Entries published during January, 2010
January 30, 2010
“Presentism and Periodization in Language Writing, Conceptual Art,
and Conceptual Writing”
Panel on “Post-Presentism” with Jonathan Eburne
ASAP/Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
23–24 October 2009, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Knoxville, TN
On Kawara, Oct. 23, 1989, oil on board.
January 29, 2010
“The Expanded Object of the Poetic Field; or, What Is a Poet/Critic?”
Keynote address, Poetry and Public Language, University of Plymouth, U.K., March 2007; in Poetry and Public Language, ed. Tony Lopez and Anthony Caleshu (Exeter, U.K.: Shearsman Press, 2007). Publicity flyer/ordering information here; the essay can be accessed in pdf here.
In March 2007, Lyn Hejinian and I were invited by U.K. poet Tony Lopez to lecture at a poetics conference at the University of Plymouth (see links above). My talk addressed transformations in the nature of the poem as object, and employed in terms of the relation of poet and critic, using a series of works from my own oeuvre. The claim that one could speak as both poet and critic proved to be controversial in England, where distinct roles must be perserved as, respectively, object-producing and value-conferring. … More
January 28, 2010
From The Engineer, Life Science Library (New York, 1966), 89.
(In memory of Jeanne Alderton Watten Agnew, 19 April 1926–28 January 1990.)
January 27, 2010
The details are all in this performance of John Cage’s 4′ 33″ for large orchestra, conducted by Lawrence Foster, the Barbican Center, London, 2004. Thanks to Joseph Coates for the link.
January 26, 2010
Stephen Vincent, in response to my entry on Sylvia Plath [Entry 06: “Sylvia Plath’s Collage”], sent a poem by little-known California poet Laura Ulewicz. Ulewicz, who was born in Detroit, spent the early 60s in the U.K., where she met Plath, returned to San Francisco in the late 60s, then lived in Locke, Calif., where she died in 2007. Vincent is editing a selection of her work. His note follows the first section of the poem (which is set in Detroit). Of particular interest to me is the narrative/sentence interface, between confessionalism and the New Sentence:
from Nightmares to Be Born
I. Reality
Elizabeth Barrett hunched up in a book
While the foxes in my head ran round a tree
The foxes in my head ran round a tree
Under the ether. The nurses joked together,
“Freud at five.” Everyone (my father
And mother) disapproved. Baba, I cried
Because they’d bury the foxes that were so happy.
I hid the foxes alive inside my crying.
The Brontë sisters—But my own real friends.
Detroit a sex machine. Joey
And I, thirteen, peddling into Duns Scotus.*
Trees. Sanctuary for birds, God.
But then she was racing, racing. The boys put a stick
In my spokes. Falling I hit them. Hit them old
As the naked man in the basement who pumped his head
And lied. Oh, if I should grow up Beatrice.
January 25, 2010
Non-Events I
Morning turns inside out. The engine
is diseased, as it floats along
approximate ice. High contrast
geometry of persons straightens out from
meandering road. Desperate focus
never looks back. Progress makes possible
a paralyzed attendant, set apart
an end to himself (moral noise).
—Frame: 1971–1990 (Sun & Moon, 1997), 13
Avenue Poupelard in the center of this devastated city pulses with life and reeks of death almost two weeks after the earthquake. Before what Haitians call “the event,” it was a chaotically bustling street of lottery kiosks and cybercafes, gated homes and shacks, churches and schools. Now, a coffin maker spends the day hammering wood as fast as he can get it, while the body of a 6-year-old boy decomposes in the ruins of a school. … More
January 24, 2010
The astonishment (aftershocks) bordering on terror (tremor), the (tin) horror and awesome shudder (shaking), which grip the spectator in viewing (victims) mountain ranges towering to (of) the heavens, deep ravines (research) and the raging torrents in (to) them, deeply shadowed wastelands (Wednesday) inducing melancholy reflection, etc. (but), is in view of the safety (shaken) in which he (we) knows himself to be, not actual (agency) fear, but (and) only an attempt (article) to involve (injured) ourselves (otherwise) in it by means of the (not) imagination, in order to (be) feel the power of (by) that very faculty, to combine (crumbled) the movement (measures) of the mind (more) thereby aroused with its (her) calmness (collapse), and so to be superior (seismic) to nature within us, and thus (toll) also that outside (ongoing) us, insofar as it can (who) have an influence on our feeling (fearing) of well-being.
—Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (152);
“Fierce Quake Devastates Haitian Capital,” New York Times, 13 January 2010
January 23, 2010
To Toussaint L’Ouverture
Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;
O Miserable Chieftain! Where and when
Wilt thou find Patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.
—William Wordsworth
January 22, 2010
“Plasma,” the lead poem in Plasma/Paralleles/”X” (Tuumba, 1979), has been translated into Italian by Gherardo Bortolotti in the online journal G A M M M (joining previous translations into French, Dutch, and site-specific sculpture). The text and link are provided below. The next thing for me to do, clearly, is to attempt a homophonic translation!
Plasma
Un paradosso è mangiato dallo spazio che gli sta attorno.
Ripeterò ciò che ho detto.
Far diventare una città una stagione è come indossare occhiali da sole dentro un vulcano.
Non dimentica mai i suoi sogni.
L’effetto della mancanza d’effetto.
