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September 25, 2010

Entry 13: Jackson Mac Low as Reading Machine

Turing Machine

“Jackson Mac Low as Reading Machine: Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Sampling, and Print Culture,” presented at High and Low, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, 11 September 2010.

[From the introduction] In this paper, I propose a historical and cultural reading of postmodern practices of textual sampling and “reading through” in the poetry of Jackson Mac Low. To do so, I will position the methods and materials of his magnum opus Stanzas for Iris Lezak at the intersection of several concerns. The first is the imperative to rethink modernism and the historical avant-garde in relation to the content, forms, and media of mass culture. … More

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March 12, 2010

Entry 11: For a Left Ashbery Critique

from “Ashbery’s Historicism: 
Nonsite Hypotaxis and Modernity Critique
in The Double Dream of Spring“

Presented at John Ashbery in Paris: International Conference
12 March 2010, Institut Charles V, Université Paris Diderot

What makes The Double Dream of Spring both unique and exemplary for Ash­bery’s work is its positive critique of social modernity, rather than a mere ironic reversal of modernism, at the intersection of critical theory, poststructuralism, and romanticism. In the figural space of his works, Ashbery inverts of the poetics of radical particularity—seen in terms of an aesthetic of the fragment and the condition of reification under capitalism—that relocates what Altieri terms its “aesthetic agency” in an interplay of “partial local coherence” that at once proposes and disposes of any horizon of totality. … More

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February 10, 2010

Entry 10: Lost Landscapes of Detroit

Tonight at MOCAD, San Francisco archive activist Rick Prelinger showed an hour’s worth of material from his vast collection of film images of Detroit from the first three quarters of the 20th century (earliest 1917; latest in the 70s). I attended, along with several hundred other people—the space was full to overflowing. The screening was open to audience participation, and Prelinger, after his opening statement, encouraged vocal responses.

This dynamic made for a unique occasion. To begin with, the range of Prelinger’s material was limited—indeed, its limitations made for a kind of interpretive framework in themselves. We saw clips of downtown and water transport (modernity); the auto industry (mode of production); suburbs (community) and family (reproduction); police work (power); and local landmarks that no longer exist (history). We did not see sufficient images of labor or the black community, as Prelinger noted, likely due to the distribution and use of home movies.

… More

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February 6, 2010

Entry 09: Frequency of Posts

Yesterday was the first day since beginning this project that I was unable to add daily content. My initial plan had been to add “something” on a daily basis, and to make the necessity of doing that at such a frequency part of determining what “something” is (see Entry 07, “Is This Anything”). I remain interested in the exterior, conceptual dynamics of such a frame—after On Kawara’s “I Got Up” project as a task of daily self-understanding, over the long run. Yet I also recognize, in refusing conceptual dogmatism, that there are other exigencies. … More

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February 2, 2010

Entry 08: Homage to Lee Crabtree

Fugs Second Album.

Recent threads on The Fugs have brought to mind my early encounter with their music, and the band itself, during my first visit to the St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, November 1965. When asked for a short statement on the Poetry Project for Anne Waldman’s anthology Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–91, I wrote:

Thinking back on the Poetry Project, I am reminded of an absurdist question posed by Gerard Malanga to Charles Olson in The Paris Review: “A school is place where one can learn something. Can a school lose by giving away its knowledge?” From my first involvement with it in about 1972, The Poetry Project seemed a place where a school of poetry—the New York School—was physically embodied in a group of writers who felt free to develop in the confidence of their mutual (and contending) assumptions, and I certainly learned something from that. … More

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January 21, 2010

Entry 07: Is This Anything?

My resolve for this website project, at least at the outset, has been to post “something” once a day. But what counts as something? One of David Letterman’s fugitive routines suggests a standard for judgment: “Is it something, or is it nothing?” Not remembering the correct title for the routine, I searched the internet and came up with a number of philosophy sites that had used the line as a cue—but nothing like a record of Letterman’s usage.

The last post is an example. As the time frame for posting “something” on January 20 neared its end, due to the lateness of the hour and the difficulty of the day, I was starting to draw a blank. That in itself could be “something,” properly framed. I searched the internet for traces of “something” and, following the faintest of threads, came up with a 90-minute video I had not previously seen, a virtual screen test from the ontological bunker of aesthetic theory.

This was truly “something,” and suggested an idea for my next post: an account of David Letterman’s routine, were I able to substantiate it. Perhaps it was entirely ephemeral, made up—but the ghost of its effects in the larger culture remain. Chris Vitiello, on Facebook, posted a random entry that showed the way: “Who the **** is Jay Leno?” This may have been the origin of the routine, as I have never understood what Jay Leno is about, if anything.

… More

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January 16, 2010

Entry 06: Sylvia Plath’s Collage

Sylvia Plath, collage, 1960.

Like many who identified with the epochal chasm between The New American Poetry and mainstream verse of the 50s and 60s (whose benchmark anthology was Hall, Pack, and Simpson’s New Poets of England and America), I have been skeptical about Sylvia Plath; the cult of her suicide; the Plath, Sexton, Lowell, Berryman quadriviate; and any kind of confessionalism. As mainstays of workshop writing, these figures set in place terms for the personal lyric that is as close to a norm for verse culture as we have had—to the point that it becomes a cultural norm. But in the period since Plath’s mainstream and feminist reception in the 60s and 70s, much has changed. Lyric poetry has come under pressure from Language writing, and revisionist contextual and  gendered readings have opened up Plath’s poetics, allowing one to see her negativity as critical and cultural, not simply formal and expressive.

… More

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January 14, 2010

Entry 05: Criticizing the Poet/Critic

In today’s mail came the current Critical Inquiry (36, no. 2; Winter 2010), which I earlier noticed would contain an essay on George Oppen (John Wilkinson, “The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and Glitter in the Poetry of George Oppen”). I had been looking forward to that discussion with interest, in terms of Oppen but also of where poetry criticism seems to be going in CI, after some recent questionable efforts. “Poetry” itself is still a tarnished critical category, with the New Lyric Studies and Conceptual Writing failing to provide direction.

Flipping through, as one might likely do, scanning footnotes and catching the drift, I came up short at the penultimate paragraph: a strained mention of my Constructivist Moment in the service of—what point? That the split between Oppen’s poetics of “integrity” and his Left politics remains problematic, pointing to a tendency in American poetics to presume a convergence of politics and form that collapses under scrutiny? This is the quote:

The fantasy entertained by Barrett Watten of an American “constructivist moment” seeks to arrogate William Carlos Williams and Vladimir Mayakovsky as dialectically linked forefathers for Language Poetry. Watten seems ignorant of the two poets’ meeting in an apartment in East Fourteenth Street in Greenwich Village on 19 September 1925. Mayakovsky’s reading was a profound experience for Williams, according to his biographer—a touchstone for epic revolutionary art exposing the bombast of Carl Sandburg, even if its influence cannot be discerned directly in Williams’s poetry. But Williams continued to publish both poetry and prose through the Depression and the period of the Cultural Front . . . . (237–38).

… More

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January 12, 2010

Entry 04: Computer Visualization

One should inscribe the letter A on the heart of one’s shadow.
[Next], without blinking, one should gaze fixedly at the latter A [drawn] at the heart [of the shadow],
And focus one’s awareness upon [the letter A].
Then, once the eyes have grown numb [through strain],
One should look up into the center of the cloudless sky,
At which time one’s own form should become visible in the sky.
One should then know that if the head and body of this [reflected image] are intact, and [the image] is pale in colour,
This is an auspicious sign that there will be no obstacles and that one will not die [imminently].

—Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Gyurme Dorje (159)

GLOSS: in the midst of computer malfunction, visualization exercizes restore a sense of well being. Computers are machines for visualization exercizes, but these must not be accepted as automatic. The letter A stands out beyond the dysfunctional interface. One should stare at the computer until the eyes grow numb and the screen itself disappears. When the screen disappears, one’s own form is made visible. This is the letter A on the heart of one’s shadow.

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January 7, 2010

Entry 03: Mala cosa

This entry takes the place of a previous one, which turned out to be a gateway for malware. I wanted to undertake a small conceptual project, after posting Asa’s logo of Detroit “rising from the ashes,” of searching for the words “deterritorializing Detroit” and putting up the results, for use later perhaps. I did so, and listed the top ten entries, with descriptive copy: theory and techno, Arab Detroit and hiphop, globalization and Fordism were among the links.

The next morning I clicked on one, a theory blog that connected Deleuze and Guattari with Detroit techno. I checked a music site for Drexciya, a techno group from the 90s that has since disbanded—this was the entry point for the malware, which crashed the firewall and set up a fake virus protection program that simulated a virus scan, posted the results, and demanded payment as protection from further threats. Every action I took to bypass it resulted in an error message that said “program infected” or produced another popup.

… More

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