Entries tagged with readings

September 16, 2023

Entry 52: Magnetic North (V)

Tuesday, June 20

Donna Stonecipher

Martin Eder, Elysium
Galerie EIGEN + ART

Pro QM Buchhandlung

I.S. Kalter/Yana Tsegay
Mountains Gallery

On this day we determined to meet poet Donna Stonecipher and spend some unstructured time with her. We would begin with Galerie EIGEN + ART, last hold-out of the gallery wave that defined Auguststraße as emergent art district twenty years ago and representative of the Leipzig School, notably Neo Rauch. Most of the galleries that traversed the merger from East to West have left—most recently the conceptual gallery Barbara Wien—but EIGEN + ART kept its original location while branching out. (A search to find out what happened to the former Waschmachine gallery yields no trace but ads for the Whiteware brand of washing machine and “Hot German girl fucks dildo on Waschmachine,” on Xhamster). Such references intersect, in their vulgarity, with the work on view: a theatrical series of hyper-post-consumer-utopian-quasi-religious-fantasy tableaux by Martin Eder titled Elysium. As the gallery handout reads: “Since there are no blemishes, no disease, no suffering, and thus also no death in Elysium, the fresh moisture on the figures’ skin must come from the dew on Paradise’s meadows. ‘Dewy,’ as the beauty tutorials in the Internet call it.” The stretch from the conceptual rigor and ideology critique the gallery brought to Berlin, to the cynical avowal of kitsch grandstanding as having somewhat the same effect, defines the times we are in. Not much comment to make, so we proceed to a late lunch and walk a mile across Linienstraße to Pro QM Buchhandlung, nearby the always-beating heart of Left Berlin of Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, the Volksbühne, Babylon Mitte, and the headquarters of Die Linke. After the surrealists’ calling as “specialists in revolt,” Pro QM sells books for “specialists in transformative urbanism,” from the psycho-geographical dérives of the situationists to current architectural studies and city guides, such as the one I brought back on Eisenhüttenstadt. It is home-in-exile on an intellectual plane that shows why we came here in the first place: to map the excitement of Berlin’s evolution as a city onto critical and creative projects. It is a source of thinking the city as one is within it.

… More

December 3, 2022

Entry 46: Theoretical Autobiography

Grand Piano TV episode 6: Barrett Watten
original recording, 17 November 2022
take 2: 27 November 2022

The name “theoretical biography” is intended to distinguish its territory from that of philosophy and physiology better than before, and to expand that biological approach which has been one-sidedly parad­ed and, in part, greatly exaggerated by the most recent school of psychology (Darwin, Spencer, Mach, Avenarius). Such a science would have to account for the mental life as a whole as it progresses from the birth of an individual to his death according to certain laws, just as it does for the coming into being and the passing away, and all the discrete phases in the life of a plant.

—Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1903)

Introduction: method/technique

[Original recording] I’ve been thinking about how to represent The Grand Piano in this reading. One thought was simply to take a section and read it straight through with comments, build a structure out of it—like the concept of “reading out” I spoke about the other day at the Kelly Writers House event, using the text as a platform to make more text, more interpretation. I decided not to do that; rather, I decided to sample from the text and let the text do the work of commenting on itself. (If you want to experience the section that I would have read straight through, you can go to The Grand Piano part 4 and read that section.) I’ve done quite a lot of “reading out” of The Grand Piano; in Questions of Poetics there is a whole chapter on it. Even as the work was coming into focus, not yet complete, I was giving lectures on it—the whole process was entirely immodest. … More

November 16, 2021

Event 88: Correlations & Conversations

Barrett Watten & Carla Harryman
Correlations & Conversations in Poetics
24–25 November 2021

[NOTE CORRECTED SEMINAR START TIME!]

  • Poetry Reading / 24 November 19:00 / open to the public / notice of attendance requested / contact Hélène Aji (below)
    Ecole normal supérieure (rue d’Ulm) / Bibliothèque des letters

World premiere of “Notzeit (After Hannah Höch)” / Barrett Watten
Reading from “Good Morning” and “Cloud Cantatas” / Carla Harryman

  • Seminar / 25 November 9:00–10:00 / by registration
    [NOTE CORRECTED SEMINAR START TIME!]
    ENS (rue d’Ulm) / salle Celan / open to students and doctoral students on prior registration / contact  Hélène Aji (below)

“Historicism and Presentism in Bad History and ‘The Annotated Plan B'”

  • Roundtable / 25 November 16:30–18:30 / open to the public / notice of attendance recommended / contact Hélène Aji (below)
    Université Paris Nanterre / salle de séminaire / 2 Max Weber

“Correlations & Conversations in Poetics”

Exchanges with Barrett Watten on Zone (Correlations, 1973–2021) and Carla Harryman on Poetics of Conversation
Discussants: Hélène Aji (ENS); Benoît Bondroit (U Paris Nanterre); Abigail Lang (U Paris); and Clément Oudart (Sorbonne U)

Policies, media, and contact

Due to COVID precautions in Paris institutions, attendance at events at ENS is limited to 30 (reading) and 35 (seminar). Please contact Hélène Aji to place yourself on the list for the reading or to register for the seminar (students and graduate students). Attendance for the roundtable at Paris Nanterre is limited 25; contact Hélène Aji to guarantee your place.

Present plans are to make high-quality videos of the reading and roundtable, to be edited and uploaded in the near future; interviews with Barrett and Carla will be made by the ENS library and uploaded to YouTube.

Hélène Aji helene.aji@ens.psi.eu
Benoît Bondroit benoit.bondroit@parisnanterre.fr
Naomi Toth ntoth.parisnanterre.fr
Barrett Watten barrett.watten@gmail.com

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

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. 

 

January 29, 2017

Event 70: Sandra Simonds @ WSU

Poet Sandra Simonds kicks off the Open Field Reading Series at Wayne State University, Monday, January 30, 4 PM, in the Department of English Conference Room, 10302 5057 Woodward Avenue, Detroit. Tuesday, January 31, 7:30, she will lead a discussion on “Antifa Sorcery / Mongrel Dialectics,” at N-Space in the Canfield Lofts, 460 W. Canfield, Detroit. For flyer, click below:

simonds poster

If there is a 24/7 poet now writing, Sandra Simonds is it. Bridging language-centered experimentalism, engaged feminism, media culture, and immediate politics, her poetry demonstrates the neural networking that we require, suffer, and live under millennial capitalism. Writing in fluid and inventive formal structures, she mines the materiality of the everyday, distributing it in nuanced combinations and pushing toward the resistant truths it reveals.

… More

January 9, 2015

Event 48: The New 1–10

The Other Fabulous Reading Series
The Long Haul Infoshop
Berkeley, California
2 January 2015; info here
with Brian Ang, Patricia Murphy, and Chelsea Tadeyeske

“The New 1–10”

Introduction, Questions of Poetics (MS)
Zone LI (in Armed Cell 7) + The Grand Piano 10, 000–00
Zone LII + The Grand Piano 9, 000–00
Zone LII + The Grand Piano 8, 000–00
Zone LIII + The Grand Piano 7, 000–00
Zone LIV + The Grand Piano 6, 000–00
Zone LV + The Grand Piano 5, 000–00
Zone LVI + The Grand Piano 4, 000–00
Zone LVII + The Grand Piano 3, 000–00
Zone LVIII + The Grand Piano 2, 000–00
Zone LIX  + The Grand Piano 1, 000–00

(Thanks to Brian Ang for his reading of “Barrett Watten, 1999“)

 

September 19, 2013

Event 39: Learning from X (ASAP)

ASAP flyer

Association for the Study
of the Arts of the Present (ASAP)
October 3-6, 2013, Wayne State University

“Learning from Oakland: Occupy Poetics”
“Learning from Berlin: Hybrid Strategies”
“Learning from Shanghai: Sinofuturisms”
“Site/Nonsite Detroit: A Reading”
[reading flyer here]

Curated by Barrett Watten

“Learning from Oakland: Occupy Poetics”
Thursday, October 3, 3:30-5:00 PM

Brian Ang, poet and editor, Oakland: “Assembling ARMED CELL: Post-Crisis Poetics” [link to ARMED CELL; essay on Oakland Occupy at Lana Turner]
Sara Larsen, poet and organizer, Oakland: “The Praxis of the Commons: Poetics, the Public School, and the Polis/ce of Oakland” [link to The Public School]
David Lau, poet and editor, UC Santa Cruz: “Poetics in a Wave of Struggles: Passages and Limits of Contemporary Bay Area Practices” [link to Lana Turner]

… More

August 5, 2013

Entry 18: Reading @ Amsterdam

Amsterdam reading 1200Reading @ Amsterdam
Perdu/Lloyd Hotel
Oostelijke Handelskade 34
8:00 PM, 30 July 2013

After reading via Skype at the Amsterdam poetry venue Perdu last fall, for a thematic program based on the formal idea of “parataxis,” I wanted to return and present my work in person. I was able to arrange a reading through Samuel Vriezen and Frank Keizer, which due to the renovations undergoing at Perdu, would take place at the Lloyd Hotel, booked as “the world’s first 1-5 star hotel.” The hotel itself has a history and design idea, recounted here.

… More

Event 36: I Met (Amsterdam)

I Met (Amsterdam)
Reading @ Perdu
Hotel Lloyd, Amsterdam
30 July 2013
(After On Kawara)

Frank Keizer
Samuel Vriezen
Rachel O’Reilly
Mia You
Wouter Beek
Ton Van t’Hof
[t/k]

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