February 7, 2021

Archive 11: On Going Down Dignified

Working through has never had a clearer usage than to “work through an archive,” which is now my task virtually on a daily basis. Things emerge from files and folders with breathtaking immediacy, though in actuality they have been there all along—a form of latency that is also a structure of the present. An archive, in my experience, is not a thing of the past; we are constituted in the present by our archives. This notion of archive is distinct from memory—a memory can pop up at any time, prompted by as little as a similarity in sound or image or even a proximity in neural networking. I remember walking to our black Chevrolet in a San Leandro parking lot coming out of a Five and Dime store with my mother in 1956. An archive is more logically or interpretively or thematically structured; it has a filing system that is a product of labor, vertically organizing materials in their lateral connections to form a network that begins in the archived past but extends to the present. Just so, I was organizing a set of files to be accessed under subhead 5.3.3.1 “Discussions and controversies: literary/artistic,” of which I have seen many. I open the file marked “Georgia Review” to organize/distribute its contents in three records:

5.3.3.1. controversy (1981). NEA/Georgia Review
letters following publication of “Go Down Dignified: The NEA Writing Fellowships” [see also 5.2.2.1981.1–1982.1]
MASTERS and WILK articles, w introduction, xer, 14 pp.
D’SOUZA article, sent by FRANK CONROY to MARY MACARTHUR and LYN HEJINIAN, xer w notes, 9 pp.
BW > GEORGIA REVIEW, tcb, 5 ppl.; drafts, tcb, 3 pp.; > BILL HENDERSON (PUSHCART PRESS), tcb, 1 p., 1 cp.; > JEANETTA JONES MILLER (SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION), tcb, 1 p.; > BILL BERKSON, 2 tcb, 3 pp.; > THOMAS M. MEYER (attorney), tcb, 1 p.; DAVID WILK, tcb, 1 p.; FRANK CONROY (NEA), tcb, 2 pp.; STANLEY W. LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW), tcb, 3 pp., 2 cp.
BERKSON > GEORGIA REVIEW, tcb w BW edits, 10 pp.; > LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW), 2 tlx, 5 pp.; > BW, als and tls, 2 pp.
LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW) > BW, tls, 1 p.; > BERKSON, 2 tlx, 3 pp.
WILK > BW, tlx, 2 pp.
HEJINIAN > HENDERSON (PUSHCART PRESS), tcb w hm note, 1 p.
HENDERSON > BW, tls, 1 p.
JENNIFER MOYER (CCLM) > BERKSON, tlx, 1 p.
MARY MACARTHUR (NEA) > BW, tls, 1 p.
BW notes, hm, 1 p.; mailing rects, 5 pcs.

… More

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January 10, 2021

Entry 43: Rolling Out Plan B


These are the words that conclude “Plan B,” my poem written after the Trump election in 2016. What has transpired since could not have been more like—turbulence has been destiny, our demography is in pieces, and nothing is decided. It is that moment of stoppage—”the stopping / of the battle,” as Charles Olson wrote—that I wanted to get down, as my contribution to radical democracy perhaps. But even the concept of “radical democracy” is not now decided—that is in the nature of a decision—with the spectacle of the “mob” thinking it represents the demos violating “the People’s House,” as we have been told and can see for ourselves. My point is the instability of the moment, but also that of the discourse that represents it or attempts to intervene in it. Is that a good thing for poetry, to record such a moment, or a bad thing for politics, that its confusions may be reproduced? … More

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December 25, 2020

Entry 42: Hello, Indiana!

On 4 December, this year, I was emailed by John Pratt, English teacher at Greensburg High School in Indiana, asking if I would read for his program (virtually), and send a shout out to the students. Greensburg has experienced two waves of COVID and was forced to return to all-online classes; the readings would be an end-of-year bonus for students. I also see it as an effort to communicate between “regions” of the pandemic: Indiana, a red state with huge uptick in cases in December, and Michigan, a blue state where a similar surge was somewhat damped but still compares with other Midwestern states, as I know from the Michigan Coronavirus page [here].

With a population of 11,000, our small town of Greensburg Indiana was hit hard by the pandemic in March and last week it returned with full force. Once again Greensburg High School has been moved to virtual learning. As one of our teachers, I have launched a campaign to provide an inspiring lesson for our over 700 students. It is called The Bucket List—Our Greatest Poets. I have sought out those who I feel would inspire us with a few words. Would you be willing to read a poem for my students? Simply tape yourself saying who you are, give a shout out to Greensburg High School students, then read a poem. Thank you for your consideration and have a great week.

No problem, you bet. On 14 December, I recorded a section from my poem of the COVID duration, “Notzeit (After Hannah Höch),” with a short exhortation to the students to write about what they have learned from strange times:

John Pratt, in turn, posted the video to his Virtual Chautauqua page [here], which provides links to the fifteen poets who responded; I was pleased to see myself in company with Eileen Myles, Martín Espada, and other poets new to me. The readings are marvelous, unified by the prospect of speaking to youth across time zones, and worth the time clicking through. … More

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November 16, 2020

Archive 10: Lewis Warsh in This

Yesterday I received news that New York poet Lewis Warsh has died. He had been ill, I heard from a distance, and I had sent birthday greetings earlier in the month—unanswered. We had a kind of  . . . rivalrous, or contestatory, poetic conversation over the decades, concerning basic issues of what counts as poetry, what the poetic calling is. The issue was person versus language, if a bit characterized and reduced. We go way back. I met Lewis in Albion, California, up the coast in California, the summer of 1972. I had moved there with Sandy Berrigan, David, and Kate, and Lewis visited on his way down to Bolinas, where I would also see him, and later in Stinson Beach, sharing a beach house with the cartoonist Greg Irons. When I assumed full editorship of This in 1973, taking a turn toward more complex aesthetics, he sent me several works, which I have scanned below. He would have sent them from Cambridge, where he lodged briefly after the West Coast. We wrote a collaboration (now in the archive), and he published my autobiographical writings—some exceptionally raw—in the “Autobiography” issue of The World (28), with its larger than life format and cover drawing by Alex Katz, New York School period style for sure. For the issue of This (4), he sent three works (he had a particular way of calling poems “works,” each being unique):

… More

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October 31, 2020

Archive 09: WCW on Poetic Agency

Working through my archive, a copy of the above letter from William Carlos Williams, dated “April 29” and addressed to a “Rubenstein,” turned up. Given the degraded quality of the Xerox, it must have been passed around from hand to hand, and is now far removed from its origins. I have no idea how it came into my possession; my impulse was to distribute it forthwith as widely as possible, given our situation four days before a decisive political event. It does not appear in Williams’s Selected Letters, but an article from the William Carlos Williams Review (here) gives a thumbnail history. The addressee is Richard Rubenstein, editor of a little magazine The Gryphon, a poet associated with the emerging Beat movement in San Francisco who died of the effects of psychiatric treatment in 1958. The date is 29 April 1950, at which time Williams was recently investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for his association, I now believe is likely, with Popular Front groups in the Spanish Civil War but reputedly for his friendship with Ezra Pound, which resulted in his being denied appointment as the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress in 1949. In its resistance to the “stupidity” of “political dogma,” Williams writes: “A mind accustomed to the poem as it is gradually being understood can never be quite as deceived by the testimony of the scurrilous liars who beset us as they could have been had we not had the poem to test them against.” Four days before our opportunity to run the scurrilous liars out of power, his words have a new force.  … More

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October 25, 2020

Archive 08: Message @ Destination

View of Centerville.

Would be delighted to see you, here, in the near future.
Mrs. Wm. A. Keune

[Hika Wis. Aug 17 1906]

Mrs. Emil Plantz, Milwaukee, Wis.
1120 Richard Str.

Fucked up. Left the place
without picking up a
pouch. Got rattled had
to be aware of three people.
My brother in law is here
again. Had more Pins to
send but a friend here
cut his finger on his saw
and needed money so I had
to go get this and sell
some Pins to get
instant bread.
Nothing is choice except for
a pin or 2 and the Brown
vaseline bag is
intact. Perhaps Barbra
can salvage something.

… More

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October 1, 2020

Document 89: Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour

CALL FOR PAPERS

Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour:
European, American, Transnational

American Comparative Literature Association
Virtual conference, 8–11 April 2021

This seminar continues the work of “Modernism @ Zero Hour,” focusing on European, American, and transnational avant-gardes after the epochal moment of “Zero Hour,” 1945. At a moment of crisis and renewal, modernity is disclosed in a process of “systemic detotalization” that new avant-garde tendencies interrogated in forms of mimetic activity, at once preservative and self-undoing. The destruction of European cities, the displacement of peoples, the end of colonial empires, political and economic antagonisms, the specter of mass extermination, but also new cultural freedoms are enacted in a broad range of aesthetic, philosophical, and political forms, differing substantially from the historical avant-garde. What was “new” in 1945 was to see the world as it had never been, as a locus of destruction and creation on a global scale. Seminar topics could include transnational routes for the avant-garde: the global influences of surrealism and existentialism; the ethical imperatives of “bare life” and abstraction; the eruption of absurdism; cross-racial aesthetic motives and possibilities; the circulation of new cultural forms such as American jazz in Europe or New Wave film in the U.S.; the tension between avant-gardes, state formations, and ex/repatriation; and aesthetic movements of the global South that oppose the spatial hierarchy of prior avant-gardes. In each instance, radical form addresses modernity in crisis and the inauguration of a new global order in unique ways.

Submit proposals to ACLA by Saturday, October 31
For ACLA portal, click here; for seminars, click here
Contact barrett.watten@gmail.com for more information

Image: Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, No. 583, 30 April 1957

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September 26, 2020

Archive 07: The Hegemony of Language

Twenty years on, it is timely to reread the kind of discourse—or brazen publicity—that was circulated about Language writing and the academy, and indeed the entire project of poetics that was imagined as their synthesis, about 2000. In the two decades that followed, everything has changed in terms of the “horizon of expectation” that led to this premature discussion of the dominance of Language writing in the academy; in 2020, I will say confidently from my experience, and what I know of others’, that such a thing never happened. Perhaps it was meant not to happen, and the provocative title page to the September 2000 article in Lingua Franca by Andrew Epstein may be the reason why. As I work through my archive, I am finding numerous such signposts to futurity that did not arrive, while at the time I was caught up in the process, let us charitably say, of negotiating the “stakes at the table” of the future of Language writing. Why this discourse was misdirected, and for whose interests, will be the substance of my reading below; those interested may find, in the interest of time travel, the full text of the article here.  … More

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Entry 41: Failed Mail Art Piece

Reflective  sandboxing of software code within a machine built to parse it is seen in the case of a computer language like Java which must be compiled and  then run as bytecode inside a special runtime environment, or, as with the language C, compiled and then run as “native” machine instructions, or with a simple mark-up language like HTML the specifications for which must be entirely designed into any browser destined to interpret and display it, or also with other interpreted code such as a three-dimensional model whose mathematical values for vertices and textures must be transcoded according to the rules of a given data format and given style of visual projection.

—Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (65)

The distinction between code as executable and language as interpretable has a basic horizon in the question of new meaning. Machinic encoding is not capable of making new meaning—only humans are. But caught in the web of mediated processes (as above), humans often fail to recognize the new—or attempt to transcode it in terms of earlier structures of interpretation. The example of the “failed mail art piece” will illustrate this. … More

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September 16, 2020

Document 88: Crisis @ EAM

The weekend of 17–20 September was to have been seventh in a series of biennial conferences of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM). I have been presenting at EAM since their first meeting in Ghent, Belgium, in 2008. Each of the meetings that followed was remarkable, and opened a window onto new vistas on the aesthetics and politics, in fact the historical importance, of avant-garde and modernist studies—an expanding field that departs significantly from its Eurocentric origins and turns toward postcolonial and post-socialist contexts. The latter was encouraged by meetings in Poznan, Poland, and Helsinki, Finland, where I met a number of Eastern European scholars, and that connection is an important aspect of my organization of a seminar on “Avant-Garde @ Zero Hour.” The seminar was to focus on radical formal innovation in the crisis of the immediate postwar period, seeking different frameworks for the avant-garde than those that define the “historical avant-garde”—seeking a different register of the historical, in fact, one that eschews any form of progressive historicism for the crisis, destruction, discontinuity, and universality that attends the Zero Hour.

As it happened, the conference was canceled due to the current crisis. Much reflection may follow on the nature, and specificity, of “crisis” in its many instances. My proposal for the seminar may be found here; the conference CFP is linked here and above; and below is the line-up for our seminar. I will update this page with a link to full conference program soon; while the organizers have proposed a conference volume on our evolving understanding of crisis, with the avant-garde as both instance and guide.

 

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