Notes on Conceptualisms

Notes on Conceptualisms: An Evening With Ugly Duckling Presse
Venue: Kitchen, The
(212) 255-5793
512 W. 19th St.,
New York, NY 10011

The event celebrates the release of the nonprofit art and publishing collective's new book 'Notes on Conceptualisms,' an unconventional primer on contemporary innovative writing. Hosted by the volume's authors, Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place, this evening features readings by some of the leading figures in conceptual writing: Jen Bervin, Nada Gordon, Kim Rosenfield, Lytle Shaw and Steve Zultanski.

Press releases crack me up. How did I get to be one of "the leading figures in conceptual writing"?!? Love it. And am looking forward to the event.

K. Silem Mohammad reads a Sonnagram!

Nada reads a sonnet to introduce Kasey at the BPC 3/21/09

Lytle reads from his project The Chadwick Papers at the BPC 3/21/09

Stan Apps on Rules for Drinking Forties

Stan reads Rodney.

A little more memoir material

When I was a little girl growing up in northern California among the wild and free, my mom used to get me to do Joe Cocker impressions at parties. That explains a lot, I think.

If you haven't watched this, by the way, you haven't yet lived life to the fullest.


p.s. Gary said on reading this post that he used to do Joe Cocker impressions at parties as a kid, too. So that's either endemic to California kids of our generation or speaking volumes about our relationship.

Go Wild... and Get a Free Eyeliner!

Two possible titles for something:

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Yeah

Go Wild... and Get a Free Eyeliner! (in this morning's spam crop)


Observations:

The soundtracks to one's own movies become unavoidable brain feedback loops, sometimes a little deranging.

Lately my Yahoo horoscopes have been uncanny. I think it would be a nice writing project to sort of write around them on this blog, but I have other things to attend to. Still, here are three recent ones (three in a row!) that have amused me:

March 24, 2009

1.
CapricornCapricorn (12/22-1/19)

You can turn heads with your beautiful words today, so use your impressive creative writing skills whenever possible. Have you been trying to work up the nerve to make a move on someone? Write them a note and slip it to them when no one's looking. Or send them an email that makes your goal clear. What you write will get you noticed and show people that you are not like everyone else. Your extra effort and refreshing creativity is more flattering than any trite come on or hollow gesture.

No comment, but always happy to turn heads with my beautiful words.

The next one I thought was wonderfully apropo of reading Santayana on the iPhone, particularly since he addresses subjectivity and taste with regard to aesthetics:

March 25, 2009

1.
CapricornCapricorn (12/22-1/19)

What is beautiful? Your answer to that question is different from anyone else's answer to that question. No two people can always agree on aesthetic issues, and you will need to remember that today. Something you see as a great work of art won't get quite the ecstatic reception you were expecting, so try not to take it personally. These critics might not like what they are seeing, but that doesn't mean that they don't like you! Respecting their opinions doesn't mean you agree with them.

And this next one seemed to reassuringly address what I referred to in my last post as my tendency to be "so predictably emo," although I have to say that the thought of "a giggle coming up from my belly" makes me think of nothing so much as barfing up a little reptile:

March 26, 2009

1.
CapricornCapricorn (12/22-1/19)

It might feel like your emotions are taking over your entire life right now, but maybe that's not such a bad thing. If you feel tears welling or a giggle coming up from your belly, don't try to fight it. Just let it go and let yourself feel whatever you feel right now -- it's the only way to move through it. And don't worry if these feelings seem to be putting you in a grumpy or introspective mood. You are an imperfect human and it is a healthy thing to process all your feelings.

A healthy thing.

What else? Last night I hung out with Sachiko, a former student from Japan. She was in my first class at my school in Tokyo, which means I taught her when I was 24. She now has two gorgeous kids. Really fun to speak Japanese again with her and her family and friends, even though my vocab is disintegrating. I stated my desire to move back there, and she encouraged me.

Insomnia more or less out of control lately. That makes my days wretched. Maybe the thyroid needs to be lowered again? It's so weird how this controls me. The thing is, hyperthyroid & menopause signs are almost identical, so it's hard to know what's at the root of it. The migrating hives that visit me every night are the weirdest thing, and no one told me to expect that. The flashes come on so suddenly, like, whoa, must discharge molten lava/ feminine fire QUICK (although, OK, that's romanticizing what is basically just moments of discomfort).

Oh, am I wearing my self-pity threads again? Sorry!

I need to post videos from last week, I know.

Unrelated: I dyed my hair fuschia:



I love to photograph myself not so much because I enjoy my own image, although to be honest I sometimes do, but because in myself I have such a cooperative model, and also in a way to convince myself that I do exist, sort of like when Colin Powell held up "proof" of Iraq's WMDs, remember?

Oh jeez, I'm slipping into my Fanny Brice routine again:



Maybe I should try to sleep some more.

the human world could have been anything (given the limits of the materials at hand)

The cherry blossoms at the top of this page are optimistic. We are nowhere near that point here yet. I am pleased to report my first sighting yesterday of a BLOSSOMING PLUM TREE (white blossoms) from the window of the F train near Smith and 9th St. Station. In other news, magnolia buds are getting plump and velvety, forsythia is FINALLY starting to bust out, and (sorry to anthropomorphize) those brave little souls, the crocuses, have been making themselves known for a little while now. Gawd, what could be duller than a poet writing about spring.

Further note on "poetry and personality": I thought to post on it for two reasons. One was that an antagonist of mine objected to my Tzara epigraph at right, saying that it promoted a (merely) expressive (as opposed to investigative) poetics. The other was a conversation after Segue a couple of weekends ago with James Sherry, who said that in editing Folly he had really tried to get me to approach my revisions of the book in a way that would forefront the symbiosis of individual and environment, but that I had responded in such a way that merely forefronted my personality. Fair enough, but you can't squeeze ecopoetics from a turnip. At least my writing has personality, or more accurately, personalities.

I don't actually feel much symbiosis with "my environment" (the term itself makes the individual apostate, doesn't it? we have to change the language to be more gins & arakavian). Do you? I feel like a Venusian. I'm mainly thinking of the human environment, since the human presence in the city I live in overwhelms the non-human, and maybe that's why the weather is so bad, as revenge (nothing more pathetic than a fallacy!). Walking down a particularly ugly street yesterday, I felt a huge thought like a cold wind in my face that the human world could have been anything, with all our imagination and resourcefulness and technology... and it's... this? Buildings these stolid unmovable remnants of history & capital, awkwardly placed freeways, stoplights, trees fighting back making the sidewalk bumpy; it's all so drastically unacceptable. It's the personality that responds to that with, you know, lyric protest, that "scrawny cry," that (this) thin, operatic no!

catsitter sought

We need a catsitter to take care of Dante and Nemo and hang out in our apartment from May 14 to May 29 or so. Are any Ululations readers planning a NYC vacation around that time? Brooklyn, and our street, becomes very leafy and pleasant around that time.

It looks like we will not be crossing the Atlantic this year, but rather going westward to visit moms and friends in Portland, Corvallis, Ashland, and the Bay Area...

anxious coed spontaneous fried chicken dance party

here, with smart commentary

Recycled cinema blog

Cool!

Failed post on poetry and personality

I can't do it. I can't post on "poetry and personality." To do so I would have to a) define my terms and b) totalize, and honestly, every time I start to try to think about "personality" even pretend-methodically I can feel my mind start to flail about thinking well then I will have to know what a self is, won't I, and then I start generating conjectures like the self is the sensorium, you know, that which loves and exults and suffers and gets bored, but then I wonder, isn't it just my personality to reduce everything to sensation, to be so predictably emo? And is that my personality or my persona making those reductions? It could be that in fact I am truly much more methodical than my persona, who just likes to put a frosting of gaiety on her fatigue, and maybe under that fatigue there's a kind of beautiful clockwork after all like a Cartesian animal.

What kind of animal? I imagine a kind of cat or donkey.

Reading Santayana on my iPhone:

The beauty of material is...the groundwork of all higher beauty, both in the object, whose form and meaning have to be lodged in something sensible, and in the mind, where sensuous ideas, being the first to emerge, are the first that can arouse delight.

To love glass beads because they are beautiful is barbarous, perhaps, but not vulgar...

Form cannot be the form of nothing. If, then, in finding or creating beauty, we ignore the materials of things, and attend only to their form, we miss an ever-present opportunity to heighten our effects.


Whenever the golden thread of pleasure enters that web of things which our intelligence is always busily spinning, it lends to the visible world that mysterious and subtle charm which we call beauty.

Etcetera. I could go on and on quoting this quaint philosopher (if only in an attempt to dodge my failure to address "poetry" and "personality" at all satisfactorily).

Bruce Andrews seemed very amused that I was reading Santayana on my iPhone (thanks to Project Gutenberg! Coolio!).

"You're reading Santayana? George Santayana? That's so... fifties!"

"I like the clear prose style. None of this... textuality nonsense..."

(that's a joke. you understand that's a joke, right?) (why is everything a joke for me? I should look at that.)

So, it's Bruce's personality to make comments like that, kind of affectionately sneering, and mine to be "sassy" (Bruce later in the conversation used the word to describe my personality) in response.

Personality, whatever it is, has an awful lot to do with voice, then, and voicings: what are they called, "performative utterances," in the sense that I commit to a personality, promise the world at least a measure of repeated personality, in the accruing predictability of the kinds of statements I make and the way I inflect them. I shudder a little at the words voice and voicings, though, because I don't want to mean them in any sort of Iowa-workshop way, but when I actually try to consider how I do mean them, I think it might actually not be very different. Those Iowa-workshoppians might not know it, but when they say a writer needs to "find her voice" what they really mean is that she needs to find a persona or personae to perform via utterances so that she can accrue an artificed writing personality and bequeath it "performatively" to the world. I do think that actual physical voice sounds and accents and lexicons give permissions and limits to the artifice. I mean like how Bruce sounds funny and caustic and sort of nasal, and how his voice is not small, and aren't these aspects of his personality? My voice when I hear it sounds kind of pedantic, but I laugh a lot and use a lot of emphatic/ecstatic adjectives, or at least I think I do, and I think this has something to do with my personality as well. For those of you who are worrying about sincerity at this point, can't we say that this voice to the extent that it is intrinsic, like really biologically so, it is "sincere"... and the rest is creative artifice, and leave it at that?

There's something to be said, really, for living a life among poets and hearing them vivify their words with their peculiar voices. That certainly gives their poems even more personality. Kasey's voice for example is deep and sonorous and metrically precise and also oddly goofy, a quality that contrasts with the other three qualities I mentioned but all the qualities very much define his poetics. I can't look at a poem on a page by Katie, say, and not imagine it in her factual kind of deadpan voice punctuated with her sort of no-nonsense strong laughter, or read a poem of Drew's online that I don't hear in his special sarcastic/mystic/brainiac enunciation. I mean, right? Don't these voices just ooze personality? And doesn't whatever oozes inhere in the poems, even those poems that are composed only from "outside" materials? I'm thinking of Kenny reading at the BPC the transcript of the 9/11 newscast, for example, how the "art intelligence" of his voice transformed the words.

Oh okay but that's reactionary, right, like I'm proposing some sort of essential self-voice that we already argued away in the 80s, right? But wait. What is this tenacious thing: personality?

I don't know. I mean I'm not Santayana and I don't have time to lay out my arguments in pretty aphorisms the way he did although it is fun to quote him. I have to get the words out REALLY FAST because tomorrow there will be some other whirlwind thought and also I have to blog about Terayama Shuji, I said I would, and besides I'm not doing this for school. I think a lot of poets behave as if what they are doing is something they are doing for school, and I say that not as an anti-academic, because I'm not, and I already said my voice sounds pedantic and a little snotty or self-conscious, and I'm a teacher, and I'm all for everyone learning as much as they can all the time, but then of course learning something and doing something for school are entirely different activities much of the time, now aren't they. Is it a kind of torture reading this? I apologize in advance. I'm just trying to keep you with me in a simulacrum of real-time associative thought.

I suspect that when we read the work of writers who are no longer alive that we project our concept of their personality and voice onto the words, we deduce it from the syntax and the diction, and our projection sort of weaves into our Vygotskian stream of self-talk until we have an idea who is talking to us, even though that "person" is part "us." Any biodata we are possessed of regarding the writer goes into the mix too, doesn't it. I think even the most purist of us can't keep it separate. Does anyone want to disagree? This is why I feel like I "know" Tolstoy (even in translation: sure, why not), Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Stein, etc.

It happens sometimes that the poetry a poet emits, though, and here I'm talking about poets I know, is strikingly different from how I conceive of their personality. This is very disorienting. I actually don't want to give examples of that, because most often it is the personality I am more attracted to than the poetry, and the poetry disappoints me because I want it to be like the personality. Is this what it means to have not "found one's voice"? When the disparity between the performed self in speech and the performed self in aesthetic writing is too great? It disturbs me that I might even think like that. That disparity is the essence of theatre, isn't it? I don't know, I'm confusing myself again. It strikes me though that in these cases what I am seeing is poets who are swayed by trends or who write how they think they ought to or out of maybe undeliberate pastiche of writers they admire? So that their enthusiasm or intention (the best media for "personality") is interrupted or diluted by obligation in some cases? and possession (the extreme of "influence") in others?

I really had intended to work on my movies tonight. It's 10:11. I need to make better movies as I can see now how floppy the first one is. Or maybe I should just keep adding to it until I have a movie equivalent of that crazy painting of Jay deFeo's? Since I made that blanket statement about no erasure? You see, I HATE when I totalize! I need to put away a pile of clothes. I need to not stare at a screen all the time. Do you guys remember this NY Times article? By Kevin Kelley?He wrote, I mean typed:

We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link.

OK look, it's not that we don't know that, that it's not painfully obvious. It's just a nice clear prose style, not like Santayana's who also had a nice clear prose style, and nothing at all like mine because I apparently do not have a nice clear prose style even though I am not abstruse either. What can I say? I'm all over the place! I'm a total spaz [can we still say that?]! Help! Maybe it's just my personality...

on freaky goth ambiance, horseradish-infused vodka shots, terayama shuji, etc.

At Sean Killian’s house party last night after Kasey and Lytle’s great reading I at some point declaimed, in answer to Michael Golsten’s question, “What do you really look for in poetry, anyway?”: “Two things,” I said, “and they are totally démodé: personality and style.” A moment later I added “music” to my list. Kasey seemed to agree, and Gary, too, although Kasey was quick to say that a poet does need at least a smattering of other concerns so as not to just write “beautiful words,” and of course he’s right.

I have been wanting to engage “poetry and personality” here for a while, and threatened to over on Brandon Brown’s blog, but life has been a bit busy and interesting over the past few days, so I haven’t got around to it. Even at this moment I am wondering whether to report on my busy and interesting life or to engage the terms, and I can feel myself swaying over to reportage as I’m a bit too hungover for analysis. Yes, dear reader, I who usually total only tea did indulge in some horseradish-infused vodka shots (piquant!) last night, which had the predictable and temporary effect of making me even more giddy than usual. While I did refrain from dancing on the table at the Anyway Café, a subterranean Russian tiki room cluttered with antique tchotchkes, I do recall screeching when Drew poked me in the ribs, which he did more than once to everyone’s amusement.

Rewind to Thursday, when with Sharon Mesmer, Ekkehard Knoerer (visiting from Germany), DJ Huppatz (visiting from Australia), and Gary, I went to see the latest Richard Foreman piece, an opera, “Astronome,” created in collaboration with John Zorn. The piece is touted as being extremely loud, and they ceremoniously give you earphones when you pick up your ticket, but honestly it was much less loud than most of the punk shows my youth was steeped in, and although now as an adult I am quite noise-sensitive, I enjoyed the intensity of the music. Foreman is iconic to me, and I think I’ve said on this blog before that if I were in theater in any way, as writer or producer or puppet or extra or prop-maker, it doesn’t matter, his is the sort of theater I would want to make. I love the claustrofeeling of the cluttered theater space, the complex determinations (some of them under-, some of them over-) of the sets and objects and costumes, the choreographed gestures, the tableau-like shock imagery of them. Honestly, the productions don’t feel all that different (from each other) to me, and I have liked none of them so much as the first one I saw, “Panic,” but I mean neither of those assertions as wounding criticisms. It’s just that I know now that when I go to see a Foreman piece I am going to experience a highly stylized version of the most disordered workings of my own psyche, and that’s cool. What struck me about this one was how adolescent it was, with the “metal” “opera” complete with barfing sounds and noodly guitar solos, the freaky goth ambiance, the urges on display (as when a woman actor put on a headpiece like a giant strawberry and a man actor made like he was “eating” her face to the accompaniment of outrageous slurping noises courtesy of Zorn). There was also a sort of Alice Cooper figure like a voodoo chieftan in a giant feather headdress, his face painted Kelly green, with a fake eyeball popping out of one of his eyes. Magnificent.

I love how the text of Foreman’s pieces is so spare. It seems that often it can be reduced to about a paragraph total; Daniel said afterwards, it’s as if language is just another prop. And how brilliant the props! Like the claw device one uses to get a roll of toilet paper down from a high shelf at the corner bodega! There is indeed a kind of equivalence created by the highly artificed everything in Foreman’s plays, but it’s not the kind of equivalence that bores by flattening; it’s quite the inverse: suddenly everything becomes bizarre, and of course that is precisely the effect one wants, and that I guess I go for in my verse, which is admittedly also sort of adolescent.

That would seem a natural point to start in on poetry and personality, but I haven’t yet exhausted my report. I will post clips of Kasey’s and Lytle’s readings anon, but I should say that Kasey’s Sonnagrams were so gut-bustingly hilarious that I just want to genuflect. Listening to them, I told Gary in the cab home last night, I was really on the edge of my seat breathless for what was going to come next. How often does one feel that way about poetry? Lytle’s presentation of his multimedia conceptual art collab with Jimbo Blachley, The Chadwick Papers, was elaborate and brilliant, and I especially enjoyed the final video that featured Lytle in a Dutch Renaissance ruff reciting a homophonic translation of a Dutch poem. From there we found ourselves at the aforementioned Anyway Café, where some other alt-culture types had gathered, separately from us, one a former member of Fluxus, whoa, and much horseradish-infused vodka was imbibed by everyone not excluding yours truly.

Marianne Shaneen, who usually is occupied with her film-in-progress, “American Furries,” and doesn’t get out to poetry stuff much anymore, was (yay!) in attendance and she said, “Hey, it’s Saturday, Bradley is working at Anthology!” and I got very excited because I hadn’t seen Bradley Eros in years, and I adore him, so I said, “yeah! let’s go see Bradley!” So several of us descended upon him and crowded into the back office, where we convinced Kasey to read another sonnagram and we convulsed with laughter again. Then Bradley showed us some crazy films: Dorsky’s rare first, “Revenge of the Cheerleaders,” replete with terrifyingly exuberant stripping cheer-nymphs; some hilarious Kuchar (I don’t remember which one) that featured a seemingly fine actress acting deliberately as badly as she could, taking direction and caressing a mannequin whose wig kept falling off, and then weirdest of all, these Terayama Shuji films that were so wrong and so beautiful in so many ways, as if a Japanese Jack Smith had mated with Warhol and made politically-fragranced child porn cabaret. I have plenty to say about Terayama Shuji, and should just commit here to a post about him later on although I haven’t yet got around to the other post on poetry and personality that I’ve clearly not yet written.

OK, this post right now is cutting into my hangover recovery and my Sunday morning, but how thrilling, really, these last few days: all this mad culture, and its attendant fabulous personalities (there, I said it!)! Whee!

I’ll just end here by posting my intro to Kasey, which I thought, if I do say so myself, was pretty funny:

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003). Abraham Lincoln, which he edits with Anne Boyer, is the single most significant poetry magazine in North America that always features a large cat and a rainbow on its front cover. Like all great poets, K. Silem Mohammad has a back story.

While undergoing a tonsillectomy, young Kasey was badly overanesthetized. After emerging from a 10-day coma he developed St. Vitus’s Dance and epilepsy. He was seized by fits of uncontrollable laughter and experienced hallucinations. For the rest of his life, he has seen visions and conversed wittily with the world of the undead. Physically unfit for military duty, Kasey began writing his very special brand of poetry after attending Stanford University.

Often categorized as a flarfist, he has created an artistic circle that overlaps with the worlds of conceptualism and B-movies but remains distinct and apart. Kasey, a kind of self-created planet, has found a way to combine Old World mysticism and New World nausea. A poet prey to visions and hallucinations, a philosopher, a scholar with a deep understanding of Renaissance poetry, an enthusiastic consumer of TV dinners, perhaps the great white magician of our time — he is all of these, and something else besides. I adore him, and lay this little sonnet at his feet as a garland.


Shall I compare thee to a ZZ Top Concert?
Thou art more heinous and less hirsute:
Rough winds do shake the asses of your screaming fans,
And your visit here in NY hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot is the macaroni and cheese,
And oft' is its orangey color dimm'd;
And every freak from freak sometime recoils,
By chimps or unwashed intercourse untrimm'd:
But thy eternal grooviness shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that old time rock and roll;
Nor shall, uh, Alice Cooper, brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou rulest:

So long as men can snort, or eyes can squeal,
So long lives this, and Kasey, you’re for real.


Please welcome my homie, my comrade, my idol… K. Silem Mohammad…

For the record

Erasure: no

Substitution & Addition: yes

signs of spring

A beautiful day.

The sycamore trees outside my window starting to sprout little burgundy pre-leaves.

Walking through the Fulton Mall this sunny afternoon, a couple: her hand tucked in his back pocket.

Men-of-the-hoi-polloi addressing me wolfishly, although I am 45 and look tired.

Many tulips (for sale).

Street revellers in shades of green in the very Irish Windsor Terrace.

Jay St. station smelling inexplicably like the Paris Metro (dusty, sweet).



Unrelated, but notable: Extraordinary reading by Larry Price at the Poetry Project last night.

Oh and, last weekend Anselm gave me a copy of Have a Good One. The pages smell of cigarettes: traces of Dana Ward?

Up too late! My movies did this to me! Must go to sleep.

chincoteague

Words and voices by Nada Gordon, translated idiolectically from a poem by Kimberly Lyons. Images from the 1942 version of The Jungle Book, The Magic Sword, and The Legends of Belly Dance (the dancer is the great Najwa Fouad). Sung to the tune of Pur Dicesti o Bocca Bella as sung by Cecilia Bartolli.

This is my third movie, but I should say it's really more like 1.5, coming in between the rather more epic Op.1 ("You Won't Ever Learn") and Op. 2 (the still-in-progress-at-the-time-of-this-wr iting "The Garden of Life"), which is also more elaborate..

Those two are not really you-tube-able, so consider this a kind of teaser.



p.s. I need to tweak the sound at the beginning, make it fade in. Well, later.

Charles Bernstein at the BPC 3/14/09

Charles Bernstein reads what is either one or two poems (if it is two, he kind of runs them together) at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on March 14, 2009.

Adeenaa Karasick reads her version of

Adeena Karasick reads her version of "The Rules" at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on3/14/09 as part of the Segue Series.

Jerome Sala at the BPC 3/7/09

Jerome Sala reads two poems about poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club, New York City, March 7, 2009.

Rachel Zolf at the BPC3/7/09

Rachel Zolf reads at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on March 7, 2009.

Cabs everywhere

It's so easy to get a cab now in the new economy. The driver last night told me there's been a 40% reduction in passengers.

Poetry and comics living together!

Gary goes to Milwaukee!

Eco-poetics

Can one make an argument for the "greenness" of appropriated poetry?

I suppose it's a bit of a stretch.

-- Post From My iPhone




Oh did I mention that this morning on the way to work I found a VHS copy of my favorite movie: "High Society"? And also "Learning about Letters" by Children's Television Workshop. Apropo of scavenging, I mean. So I was four minutes late to class, having rummaged a little through garbage.

"It's not like I have a plan here"

So, recently I had my students watch a video called “Art City: Making It in Manhattan,” that features interviews with several illustrious visual artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Pat Steir, Elizabeth Murray, Chuck Close, Neil Jenney, St. Clair Cemin, Ashley Bickerton, and Brice Marden, as well as many others. Of all of them, I thought that Ashley Bickerton was the one I most wanted to meet. I was interested in the way he described the explosivity of his creative process and his wry sense of humor; he would, I thought, be very amusing to talk to at a party.

He discussed the vexed problem of political correctness in regard to artworks. He said that aesthetics are not easy like the military, which is all about rules; aesthetics are difficult precisely because there are no rules.

Elizabeth Murray said that she begins a painting by “sort of heaving paint on the canvas” and not really knowing what will become of it. She said she enjoys the physicality of that struggle, or “tussle,” I think she called it.

Brice Marden discussed his picture-making process in very Orphic terms; he referred to the drawings he had “been getting lately” as if they were being channeled rather than created. We see him at one point in the video somewhat awkwardly using a long stick dipped in ink to draw, and he says, “It’s not like I have a plan here.”

I drew out several quotations from the video for my students to record responses to. Interestingly, a few of them chose that quotation from Brice Marden. They all felt that “having a plan” could actually be a hindrance to creativity. I keep thinking about that. I recorded responses to their responses, asking whether not having a plan is in itself a kind of plan, and whether the natural limits of materials don’t actually impose a kind of de facto plan on the process of making something.

I often find that my brain generates a lot of plans, although they are not really plans, they are notions based on impulses, not entirely worked through as a proper plan ought to be. And then I find that once I sit down to work, the materials fight my plan and take over, and what I finally end up calling “finished” (probably incorrectly) is not at all like what I had “planned.”

So now that I am into my second movie project, Gary comes and stands over my shoulder asking what the themes are. He really wants my movies to cohere. He says he’s more conservative than I am that way. The thing is, to the extent that they do cohere, that coherence doesn’t really emerge until very late in the process. Sort of like that great essay by Max Ernst on frottage, which did you know also means dry-humping? :-0

Anyway I begin as a hunter-gatherer (thinking here of the description of Rachel Zolf’s Human Resources as exploring “the creative potential of salvage”; I like to think we are all working in a kind of Mad Max landscape at this point), and then look at how the contours of one unit will alchemically react with the contours of another.

I was writing to Stephanie early this morning that my early impressions of the process of “film repurposing” (I don’t think it’s exactly right to call it filmmaking, but then again, why not?) is that it asks for pretty much the same skill set as poetry writing: senses of juxtaposition, rhythm, surprise, etc. But I also wrote to her that many effects that I aim to achieve in text are really much easier to achieve with moving images.

In Folly, for example, because always being caught in one’s own subjectivity is just too sad, I made the poems into plays, or operettas, really, with a multitude of characters giving them their voices. The lines were therefore “nested” into other people’s interiorities. It’s incredibly easy to do this with film, and rather more powerful, I think. All you need is a close-up of a face and suddenly you are looking through that person’s eyes; their character and perspective suddenly pierces the frames both before and after. And the even cooler thing is that in film it’s easier to nest interiorities within interiorities within interiorities so that the person-medium through which one is experiencing the images gets, oh, incredibly layered and wonderfully bewildering. I find I am getting very attached to all these “people” (for they are all “acting” and therefore not “themselves”) I am manipulating and through whom I see. Several of them I’m sure I consider as mouthpieces or avatars for “me” (c.f. my comment on Stephanie’s film narration last month) or at any rate my fantasy of “me.”

I am sure that for real filmmakers this is all yawningly obvious, but this is a new medium for me, so I think I can be forgiven my enthusiasms.

I’m curious, at any rate, what other people think about this notion of “having a plan” vs. “planlessness” especially with a view towards conceptualism (which is, in a way, all plan) or strict proceduralism. I mean, I’m a proceduralist, too, after a fashion, but I’m interested in the way the rules for procedures get FOILED in the interest of aesthetics (or of whim) in the process of making something. Your thoughts?

The Story About “Cartoon Sight” and “Floozy Winds”

Is morning just a drastic plaything? Are the lords that blink on my amniotic fallacy just hysterical cantors? Am I just some dumb cheerful donkey? My hair needs to get swollen now with the foggy contrition of seductive leeches.

Margarine paints the day a deathly boring upset green like the sounds of the air in between bones where I huddle, an unsoothed monstrosity in the conspiracy of soreness.

The thralls stick on me like the bubble paste of wildly aggressive submission.

Whenever the “graininess” hugs me in his styles-of-doubt, “glowing” and “quivering” as flocks of white seagulls by the Gowanus Canal,

Gathering all un-idealized creations in one hush of dream at its dramatic fiercest and most desperate quotidian,

it unites to the source of bounce-light – yawn-jaw’s cartilage – rule-encrusted eggs – a trance of motor-dictation to the “clown thumpers”…

And here I am, standing between “cartoon sight” and “floozy winds,” a visually discordant surface-fret in the international law of poetry’s insane floppiness,

Trying to find an emptiness of nasal wind’s hiss and moan, un-nouned, a dark jittery bird, in your cold personality…

While the tremolo of morning sun sculpture, rhythmically castanet-like, sets up a conflict that causes a tension that demands release from the spasmic magma of hellish proprioception (oh and plus my money is sad like a horny flower).

One aberration, a limp lettuce nightmare, is left inside the trembling of the vocal chords’ mottled bubbly shapes’ pure negation, the forfeiture of some vague code, like an animal fist in the plumpness of my radical fantasy –

that "felt-need-for", uh, spatially charged doodling – nerves strumming-in-ear or tone-texture haunt:

numb thought’s otherwise endless flights of fancy: “raw jewels” or toned puddles… crippled by error and its fixed, candy-colored pleasures:

I believe in the beauty of the singing, its thick, churning motion, its brave lipstick: the lipid flash dance of your –how do you say?– unbearable… “outsideness.”

Coyote

I could almost swear I just saw a coyote standing on the roof of the Kentile building as I rode past on the F train this morning. I am aware that this is impossible, and that the creature I saw was likely a coyote-like dog, but I do like the idea of a coyote on a rooftop in Brooklyn. To make my notion even more romantic: I'm pretty sure the coyote-ish beast only had three legs.

Just a hallucination brought on by forced compliance with daylight savings time? Maybe.

-- Post From My iPhone

coincidence

Theda Bara

and...



(photo by Mel Nichols)

$1 DVDs from Pergament

At the end of last week, still so fatigued in flu's aftermath: why is it so decimating? But most major symptoms are gone, even if I'm pale, easily tired, and just generally still Victorianly pathetic. I did drag my sorry ass to Friday's dance class after a two-week absence, and yesterday's unusually balmy faux-spring offered some succor.(Say that last word out loud. Funny, right?)I suppose then that things are on the up-and-up, even if the trees remain resolutely leafless.

I did, though, manage to wear myself out further last week obsessively working for hours on end on a new project in a new medium. I made a collage movie out of $1 DVDs from the local discount store. It's called "You Won't Ever Learn" and it's just under 23 minutes long. It's really, in the common parlance, "fucked up," as in "deeply disturbing," and I love it. Major themes: desire, education, mortality (you can't go wrong with those chestnuts, right?). There will be more, and I'm not sure if that's a threat or a promise.

Clips of yesterday's terrific Segue readings to come very soon, maybe even today.

Thinking, like everyone else, about the not just stagnating but plunging economy, and what it means, or will mean, for our lives. It means that even if we are not suffering (yet) from it, we can make fewer choices at least about our external conditions. It creates a stagnancy in the possibilities we can impose on the quotidian. Who among us now is starting a business or taking a year off to travel?

Well, I'm glad I have basic life skills, by which I mean I can cook and sew, and that I can entertain myself so cheaply by making movies with $1 DVDs from Pergament. And grateful that the only mouths I have to feed are those of the little felines, oh and Gary's, too (but he, of course, pitches in).

Poetry's basically a very cheap endeavor, and one can only rejoice about that.

Extra Toes

I dreamed this morning that I was growing all these extra toes. They were a little shorter than my other toes kind of budding up in between. Seven total on the right foot and eight on the left, I think.

(yes, Lynn, sure, go ahead and take this)

Jimmie Rodgers - Honeycomb (live appearance)

This made me think of what was written on the container of Haagen-Dasz strawberry sorbet I took some spoonfuls out of very late last night: Honeybees are disappearing, and nobody knows why.

Prancing as if I am a prancer

Lovely Human

I am not an Exoskeleton.

Prancing as if I am a prancer
Sallow with great desire
I am not an exoskeleton
Replicate me as I am should be

Love makes me wander
Walking around the corn
Finding hidden holes

Is love only for Mexicans?

Love me velvet-creepily

My Lap

Love me like an intriguing notion
Love me velvet-creepily
Search my sour turmoil…
Have I now be your sour mate?

My lap…
I try to write you down my frantic annotations
into the bottom of honey ‘till there’s no more travesty
This love letter shall remind me
Love fabricates (fellates) us this far and it should be!
Well, I edit out the best of you
to see you receding always…

Ovaltine Love Feeling

Ovaltine Love Feeling
or
The Beauty of Love

The beauty of love that I feel in mimic of eyes’ slippage
Into the “cubistic environment” of my soul
As if my body ripped the experienced chaos of everyday life
By the deepest of love’s neglected child.

Understanding love as a more fundamental set of dualisms
Translate life into a visual corollary of a word trap:
A perfect feeling like an echo chamber.
There’s nothing impossible: I work with ephemera.
I walk with passion, oar buckets, shovels, etc.
Try to stand with the power of love and artichoke suppers.

Have you waiting for my damn thing or my big star-studded names?
And say love words in language as a damnation of human sensibility into the blinder mouths of politicans?

Look, kids! Videos!

The legendary John Giorno reads his poem, "It Doesn't Get Better" at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on 2/28/09.



Brian Kim Stefans reads "New" at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on 2/28/09. Gary Sullivan introduces, Coco Fitterman provides conceptual musical accompaniment, and a bunch of avant-garde poets sing "Happy Birthday" to Brian.





Gary Sullivan reads his submission to "Poetry" magazine at the Poetry Project, New York City, on 2/25/09. "If you were paid better, would you pay better attention to my poem?"






Gary Sullivan reads the follow-up poem to "Grandmother's Labia," "Grandmother's Anus" at the Poetry Project, 2/25/09. "Someone get that man an Immodium!"





Bill Luoma narrates baseball bloopers with the language of particle physics. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.

Felix Bernstein on Richard Foreman!

High art and low art are pals. I guess I’ve always found that in art but now, this has helped me to find it in my reality, that the world full of TV and come-downs and stresses and tests, is all part of the beauty. It mustn’t be chained away some place, it mustn’t be victimized, it mustn’t be labeled as diseased, it mustn’t be cured with a pill. It must be first embraced, as much as it embraces us.