March 21, 2022

Document 96: To Russian/Ukrainian Poets

From Scales (11)
by Carla Harryman

to Russian/Ukrainian Poets

—checking email every five minutes for an answer. I got it I got the answer and it didn’t make me look so good.

Pounding on your own goodness sounds a bit tarnishing.

Say stinging.

Have a latke.

The smell of onion in the vapor of potato reminds me of the Russian poets in our kitchen drinking vodka at a somewhat earlier hour than this.

They did not sleep.

They do not sleep much now either.

Up all night in your fantasy. Some of them dead.

No not in mine. In mine they sleep willowy sorts of idealisms smothering vast plains sequestered in small farms and mushroom gathering.

They are almost all gone now, but there are more.

Some. Alexei. Others too are lauded on the lips of the still living.

Alexei turned vitriol blue.

Hmmm . . . I thought it was a reference to hydrated copper.

Ukrainian rubble recalls each dead poet in Russia as Ukrainian.

They have to be careful now. That rubble disseminates in the elements spreading across the globe.

As ever but more so.

Tabling the turn and turning.

So. Let them leave as they did.

They leave again and again.

So and so is arriving.

A ways off.

They are arriving.

We break hearts with them when they arrive with stoic pretense.

And then we get out the vodka.

They have not yet slept.

We keep the vodka in the freezer in case someone is looking for it.

I confess I didn’t understand entirely, these males. But Alexei—

Now understanding, forget.

—I was a poet in the company of Alexei.

The point is disbursed in rubble—

Yes forget understanding.

—and never made again in the same way.

That’s right. It’s missing varnish.

—March 20, 2022 … More

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March 20, 2022

Archive 15: The Currency of History

In Questions of Poetics, I wrote that, in contrast to André Breton’s motto “I seek the gold of time,” what I wanted is more like the “currency of history.” All this bears on the question of value, of course. Breton’s wish to alchemically transform desire into substance is inscribed on his tombstone, where it is still doing its work. In another present, I see history as a gold mine of another sort, making meanings that circulate and become value. Such is the task of the poet, broadly put, writing works that will be circulated until they find their meaning and use. It is also the task of the literary historian, to establish the contexts, motives, situations in which such meaning may be made. There needs to be more literary history, not of the old, positive kind but one addressed to the making of value in poetics as history. This could begin with the work of an archive, as an assembly line of parts for meaning making—eventually tending toward a form of comprehension, like the work of literary history depicted above.

Lilian Chaitas’s Being Different: Strategies of Distinction and Twentieth-Century Poetic Avant-Gardes contains, in my reading-in-progress, the best account of the debates on early Language writing I know. Published in 2017, it is a meticulously detailed, 435-pp. account of American poetic avant-gardes from the New Americans to Language writing, drawing its theory from Renato Poggioli and Pierre Bourdieu, with a glance back to Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic (1995). Originally it was a 2013 dissertation written to German standards under the direction of Bernd Engler at the University of Tübingen, where not coincidentally I was hosted as a Fulbright scholar in 2005 and staged a raucous conference on Authorship and the Turn to Language that December—a currency of history itself. But I did not know the work existed until a section of the last chapter, retelling the 1978 Duncan/Watten cataclysm in microscopic detail, turned up as a pdf on Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. I finally located a copy on Amazon.de, which arrived last month from a warehouse in Nijmegan, Netherlands. The last chapter, “Language Poetry in the 1970s and 1980s,” is what concerns me here—and which so impressed me that I provide it in three separate pdfs (here and below), one for each of the major sections. These address, in turn, “The So-Called ‘Language’ School”; “The Duncan/Watten ‘debat/cl/e'”; and “Stalin as Linguist.” … More

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March 19, 2022

Event 93: We Saw (Northern California)

After the Louisville Conference, with COVID numbers in decline, Carla and I headed west for a week on the coast. The trip was not simply restorative but repurposing, reconnecting with friends and family in real time, face to face. And so we saw them, in each instance redefining both time and events that have come between. These friends and family, of long standing and more recent acquaintance, are prime numbers, so to speak, in a series that has many twists and turns. Life histories and practices of art coincide with them, for which they are primes. As we know, a coastline is a fractal, as in the thumbnail sketches below:

Monday, February 28
Delta DTW > SFO
> San Francisco/Stinson Beach

Megan Adams/Camille Roy

Our first stop after arrival at SFO was with New Narrative author Megan Adams/Camille Roy, celebrating her just published collection of stories Honey Mine. We admired the art, light, rooms, and overgrown garden of her working-class mansion across from the thronged Daniel Webster School playground, where I first taught Poetry in the Schools. We then walked the streets of Potrero Hill, with its monuments to the history of Language writing still preserved at 235 Missouri Street, 326 Connecticut Street, and the public gym and soccer field at the top of the hill, where the competitive drives of young poets were at play. Just so, New Narrative and Language writing conjoin.

> Stinson Beach

… More

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March 13, 2022

Event 92: I Met/I Heard (Louisville)

style=

The Louisville Conference
on Literature and Culture since 1900
24–26 February 2017
University of Louisville

Joseph Donahue
Adeena Karasick
Mark Scroggins
Alan Golding
Matthew Biberman
Lauri Scheyer
Judith Roof
Lynn Keller
Aldon Nielsen
Joseph Shafer
Joe Safdie
Jeff Davis
Lisa Shapiro
Norman Finkelstein
Alice Finkelstein
Joshua Corey
Robert Archambeau
Sally Connolly
David Kellogg
Tyrone Williams
Laura Vrana
Johnny Payne
V. Joshua Adams
Charles Altieri
Robert von Hallberg
Oren Izenberg
Rosanna Warren
Richard Strier
John Beer
Brenda Hillman
Kristi Maxwell
Brendan Johnston
W. Scott Howard
Addie Hopes
Peter O’Leary
Stephen Williams
Shannon Tharp
Alicia Wright
Justin Wymer
Leah Nieboer
Benjamin Lee
Karen Hadley
Ali Altaf Mian
Suzette Henke
Ann Hall

 

Notes and links

Photos: Matthew Biberman

[t/k]

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February 6, 2022

Entry 46: Invocation of Fourier


Fourier it’s all too depressing
     to see them emerging from one
     of the worst cess-pools in history
Infatuated with the maze that
     leads back to it
Impatient to start all over
     for a better jump

—André Breton,
     Ode to Charles Fourier

The image to the left is what now exists of the monument to Charles Fourier, located at the end of the Boulevard de Clichy before its leftward turn toward the Place de Clichy with its restaurants and skin trade, under the imagined shadow of the Montmartre Cemetery, site of pitched battles in the Paris Commune. This was the object of a pilgrimage I made in the company of Carla Harryman and Françoise de Laroque at the end of a rainy afternoon in November in the year 2021. The statue itself preserves the original plinth of the monument raised in 1899 in homage to the utopian socialist by supporters of his imagined utopia at the site of its historical suppression. After many historical turns, from the melting down of the statue of Fourier in 1945 to its reconstruction by Situationists in 1968, the base now presents a ludic apple inscribed with outlines of the globe and reflecting lights of the boulevard at night. As an homage to the theorist of the gastrosophic state and phanerogamous morals, it is a fully realized work of surrealist art. … More

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January 23, 2022

Entry 45: Writing in the Event

Writing in the Event:
“The Beirut/Hell Remix
(After Etel Adnan)”

Last October I had the good fortune to preview Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure, the Guggenheim Museum’s career retrospective of Adnan’s visual art, which makes significant reference to her writing. The cross-genre and multi-languaged aspects of her work could not be missed, an opening beyond the usual categories that art history and museum curating maintain. The museum was also making a political point in showing Adnan’s work along with a deep selection of the abstract painting of Vasily Kandinsky. The move from landscape to abstraction unites the two, but the differing contexts for abstraction are equally the point. Eurocentric modernism is in transition, refunctioned as a global cosmopolitanism, which arrives with the breakthrough moment of Adnan’s painting at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012) at what I have described as a “global archive.”

The occasion itself was compelling and bittersweet. Etel herself could not attend the opening but was represented by her partner, Simone Fattal—whose solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London was also on the global agenda. With Carla Harryman, we made plans to meet in Paris in November; we would have a French Thanksgiving, the day after the American one. Etel Adnan died on November 14, a Saturday. The news came through friends the next day. From all corners and all kinds of people the reaction was profound: the passing of a figure who had touched many, over many decades. We would still be coming to Paris as travel was arranged and plans had been made; the Omicron curtain had not yet come down. Everything was up in the air, suspended. Simone texted after we arrived; will you still be coming to dinner? Meetings with a remarkable woman on the rue Madame. We discussed everything and nothing as friends came and went. One resonant detail concerned Etel’s daily attention to events in Beirut, from economic collapse to the 2020 explosion. Not coincidentally, the Institut du Monde Arabe was exhibiting visual art referencing Beirut before and after the explosion under the title “Lumières du Liban,” in which Etel and Simone were both strongly present. We told Simone we would attend, and reported back after we did.

The museum bookstore stocks an impressive array of titles by Adnan, in many languages. I was immediately taken by Galerie Lelong’s 2021 publication of L’Express Beirut–Enfer, which brought together three texts, the first originally written in French and then later published in her English version. Meanwhile, plans that had been under way at the Guggenheim Museum were also up in the air, with the news of Etel’s passing, the onset of the Omicron surge, and the Guggenheim’s new partnership with the Academy of American Poets. In the end, I would agree to provide a written work, on commission, for the tribute to Etel, to be published online in conjunction with a virtual reading by poets who could perform in New York. Both events took place: the reading, while impeded by some gapping due to bandwidth issues, features an epochal performance by Anne Waldman along with tributes by Ammiel Alcalay, Omar Berrada, Stephen Motika, and Asiya Wadud, made available on Vimeo. And my text, “The Beirut–Hell Remix (After Etel Adnan),” along with an explanatory note that appears at the end of the poem, is published at the link below. One can only hope that, in future days, the many facets of this event for Etel Adnan will be seen together.

“The Beirut–Hell Remix (After Etel Adnan)” [link]
Original by Etel Adnan composed 1970; first published 1971
Adaptation/translation by Barrett Watten; completed January 2022
Online publication by The Guggenheim Museum, January 2022

Notes and links

[t/k]

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January 7, 2022

Document 95: Global Parataxis

CFP FOR PROPOSED SESSION(S)
“Global Parataxis and the Avant-Garde:
Rethinking Histories on a Planetary Scale”

“Globalizing the Avant-Garde”
European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM)
Instituto de História da Arte, IHA/FCSH–Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
Lisbon, Portugal, 1–3 September 2022

The conference proposal for EAM’s eighth biannual conference, reconvening in Lisbon after a two-year hiatus in 2020, clearly calls for a critical reassessment of the Eurocentric history of the avant-garde, given the multiple writers, artists, styles, and movements that bear similarities and links to the historical avant-gardes as they develop culturally but also regionally specific projects that challenge the given accounts of what is “avant-garde.” Otherwise put, if global avant-gardes overall conduct a “systemic detotalization” of the global system through radical formal means, what does that mean if the “global” is open, not yet determined, always in process, even violently contested across multiple regions. An open horizon of the avant-garde may indeed be the project of global exhibitions such as Documenta, the Venice and São Paolo Biennales, and others, often involving conceptual, site-specific, performative strategies but also new forms of positive representation. The recent handbook Global Art by Jessica Lack (2020) summarizes a compelling range of multiple movements and styles, from anti-Imperialist and revolutionary movements to movements founded at moments of independence, as acts of resistance, as interrogations of identity and collectivity, and as overtly political artistic practices. In literature, the shift of comparative literature away from Eurocentric literariness and toward a more complex account of multiple languages, diasporic histories, and possibilities of translation create opportunities for rethinking the avant-garde as always addressing cultural displacement as much as metropolitan location; here the convulsive growth of global cities comes into view in work from East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa in particular. This Call for Papers seeks to establish a multiple, decentered, global or planetary frame for the avant-garde(s), in the present, recent past, or longer history. Presentations on specific writers, artists, styles, or movements as sites of inquiry; or rethinking of what terms such as “global,” “planetary,” or “world” mean for the avant-garde in an era of pandemics and climate change, as well as political antagonism and the aporias of global capitalism will be most welcome. At the intersection of radical particularity and detotalized globality may arise new approaches that augment and depart from the historical avant-gardes.

The conference proposal deadline is Saturday, January 15. Please submit an abstract and bio for consideration by Friday, January 14 to Barrett Watten, barrett.watten@gmail.com.

Links and Notes

For PDF flyer, click here; for EAM conference site, click here.

Image: Gordon Bennett, untitled, 1989; from Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, Queens Museum, 1999.

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December 18, 2021

Event 90: I Met (en España)

I first got to know Claudia Franken through academic channels; she is a Europe-based scholar of Gertrude Stein and Arno Schmidt, a less-well-known prose writer who anticipates American postmoderns such as Thomas Pynchon. As his Wikipedia entry states, “Arno Schmidt (1914–79) was a German author and translator. He is little known outside of German-speaking areas, in part because his works present a formidable challenge to translators.” Claudia’s proposal for a session on “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour” took up Schmidt’s early “trilogy” of novellas focusing on cultural displacement after 1945, pursued by analogies to Egyptian and Phoenician antiquity—as if the two time frames were disturbingly (felicitously) co-present (see John E. Woods’s unequaled translation). The conference itself was canceled due to COVID but was revived as a webinar in March 2021, where Claudia presented her work on Schmidt—in a form, on first hearing, that was as allegorically complex as Schmidt’s work itself. I then engaged Claudia’s essay editorially, working toward publication in the Hunan, China-based Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, where it appears (here). All this is complicated, but is what it takes to get the work done in this era of travel restrictions and ideological blockage. What resulted is a fine literary essay that the editors selected to inaugurate their issue. … More

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December 8, 2021

Event 89: I Met (Metropole)

I return here to the series of “I Met” posts, begun in January 2010 after the work of On Kawara. In a series of journal entries, On Kawara documented his life in art as identical to the names, location, and dates of his dealers, contacts, and friends, giving no further interpretation. Thus he interpreted his life as identical to his art, and his art as identical to its names, locations, and dates. This project is unique, and must be so, in its radicality; it is an essay on meaning as a “restricted code” that is at the same time a subtext of the public exhibition of his iconic works and the private circulation of artistic property (as I found when permission to reproduce one of his date paintings for Questions of Poetics was denied). In my entries, the purely conceptual project undergoes mutation to the forms of life and art I inhabit while still focusing on the intersection of names, locations, dates. At one point, the series achieved a kind of “feedback” state, as when people I met at conferences or readings would ask if there going to be an “I Met” for the event; alternately, for more than two years this form of work has been nearly impossible.

Wednesday, October 6
Delta DTW > LGA

Carla Harryman

Lisa Yuskavage @ David Zwirner
Jesse Murry @ David Zwirner
Alice Neel @ David Zwirner
Frank Moore @ David Zwirner
Tyler Mitchell @ Jack Shainman
John Currin @ Gagosian
Philip Guston @ Hauser & Wirth
Robert Rauschenberg @ Pace
Robert Longo @ Pace
Jeanne Liotta @ Microscope Gallery

Michael Gottlieb & Josef Kaplan
@ St. Mark’s Church

James Sherry
Lee Ann Brown
Tony Torn
Brenda Coultas
Drew Gardner
Kyle Dacuyan … More

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November 16, 2021

Event 88: Correlations & Conversations

Barrett Watten & Carla Harryman
Correlations & Conversations in Poetics
24–25 November 2021

[NOTE CORRECTED SEMINAR START TIME!]

  • Poetry Reading / 24 November 19:00 / open to the public / notice of attendance requested / contact Hélène Aji (below)
    Ecole normal supérieure (rue d’Ulm) / Bibliothèque des letters

World premiere of “Notzeit (After Hannah Höch)” / Barrett Watten
Reading from “Good Morning” and “Cloud Cantatas” / Carla Harryman

  • Seminar / 25 November 9:00–10:00 / by registration
    [NOTE CORRECTED SEMINAR START TIME!]
    ENS (rue d’Ulm) / salle Celan / open to students and doctoral students on prior registration / contact  Hélène Aji (below)

“Historicism and Presentism in Bad History and ‘The Annotated Plan B'”

  • Roundtable / 25 November 16:30–18:30 / open to the public / notice of attendance recommended / contact Hélène Aji (below)
    Université Paris Nanterre / salle de séminaire / 2 Max Weber

“Correlations & Conversations in Poetics”

Exchanges with Barrett Watten on Zone (Correlations, 1973–2021) and Carla Harryman on Poetics of Conversation
Discussants: Hélène Aji (ENS); Benoît Bondroit (U Paris Nanterre); Abigail Lang (U Paris); and Clément Oudart (Sorbonne U)

Policies, media, and contact

Due to COVID precautions in Paris institutions, attendance at events at ENS is limited to 30 (reading) and 35 (seminar). Please contact Hélène Aji to place yourself on the list for the reading or to register for the seminar (students and graduate students). Attendance for the roundtable at Paris Nanterre is limited 25; contact Hélène Aji to guarantee your place.

Present plans are to make high-quality videos of the reading and roundtable, to be edited and uploaded in the near future; interviews with Barrett and Carla will be made by the ENS library and uploaded to YouTube.

Hélène Aji helene.aji@ens.psi.eu
Benoît Bondroit benoit.bondroit@parisnanterre.fr
Naomi Toth ntoth.parisnanterre.fr
Barrett Watten barrett.watten@gmail.com

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