March 19, 2021

Document 91: Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour

Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour: European, American, Transnational
Monday, April 5–Wednesday, April 7

A virtual colloquy featuring 16 scholars, writers, artists
& the global premiere of Carla Harryman’s “Occupying
Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music: A Re-Performance”
attendees welcome; registration required; click here

Originally organized for the 2020 conference of the European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM) conference in Ghent, Belgium, canceled due to COVID-19 (here), and following last year’s virtual colloquy on “Modernism @ Zero Hour” (here). The seminars have  been reorganized and expanded, with participating scholars and artists from seven nationalities and time zones, and with the addition of the streaming of Carla Harryman’s revised production of “Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music,” originally staged at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012). The colloquy takes up transnational approaches to the emergence of avant-garde art and practices after the metahistorical date of “Zero Hour,” 1945—the end of the war which is not one—to comprehend the profound reflection on destruction, displacement, and a new global order in post–1945 movements and works.

Organized by Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University
and Lauri Scheyer, British and American Poetry Research Center,
Hunan Normal University
Sponsored by Projects in Poetics and Statement Magazine,
California State University, Los Angeles
 … More

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February 23, 2021

Document 90: Poetics & the University in Crisis

Poetics & the University in Crisis
Friday, March 5–Sunday, March 7 / 3:00–7:00 P.M.
featuring 22 poets, critics, teachers, artists
free registration required; click here

A virtual colloquy on the role of poetics in the American university in crisis, for a nation also in crisis. The humanities and arts continue to be major targets of increasingly austere budgets—and so, too, has critical thinking. How can poetics—as inventive, intellectually engaged creative series of practices and modalities of thought—offer an intervention into this moment? How can the university re-embrace the necessity of art based in critical thinking and open inquiry that includes the aesthetic and the political? The three days of this colloquy will aim to unite creative poetic practices with analytical critique and pedagogy from a wide range of voices, methods, points of view.

… More

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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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