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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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August 21, 2021

Archive 14: World Autobiography

I return to the vexed question of autobiography, which in earlier times I believed one should “start writing” only when all other options—of world transformation, for instance—had failed. The two key terms are brought together in the 1973 cover of The World 28, the “Autobiography Issue” edited by Lewis Warsh. As I recalled when Lewis died late last year, I first met him in Mendocino, on his way down the coast to Bolinas, where I visited him before he moved back east. In his editing of The World, he wanted to radicalize autobiography not as a genre but as a mode of writing. Writing from an immediate perspective of “personhood” in any genre was of interest, from poetry to fiction to memoir, journal entries, letters, portraits, and snapshots.

Autobiography would be the royal road to writing per se; there was a tradition and consensus that “self/life/writing” was what there was to do, in fact was all that could be done. For a brief while there was in fact a kind of period style of autobiographical self-discovery, nothing like the persona poems of the workshop but evoking a tradition from Rousseau and the romantics, Zukofsky’s “the words are my life,” Beat spontaneity, and New York School everyday life. The consensus—and it was not long lived—was that “into the company of self it all returns,” one might say. Warsh’s 1973 project, bringing together writers of several diverse schools, was the highpoint of that moment.

I was the early Language writer in that group, in company with Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Bill Berkson, Anne Waldman, all poets who would appear in the first issues of This, but also Diane Di Prima, Kenward Elmslie, Lee Harwood, Harris Schiff, and John Wieners. The issue should be reprinted in its entirety, to reflect on the question of writing that Lewis proposed: where the fact of writing and the events of life are seen as nearly identical. What historical circumstances obtained for that to be possible, desirable, likely? But there is also a moment of transition here: from person to language—at one pole the iconic representation of personhood, in condensed and presentable form, and on the other the endlessness of scribbling in letters and journals, a fascination of writing per se. … More

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January 10, 2021

Entry 43: Rolling Out Plan B


These are the words that conclude “Plan B,” my poem written after the Trump election in 2016. What has transpired since could not have been more like—turbulence has been destiny, our demography is in pieces, and nothing is decided. It is that moment of stoppage—”the stopping / of the battle,” as Charles Olson wrote—that I wanted to get down, as my contribution to radical democracy perhaps. But even the concept of “radical democracy” is not now decided—that is in the nature of a decision—with the spectacle of the “mob” thinking it represents the demos violating “the People’s House,” as we have been told and can see for ourselves. My point is the instability of the moment, but also that of the discourse that represents it or attempts to intervene in it. Is that a good thing for poetry, to record such a moment, or a bad thing for politics, that its confusions may be reproduced? … More

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October 31, 2020

Archive 09: WCW on Poetic Agency

Working through my archive, a copy of the above letter from William Carlos Williams, dated “April 29” and addressed to a “Rubenstein,” turned up. Given the degraded quality of the Xerox, it must have been passed around from hand to hand, and is now far removed from its origins. I have no idea how it came into my possession; my impulse was to distribute it forthwith as widely as possible, given our situation four days before a decisive political event. It does not appear in Williams’s Selected Letters, but an article from the William Carlos Williams Review (here) gives a thumbnail history. The addressee is Richard Rubenstein, editor of a little magazine The Gryphon, a poet associated with the emerging Beat movement in San Francisco who died of the effects of psychiatric treatment in 1958. The date is 29 April 1950, at which time Williams was recently investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for his association, I now believe is likely, with Popular Front groups in the Spanish Civil War but reputedly for his friendship with Ezra Pound, which resulted in his being denied appointment as the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress in 1949. In its resistance to the “stupidity” of “political dogma,” Williams writes: “A mind accustomed to the poem as it is gradually being understood can never be quite as deceived by the testimony of the scurrilous liars who beset us as they could have been had we not had the poem to test them against.” Four days before our opportunity to run the scurrilous liars out of power, his words have a new force.  … More

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October 25, 2020

Archive 08: Message @ Destination

View of Centerville.

Would be delighted to see you, here, in the near future.
Mrs. Wm. A. Keune

[Hika Wis. Aug 17 1906]

Mrs. Emil Plantz, Milwaukee, Wis.
1120 Richard Str.

Fucked up. Left the place
without picking up a
pouch. Got rattled had
to be aware of three people.
My brother in law is here
again. Had more Pins to
send but a friend here
cut his finger on his saw
and needed money so I had
to go get this and sell
some Pins to get
instant bread.
Nothing is choice except for
a pin or 2 and the Brown
vaseline bag is
intact. Perhaps Barbra
can salvage something.

… More

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September 26, 2020

Entry 41: Failed Mail Art Piece

Reflective  sandboxing of software code within a machine built to parse it is seen in the case of a computer language like Java which must be compiled and  then run as bytecode inside a special runtime environment, or, as with the language C, compiled and then run as “native” machine instructions, or with a simple mark-up language like HTML the specifications for which must be entirely designed into any browser destined to interpret and display it, or also with other interpreted code such as a three-dimensional model whose mathematical values for vertices and textures must be transcoded according to the rules of a given data format and given style of visual projection.

—Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (65)

The distinction between code as executable and language as interpretable has a basic horizon in the question of new meaning. Machinic encoding is not capable of making new meaning—only humans are. But caught in the web of mediated processes (as above), humans often fail to recognize the new—or attempt to transcode it in terms of earlier structures of interpretation. The example of the “failed mail art piece” will illustrate this. … More

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August 27, 2020

Archive 05: Olson in This

The first issue of This (1971) included a short photo essay and memorial to Charles Olson by photographer Elsa Dorfman, who died in May 2020. Bob Grenier, co-editor and mentor, had moved to a small house by the cove in Lanesville, Mass., on Cape Ann, and would have been in contact with Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, and, through poetry connections, Elsa Dorfman. Olson had recently died (10 January 1970) and I was in the thick of his influence, visiting Gloucester that summer and organizing a reading group on the “modern epic” at Iowa in the academic year 1971–72 that included renowned scholar Sherman Paul, who credited the group discussion in his book Olson’s Push (1978). A signal moment in that seminar was unfolding the Coast and Geodetic Survey map of Gloucester harbor, which I bought when I visited, to provide a “spatial reading” of the otherwise cryptic poem: “In the harbor // Can 9 Nun 8 / Nun 10 Can 11 //// Charles Olson / Friday, November 23rd //  #1” (Maximus IV V VI, n.p.; Maximus Poems, 302). From the map, one can track a sequence of buoys in the harbor (termed “cans” and “nuns” from their shapes, presumably) that transposes the subject-centered experience of sighting the buoys to a sequence of signs in space. It is tempting to imagine that Language writing was born right there, though there were many converging influences, never reducible to a moment of origin. In fact, it was the gap between what Olson was seeing and what his poem and the map record that signified, a way of reading that makes clear why the poem had to be written as it was. Many of the short poems from the second volume of Maximus, along with Creeley’s Pieces, were objects of fascination then. … More

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May 8, 2020

Document 86: Thinking Zero Hour

The fatalism by which incom-prehensible death was sanctioned in primeval times has now passed over into utterly comprehensible life. The noonday panic fear in which nature suddenly appeared to humans as an all-encompassing power has found its counterpart in the panic which is ready to break out at any moment today: human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are powerless.

—Adorno and Horkheimer,
Dialectic of Enlightenment

In modernity, “Zero Hour” is an event waiting to happen, as critical theorists from Adorno to Žižek have presciently seen; our experience of the COVID-19 pandemic reconfirms the event as a “noonday panic fear” that structurally recurs. In Germany at 1945, this moment of destruction is conventionally known as Stunde Null, which we may translate as “Zero Hour.” I use the concept of Zero Hour—seen as the punctual moment of political and material destruction that ended Germany’s Totaler Krieg (total war) through unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945—as a metahistorical concept, after the work of narrative and conceptual historiographers. As such, Zero Hour is not simply reducible to its historical date; it has a structural relation to real-time historical unfolding in both narrative and nonnarrative terms. Zero Hour thus did not simply happen; rather, it is a phenomenological moment that took place “as if” it were an actual event, no matter how the particular details of history coincided with it. Psychoanalytic processes of destruction, repetition, and Nachträglichkeit are crucial for the historicity of Zero Hour, as an opening to the Real “that can only be known in its effects.” At the same time, what we term Zero Hour as a historical fact is irreducible to a concept—formed from a complex multiplicity of individual and collective, human and material experiences that only retrospectively condense into the univocal date, 8 May 1945. There is, as well, a unique political content to this historical endgame, a combination of the persistent German commitment to Totaler Krieg after massive defeats that began with Stalingrad, matched by equally persistent Allied demands for total capitulation. Zero Hour is thus a composite historical fact, viewed through an imprecise historical frame, that extends from a series of moments of destruction and liberation that constitute it. As a historical event, Zero Hour is a punctual moment that is not one, depicted and imagined through a series of iconic images of human bodies and urban destruction that took place with military defeat, the liberation of the camps, the destruction of cities, the mass displacement of peoples, occupation by allied armies, and civilian privation throughout Europe. A reduction of human experience to material bare life as a political, cultural, and even existential reference point—and its overcoming—gives Zero Hour a meaning well beyond its narrative origin as null point. My account of Zero Hour is thus not primarily concerned with the narrative it begins for the immediate postwar political or cultural order, but focuses on the moment of the event itself. Zero Hour is a material, not merely a phenomenological, event of destruction that announces a new world order; to locate it, we must work carefully through the combined figural logics and material evidence by which it was experienced and represented.

Notes and links

Text: from “Modernity @ Zero Hour: Anticipatory, Punctual, Retrospective Universals” (work in progress)

Image: Karl Hofer, Schwarzmondnacht—Potsdam, 1944

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April 21, 2020

Document 85: Ashbery Lesson

Introduction

To be a writer and write things
You must have experiences you can write about.
Just living won’t do. I have a theory
About masterpieces, how to make them
At very little expense, and they’re every
Bit as good as the others. You can
Use the same materials of the dream, at last.

It’s a kind of game with no losers and only one
Winner—you. First, pain gets
Flashed back through the story and the story
Comes out backwards and woof-side up. This is
No one’s story! At least they think that
For a time and the story is architecture
Now, and then history of a diversified kind.
A vacant episode during which the bricks got
Repointed and browner. And it ends up
Nobody’s, there is nothing for any of us
Except that fretful vacillating around the central
Question that brings us closer,
For better or worse, for all this time.

—John Ashbery

Notes and links

Text: John Ashbery, “Introduction,” in A Wave (New York: Penguin, 1985): 34.

Image: Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1977.

Links: Entry 11: “For a Left Ashbery Critique”
Entry 14: “The Perfect Ashbery (Review)”
Entry 36: “Ashbery Alpha and Omega”

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April 10, 2020

Archive 03: Abjecting the Avant-Garde

Continuing my work in the archives, I want to locate the shift from a more or less happy recognition of new writing in the late 70s to what can only be called full-fledged reaction by the mid 80s. While the encounter with Duncan over a materialist reading of Zukofsky was a premonition, it was an isolated—if internalized—event. The San Francisco literary avant-gardes—Language writing among others—got a lot good press at their moment of emergence, in a climate of openness that only encouraged their work. The milieu of Left cultural activism—backed up by federal support for alternative publishing through the NEA and community arts jobs via CETA—is readable in the October 1978 cover of the San Francisco Review of Books. The author shot of Kathleen Fraser juxtaposed with Ron Silliman reading Ketjak at Powell and Market Streets goes with the Left agenda: articles on Black power, the nuclear arms race, the Russian revolution, and—the small press. As with the earlier countercultural moment in the 50s/60s, avant-garde writing and small press publishing were seen as part of a cultural politics extending out in all directions. The inky, unpretentious typography of the cover goes along with a baseline populism of multiple agendas. … More

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