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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June 9, 2018

Event 84: Rewiring DE (2018)

berlin detroit event

Berlin, 29 May–7 June 2018

Tuesday, May 29

Delta Airlines / DTW > AMS > TXL

Donna Stonecipher
Jed Rasula
Suzi Wong

Berlin Seminar in Transnational European Studies
@ Palais, Kulturbrauerei

Wednesday, May 30

Donna Stonecipher
Mike Banks

“How Techno Came to Europe: The History of the
Early Detroit-Berlin Exchange and Future Ideas”
with Mike Banks, Mark Ernestus, Dimitri
Hegemann, and Adrian Tonon
@ HAU 1

“Sun Ra Reel-to-Reel Sessions”
with Mike Huckaby, Richard Zepezauer, and Lakuti
@ HAU 2

Strandbad Weissensee … 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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May 6, 2018

Entry 34: Lost America

lost america of love cover ed

The question of my relation to the New Americans over the long decades since the ’70s has recently come up. In working through my last post, a response to a review that framed my 2016 book with a retelling of the poetic debacle of 1978, I linked to an essay I published in 2000 (per copyright date; it likely appeared in 2001) that was, at the time, my critical and historical assessment of some of its major figures: Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan. Duncan (1988) and Dorn (1999) had already passed, and I do not think I sent the essay to Creeley, with whom I maintained good relations at the time (Creeley died in 2005). Creeley tended to glaze when I sent him offprints of my critical writing, for instance the essay on “poetic vocabulary” that links Jackson Mac Low and BASIC English, to which he wrote a one-word response: “Impressive.” Only later did I find, via a comment Creeley dropped in conversation and a letter in his Selected Letters, that BASIC English had been an influence on his work, after a high school teacher asked to write an essay using its minimal vocabulary.

The events of September 2001 decisively changed the focus of thinking through the poetics of the New Americans onto a more immediate political situation; the broad expanses of time needed for genial conversation on poetry and poetics would be displaced by a militarized discourse of threat, reprisal, and nonexistent WMDs. The essay itself was a kind of swerve, using a request from editor Timothy Murphy for a contribution for a volume of the academic journal Genre to be titled “Desert Island Texts,” with a prompt something like, “what one book would you want to have if stranded on a desert island.” … More

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May 5, 2018

Entry 33: The Duncan Thing

boojum

Grant Jenkins opens his review of Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (ALH Online Review, ser. 14:1 [2017]) with an anecdote that has now become canonical lore in American poetry, the encounter between me and Robert Duncan at the San Francisco State Poetry Center’s 1978 Zukofsky memorial. As the story is now forty (4-0) years old, it is more than surprising that it is used to frame a discussion of my 2016 volume of critical poetics, as if no one had ever heard it before:

One of the most infamous events in the history of “postmodern” or “experimental” US poetry is the 1978 argument between Robert Duncan, a veteran of the New American Poetry anthology generation who was 59 at the time, and upstart Barrett Watten, then the 30-year-old self-fashioned cofounder of the more recent school of modernist-inflected verse called “Language poetry.” The incident took place during a film screening at the San Francisco Poetry Center memorializing the “objectivist” poet, Louis Zukofsky, who had recently died at 74. According to most accounts, Duncan interrupted Watten because he did not like the younger poet’s reading of Zukofsky’s poetry.

… More

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April 21, 2018

Entry 32: For Kara Walker

kara walker 01

Context is everything. To begin with, there is the question of intent in the circulation of racialized images, and the way racism may be ascribed to them. To display racialized imagery in America is to open a Pandora’s Box of every conceivable projection and denial. This is not to separate intention from context, but to find ways of reading it that are contextual and historical. Pandora’s Box is an apt metaphor for the racial content of Kara Walker’s work. There was an incident, about a dozen years ago, when her work was to be first shown at the then-quite-stodgy Detroit Institute of Arts. Think of the recent film Get Out as another of Pandora’s Box—the basement and its horror of substitute body parts. Kara Walker was new to Detroit, and the DIA was still a bastion of cultural separatism in the city. In the film, black bodies are used as vehicles for whiteness that has run out its biological course and needs new life. Off hours, a black janitor encountered the work during installation and complained; the show was cancelled. A state of mind called “the sunken place” is introduced in the film as the horror of racial subjectivity. This is the kind of textbook case that organizations such as the National Coalition Against Censorship deal with all the time, from Huckleberry Finn to the controversy of Vanessa Place tweeting 140-line texts from Gone with the Wind. On the other hand, the contrast between that moment to the ramp up of Kara Walker’s career in museums could not be more marked. The art world itself is represented in the form of a blind gallery owner lusting for authentic talent. … More

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March 31, 2018

Document 70: Poetics as Value Thinking

Poetics as Value Thinking:
The Example of “Plan B”

BB Barrett Watten flyer
Wednesday, 4 April 2018, 12:30–1:30 PM
2339 F/AB, Wayne State University

This lecture is a hybrid of two thought experiments—one, a discussion of the poetics of value that sees political economy and poetics as twin forms of historically specific making, linked discourses of the determination of value. The second is a proposal for the transvaluation of poetics, and specifically Language and conceptual writing, as prospective organizations of poetic labor as a form of a “knowledge base” (adopted from information and digital theory). … More

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Document 69: Six Moments of Occupy

Six Moments of Occupy:
Transvaluations of the Symbolic

Humanities Center Faculty Fellows Symposium
Wayne State University, 23 March 2018

[excerpt from the introduction] 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.” To begin with, the concept of “revolution” in Occupy—as distinct from other specific moments such as Tahrir Square or anti-austerity Greece—oscillates between “radical particularity” of material conditions (such that every local instance of Occupy, from Zucotti Park to to Oakland to Paris to Moscow, could be seen to have substantially different strategies and goals) and a utopian horizon that must be preserved as an abstract totality: “We are the 99%.” … More

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March 16, 2018

Document 68: Third Factory

“Third Factory: Avant-Garde,
Social Construction, and Ideology in the Soviet 20s”

European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM)
Universität Münster, 5–7 September 2018

For this year’s EAM, centered the theme of “Realisms of the Avant-Garde and Modernism,” I propose to organize a panel or multi-session series of panels that would revisit the relation of the avant-garde to social construction. Such a project would necessarily be revisionist, in deepening but questioning the role of the avant-garde in the project of social construction, particularly after new archival materials and critical perspectives have become available. But it would also try to refocus interest on the Soviet 20s as scene of a coordinated Gesamtkunstwerk beyond individual artists, works, groupings, or genres that has continued relevance for a global, mediated, ideologically distorted world. … 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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