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March 16, 2025

Event 105: Transposition/Recovery

Launch of  Barrett Watten,
Not This: Selected Writings
Voznesensky Center, Moscow
46 Bolshaya Ordynka Street
January 24, 2025

The meeting focuses on how American literature experienced a “turn to language” in the 1970s, what the hybrid genres of contemporary poetry are, and the challenges faced by translators working with the “language trend” in literature. (Voznesensky Center announcement)

On the given date, at about 11:30 A.M. from a Detroit suburb, I was transported behind the lines of antagonistic states for a literary evening that, I hoped, would have long-term cultural and political meaning. It was not the first time had I stepped over this line, as I did for our “Summer School” in then-Leningrad, 1989, about which much has been written (including the multi-authored text published in 1991; here). Twenty-seven years later, with Carla Harryman, I traveled to now-St. Petersburg to participate in the Dragomoshchenko Prize awards in 2016. The consequences of these transpositions, as they may be called, between literary and cultural/political realities, continue to expand and be productive as sites of meaning. The turn to language turns out to be more than one thought. … More

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March 1, 2025

Event 104: Signifying Non-Solutions

“Dispersed Poetics: Signifying Non-Solutions
in Time of War”

Ekaterina Derisheva, University of Pennsylvania
Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
Jamie Olson, St. Martin’s University

The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture
University of Louisville, February 22, 2025

“Dispersed Poetics: Signifying Non-Solutions in Time of War” introduces the work of experimental poets writing in Russian and Ukrainian, from positions of opposition, emigration, and displacement, from the late Soviet period to the present conditions of war and exile. The notion that “the non-solution must signify” is a formulation by critic Terry Eagleton that seems apt to the present moment, where poetry can best address a situation of profound indeterminacy.

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November 16, 2024

Entry 63: Communicating Vessels I

Surrealism in Paris
October 2024

Surrealism, as many of us had conceived of it for years, should not be considered as extant except in the a priori nonspecialization of its effort. I hope it will be considered as having tried nothing better than to cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness, the assurance of knowledge and of love, of life for life and the revolution, and so on. —André Breton, Les Vases communicants (1932; English trans. 1990)

In the spirit of a thought experiment, I offer my time spent in Paris attending the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) conference on Surrealism, one week before the American election, as charged with the co-presence of dream and reality. The first reality was Paris itself as elective site of a transformative moment—the 100th anniversary of the First Manifesto of Surrealism. Being in Paris at that time, as it condenses all time passing between that moment and the present, had the feeling of co-presence of many moments all aware of each other and on the same level though not directly in contact. The crowds going about their business under a gray sky, during a school holiday where there was some release of tension and many children and families on the street, were not in direct contact with us streaming in cab or Uber to specific destinations, for instance the conference venue at American University Paris (AUP). Those presenting in multiple rooms, with visual aids and in three languages, were not aware of the cabs or Ubers picking passengers up and dropping them off. Just so, the meticulously curated book display of surrealism was not aware of the content delivered above. The array of editions, including many facsimiles of original texts, had a remote and uncanny feeling, as with the difference between books being opened and closed. The conference, as site for special knowledge (of “specialists in revolt”), was removed from the “nonspecialization” of lifeworld unaware of it outside. … More

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August 11, 2024

Entry 60: The Indexical Present II

The photo registers the scene: it is Ron Silliman reading, Krishna Evans following the text. Or perhaps Krishna is reading and Ron is following the text, as will be the case in a minute or two, as soon as Ron finishes his passage. The vantage point is from where I am sitting, having read my part some time ago and now listening as it continues. To the side are  Eliot D’Silva next to Ivan Sokolov; then to the right are Jen Hofer, leaning against the garage; Claire Marie Stancek is just behind the forked trunk of a tree; Jennifer Scappettone between the branches of the tree, and Jane Gregory, the host of the event, is to the far right. Continuing out of the picture one would encounter Lytle Shaw, whose elbow is just visible, and then next Syd Staiti on the stairs. Everyone is not especially solemn but bent to the task, reading Lyn Hejinian’s just published Fall Creek (Litmus Press), copies and xeroxes of which are out on the table. All of them have taken their turn. There are thirty-three sections, with Ron and Krishna reading the next-to-final two, before the group takes up the last section in unison. This was my proposal to the group at the break, recalling the pleasure of cacophony in our Grand Piano reading of “A”–24, whose plurivocality Lyn internalized and, some decades later, realized in one of her last works.  … More

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March 13, 2024

Document 104: Discrepant Analogy

“Discrepant Analogy:
Immanent Transpositions of Surrealism”

CALL FOR PAPERS/SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET

“Surréalismes Paris 2024
6th Conference of the International Society
for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS)
October 28–30, 2024 / pdf here … More

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March 3, 2024

Document 103: Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour

“Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour:
Destruction, Displacement, Emergence”

CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET

“Avant-Garde and War”
9th Conference of the European Network for
Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM)
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
September 17–19, 2024 / pdf here … More

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January 5, 2024

Entry 56: A Poetics of Encounter

A Poetics of Encounter:
Dialectic of Outside with the Beats

Read at “Can We Teach the Beat Generation?”
Discussion organized by Erik Mortenson and Tony Triglio
Session 228, 5 January 2024, 10:15–11:30 AM, Loews 3rd Fl.
Modern Language Association, Philadelphia 

“The transmission of poetry is a passion unlike any other.”
“I too have started a riot in the academy.”

In this note, I want to call up certain moments of encounter that were, as with the visual image of a “diamond thunderbolt” or dorje, immediate, double-faced, and bivalent: outward in the transmission of poetry, from the Beats or New Americans and others; and inward, toward self-formation and a long process of professionalizing within the Academy. In charting such a poetics of encounter, I draw from my presentations at the “decades” poetry conferences at University of Maine, Orono, in the 90s and 00s that I, in the company of a shifting assemblage of poet/critics, took part in. I connect these moments to Steven Belletto’s genealogy of three early moments of encounter between Beats and the Academy: Jack Kerouac’s intervention at a symposium sponsored by Brandeis University in New York, 1958; Diana Trill­ing’s reaction to Allen Ginsberg’s being given an “unofficial” reading at Columbia, that same year; and Gregory Corso’s rebuttal to a symposium on the Beats in Wagner Literary Review, 1959. These are part of series of breakthrough moments: the Gallery 6 reading, San Francisco, 1955; Ginsberg’s appearance in Time magazine, 1959; the Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963; the Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965. What makes the first three definitively “Beat” aligns with two concepts from my essay on Michael McClure: antagonism and holism. In challenging the Academy’s scholastic pedagogy—I often thought of the English Department in the 60s or 70s as a kind of monastery, corridors filled with the brethren nodding to each other under hooded robes—the Beats took a position Outside that was, at the same time, subject to everything—“Is there a world?,” Kerouac asked; “Man does not exist,” opined Corso. The nature of this encounter between an unregulated Outside and a self-regulating Inside points to a dialectic of the Academy whose stakes are not only literary, pointing toward our volume’s significance not only for Literary but University Studies. … More

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December 31, 2023

Entry 55: Beginning Again and Again

Scaffolding Repetition: Gertrude Stein,
Language Writing, Electronic Dance Music (online here)
eLyra 22, special issue on “Poetics and Politics
of Repetition,” ed. Bruno Ministro, 25 December 2023 (online here)

Abstract: This essay takes up the critique of repetition in Gertrude Stein, her claim to have written a “continuous present” that “begins again and again” and “includes everything” versus her later qualification that repetition is always shifting in terms of “insistence” and “emphasis”. Even so, Stein focuses on the unfolding of the verbal material primarily in a linear fashion, though resonances and overtones abound. In Electronic Dance Music, from Detroit to Berlin techno, one finds more vertical layerings and “scaffolding”—a term taken from Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky—as a way of building up sonic elements in pleasurable and meaning-bearing ways. Using these two contrasting models of repetition, I read three language-centered poets—Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, and Marjorie Welish—in terms of their complex forms of temporality in poetic form, seen in terms of Stein’s often repeated framework of “beginnings, middles, and ends”. I conclude with a discussion of ”vital movement” in the electronic dance music of Berlin DJ Ellen Allien.

Keywords: Modernism, avant-garde, repetition, language writing, poetry, electronic music, American, Berlin

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November 14, 2023

Entry 54: The Transmission of Poetry

MATERIAL TRANSMISSIONS:
DEMOTIC SURREALISM/HIERATIC LANGUAGE,
SAN FRANCISCO, 1975–1980

Plunged each day into the fog of received ideas, man is led to conceive
of all things and to conceive of himself through a dizzy series of quickly
hidden stumblings, of false steps rectified as best as possible.

—André Breton, “The Automatic Message” (1933)

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September 2, 2023

Entry 51: Magnetic North (IV)

Friday, June 16
DB ICE 1040 Bergen auf Rügen > Berlin Hbf

54 Ebertystraße, Friedrichshain, Berlin

Carla Harryman
Ragna Berg
Florian Werner

Ellen Allien
Hamburger Bahnhof

Just about to get there; we have been away. Time crosses space, beginning in Rügen Island and ending in Berlin. Then we were advised to come and we would arrive. The party crowd is aware of its having a location in time and space, had been there for awhile—before we came. The party crowd at the Hamburger Bahnhof, celebrating the new director, a new orientation for art. As we come from a distance, the music invites us in, not yet there. On arrival it is there, an insistent pulse, meditative, cruising on horizontal, an endless plane of immanence, synced in time. He is coming soon, wrote Wittgenstein; he will be coming, he will have come. That must be the new director. Then he will have arrived. Gertrude Stein repeated the phrase, only with modulation. Ellen Allien is the legitimate appointee of the new director, hired to entertain and inspire the crowd, to be a work of art in herself. The party crowd is a work of art in itself, an instance of Gertrude Stein advancing in time. As the director himself had written, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world“—that is the principle of new art at the Hamburger Bahnhof. It is raining, the crowd is moving slightly then more openly, Ellen Allien gestures to the sky, arms raised, rain is coming down. A steady pulse of the language of limits becomes an episode in time and space. We are not afraid of speaking.

A man coming.
Yes there is a great deal of use in a man coming but will he come at all if he does come will he come here.
How to you like it if he comes and look like that. Not at all later. Well anyway he does come and if he likes it he will come again.
Later when another man comes
He does not come.
Girls coming. There is no use in girls coming.
Well anyway he does come and if he likes it he will coming gain.

Ellen Allien is the legitimate heir of Gertrude Stein. Nonsense, she pushes a button and there is a new orientation to the beat. Nonsense. Pulse, difference. Slight movements under an umbrella, the umbrellas are folded. We learn the new meaning to experience time and space, under the auspices of the new director, as an example of the new art. The art is coming all over with newness, like Gertrude Stein coming to Radcliffe, GIs arriving in the Bavarian Alps. The movement begins with a slight dancing, becomes more pronounced, is shared by many in the crowd. Finding a position in the middle, unable to really get a look at Ellen Allien, stepping back, her arms are raised with the beat. And a gigantic pause makes ensuing pulse more danceable, this is the basic grammar of techno. Nonsense. Now take a position a bit farther back, focus and click. On the pause that makes the pulse happen. Let us say what Ellen Allien teaches: electronic dance music teaches. She is the instructor of the moment, hired by the director, as an example of the new art. Her whole life is oriented toward this moment of instruction, in the form of a work of art, a way of being historical. This is the mandate of the Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart: to preserve the present as ethical obligation in the form of Ellen Allien and the crowd, moving under rain, skies now clearing, continuing as may be, a work of art.

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