September 3, 2017

Document 66: The Bungalows

[In memory of John Ashbery]

ashbery collage 01

THE BUNGALOWS

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they,
The presumed landscape and the dream of home
Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,
Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes
Became so extraneous and so near
To create a foreground of quiet knowledge
In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that
Will sign for old age
And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.

… More

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August 20, 2017

Event 81: I Met (Imagined Theatres)

Imagined Theatres:
Writing for a Theoretical Stage
Edinburgh International Book Festival
17 August 2017

Imagined Theatres cover

Daniel Sack
Dominika Laster
Michael McMillan
Carla Harryman
Jen Harvie

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Document 65: The Trouble with Occupy

from “The Trouble with Occupy:
Materialism, Transvaluation, and the Symbolic”

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.” Occupy poets both participated in the event of Occupy but also continued it as an event through their work, which to a degree anticipated the event in providing terms drawn from poetry. At the center of the Occupy movement was a poetics, one that is not merely represented by its poets or reflected in their work. The spontaneity of decision making, the refusal of hierarchical structures, the advocacy of a “transvaluation of all values” without concrete political goals, the temporal and spatial forms of the movement, its self-understanding as exemplary as much as practical—all point toward a constructivist poetics in which there are no prior givens or certain grounds. My writing on Occupy poetry, too, has had an evental character; what follows develops a sequence of paradigms over several conference presentations and publications as political events continued to unfold. It has not been sufficiently noted that a shift in the register of politics as “event” from Occupy in 2011 to the 2012 reelection of Barack Obama effectively ended the active phase of the movement; since that time, it has persisted as a political imaginary that has been both absorbed into political developments like the Sanders campaign and preserved in an ongoing articulation of poetics and political theory. … More

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August 19, 2017

Event 80: I Met (MSA 19)

Modernist Studies Association
Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam
10–13 August 2017

Questions of the Present
in Contemporary Poetics
1.20 Veilingzaal, 13 August 2017

Stephanie Anderson
Louis Bury
Tomasz Cieslak-Sokolowski
George Fragopoulos
Alan Golding
Kristin Grogan
Franziska Ruprecht
Joshua Schuster
Wendy Truran
Samuel Vriezen
Tyrone Williams
Mia You
… More

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July 24, 2017

Document 64: Reinstate Georgette Fleischer!

Georgette Fleischer is a scholar of modernist studies and, until recently, adjunct faculty at Barnard College, where she taught in the First Year Foundations and the English Department for 17 years. She is a vociferous advocate for union organizing of contingent labor and was instrumental in organizing Barnard Contingent Faculty, local 2110 of the UAW/United Auto Workers. Clearly in connection with her organizing activities, she has been terminated by Barnard College, using a concession in the very contract she negotiated to do so.

The situation of adjunct faculty nationwide is a scandal that has affected academia at every level and is a major factor in the continuing decline of higher education. We must broadly support the right of contingent faculty to organize; to earn a living not a subsistence wage; to be fairly evaluated and not subjected to arbitrary procedures; to have access to security of employment; to achieve professional dignity in otherwise increasingly hierarchical institutions; and finally to participate fully and openly in academic inquiry and public advocacy without risk of censorship or punishment.

Georgette Fleischer is a courageous advocate for all these rights, and her case touches on all of them. She was instrumental in organizing contingent faculty at Barnard after having endured a decade and a half of substandard wages, lack of opportunities for advancement or security, lack of recognition for the intellectual and pedagogical contribution she has made, and exposure to arbitrary procedures. It is obvious from the history of her teaching and organizing at Barnard that she has been singled out as a “squeaky wheel,” a voice that refused to be silenced, a gadfly that kept returning to the struggle.

Her union organizing history has been summarized in detail in online articles, and there is now a Facebook page for BCF-UAW, with numerous support letters. See the following:

“An Inconvenient Adjunct,” by Colleen Flaherty. Inside Higher Education, 9 June 2017; click here.

BCF-UAW 2110 Facebook page, with numerous supporting posts; click here.

Barnard Contingent Faculty, letter to the President of Barnard College; click here.

“When Unfair Labor Relations Reify, It’s Time to Strike” by Georgette Fleischer. The Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) Contingent Faculty Blog, 25 September 2016; click here.

… More

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July 22, 2017

Event 79: Processing DE (2017)

Munich, 4–8 July 2017

Tuesday, July 4 

Delta Airlines / DTW > MUC

Franziska Ruprecht

Thomas Struth, Frank Bowling,
Hans Haacke, Free Music Production
@ Haus der Kunst

Wednesday, July 5

Meike Zwingenberger
Markus Faltermeier

Guest class on Language, conceptual,
performative, and digital poetries
with Franziska Ruprecht
Amerika Institut, LMU Munich

Kim Kügler
Julin Lee
Xiaoxiong Lin
Florian Roelen

Thursday, July 6

Klaus Benesch

“Plan B in Munich”
Reading at JYM Munich
with Franziska Ruprecht … More

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July 21, 2017

Document 53: Reprobate

William_Blake's_Cain_and_Abel

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

reprobate n. M16 1 A person rejected by God; a person who has fallen from grace. M16. b collect. pl. The people rejected by God and thus denied salvation. M16. 2 An unprincipled person; a person of loose or immoral character. L16. 2 S. O’Casey Gimme money, y’oul’ reprobate!

reprobate a. L15. 1 Rejected by God; hardened in sin. L15. b Lacking religious or moral obligation; condemned as worthless, inferior, or impure. M17. 2 Rejected or condemned as worthless, inferior, or impure. Now rare. M16. 3 Depraved, degraded, morally corrupt. Also foll. by to. M16–M18. 4 Deserving of condemnation or reproof; appropriate to reprobates. E17–L18. 2 J. Spencer A great deal of reprobate Silver which . . . looks like Sterling.

reprobate v.t. LME. 1 Disapprove of, censure, condemn. LME. 2 Of God: reject or condemn (a person); exclude from salvation. L15. 3 Reject, refuse, put aside. E17. b Law (chiefly Sc.). Reject (an instrument or deed) as not binding. E18. 1 H. L. Wilson Especially reprobated by the matrons of the correct set. G. Gorer Whether premarital experience is advocated or reprobated. 2 G. Lavington Look upon themselves as reprobated, and forsaken of God. 3b approbate and reprobate: see APPROBATE 2.

… More

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July 3, 2017

Document 52: Plan B

Plan B is Poem of the Week!

plan b broadside 1

plan b broadside 2

Mark Olival-Bartley has published the first 22 (of 101) tercets of “Plan B,” my poem refusing normalization after the 2016 election, in his Poem of the Week series in Munich. I will read it, and Franziska Ruprecht will perform the poem in German translation, along with other work, on Thursday, July 6, 7:30 PM, at the JYM in Munich. Click here for more information.

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June 27, 2017

Event 78: Plan B in München

plan b munich flyer

Barrett Watten will read “Plan B,” a poem written in the aftermath of our national catastrophe, over four days in which the intensity of distorted discourse, media frenzy, and psychological projection fused in a mass of contradictions so real one could simply reach out and grab them to make a poem. The resulting work stands as a kind of “knowledge base” for the symbolic detritus of the election and the state of political crisis it produced. The keyword Gleichschaltung is drawn from the German experience of 1933 and is used as a “discrepant analogy” to the imperative not to “normalize” the result of the election—an imperative that continues for many. Both terms appear at regular intervals through the poem. Also evoked is the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald—a 1975 maritime disaster on the Great Lakes (and ballad by Gordon Lightfoot) that is iconic for residents of Michigan, for whom it represents the destruction of the state as well as the wreck itself. One might immediately compare this reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland to achieve the kinds of discrepant analogy the poem explores. For the reading in Munich, performance poet Franziska Ruprecht has translated “Plan B” into German, which she will perform. The reading will also present other texts evoking poetry as a “knowledge base,” on the one hand, and as record of catastrophe, on the other.

See above for details; click on image to download flyer. 

 

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June 25, 2017

Event 77: I Met (ecopoetics)

Association for the Study
of Literature and the Environment
Wayne State University
20–24 June 2016

Offsite reading @ N-Space
23 June 2016

Linda Russo
Brenda Iijima
Megan Kaminski
Marthe Reed
Joshua Schuster
Adam Dickinson
Lynn Keller
Evelyn Reilly
Angela Hume
cris cheek
Tyrone Williams
… More

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