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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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October 16, 2022

Event 98: Carla Harryman/Jon Raskin

Carla Harryman & Jon Raskin
Cloud Cantata and “Scales for the Living”
Text-based and multi-instrumental performance

Gray Loft Gallery
Saturday, October 22, 7:30 PM
2889 Ford Street, 3rd Floor, Oakland
RSVP grayloftgallery@gmail.com

Poet Carla Harryman poet and musician Jon Raskin musician render Harryman’s Cloud Cantata and in-progress “Scales for the Living” in variations of speaking, singing, and musical interpretations. These dialogue poems respond to domestic companionship and televised bubble, dreamscapes and slant trouble, war, immigration catastrophe (de) realization, dangerous waters, historical circumspection, and whatever occurs in the liminal mind or neighborhood of pandemic time.

… 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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April 21, 2021

Document 92: Event Horizon

 

 

Kim D. Hunter
The Official Report
on Human Activity

Zoom discussion
Thursday, April 22
7:00–8:30 P.M. EDT

Projects in Poetics and Event Horizon announce an informal discussion with Detroit poet kim d. hunter, author of the ground-breaking collection of short stories from Wayne State University Press. Guests  are welcome; register here: https://bit.ly/2Qm6tcG.


The Official Report on Human Activity, which is neither official nor a report, is a collection of long stories that are linked by reoccurring characters and their personal struggles in societies rife with bigotry, in which media technology and capitalism have run amok. These stories approach the holy trinity of gender, race, and class at a slant. They are concerned with the process and role of writing intertwined with the roles of music and sound. … More

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December 25, 2020

Entry 42: Hello, Indiana!

On 4 December, this year, I was emailed by John Pratt, English teacher at Greensburg High School in Indiana, asking if I would read for his program (virtually), and send a shout out to the students. Greensburg has experienced two waves of COVID and was forced to return to all-online classes; the readings would be an end-of-year bonus for students. I also see it as an effort to communicate between “regions” of the pandemic: Indiana, a red state with huge uptick in cases in December, and Michigan, a blue state where a similar surge was somewhat damped but still compares with other Midwestern states, as I know from the Michigan Coronavirus page [here].

With a population of 11,000, our small town of Greensburg Indiana was hit hard by the pandemic in March and last week it returned with full force. Once again Greensburg High School has been moved to virtual learning. As one of our teachers, I have launched a campaign to provide an inspiring lesson for our over 700 students. It is called The Bucket List—Our Greatest Poets. I have sought out those who I feel would inspire us with a few words. Would you be willing to read a poem for my students? Simply tape yourself saying who you are, give a shout out to Greensburg High School students, then read a poem. Thank you for your consideration and have a great week.

No problem, you bet. On 14 December, I recorded a section from my poem of the COVID duration, “Notzeit (After Hannah Höch),” with a short exhortation to the students to write about what they have learned from strange times:

John Pratt, in turn, posted the video to his Virtual Chautauqua page [here], which provides links to the fifteen poets who responded; I was pleased to see myself in company with Eileen Myles, Martín Espada, and other poets new to me. The readings are marvelous, unified by the prospect of speaking to youth across time zones, and worth the time clicking through. … More

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May 6, 2018

Entry 34: Lost America

lost america of love cover ed

The question of my relation to the New Americans over the long decades since the ’70s has recently come up. In working through my last post, a response to a review that framed my 2016 book with a retelling of the poetic debacle of 1978, I linked to an essay I published in 2000 (per copyright date; it likely appeared in 2001) that was, at the time, my critical and historical assessment of some of its major figures: Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan. Duncan (1988) and Dorn (1999) had already passed, and I do not think I sent the essay to Creeley, with whom I maintained good relations at the time (Creeley died in 2005). Creeley tended to glaze when I sent him offprints of my critical writing, for instance the essay on “poetic vocabulary” that links Jackson Mac Low and BASIC English, to which he wrote a one-word response: “Impressive.” Only later did I find, via a comment Creeley dropped in conversation and a letter in his Selected Letters, that BASIC English had been an influence on his work, after a high school teacher asked to write an essay using its minimal vocabulary.

The events of September 2001 decisively changed the focus of thinking through the poetics of the New Americans onto a more immediate political situation; the broad expanses of time needed for genial conversation on poetry and poetics would be displaced by a militarized discourse of threat, reprisal, and nonexistent WMDs. The essay itself was a kind of swerve, using a request from editor Timothy Murphy for a contribution for a volume of the academic journal Genre to be titled “Desert Island Texts,” with a prompt something like, “what one book would you want to have if stranded on a desert island.” … More

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April 21, 2018

Entry 32: For Kara Walker

kara walker 01

Context is everything. To begin with, there is the question of intent in the circulation of racialized images, and the way racism may be ascribed to them. To display racialized imagery in America is to open a Pandora’s Box of every conceivable projection and denial. This is not to separate intention from context, but to find ways of reading it that are contextual and historical. Pandora’s Box is an apt metaphor for the racial content of Kara Walker’s work. There was an incident, about a dozen years ago, when her work was to be first shown at the then-quite-stodgy Detroit Institute of Arts. Think of the recent film Get Out as another of Pandora’s Box—the basement and its horror of substitute body parts. Kara Walker was new to Detroit, and the DIA was still a bastion of cultural separatism in the city. In the film, black bodies are used as vehicles for whiteness that has run out its biological course and needs new life. Off hours, a black janitor encountered the work during installation and complained; the show was cancelled. A state of mind called “the sunken place” is introduced in the film as the horror of racial subjectivity. This is the kind of textbook case that organizations such as the National Coalition Against Censorship deal with all the time, from Huckleberry Finn to the controversy of Vanessa Place tweeting 140-line texts from Gone with the Wind. On the other hand, the contrast between that moment to the ramp up of Kara Walker’s career in museums could not be more marked. The art world itself is represented in the form of a blind gallery owner lusting for authentic talent. … More

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August 20, 2017

Event 81: I Met (Imagined Theatres)

Imagined Theatres:
Writing for a Theoretical Stage
Edinburgh International Book Festival
17 August 2017

Imagined Theatres cover

Daniel Sack
Dominika Laster
Michael McMillan
Carla Harryman
Jen Harvie

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June 27, 2017

Event 78: Plan B in München

plan b munich flyer

Barrett Watten will read “Plan B,” a poem written in the aftermath of our national catastrophe, over four days in which the intensity of distorted discourse, media frenzy, and psychological projection fused in a mass of contradictions so real one could simply reach out and grab them to make a poem. The resulting work stands as a kind of “knowledge base” for the symbolic detritus of the election and the state of political crisis it produced. The keyword Gleichschaltung is drawn from the German experience of 1933 and is used as a “discrepant analogy” to the imperative not to “normalize” the result of the election—an imperative that continues for many. Both terms appear at regular intervals through the poem. Also evoked is the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald—a 1975 maritime disaster on the Great Lakes (and ballad by Gordon Lightfoot) that is iconic for residents of Michigan, for whom it represents the destruction of the state as well as the wreck itself. One might immediately compare this reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland to achieve the kinds of discrepant analogy the poem explores. For the reading in Munich, performance poet Franziska Ruprecht has translated “Plan B” into German, which she will perform. The reading will also present other texts evoking poetry as a “knowledge base,” on the one hand, and as record of catastrophe, on the other.

See above for details; click on image to download flyer. 

 

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June 25, 2017

Event 77: I Met (ecopoetics)

Association for the Study
of Literature and the Environment
Wayne State University
20–24 June 2016

Offsite reading @ N-Space
23 June 2016

Linda Russo
Brenda Iijima
Megan Kaminski
Marthe Reed
Joshua Schuster
Adam Dickinson
Lynn Keller
Evelyn Reilly
Angela Hume
cris cheek
Tyrone Williams
… More

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