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January 20, 2013

Document 20: Modernism and Value

Modernism and the Abstraction of Value:
Poetry and Political Economy in transition (1927-38)

During this recent era, linguistic understandings of political economy found purchase for a wealth of reasons, many of which have a grounding in actual conditions. Nonetheless [. . .] the literarity of such conceptions ended up participating in, and sometimes generating, serious analytic errors . . . . The misrecognitions of value engendered by modes of literarity thus pose a radical limit to the history of the present. —Joshua Clover, “Value/Theory/Crisis” (107, 109)

[Introduction]

In my lecture at the Poetry of the 70s conference at University of Maine (under the rubric “Late Capitalism and Language Writing”; 2008), I made a strong claim that the “turn to language” in poetry must be seen as simultaneously a response to the emergent horizon of neo­liberalism after 1973 along with an anticipatory illumination, undertaken at the level of form, of what the new order of intensified commodification and mobility of capital would look like—and how it might be comprehended and opposed. … More

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January 7, 2013

Document 19: Books @MLA/Gloucester

[for Sarah Ruddy]

In lieu of a list of resolutions for the New Year, a bibliography of books acquired at the recent MLA in Boston and on a side trip to Gloucester may point toward some of its promises.

Modernism

Isherwood, Christopher. Goodbye to Berlin. New York: New Directions, 2012. New ed. in single volume.

Walser, Robert. The Assistant. Trans. Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions, 2007.

———. Microscripts. Trans. Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions/Christine Burgin, 2012.

Post-1945

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot/En attendant Godot: A Bilingual Edition. 1952/1953. New York: Grove Press, n.d.

Perec, Georges. La Boutique obscure: 124 Dreams. Trans. Daniel Levin Becker. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2012. Advance copy.

Modernity

Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotton Holocaust of World War II. 1997; New York: Basic Books, 2012.

… More

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June 30, 2012

Document 18: D/Books/Annotated

[in memory of Ron Allen]

Returning to Detroit from Germany, I continued my frenzy for discovery in an afternoon session at John K. King Books, a monument to the material text located off a ramp of the Lodge Freeway, just beyond downtown Detroit. I think of John K. King as a kind of mine, much like one I visited in Germany, where one laboriously seeks an ore-bearing vein from the base substrate (of pulp fiction, back issues, technical manuals, legal handbooks, and so on). On the day I visited, the poetry vein was productive, as will be evident from the finds below.

Numerous personal associations surround these discoveries. Josephine Miles was the only woman faculty in the English Department at Berkeley in the 60s and wrote for my admission to the Iowa Writers Workshop. She pioneered the use of quantitative methods (word counting) in the study of poetry; the two volumes are the major results of her work. Christopher Caudwell is a now forgotten Marxist anti-modernist critic whose work I read, likely in this edition, in the 70s. Philip Whalen’s On Bear’s Head has always been a mystery as an object; how could such a mass of jottings find their way through a New York publisher? A similar mystery attends Clark Coolidge’s 1970 Space, from Harper & Row. Ronald Gross’s Pop Poems ought to be on any canonical list of conceptual writing, as it antedates that movement by forty years. Gross would take banal ad copy and other socially inflected messages and versify them, anticipating the work of Rob Fitterman and his “rubber duck” catalogue poem. … 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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June 24, 2012

Document 17: DE/Exhibitions and Events

[for Carla Harryman]

The following chronology documents two weeks of intensive travels in the zone of the aesthetic, under the aspect of the political, in Germany. I accompanied Carla Harryman, who had been invited to present a lecture in the closing week of documenta and was a credentialed participant for the preview, for the first week, and then continued on alone through Munich, Nuremberg, Jena, Leipzig, to Berlin. Annotations will be added to the entries, as time permits.

Monday, June 4

JFK > FRA.

Tuesday, June 5

“Auf dem Goetheweg zum Brocken.” Nationalpark Harz, Torfhaus, Lower Saxony.

Grenzmuseum, Sorge, Lower Saxony.

Wednesday, June 6

Weltkulturerbe Rammelsberg, Museum und Besucherbergwerk, Goslar.

“Der Andere Blick: Alltagswelten von Martin Parr, Tim Wood, Antanas Sutkus.” Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar.

documenta 13, Kassel. Preview.

Thursday, June 7

documenta 13, Kassel. Fridericianum.

“On the Kabul-Bamiyan Seminars and Exhibition.” Conversation with Christine Christov-Bakargiev, Chus Martinez, and artists. Ständehaus.

… More

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Document 16: DE/Books

[for Donna Stonecipher]

Over two weeks in June, I traveled to eight German cities—Frankfurt, Goslar, Kassel, Munich, Nuremberg (including Erlangen and Fürth), Jena, Leipzig and Berlin—attended the opening of documenta 13; saw many related exhibitions and attended lectures and readings; presented a seminar at the University of Erlangen; bicycled, walked, and rode public transportation; and scanned for books. The list below documents the extent of my interests on what ended up as a research trip focusing on critical theory, poetics, and exhibitions. I will return in September for a second look at documenta, and to attend Carla Harryman’s closing keynote lecture, a re-presentation in poetic/musical form of Adorno’s 1959 lecture on New Music at documenta 2.

Critical theory

Adorno,  Theodor W. Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft  (1964). Ed. Tobias ten Brink and Marc Phillip Noguera. Nachgelassene Schriften, Vorlesungen, vol. 12.  Frankfurt am Main:  Suhrkamp, 2008. [Purchased at Buchladen zur schwankenden Weltkugel, Kastanienallee, Berlin]

Harman,  Graham. The Third Table/Der Dritte Tisch. 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, no.  85. Ostfildern, Germ.: Hatje Cantz, 2012. [documenta, Kassel]

Hawel,  Marcus, and Moritz Blanke, eds. Kritische Theorie: Der Krise. Berlin:  Karl Dietz, 2012. [Buchladen zur schwankenden Weltkugel]

Mann,  Thomas, & Theodor W. Adorno. An Exchange/Ein Austausch. 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, no. 50. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. [documenta]

Mitscherlich,  Alexander, ed. Das beschädigte Leben: Diagnose und Therapie in einer Welt  unabsehbar Veränderungen. Grenzach/Baden, Germ.: Hoffman-La Roche, 1969. [Arkonaplatz,  Prenzlauerberg, Berlin]

Poetry  and poetics

Krutschonych,  Alexei (Alexei Kruchyonik). Phonetik des Theaters (1925). Ed. Valeri Scherstjanoi. Leipzig: Reinecke & Voß, 2011. [Lettrétage, Methfesselstraße, Berlin]

Reinecke,  Bertram. Sleutel voor de hoogduitsche Spraakkunst, ed. Ulf Stolterfoht.  Leipzig, Berlin, and Solothurn: roughbook, 2012. [Lettrétage]

… More

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April 2, 2012

Event 28: I Met (ACLA)

onkawara 01

I Met (ACLA)
American Comparative Literature Association
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
30 March–1 April 2012
After On Kawara

Omaar Hena
Nathan Suhr-Systma
Jim Cocola
Matthew Nelson
Sonya Posmentier
… More

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August 16, 2011

Document 15: What Is Literature? (FR)

Two publications I brought back from France this summer, both of which I would like to consider (and question) as possible definitions of “the literary”—after a quote from Jacques Rancière (cited by Omar Berrada): “L’homme est un animal politique parce qu’il est un animal littéraire, qui se laisse détourner de sa destination ‘naturelle” par le pouvoir des mots.” At which I asked, “How broad is “literature” for Rancière? Why would he not say, simply, “language”—or language in a certain sense?” Let us imagine two versions of “the literary” are represented by the above works: one a critical history of the international avant-garde journal transition, by modernist literary historian Céline Mansanti, and the other the catalogue of a stunning exhibition of politics, culture, and literature under the Occupation and during the Resistance. My thesis is that the “literary” should include both options, and I would go so far as to speculate that the “literary” in the French postwar period takes its fundamental bearings from the condition of print culture during the period of “national” instability. Hence my question of Rancière: is this the “literary” in the sense of the quote (“un animal littéraire”), or is there a more encompassing usage—something like “language,” as I suggested.

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August 6, 2011

Document 14: Nowa Poezja Amerykansky (Anthology)

Nowa poezja amerykanska (New American Poetry), special issue of Literatura na swiecie (Warsaw) no. 11–12 (2010). Featuring poetry translated into Polish by Lyn Hejinian, Tony Hoagland, Elizabeth Willis, Peter Gizzi, Lisa Jarnot, Harryette Mullen, Forrest Gander, Cole Swensen, Barrett Watten, John Yau, and David Schubert; with essays, reviews, and interviews; www.literaturanaswiecie.art.pl.

… More

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