Entries tagged with zone

September 27, 2026

Event 76: Zone (New York)

Zone (New York)
@ Torn Page
435 W. 22nd Street, New York
September 20, 2026

with Steve Benson
and Marjorie Welish
hosted by Carla Harryman
and Lee Ann Brown

On the right day, New York is about openings. On that day, Lee Ann and Carla organized an event to launch Zone: correlations (1973 2021) in New York, in the company of two long-time collaborators and close allies in poetry, Steve Benson and Marjorie Welish. As a member of the Grand Piano, Steve has been a significant part of an imagined poetic unity since meeting about 1974 in Santa Barbara, followed by his emigration north to join the community then converging. I first encountered Marjorie a decade later, about 1989 when she published a review of my book Conduit in the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Exposed Wires of an Electronic Age.” This review, edgy but positive, followed the disastrous series of poetic kneecappings that attended Total Syntax and the resistance it inspired among the philistines, which I have returned to past the point of recall. Nothing short of an anti-philistine Poetic Front has characterized our solidarity since then, as Marjorie confirmed in introducing her reading. Her magisterial A Complex Sentence (2021) stands as a charter document of that movement’s core values. … More

May 17, 2026

Entry 72: Zones (Paris and Berlin)

Zone (Paris)
@ Double Change / L’Atelier Michael Woolworth
2 rue de la Roquette, 11e
May 4, 2026

with Suzanne Doppelt, Cole
Swenson, and Carla Harryman
Abigail Lang: translation

For Double Change, I followed the procedure from my previous reading in Oakland, while limiting the sequence to thirteen sections for reasons of economy. I thus sampled once from each of the twelve works in Zone plus one selected as “clinamen” or swerve to end the piece. A previous post (“Performing the Zone,” here) summarizes the method, but as before the “aleatorical indeterminate” of the randomly generated numbers for text and passage (beginning, middle, end) could not have been improved by human means.

Below, I note pagination and the beginning and ending of the thirteen samples. In addition, Abigail Lang read French translations after sections 3, 6, and 9—in the section derived from Williams’s Paterson alternating French and English with every stanza. I read the French lines from “Orphée in Translation,” after abandoning the idea of having Abigail pronounce them properly. This was the right choice: my attempting French as “other” is a mirror reinforced imagistically throughout the poem (cf. “a man cut in half by a window,” a key moment in surrealism). … More

March 18, 2026

Entry 70: Performing the Zone

In the Zone, there is no beginning, middle, or end—they have been erased. But there is a before, during, and after—they are activated. Zone is the space between text and world that productively activates them.
—Introduction to reading from Zone: correlations (1973 2021), 15 March 2026

For my reading from Zone, I prepared a score made by randomly sampling and sequencing selections from across its twelve separate works, a continuous presentation without individual titles and with little or no comment, with the exception of an occasional nod to an audience member (George Lakoff, Brian Ang) mentioned or inferred in the text, and on one occasion to interact with loud street music coming from outside the gallery space. This is a strategy I have deployed on a number of occasions, and it suggests or “rhymes” with the modular construction of most if not all the works in Zone, each built up by differing versions of sampling and sequencing. Brian Ang noticed this strategy in a reading I gave at Kelly Writers House in 1999 (here). In dialogue with Ang’s account, I documented two readings from 2013, in Nuremberg and Amsterdam, for their sampling and sequencing strategies (Nuremberg here; Amsterdam here). … More

January 19, 2026

Document 109: Poetics of the Zone

“Avant-Garde Poetics of the Zone:
Interchange, Transposition, Translation”

CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY JANUARY 30 (CONFERENCE DEADLINE FEBRUARY 1)

European Network for Avant-Garde
and Modernism Studies (EAM)
10th Annual Conference, Stockholm, Sweden
2–4 September 2026 /flyer here … More