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June 15, 2018

Document 73: Period Style

period style

An online commentator, I have heard, has just described my critical work Questions of Poetics as imperialist and hegemonic—strong language indeed! While my book does make strong claims, they are in the context of critiquing, and revising, the history of Language writing after 2000, among many topics. One of its major polemical goals is to defend Language writing from the charge of being a “period style”—a term first used by Marjorie Perloff and taken up by others to dismiss Language writing’s continuing relevance. I argue that Language writing has been widely influential, among many tendencies; it is a part of the literary history and poetic resources of the present. That does not make it the Third Rome, no.  … More

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June 10, 2018

Document 72: Book Quest DE (2018)

lokanandi books

Adorno, Theodor W. Night Music: Essays on Music, 1928–1962. Trans. Wieland Hoban. London: Seagull, 2017.
artiCHOKE, no. 12. Feat. Fabiana Faleiros, Birgit Kreipe, Samuel Solomon, and Jackie Wang. Berlin: Vierte Welt, 2018.
Avermaete, Tom, Serhat Karakayali, and Marion von Osten. Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future. Exhibition catalogue, Haus der Kulturen der Welt. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010.
The Beatles. “Michelle” b/w “Girl.” 45 rpm. Cologne, Germ.: Odeon O 23 152.
———. ““No Reply” b/w “Eight Days a Week.” 45 rpm. Cologne, Germ.: Odeon O 22 893.
———. “We Can Work It Out” b/w “Day Tripper.” 45 rpm. Cologne, Germ.: Odeon O 23 122.
Detroit—Berlin: One Circle, 30.5–2.6.2018. Program catalogue. Berlin: HAU, 2018.
Flaßpöhler, Svenja. Die potente Frau: Für eine neue Weiblichkeit. Berlin: Ullstein, 2018.
Franke, Melanie, Silke Krohn, and Dieter Scholz, eds. The Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection Berlin. Exhibition catalogue. Munich: Prestel, 2008.
Fuchs, Von Konrad, and Heribert Raab. Wörterbuch Geschichte. 13th ed. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002.
… More

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May 24, 2018

Document 71: Purloined Letters

The recent unfriendly publication of my email exchange with Nathaniel Mackey, along with fragments of a Facebook thread that I had removed—both without permission, as is customary and a sign of respect among authors and publishers—demands some comment and explanation. I have asked that the material be taken down, as it is framed as an act of theft, intended to humiliate, and circulated to recreate the adversarial dynamics of the “poetry wars” of the 1980s. As such it is an extension of what I have called “The Duncan Thing” and have written about previously here.

Perhaps the best way to respond is to change the framework of this discussion, since the material is out there, and attempt to reframe it from my own perspective. Readers may read what I wrote differently in a context that does not evoke literary theft or online flaming. I have had a long-term, friendly, and collegial relationship with Mackey, and have seen and interacted with him many times over several decades—and have often done things that support his work in ways great or small. I will begin, then, with an email I sent to Mackey on March 30, 2017, asking if would be interested in being part of a panel on “Generation and the Arts of the Present” at the ASAP conference in Oakland that fall. … More

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November 4, 2017

Entry 31: Generation

Generation n. 1 All of the people born and living at about the same time, regarded collectively; ‘one of his generation’s finest songwriters.’ 1.1 The average period, generally considered to be about thirty years, in which children grow up, become adults, and have children of their own; ‘the same families have lived here for generations.’ 1.2 A set of members of a family regarded as a single step or stage in descent; as modifier, in combination ‘a third-generation Canadian.’ 1.3 A group of people of similar age involved in a particular activity; ‘a new generation of actors and directors.’ 1.4 A single stage in the development of a type of product or technology; ‘a new generation of rear-engined sports cars.’ 2 mass noun The production or creation of something; ‘methods of electricity generation’; ‘the generation of wealth.’ 2.1 The propagation of living organisms; procreation. Origin Middle English: via Old French from Latin generatio(n-), from the verb generare (see generate).

—Oxford Living Dictionaries

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Document 67: The Face Gone, Generation

Introduction to “The Face Gone:
Generation in Presentist Poetics”

presented at ASAP 9, 27 October 2017
“Generation and the Arts of the Present”
with Lawrence Rinder and James Smethurst;
chaired by C.D. Blanton; Rita Raley, respondent

In critical and creative terms, “generation” is a blindspot in the discourse of the arts of the present. My essay starts by questioning the reliance on art historical, literary, and critical paradigms of periodization as assumed across the disciplines: from Foucault’s “epistemic shift” to Jameson’s “cultural logic of late capitalism” to periodizing notions of the literary, artistic, or cultural succession of one movement, school, style, or group to the next. Rather, I see “generation” as a cultural logic is negotiated at every moment in poetic practice: for instance, Language writing does not simply succeed and overturn the “presentness” of the New American poets, nor is it simply overturned by conceptualism or new activist poetries—rather, a complex negotiation of generation takes place at each moment, which may be seen both within the details of the work or movement’s construction or self-understanding, and externally in terms of its aesthetic positioning. … More

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September 3, 2017

Document 66: The Bungalows

[In memory of John Ashbery]

ashbery collage 01

THE BUNGALOWS

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they,
The presumed landscape and the dream of home
Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,
Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes
Became so extraneous and so near
To create a foreground of quiet knowledge
In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that
Will sign for old age
And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.

… More

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August 20, 2017

Document 65: The Trouble with Occupy

from “The Trouble with Occupy:
Materialism, Transvaluation, and the Symbolic”

Occupy was, and continues to be, an event; we speak of “the event of Occupy” much as we refer to the “event of 9/11.” Occupy poets both participated in the event of Occupy but also continued it as an event through their work, which to a degree anticipated the event in providing terms drawn from poetry. At the center of the Occupy movement was a poetics, one that is not merely represented by its poets or reflected in their work. The spontaneity of decision making, the refusal of hierarchical structures, the advocacy of a “transvaluation of all values” without concrete political goals, the temporal and spatial forms of the movement, its self-understanding as exemplary as much as practical—all point toward a constructivist poetics in which there are no prior givens or certain grounds. My writing on Occupy poetry, too, has had an evental character; what follows develops a sequence of paradigms over several conference presentations and publications as political events continued to unfold. It has not been sufficiently noted that a shift in the register of politics as “event” from Occupy in 2011 to the 2012 reelection of Barack Obama effectively ended the active phase of the movement; since that time, it has persisted as a political imaginary that has been both absorbed into political developments like the Sanders campaign and preserved in an ongoing articulation of poetics and political theory. … More

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July 24, 2017

Document 64: Reinstate Georgette Fleischer!

Georgette Fleischer is a scholar of modernist studies and, until recently, adjunct faculty at Barnard College, where she taught in the First Year Foundations and the English Department for 17 years. She is a vociferous advocate for union organizing of contingent labor and was instrumental in organizing Barnard Contingent Faculty, local 2110 of the UAW/United Auto Workers. Clearly in connection with her organizing activities, she has been terminated by Barnard College, using a concession in the very contract she negotiated to do so.

The situation of adjunct faculty nationwide is a scandal that has affected academia at every level and is a major factor in the continuing decline of higher education. We must broadly support the right of contingent faculty to organize; to earn a living not a subsistence wage; to be fairly evaluated and not subjected to arbitrary procedures; to have access to security of employment; to achieve professional dignity in otherwise increasingly hierarchical institutions; and finally to participate fully and openly in academic inquiry and public advocacy without risk of censorship or punishment.

Georgette Fleischer is a courageous advocate for all these rights, and her case touches on all of them. She was instrumental in organizing contingent faculty at Barnard after having endured a decade and a half of substandard wages, lack of opportunities for advancement or security, lack of recognition for the intellectual and pedagogical contribution she has made, and exposure to arbitrary procedures. It is obvious from the history of her teaching and organizing at Barnard that she has been singled out as a “squeaky wheel,” a voice that refused to be silenced, a gadfly that kept returning to the struggle.

Her union organizing history has been summarized in detail in online articles, and there is now a Facebook page for BCF-UAW, with numerous support letters. See the following:

“An Inconvenient Adjunct,” by Colleen Flaherty. Inside Higher Education, 9 June 2017; click here.

BCF-UAW 2110 Facebook page, with numerous supporting posts; click here.

Barnard Contingent Faculty, letter to the President of Barnard College; click here.

“When Unfair Labor Relations Reify, It’s Time to Strike” by Georgette Fleischer. The Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) Contingent Faculty Blog, 25 September 2016; click here.

… More

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July 21, 2017

Document 53: Reprobate

William_Blake's_Cain_and_Abel

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

reprobate n. M16 1 A person rejected by God; a person who has fallen from grace. M16. b collect. pl. The people rejected by God and thus denied salvation. M16. 2 An unprincipled person; a person of loose or immoral character. L16. 2 S. O’Casey Gimme money, y’oul’ reprobate!

reprobate a. L15. 1 Rejected by God; hardened in sin. L15. b Lacking religious or moral obligation; condemned as worthless, inferior, or impure. M17. 2 Rejected or condemned as worthless, inferior, or impure. Now rare. M16. 3 Depraved, degraded, morally corrupt. Also foll. by to. M16–M18. 4 Deserving of condemnation or reproof; appropriate to reprobates. E17–L18. 2 J. Spencer A great deal of reprobate Silver which . . . looks like Sterling.

reprobate v.t. LME. 1 Disapprove of, censure, condemn. LME. 2 Of God: reject or condemn (a person); exclude from salvation. L15. 3 Reject, refuse, put aside. E17. b Law (chiefly Sc.). Reject (an instrument or deed) as not binding. E18. 1 H. L. Wilson Especially reprobated by the matrons of the correct set. G. Gorer Whether premarital experience is advocated or reprobated. 2 G. Lavington Look upon themselves as reprobated, and forsaken of God. 3b approbate and reprobate: see APPROBATE 2.

… More

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July 3, 2017

Document 52: Plan B

Plan B is Poem of the Week!

plan b broadside 1

plan b broadside 2

Mark Olival-Bartley has published the first 22 (of 101) tercets of “Plan B,” my poem refusing normalization after the 2016 election, in his Poem of the Week series in Munich. I will read it, and Franziska Ruprecht will perform the poem in German translation, along with other work, on Thursday, July 6, 7:30 PM, at the JYM in Munich. Click here for more information.

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