The New Yorker’s recent gatekeeping effort to separate Rae Armantrout from the rest of her friends in the Language school. While it is never true that negative reviews sell books—they can kill a book as often as they sell it—here the demon of curiosity can only be let out of the bag with tantalizing references to an entire literary history a middle-brow readership has never heard of, and of course will only want to know more about:
Selections from Slechte Geschiedinis (Bad History), trans. Samuel Vriezen, Parmentier 19, no. 1, special issue on “Documentaire poëzie” (Documentary Poetics; March 2010), 48-56.
De eerste Parmentier van dit jaar staat grotendeels in het teken van hedendaagse ‘documentaire poëzie’ uit Amerika. Documentaire poëzie is poëzie die zich nadrukkelijk presenteert als een vorm van documentatie en zich plaatst te midden van allerhande nieuwsfeiten, historische gebeurtenissen en situaties. In het door hen samengestelde en ingeleide dossier laten Arnoud van Adrichem, Frank Keizer en Samuel Vriezen zien wat er gebeurt wanneer documentaire vormen als krantenberichten, wetteksten en beleidsrapporten onderdak krijgen in de poëzie.
from “Ashbery’s Historicism:
Nonsite Hypotaxis and Modernity Critique
in The Double Dream of Spring“
Presented at John Ashbery in Paris: International Conference
12 March 2010, Institut Charles V, Université Paris Diderot
What makes The Double Dream of Spring both unique and exemplary for Ashbery’s work is its positive critique of social modernity, rather than a mere ironic reversal of modernism, at the intersection of critical theory, poststructuralism, and romanticism. In the figural space of his works, Ashbery inverts of the poetics of radical particularity—seen in terms of an aesthetic of the fragment and the condition of reification under capitalism—that relocates what Altieri terms its “aesthetic agency” in an interplay of “partial local coherence” that at once proposes and disposes of any horizon of totality. … More
Michael Waltuch’s Whale Cloth Press, the original publisher of Robert Grenier’s Sentences in the Chinese box version (with ivory clasps, manufactured in Hong Kong), has put up a mediated version of the poem.
It is interesting to think about the tensions between the work in its print/index card/box format and its digital one—they are not identical. For one thing, even though the cards are displayed in a random order, different each time, they can never be displayed spatially—tacked up on a bulletin board, or placed on steps, or photographed in the crotch of a tree. The box was a three-dimensional boundary (like the skin surrounding the body of the work) that is quite a bit unlike a frame for a static two-dimensional image or an html page with flash animation. And yet the work is finding a new reception that reads the individual instances of the text in a kind of “free space” of interpretation:
A link to the Ice House Detroit project, courtesy Joe Paszek. In this project, Detroit artists sprayed an abandoned house with water in January, in a reversal of the usual method of getting rid of excess housing inventory by fire (a.k.a. Devil’s Night, a custom that seems to be on the wane). There is a description of a similar midwestern moment in Wyndham Lewis’s Self-Condemned (1954), where he describes a Toronto hotel encased in ice after a fire.
Tonight at MOCAD, San Francisco archive activist Rick Prelinger showed an hour’s worth of material from his vast collection of film images of Detroit from the first three quarters of the 20th century (earliest 1917; latest in the 70s). I attended, along with several hundred other people—the space was full to overflowing. The screening was open to audience participation, and Prelinger, after his opening statement, encouraged vocal responses.
This dynamic made for a unique occasion. To begin with, the range of Prelinger’s material was limited—indeed, its limitations made for a kind of interpretive framework in themselves. We saw clips of downtown and water transport (modernity); the auto industry (mode of production); suburbs (community) and family (reproduction); police work (power); and local landmarks that no longer exist (history). We did not see sufficient images of labor or the black community, as Prelinger noted, likely due to the distribution and use of home movies.
From Drew Daniel’s “pretheoretical” account of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats:
By replacing the swing and feel of live instruments with the rigidity of sequencers, TG ensured that their stab at funk would feel mechanical, deliberately inhuman, lacking in interplay. By replacing tight riffs and thoughtful, carefully sculpted solos with murky cornet groans and detuned modular synth squiggles, TG ensured that their take on jazz would feel alien, impoverished, the musical equivalent of milk that’s gone slightly but noticeably “off.” The song feels like a setup and induces a kind of creeping self-consciousness on the part of the listener it is ostensibly designed to relax and seduce. [45]
I want to cite the opening lines of Bob Dylan’s “Beyond the Horizon” for my private, noncommercial use:
from Beyond the Horizon
Beyond the horizon, behind the sun
At the end of the rainbow life has only begun
In the long hours of twilight ‘neath the stardust above
Beyond the horizon it is easy to love [. . .]
Now I have done so. As poet and critic, my purpose is to comment critically on the “locationality” of lyric address here, and in the larger work from which it is taken. There is something I see about the “place” of poetry that is crucially being thought through here. This is something common to the lyric in general. … More
Midwestern Water Wars is an on-going wiki project to construct an evolving knowledge base of an apocryphal series of natural/human events in the mid-twentieth-century biosphere:
Its process of construction combines elements of indexicality and narrative, dada informatics and role-playing games. The authors add content and develop the site structure independently and in dialogue with each other. The evolving narrative structure produces, as its outer horizon, a lexicon of terms that become its conceptual framework—and vice versa. This is an example of site construction as an emerging digital genre.
From its initial launch in January 2010, this site will continuously add new content: texts, images, events, critical and cultural theory, poetics, and links.
