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August 11, 2016

Entry 24: 17 Reasons Why!

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17 Reasons Why! 

“17 Reasons Why!” is a key site in the cognitive map of San Francisco during the period in which Language writing emerged, the 1970s. The cryptic formula, for which no adequate explanation has been given, overlooked the Mission District at the intersection of 17th and Mission—and yet also seemed hardly to be there. Its address was always already iterative and non sequitur, always a prompt for questioning. I left the Bay Area before it came down in 2000, but it has a solid place in the firmament of urban legend, as in this article, from which we learn: “The 17 did refer to the fact the store stood on the corner of 17th Street. But what were the reasons? ‘People would ask what the 17 reasons were, and we would guff it off. There were no 17 reasons,’ [the former owner’s son] said.”

[To be contd.]

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August 7, 2016

Entry 23: The Last Time I Saw Bill

DREAM

Broken headline column:
“YOU ARE GO
IN TO END”
Allen Ginsberg dives through the space hatch.
I watch him from the rim, hear his voice
trail a statement “MAN ISSSSSSSSSS . . . . . . . . ”
as he disappears into dot-hood.
The Poets—Anne Waldman, me, “all The Poets”—float
in interstellar space—a substance I
can touch, a fine sheen. & then I’m up against the sun,
its soft orange neon glow. “THE SUN,” I say, “IS BIG!”
Pause, a chair sails silent past me & into solar radiance.
“CHAIR INTO SUN!” I remark (a parody of big
poetical remark).
Then I am back on Earth,
speed-skating on the “Power-Cones.”

—from This 8 (1977); see also Portrait and Dream, p. 154

I had come to New York with a purpose—to visit Ted Greenwald, whose health had been failing (see here), and to make contact with people and see art (see here). I was not expecting to see Bill, whom I knew had been living partly in New York but whom I had not seen for some time (not since we read at MOCAD in Detroit, an event so poorly framed and executed—not by Bill, of course, who sounded great—that I only remember it with displeasure). One of my contacts mentioned that Bill would be reading with Kyle Schlesinger at a gallery in Chelsea, and sent an email with time and place, to begin at 5:30. … More

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Entry 22: The Last Time I Saw Ted

I was in New York for a purpose—for one thing, I had not been for a while and it was time to catch up. At a conference in Boston, I received a phone call from Kit Robinson, in the middle of a session on surrealism no less, that Ted Greenwald’s health was failing. I made plans to visit as soon as the semester was over; a day was arranged, a plane flight, a hotel booking, and other appointments fell into place. I’ve outlined what I did over the four-day weekend here. The time was specified for 2 P.M. Ted was chipper over the phone: “I have an earlier appointment, but I can see you then.” He books his time like a New Yorker, I noted; I don’t, in some unstated way assuming every event is its own uniqueness, even if that has long since become unworkable as a way to manage time. (So it came to pass that I work the day shift on the assembly line of Modernity Inc., headquarters in Detroit. But what’s the difference? Differing cultural styles of time management all depend on the same passage of time.) I was nervous about the event; he had not overprepared it. … More

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June 2, 2015

Entry 22: Speech Acts

Tim Kreiner has written a considered response to my previous post, an act of intellectual dignity given what else is out there. His piece circles around a conflict between abstract rights (Free Speech) and concrete acts (antiracist politics) he says Place herself caused when she pushed inadmissible racial content into the public arena. He also sees her timing as crucial: while I imagined that Place was grabbing a part of the limelight from Kenneth Goldsmith’s scandalous performance of Michael Brown’s autopsy, he believes that she “added the images in the midst of a live social movement against specific acts of state violence targeting black people.” [Correction: Place added the banner in 2012, and the profile photo in 2011; thus, both of our scenarios are incorrect. It is still an open question why a project that was not getting attention suddenly create intense outrage. The relation of image to text here is still crucial.] While we agree that adding the images converted a banal textual project into a racial provocation, he sees her opportunism as not simply in the aesthetic series but as an attack on the social movement, and thus criticizable from that perspective. Her cynical use of Free Speech, and by an extension the defense of her work in terms of it, cannot be dissociated from its effects on antiracist organizing and its larger concern, #blacklivesmatter.

… More

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May 30, 2015

Entry 21: Notes on Silliman/Place

A week ago, I returned from Germany to find the online poetry community in an uproar over Ron Silliman’s “Je suis Vanessa Place.” There, Silliman triangulates the Charlie Hebdo award controversy with the petition to remove Place from a steering committee at AWP, and her conceptual project to tweet Gone with the Wind in 140-character chunks over several years. Since then, a second letter campaign in part led to the devolution and canceling of the Berkeley Poetry Conference 2015 (BPC), a situation still unresolved.  Silliman sees the primary issue as freedom of expression in a climate of projective and even rhetorically violent debate. Unfortunately, whatever the merits of his position—which I agree with on many grounds—his own rhetorical strategy makes analogies and leaps that are at turns defensive and projective to the point of offense to most readers. … More

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July 4, 2014

Entry 20: Shanghai Notes

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Soong Ching-ling’s Soviet sedan. Photo: BW

From 24 June to 2 July 2014, I was in Shanghai, attending an academic/arts conference and seeing as much of the city as possible when not otherwise engaged. The meetings took place at Shanghai Jiao Tong University; jiao tong means “transportation” but is the equivalent of “polytechnic.” Many of the early technical universities in China were concerned with various forms of transportation. In the case of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the major focus was maritime engineering; there is a massive rusted iron anchor in a courtyard between classroom buildings where there might be the statue of a humanist or political figure in another context. Shanghai, of course, is built on maritime traffic on the Yangtze River, the scale of which was evident in the massive materiality of the anchor. There were many such confrontations with massive scale in Shanghai, from its population of 23 million to the waves of public housing and corporate building that extend outward in all directions to its burgeoning infrastructure, particularly elevated highways and metro system. Jiao tong seems to have been an important concept. Now, it is being reinterpreted to include more liberal forms of scholarship, as witness the arts and humanities program that was our host. A canny citation of Confucian scripture permits this broader, more inclusive reading.

*****

… More

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June 6, 2013

Entry 17: Reading @ Nuremberg

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Reading @ Nuremberg
Bavarian-American Academy
Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg
7:30 PM, 27 May 2013

For my reading, I took as a model my 1999 presentation at Kelly Writers House, about which Brian Ang wrote perceptively [here]. In that event, I used stanzas from “Non-Events” as my guide, alternating between a regular progress through the poem as semantic and rhythmic baseline, while adding selections from Bad History and prose from The Constructivist Moment.  … More

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June 29, 2012

Entry 16: Anecdoted History of Chance

Geschichte des Zufalls no. 15

On 17 June 2012, I visited the Mauerpark flea market with friend and poet D— S—. The market was bursting at the seams with the detritus of pop culture; archives of tape and vinyl; retro furniture and avant-garde t-shirts; remnants of the former socialist state and occasional contraband from darker times; out-of-date art books and mass market magazines bleaching in the sun. A carnival of objects to anchor social ground within the shadow of the former Wall.

At the end of a long alley of stands, objects, and crowds—or at the end of a confusing story that was just about to arrive at its point—appeared a stall selling what look like small cardboard boxes, each with a stenciled number cut out on the top that let optical green paper show through, under the banner “Geschichten des Zufalls.” In the center of the table stood a gumball machine, containing wooden balls with the same optical green numbers. We were invited to purchase one of the boxes as a “chance object,” and to participate in a conceptual project in which we would inform the sellers/organizers of any coincidences that had occurred after its purchase. We could pay whatever price we felt appropriate for an opportunity to encounter chance in this way.

… More

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June 28, 2012

Entry 15: Poetics of Failure

A resonant passage from Lyn Hejinian’s The Book of a Thousand Eyes, which should have wide circulation (and links) for pedagogical and moral purposes.

I am a failed fire chief
I am a failed thief

Didn’t I fail at the wrong thing, aren’t I a failure at failure

Failure is inevitable
I am a fan of failure
I am a failure flailed by failure
I leap into failure
I relish the self-pity that’s produced by the self-loathing that comes as a consequence of failure

The sauce has curdled, the meat is tough, the custard is runny—the meal is a failure

Failure is the offshoot of argument—but then failure occurs too from a lack of it
Moral failure
… More

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August 6, 2011

Entry 14: The Perfect Ashbery (Review)

Planisphere, by John Ashbery. New York: HarperCollins/Ecco Press, 2009.

There is one poem in Planisphere I would love to have written. I see it as an apogee of Ashbery’s art, toward which all combinations of rhetoric and slippage, on their elliptical path, tend. This is language art at its finest. I’ll leave it at that:

STRESS RELATED

You don’t see so much of these anymore,
not see so much of this. There were others
who saw more. Innocence is cool,
he offered. Now not so much.
Innocence is the finish. Through all our
wide day it stressed. It was foolish to argue,
idle to come undone. The post arrived.
It all failed. All failed somewhere. [104]

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