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 4, 2010

Document 10: Girl Scout Nation

Sampling a fragment from Yedda Morrison’s Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Press, 2008); cf. trauma in the previous post. In Morrison’s work trauma is distributed, refunctioned, “naturalized.” Poet and ideal reader become identified the inviolable/violated figure of the Girl Scout who must see behind nature’s naturalization, where she finds:

in that stalker suit you’re hard to see         
tracking prey against the wind         
song of the bludgeoned Killdeer         
oft empty twang         
(we didn’t see it)         

one looks for clues in the natural world         
when girls go missing         
for example the hair wad smells woodsy         

… More

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February 3, 2010

Link 08: Reznikoff Reads Holocaust

from Research

A number of Jews had to drink seawater only
to find out how long they could stand it.
In their torment
they threw themselves on the mops and rags
used by the hospital attendants
and sucked the dirty water out of them
to quench the thirst
driving them man.

—Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust, 9–10

How might such a poem be read?

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Reznikoff-Holocaust.php

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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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February 1, 2010

Document 09: A Propos Frame

from Frame

Multicolored piles of gravel on black asphalt
behind rows of aluminum sheds.

We put frames around anything we wish.

In one version, wild dogs go for each other’s
throats (they assume the optimal to exist).

Unoccupied territory between opposing sides.

Matter of interest unfolds as a story.
Conflicts put on the table for debate.

—Frame: 1971–1990, 260         

The parergon stands out [se détache] both from the ergon [the work] and from the milieu, it stands out first like a figure on a ground. But it does not stand out in the same way as the work. The latter also stands out against a ground. But the parergonal frame stands out against two grounds [fonds], but with respect to each of those two grounds, it merges [se fond] into the other. With respect to the work which can serve as a ground for it, it merges into the wall [on which the painting is hung], and then, gradually, into the general text. … More

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January 31, 2010

Link 07: Displaced Agency in Social Space

In a FaceBook post today, Bay Area artist Scott MacLeod began a thread that concerns me directly and which I will paste here, along with an explanation and answer to his query:

Scott MacLeod: Complete the following: “Displaced agency in social space becomes nearly filmic in its sutured continuity—and the meaning of this temporal autonomy of signification is _____________.” [Barrett Watten]

Miekel And: screen burn

Jakub Calouseque: sequestering of dour libido

Barrett Watten: the Dream Cruise.

… More

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January 30, 2010

Event 06: Presentism and Periodization

“Presentism and Periodization in Language Writing, Conceptual Art,
          and Conceptual Writing”

Panel on “Post-Presentism” with Jonathan Eburne
ASAP/Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
23–24 October 2009, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Knoxville, TN

 

On Kawara, Oct. 23, 1989, oil on board.

 

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January 29, 2010

Event 05: Poet/Critic in Expanded Field

“The Expanded Object of the Poetic Field; or, What Is a Poet/Critic?”

Keynote address, Poetry and Public Language, University of Plymouth, U.K., March 2007; in Poetry and Public Language, ed. Tony Lopez and Anthony Caleshu (Exeter, U.K.: Shearsman Press, 2007). Publicity flyer/ordering information here; the essay can be accessed in pdf here.

In March 2007, Lyn Hejinian and I were invited by U.K. poet Tony Lopez to lecture at a poetics conference at the University of Plymouth (see links above). My talk addressed transformations in the nature of the poem as object, and employed in terms of the relation of poet and critic, using a series of works from my own oeuvre. The claim that one could speak as both poet and critic proved to be controversial in England, where distinct roles must be perserved as, respectively, object-producing and value-conferring. … More

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January 28, 2010

Image 06: Portrait of the Artist as Engineer

Life magazine commissioned a series of photodocumentary essays for the “Life Science Library” in the mid 60s. I discovered this image quite by accident, several years after it was published and I had left MIT for Berkeley. That is the 17-year-old present author at far right.

From The Engineer, Life Science Library (New York, 1966), 89.

(In memory of Jeanne Alderton Watten Agnew, 19 April 1926–28 January 1990.)

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January 27, 2010

Link 06: 4′ 33″ for Large Orchestra

The details are all in this performance of John Cage’s 4′ 33″ for large orchestra, conducted by Lawrence Foster, the Barbican Center, London, 2004. Thanks to Joseph Coates for the link.

 John Cage, 4′ 33″

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