst streets anywhere, and that includes Minneapolis! I have fallen twice tripping on broken pavement and now actually stepping in a pothole in the middle of the street and going down hard on my left side. Ankle looks like a grapefruit or more like an eggplant -- big and purple.

This hasn't actually been my MOST unsuccessful visit to Chicago. There was the disastrous job interview 20 years ago when I came out in a rain storm, went looking for my friends in the Art Institute, had to deal with snotty minimum-wage-earning desk clerk having just had a horrendous terrible interview and being totally soaked and in tears. There have been many many trips to Chicago that resulted in public transportation mishaps, getting lost, etc. But most recent visits have been ok until now. Getting sick and now having a sprained ankle makes this my most unsuccessful visit in recent history.

It took me until Friday for some reason to go and get an ankle brace. My host for this part of the trip offered to go get some things for me, but I decided I wanted to pick it out myself and I had an ever-growing list that included pain killers, cough drops, and an unhealthy amount of comfort food! Spent the whole day Friday in front of the television doing nothing but periodically sleeping and checking my facebook games to see who played song pop with me.

The disconcerting thing is that it is now Sunday, in Davenport Iowa. I have the house to myself as my hosts have gone to visit their fathers, but mine is in Florida, too far to visit right now. And I am doing the same thing that I did on Friday. Despite having much to do, or having new cities to visit, I just don't seem to have the brain power, willpower, coordination, motivation to do any of the things I need to do. Maybe I am just residually tired from being sick and am just being too hard on myself. I just feel my vacation being wasted and slipping away from me. Even this particular journal is lackluster!

Sigh.

Hope to have better travel journals soon.

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry (Part II)

It has to be said, lest it sound like I am proscribing something equally restrictive and repressive . . . I am not arguing against any type of poetry per se. I do not want to create a monolith of styles, themes, as restrictive as a Marxist-Leninist insistence on social realism. I do oppose the stilted reification that much slam work has fallen into, both stylistically and thematically. There is a certain sound that poetry slam audiences and judges have come to expect, a rhythm to the words that isn’t necessarily organic to the poem and therefore it becomes a contest of style rather than of performance, of doing justice to the words.

Also, it is a time worn cliché now that a slam poem needs to be about either the poet herself (her deep feelings, a break-up that he just went through, a situation that the poet is confronting) or about a social condition (a homeless mother and child, a junkie, someone that the poet knew of and/or read about), or both (about the poet’s identity as a woman, as a Puerto Rican, an Asian, a gay man or a lesbian, a Latina lesbian, etc. etc.). When I competed in poetry slams, it was always what I call my “bitch feminist” poems that won rounds, not my more interesting and complex poems that I had worked on to perform well as well as to craft in the first place.

In 1986, I was at a writer’s conference in Illinois and I heard several poets, including Carlos Cumplian, talking about these poetry contests in which people showed up in costume and performed poetry and I realized about 10 years ago that what he was talking about where the early days of poetry slam. This is a far cry from the sense of “authenticity” and the singular voice of the poet with the poem itself that I have heard poetry slam participants talk about today. In the initial days of the slam, as described by poets working in Chicago in 1986, it was merely about providing a sense of excitement to the audience and performing the poem as best as you could.

At around the same time, I heard other poetry slams in the Quad Cities, about 3 hours from Chicago on the Iowa/Illinois border. There, slam was already becoming entrenched as a style, with the poets reading their poems very fast, almost like a race to poetry. Yet there were no set themes to the poems. It had not yet merged with rap music to develop the style and had not yet merged with identity politics, which had not really become widespread, moving out of the academy, until the early 1990s when activists and artists around the country started to pick up on that aspect.

I do want to honor and acknowledge the word of identity formation, community building, and progressive values that many forms of poetry can participate in. I do want to acknowledge the role that poetry slams have played in building an audience for poetry. From their inception, they sought to bring the excitement of sport to poetry, a spirit of fun and of not taking oneself as a “Poet” so seriously. All of these things are good things. But poetry slam has been around officially for a quarter of a century and is now an institution.

I want to ask, then what? NOW what? Where do we go? After at least a century of searching actively for a revolutionary function of poetry, (why) have we given up? (why) have we abandoned the incomplete experiments of the past? Where and how can poetry function uniquely, in other words, what are the unique functions of poetry, as a revolutionary practice? And how can poetry slam fit into this without providing a known form, which is antithetical to the imagination that it should be releasing?

If the term avant garde, where avant garde falls into elitism, is in its very accepted (if perhaps unofficial, naturalized) definition that the avant garde is ahead of, “anticipates” and in many ways, is therefore, more advanced and “better” than mainstream art, culture, society and art, culture, and society need only to “catch up,” then of course, in the catching up, the mainstream has then co-opted the avant garde, misusing it for commerce or entertainment, for style, failing to recognize the true substance, the original intent (as contemporary Surrealists are and were famously wont to lament).

I prefer instead to think of the avant garde as the “first wave,” the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field. The change of consciousness, overused and virtually emptied of meaning as that idea may have become, is what necessarily must predate genuine social change. It is not up to poets (or even activists, politicians or “leaders”) to proscribe where that change needs to go, but to empower the imaginations around us to imagine something new, to dream our way out of the current world, which works only for a very few people. And this means that the avant-garde will always be the avant-garde, will always be changing. Even as we feel that we “know” surrealism, that is because surrealism has been associated with a style, which can be painted, written, and then put away in a box, rather than being a “technique” for opening the imagination, which it can do over and over again, without repeating itself, for each iteration of the surrealist techniques for getting to the imagination will yield different results, different images, different juxtapositions, especially with literature, which was a field that Andre Breton, the so-called “pope” of Surrealism, contended.

Education is the watchword and it has a very important role to play, but as an instrument of “instruction” and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall pretty to. Religious missionaries often (almost always) accompanied or came fast upon the heels of conquerors to ensure that hears and spirits were converted while trying to enforce a new culture and a new rule upon the conquered. Poets must see themselves as missionaries of the imagination, not as propagandists.

To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit. This is the revolutionary work of the poet.

To then take this and bring it to the people is what poetry slam can do -- to take literature off the page and bring it to those who would not normally pick up a book of poetry, for example, or to bring that alive with performance, to reach a larger audience that is hungry for something real, something surreal, something unknown. This is the lure of science fiction and it could also be the lure to poetry. Not to write science fiction into poetry, but to perform possibilities never before imagined. Some people who know me think that I am especially hard on poetry slam and perhaps I am, but only because I think there are so many more possibilities that poetry slam can bring to the world, rather than giving it simply a different type of institutionalized, reified poetry.

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry (Part I)

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry

In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.

Shoshona Feldman (1975)

“The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.” (In Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron, p. 8)

Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman’s idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a “feminine writing” and “women’s language.” (By the way, I highly recomment Cixous. I have not delved much into Irigaray, but to me her work seems very much grounded in some rather complicated Freudian and psychoanalytic theory. Cixous is lively and quite readable.) Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter’s position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based “prisonhouse of language” (props to Jameson) but the very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak. The issue is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition (from the moment the declaration is made, “It’s a girl” Butler tells us, a whole universe of implications is set in motion.). Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.

To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies (look at the glorification of the police not only through shows like Cops, but through shows like CSI that glamorize police work, or the nuclear-family centered values of most sitcoms, etc.). In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else’s vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?

Resistance is possible through the remaking of language, of finding new, creative, imaginative linguistic practices to sustain us, to help us move toward our visions, to help us have visions we never even thought possible. I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways proscribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol Lewitt says, rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts. The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we’ve always thought. I’m not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.

(To be continued . . . .)

Epilepsy

Many people don't know this about me, but I had epilepsy as a child and thankfully, I outgrew it, although I wonder what the adult implications will be now that I am getting older -- a predisposition to have a stroke (which I believe that I have had already) or Alzheimer's (which runs in the women on my dad's side of the family anyway) or other brain-related conditions that affect older people.

But I was very lucky. I grew up in the 70s and my parents tried very hard to make sure that I did all the same things as the other kids and did not make a HUGE deal about my epilepsy (although it was always there in the background). One memory that stands out is when one of my friends had a roller skating party. My mother had read that strobe lights can set of seizures in epileptics, and she and I drove the 20 miles into Peoria to check out the roller skating rink. She did that so that she could say yes to my going to the party. She could have just said no right away and lived with the consequence of having me whine for the next week (or 20 years). It wasn't until years later that I really thought about the implications of her doing that so that I could go to the party, and thankfully, I was able to thank her for doing that while she was still alive.

To my knowledge, my teachers treated me as they did anyone else. I think there might have been some things going on behind the scenes, which I have come to realize only upon reflection since I have been older. For example, when I first started high school, I was put in the lower level English class, the one that I later identified as borderline "remedial," which meant that I read from an anthology instead of reading Shakespeare, like the kids in the advanced classes. (Little did they know that I had read King Lear when I was 10!) But I paid those things no heed and they never held me back. I showed myself to be at the top of the class and by my junior year, I was able to pick my own classes anyway and after that year, I actually graduated. So if they were attempting to hold me back in any way, they failed, not me.

Most of my classmates knew I had a seizure every once in a while, and they would tell the teachers what to do when I had one. The teachers told them not to tell me about my seizures, but of course they did, including tales of how the teachers freaked out. (That was probably why the teachers didn't want me to know, but it was wrapped in the guise of "not upsetting me.") We would laugh about the behavior of the teachers as well as my own behavior during the seizure, because I would frequently do odd things before passing out. (Once, when we were playing baseball in the backyard, I apparently stepped off base and went to the neighbor's house and started sniffing the flowers.) Sometimes, when we had to do something we didn't want to do, my classmates would try to ask me if I could have a seizure to get out of an activity.l (I of course, couldn't invoke a seizure at will!) It was treated very normally among most of my classmates, friends, and neighbors.

I had no idea about the levels of discrimination that even existed during my lifetime that the author discusses in this article in Truth-Out. We had occasional comments from friends and family members to the extent that they were amazed that I was able to go to college or to do this or that, but I always thought that was just *their* ignorance. I had no idea that these were coming from shared social stereotypes and stigmas. I am glad that I was oblivious to this kind of thing because it meant that I just went about my life and did what I wanted to do at every turn, not feeling self-conscious about my epilepsy, not feeling like I had a "disability."

I graduated early from high school, I have my master's degree and several years toward my PhD, and have never felt that my epilepsy limited my opportunities. Consequently, I have also never felt ashamed to talk about it. I never felt a stigma. I encourage people with epilepsy to not be shy about talking about it. Just tell people around you, hey, I have epilepsy and sometimes I have a seizure, and here's what you do if you see me have a seizure. It's like coming out gay. The more people know people who have "hidden disabilities" or anything else considered "abnormal" by society, the more people see these people as competent, intelligent, creative, funny human beings just like everyone else they associate with, the more normal having these kind of conditions will become.

Nowhere to go

Ok, this is a short story I wrote using a prompt from The Writer magazine. I actually took 5 verbs (they only recommended 3) to weave into my story:

Button
Delay
Quiver
Muster
Quit

I very quickly realized that I had written myself into a corner and decided to self-consciously go along that route. You will see what I mean.

Nowhere to go


Her voice quivered as she spoke into the phone. It took all of the confidence she could muster. A deep voice bellowed on the other end. She quickly hung up, hoping there was no way to trace the call, but of course there was. Everyone had a way to retrace calls these days. As the young woman in the café had said to her horrified café confidante, there is no such thing as privacy anymore. She knew that. So why did she do something so stupid. Why would she think that she could trust something so private in such a public venue? She should have just gone to the internet. But she needed to hear the soothing sounds of someone’s voice in her ear, a voice as soothing as a hand stroking her hair or rubbing her back.


She decided to go out. She buttoned up her jeans and pulled on a t-shirt, slipped on her boots, and went out the door. It was a warm night and she decided to walk the 10 blocks or so down to the bar that she had been meaning to go to. As she got closer, the cell phone in her pocket began to ring, a ring that said the caller was unfamiliar, but when she looked at the number, it was not an unfamiliar number at all. She put in back in her pocket and continued walking.


Being new to town, she didn’t know anyone yet. She had moved here less than a month ago after she had quit her job and decided to reinvent her life. She had taped a note to her boss’s door, using a bit more tape than was required for the job, and gave her 5-minute notice and a forwarding address for her check, her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend’s address. She left town two days later, go a PO Box and arranged to have her mail forwarded. In three days time, she had changed her whole life, including her cell phone number. There was only place that knew her number. She looked around instinctively, knowing that she was being silly and paranoid. No one was paying her any attention, but was that a good or a bad thing? Could someone snatch her off the street without being noticed?


She walked up to the bar and put her hand out to pull open the door. Something stopped her.


It was the realization that this scenario had been played out with every possible ending. If she met someone and had a one-night stand, it would either be the pornographic version, or the post-modern “wasn’t that meaningless” version. If she went in and no one noticed her, it would be the sad and lonely Lifetime women’s movie or it would be the self-help realization that she didn’t need anyone but herself all along. Come to think of it, that was also a potential Lifetime movie, made for lonely women that didn’t want to admit it and tried to seem empowered. Perhaps she would have the crime novel ending, in which the mysterious stranger from the phone sex line would have tracked down her neighborhood from the incoming phone line and had started hanging out, in hopes that she would start to take chances with her lonely, empty, sexually unfulfilled life and he would be there to snatch her. (This was also a potential porn plot line, although much darker and one that she was loathe to admit that maybe she had come across once or twice in her internet viewing.) Perhaps it would be the action movie ending with all of the same plot lines as the crime novel/porn story ending, except that she would get away and potentially kill her captor. If she went in and nothing either happened or failed to happen, if people talked to her and she felt good but left alone and didn’t call any of them, that would just be a modern slice-of-life film or novel, or maybe a short story. She started to feel a sense of panic rise in her as she stood at the door, delayed, unable to stay or go.


OMG, she thought. Maybe she was stuck in some kind of hipster stream-of-consciousness writing!


Guy Debord was right. Living in an overmediated culture, there was nowhere to go, nothing original to be done. Our life is prescribed, stolen from us in a media feedback loop so intense that there was nothing to be done that hadn’t already been mapped out in some way, easily recognizable as an Oprah book or a movie of the week. She had created a situation in which an original response to whatever would happen to her was impossible.


She stood at the door with her hand out. The world as she knew it was now stopped, although people were clearly moving, asking if she were going in, edging around her, and eventually asking if she was ok.


She nodded absent-mindedly but remained frozen.

Candidate House: The Politics of the Future

This was a blog I wrote during the 2008 election, but it didn't get a single hit for some reason, so I am reposting it now, in the spirit of the zeitgeist.

Whatever that means.


Candidate House: Politics of the Future


Ok, so in a previous blog I outed myself as hooked on a lot of bad reality TV. Not all reality TV mind you. I, like anyone else, have my discernments here, too. But anyway . . . it seems to me, and I suggested this to friends back in January before all of the infighting and fiascos and monsters and such, that we need a primary process that responds to how Americans really make decisions, that responds to the "reality" of America as it currently stands.

So I was thinking, we should replace the primary process with one or more reality TV scenarios. Imagine Edwards and Romney and Giuliani and Huckabee and Hillary and Obama and McCain and families all living together in Candidate House. Uh huh. And then further imagine different challenges each week a la The Apprentice one week perhaps, American Idol another week, Big Brother, Fear Factor (eat those bugs, Huckabee!), etc. Depending on the number of candidates, the challenges could be weighted and candidates voted off periodically, and then the two remaining candidates campaign against one another.

I haven't worked out all the bugs yet, but we've got 4 years to work it out. And come on. If Diebold's election machines won't work properly to give us fair elections, then maybe the producers of American Idol can still guarantee us a little democracy.

Whaddayathink?

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry

In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.

Shoshona Feldman (1975)

“The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.” (In Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron, p. 8)

Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman’s idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a “feminine writing” and “women’s language.” (By the way, I highly recomment Cixous. I have not delved much into Irigaray, but to me her work seems very much grounded in some rather complicated Freudian and psychoanalytic theory. Cixous is lively and quite readable.) Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter’s position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based “prisonhouse of language” (props to Jameson) but the very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak. The issue is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition (from the moment the declaration is made “It’s a girl” Butler tells us, a whole universe of implications is set in motion.). Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.

To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies (look at the glorification of the police not only through shows like Cops, but through shows like CSI that glamorize police work, or the nuclear-family centered values of most sitcoms, etc.). In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else’s vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?

Resistance is possible through the remaking of language, of finding new, creative, imaginative linguistic practices to sustain us, to help us move toward our visions, to help us have visions we never even thought possible. I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways proscribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol Lewitt says, rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts. The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we’ve always thought. I’m not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.

*************

It has to be said, lest it sound like I am proscribing something equally restrictive and repressive . . . I am not arguing against any type of poetry per se. I do not want to create a monolith of styles, themes, as restrictive as a Marxist insistence on social realism. I do oppose the stilted reification that much slam work has fallen into. But I also do honor and acknowledge the word of identity formation, community building, and progressive values that many forms of poetry can participate in. But I want to ask, then what? NOW what? Where do we go? After at least a century of searching actively for a revolutionary function of poetry, (why) have we given up? (why) have we abandoned the incomplete experiments of the past? Where and how can poetry function uniquely, in other words, what are the unique functions of poetry, as a revolutionary practice?

In the term avant garde, where avant garde falls into elitism, is in its very accepted (if perhaps unofficial, naturalized) definition that the avant garde is ahead of, “anticipates” and in many ways, is therefore, more advanced and “better” than mainstream art, culture, society. And art, culture, and society need only to “catch up” Then of course, in the catching up, the mainstream has then co-opted the avant garde, misusing for commerce or entertainment, for style, failing to recognize the true substance, the original intent (as contemporary Surrealists are famously wont to lament).

I prefer instead to think of the avant garde as the “first wave,” the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field. The change of consciousness, overused and virtually emptied of meaning as that idea may have become, is what necessarily must predate genuine social change. It is not up to poets (or even activists, politicians or “leaders”) to proscribe where that change needs to go, but to empower the imaginations around us to imagine something new, to dream our way out of the current world, which works only for a very few people.

Education is the watchword and it has a very important role to play, but as an instrument of “instruction” and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall pretty to. Religious missionaries often (almost always) accompanied or came fast upon the heels of conquerors to ensure that hears and spirits were converted while trying to enforce a new culture and a new rule upon the conquered. Poets must see themselves as missionaries of the imagination, not as propagandists.

To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit. This is the revolutionary work of the poet.

Notes from the conceptual poetics symposium

For those who might be interested, these are my notes from the Conceptual Poetics symposium in Tucson this past May. I'm not going to go into a lot of reformatting here, so hopefully this will all work out and be readable. And of course, these notes reflect my understanding, interests in, and interpretation of the weekend's events. But I post them in the hopes that they might be of interest to someone out there and that some of you might post some thoughts engendered by these discussions.

Cheers.

Notes from the conceptual poetics conference – Laura Winton fluffysingler@earthlink.net

Cole Swenson - as opposed to/against a poetry taken over by subject matter
Emphasis on the everyday at the expense of rhythm or other poetic aspects
Poetry/visual art ties
Rhythm, repetition, compositon

Craig Dworkin Reading:

Piece one:
From the 19th century grammar book How to Parse

Reading directly, very quickly, not slam, but quiet and fast, not meant to get every word, but maybe how rules and rules of grammar are absolute, rules of grammar might actually sound to student, to us as moderns, to those who throw out or reject or don’t adhere so much to traditional rules of grammar.

Piece two:
Sentences replaced with grammar elements rather than specific words.
Ex: pronoun noun comma adverb period. Etc.

Piece three:
Other piece: To publish the unpublishable week’s worth of subject lines from spam.

Piece four:
Used personality inventories to create poems. I am . . . etc. to create confessional/expressive poem

Piece five:
Using only the true/false answers and his occasional modifying comments to a quiz.
Note: I could take my Dante quiz and call it “How I Ended Up in the 8th Ring of Hell: with a nod to Craig Dworkin.”

Kenneth Goldsmith:

We shall reminisce about the time when human beings wrote poetry for other humans. (As opposed to themselves??)


Cole Swenson – Civil Disobedience/poetry
Tracie Morris:

Goffman – giving vs. giving off, in black poetics
Undermining typification
Phyllis Wheatley – negotiating neoclassical work w/ black aesthetic

Black “transgressive” speech – doubledness, double-consciousness, double-entendre

Ringshots – uttering of noises, use of codes
African linguistic traits interacting with everyday speech of American vernacular

Morphology of language
Uniquely African constructions

Standard American Vernacular is incorporating more and more of Africa and African speech patterns

Of corse, sampling = collage, per Duchamp, Hoch, etc. Found Art. Kenny Goldsmith in favor of appropriating, stealing, etc.


Missy Elliott—Minimalism, embellishment & futurism
Interesting clip from “The Rain”
Supa Dupa Fly

“bling” as a transgressive act


Saturday morning/pre-lunch roundtable

Jasper: -

Cognitive interruption
Beyond detournment, tqactics of situationists
Defamiliarization
Re-reading earlier works through the lens of conceptual poetics
Activist archivists – reframing works
Editorial aesthetics/poetics

How is the idea of poet/ry as solitary act/person complicated by new work, by conceptualism, by borrowing, pastiche, collage, found work, etc.

Conceptual Poetry as the ready-made. “It’s all already there. I just have to write it down.”

Beckett: Cascando (but also Krapp) “I turn the recorder on. I turn the recorder off.”

Irrelevance of “le mot juste”
My new style of strike out/parentheses= a hedge against “le mot juste”
Trying out/on different words, several simultaneous

Chance Operations

Duchamp – Art – Canned Chance
Cage – music
Judson /Cunningham – dance

Trying to cut out subjectivity. But there’s still a canned subjectivity – the subjectivity within the random/chance. Decisions be made. But is it subjectivity in terms of choices, or in terms of personal-ness, perspective, me-centered poems. Of course, choice is where the subject matter begins – setting up the parameters, the texts, the beginning and ending points, etc. Is there an unsubjective subjectivity?

My notes (already used??) Chance vs. emotion

Avant garde actually has a more democratic impulse than high modernism were we employ metaphors: x=y. (metaphorical mathematics). Where x and y are fixed, a cryptogram to be unlocked, footnotes to poetry, the need for cliff notes, a dictionary to be used side by side with the poem, the desire of vernacular/convessional poetry is the same as the desire of an avant garde, to put out surfaces, straightforward work of a way, but confessionalism still relies on a private set of meanings/references, but assumes that through commonality and sentiment the code can be unlocked.

Bok/Dworkin/Goldmsith –which one of them did the cryptogram poems, a parody of this idea of unlocking??

De-emphasis on meaning per se through choice/collage/found materials, etc. Attempt to unlock the cryptogram, meaning of high modernism, eliot, et al.

Charles Alexander

Social, political import of this work. Does it make it to activism?
Kenny Goldsmith: Sacred space of the poem for transgression.
Panelist: Can it be taken out from there?

Physical pleasures of poetry (see my notes from Friday night on pleasure and transgression.)

Tactile through speech act
I think it can be sexual too

Brian Reed:

Critic working on a book on visual/verbal links

Genres become confused over time
Derrida’s law of genre
My contention that genres become confused and under that weight, give birth to new genres, like the mixing of atoms that create new elements when mixed. Hydrogen and Oxygen combined make water, a new compound, rather than remaining discrete.


Christian Bok Presentation:

I. What is “intentional” in Conceptual Poetry?


Disarming literary mandate of self-expression
Anti-expression
Erase evidence of lyric style, the “normative” style
Suppression of subjective aspects

Oulipo
American Conceptualists like LeWitt

Kinds of manifestos (started to type meanifesto!), adherents, this is an avant garde, and one looking to an art-form, not simultaneous as with Dada, Beat, etc. but not merely homage or writing about, but taking up, just as Gysin said—we are not about 40 years after first burst of conceptualism, so maybe we are catching up—also in performance art, Judson Dance, etc

Poem as an art object.

II. What is expressible in conceptual poetics?

The I with a colon atop instead of a dot.
William tell, a novel. – the apple(s) on the head
Minimalist and conceptual. A world in an image. A story in a letter.


Contrasting to contemporary literary ctitics
The genius of the self
Convincingness of the poem, the lyric, the imagery
Poet’s mastery of self

Against criticism
Against workshop criteria

Death of the Author
Poetic despot
Trial of comprehension
Overthrow the unjust tyrant
In Barthes birth of the reader occasioned by death of the author

III. What is conceivable in conceptual literature?

Tyrant Writer
Victor Reader
Savior Letter

Lyrical style – cognitive aesthetics
Self-conscious and self-assertive simultaneously


Concepts of writing possible – according to Bok

Cognitive

+Intentionality
+Expressiveness

Autobiographic investigations
Author adopts Subjective Persona
Confessional
“Authentic” voice

Mannerist

+Intentionality
- Expressiveness
-
Self-conscious but not self-assertive

Ex: Oulipo
Automatic

- Intentionality
+Expressiveness

Still some self-assertion
Unwilled self-exhibit
Surrealistic – Schwitters to Breton to Ginsberg
Self speaking to self without thinking about self
Ir/nonrational
Aleatory

- Intentionality
- Expressiveness

Authors forfeit control
Dadaist – Tzara, Cage, Maclow


Poetics of a traffice report, its own internal grammar, poetics, lyric?


Bernstein: Saturday, 5/31

“Foolishness is its own reward” – line from poem
“from there to there is enough to blow up in anyone’s face.”

“Attack of the difficult poems”
“The answer is not in our technology but in our poetics.

Benjamin and the uncanny – Arcades project made up entirely of citations

Bernstein’s “Recantation” on poetry page
After Galileo
Therefore, is it forced?
Is it sincere?

Several mentions (typos = almost emotions, emanations, emntions . . . ) by Bernstein & Bok of “detourning” poems. J

Platonic idea – meaning as an ideal that exists outside of the social
Puritan ideal – that meaning should be available, accessible in the poem

“My quest has been to be a normal person, a self-help project toward normalcy. . . . When I become normal I will be a poet in the (normal) world.”

“Theory of Flawed Design”
--Lookup

Dea%r Fr~ien%d

Performed with all sounds, symbols, stops, & verbal struggles

“Poems (themselves) are less important than what they allow us to do in the pereceptual world.”

Progressivist model of replacement is flawed – go back and read things in a different way. How poetry exists within social space that it is written in.

“Singing/chanting ot newscasters to self.”
Poems/operas

“A pixilated man”



Panel discussion: (Friday evening???)

Dworkin:

Intellect rather than emotion
Is Conceptual Poetry the New American Poetry?
Having a “urinal” moment”
What constitutes such a speech act/provocation in this “post”-everything era?
Does Conceptual Poetry have a spiritual resonance?

Charles Bernstein:

Showed conceptual poem and talk (not reading poem) simultaneously
Seems somewhat similar to the Performance Writing people

Christian Bok:

Problem of “lethal” seriousness of the avant garde. The pleasure, play, jouissance is reserved for the poet rather than the reader/audience.

“post” = a gesture to newness in the avant garde, parallel to neo, which
is actually retro, revisiting of the old
Post = our impatience for transcendence
“More of the same, only worse”
Work is good when it creates provocation, more ideas, etc.

Tracie Morris:

Perloff: normativity of language experimentation
Meaning of sonic performance as a script
Replacing idea of consistent speaking position of an “I”

Bok:

Enigmatic bewilderment
Raise issues for as rather than reinforce what we already know – is this my comment or his???

Bernstein:

Difficulty
Invention
Innovation

Social/Cultural difficulty
Textures, ambiance (vs. the difficult of “high modernism”)
One person’s difficulty is another person’s pleasure


Final Panel – 5/31/08

Barbara Cole, Editor, Open Letter

Wystan Curnow:
Forms & History

Bernadette Myer

Gracia Capinha

Epistemicides
Who owns (the) language – paraphrase of moral/story in “official”languages
Poetry and art does matter
The fear of governments and dictatorships toward art proves that it matters, that it has power, can be dangerous
There is no language unless the emotional part of your brain works, according to neuroscience
Modernist project – enlargement of consciousness, non approved, yet to be proven, yet to be known, discovered

Thingness – object = repetition of market

Stephen Fredman

Appropriation in music, sampling
The mix
Creativity rests in how you recontextualize the work of others
Language poetry and its emphasis on discourse cut poetry’s ties to othr art forms
Subjectivity vs. emotion

Vanessa Place

Words as things
“transparent”
Words = what fills up mainstream boxes
Barthes & the evacuation of language/meaning
But language is also procedural
Responding to poems created by machines
“robopoems for a robofuture”
“bankruptcy of image & text”


Final & most heated conversation (did not document who started it, but was the final panelist) – why only 2 women writers in the Ubu Anthology of Conceptual Poetry???

Presented by someone who had done an informal survey of 50 women before the conference regarding their ideas/opinions/questions regarding conceptual poetics/

Some questioned her own “methodology”

Marjorie Perloff – impatient, suggested that not everyone needed to be included in every movement, that then we’d have to worry about why not enough latinos or African-americans, etc. and then having to weigh and watch every single thing.

Batted back and forth – why are we still asking this question in 2008 and why do we have to still ask this question in 2008

Some of the better and less combative comments included a suggestion that sometimes inclusion is a matter of definition. How you define something determines who is included.

My private note—interesting that the conference was at least ½ women and the presenters at least ½ women. Some noted this as a defense or corrective, rather than criticism, of the lack of women in the anthology. See how many of us are here now???

Another good discussion --- nature of something like Conceptual Poetics to grow out of small groups of people who form affinities, begin to define themselves and give name to what they’re doing. Indicated that Goldsmith/Bok/Dworkin constituted such a grouping.

Dworkin himself said that the online version was not meant to be “official” and representative (although some questioned that, given the “The” aspect of the title out on Ubuweb.) He said that there is a print edition planned that will likely be much more inclusive.

My private note: replication of Corso and others’ discussions of why women ignored in Beat anthologies and histories for 40 years (except for a couple who were unignorable like DiPrima). Aren’t all of these always the arguments? Question of definition seems the most pertinent. How you define the “movement”, the “artistic moment” without watering it down to include, but making sure the feelers are out to embrace those whose work does fit in, does have an affinity, etc.

Found/cut Up poem

From lines heard and misheard and contemplated at Kenneth Goldsmith's reading at the conceptual poetics conference on Friday night, May 30, 2008.

High Grade Geranium

High grade geranium
useless for making bombs
useless for making poems
on the floor in a glass jar
wrapped in plastic
Geranium-235
enough to make a small atom bomb
shark attack
arsenic strict standards
drinking water suspended(suspected)
September 10, 2001.
How much (morning) television can one nation watch.

Googled for the wrong reasons!

Ok, friends. So I was checking on the website stats for my personal webpage (SHAMELESS PLUG: (http://www.fluffysingler.homestead.com) and among the stats you can check are how people came across your site. I was pleasantly surprised to see people driven by various blogs and links, and even that several people in the past month have Googled me. (Ticklish sound here . . . )

Now, this is the really weird, possibly disconcerting part. One person got to my site from a Canadian search engine by using the following phrase:

"she had her hand inside her panties"

Huh?

Upon further reflection, I realized that this is one small line out of my draft of what is unfortunately, part of a novel, but which fortunately, I will probably never finish, because then that would make me one of those pretentious mofos working on "her novel" and I hate to even say something like "my novel" but then again, knowing that it has a line like "she had her hand inside her panties," doesn’t that make YOU want to go out and read "my novel" out on my website? (THAT ADDRESS AGAIN . . . http://www.fluffysingler.homestead.com/.)

I mean, really. Of all the things to be googled for . . .