========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 15:07:32 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: Re: Failed Experiments That piece by Timmons was pretty bad, eh ? I'd say that it failed at some thing , and should nt have been published here. Mark Roberts SIS Liaison Officer Student Information & Systems Office Ph 02 385 3631 University of NSW Sydney Australia Fax 02 662 4835 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 00:02:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: G-ology First, two corrections, or, as we G1-ers are wont to say, self-criticisms: Jena's right that I conflated Chain & A Poetics of Criticism. Mea culpa. Tho she doesn't mention that her co-editor also co-edited the Technique section of O-blek 12. I would love to have somebody FULLY elucidate the differences between the various publications with their overlapping editorships. I frankly could learn a lot from that. Second correction: nobody seems to have caught my error in assigning authorship of Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana to "Eli Mandel." It was Eli Siegel (who still turned into a professional homophobe at the end of his life). WCW wrote the intro to Siegel's book. Anybody out there read it? Steve Evans' intro to the Technique section of O-blek 12 seems to me the most heroic attempt to date to articulate a terrain for G2. I think that he's right in that intro about the motivating "hatred of identity" that runs through the work, although his reading of the phenomena in O-blek is more broad and generous than that espoused in Apex's "State of the Art" manifesto. I used those two pieces with my class at Naropa, which led to some lively, albeit inconclusive discussions. Certainly nobody has ever done a more aggressive job misreading and stereotyping a community than Apex' broad swipes at G1 (& esp. LangPo):"an avant-garde dominated in its practices by a poetics espousing the priority of 'language itself' over all other relations." (p. 5) Is that not a classic instance of labelling theory taking the misnomer "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poet" just a wee bit literally? I've never once met a G1 who espoused that. Or, later on the same page, "a participatory valorization of this disintegration...." Haven't both Gayatri Spivak & Bob Perelman completely answered that in response to Fred Jameson's only-slightly-more-in-depth reading of the poem "China"? And, throughout State of the Art, an entire series of presumptions concerning the social functions of innovation, as though everyone from M. Bertrand thru G1 were an Italian futurist celebrating the potentiality of the submachine gun. Talk about "phobic characterization"!! I think what makes the Apex group stand out so much, especially at a distance (where, for example, it's easier to forget [or ignore] that Alan Gilbert, Kristin Prevallet and Lew Daly, the editors whom I've actually met, are all lovely, charming, intelligent people, as full of complexity and caution as one might want), is precisely the directness of their address, which shoots right through even the "post"iness of its convoluted syntax. While Steve wants me to "say it ain't so,"the Apexers say openly that "a new understanding of our task as iconoclasts and not innovators will emerge." If I ignore for a moment how I feel at the lack of accuracy and generosity in their description of my cohorts in G1, that's still an interesting and difficult claim to make and I want to know more. What distinguishes them as a group phenomenon is their ambition--it's the most "out there" manifesto we've had in ages--even if their "ambition is to have no ambition" (as I think the British punk band The Gang of Four once put it, back in the swampy G1 days of 1982). Besides, Steve, Chick Gandil, who organized the Black Sox throw of the 1919 series (he was the first baseman), and thus gave rise to the very phrase you use, used to live on my very block here in Berkeley. He worked with my grandfather. That's at least as cosmic as discovering that I'm the reincarnation of one of Jackson Mac Low's past lives. (Or that Jack Spicer and my father died on the very same day in 1965.) >But on to specifics. (This is Steve "talking") Marjorie Perloff's remarks >about the shifting tenor of political commitments >among progressives in the U.S. make sense, but let's >not forget that the "burning political concerns" of >*In the American Tree* were/are by no means self-evident: >to accept Bruce Andrews's "In Funnel" or David Melnick's >*Pcoet* as doing political work, one has to have a >sense of the political rather more elastic than most >people on the left had in the 70s or for that matter >have today. At the point that David wrote Pcoet, he was either about to (or just had) abandoned his idea of ever finishing his dissertation (the one chapter he wrote appeared in the Maps special issue on Zukofsky), and came out of the closet to his students at Berkeley with a vengence, platform shoes and glitter in his beard. There was absolutely no way that any one confronting either him or that text in those days could not see the text's relation not just to the history of modernism but also to what was then known as "gender fuck" politics. The argument for Bruce's work is not dissimilar. Tho his idea of gender fuck is a little different. Besides, one of the major thrusts of one strain of G1 was to counter the various modes of vulgar left critical/aesthetic practice. Bruce Boone, Bob Gluck, Steve Benson, myself and Kathleen Fraser were all once in the same marxist study group, and we had some TERRIFIC arguments. In every sense of that word. And every single one of the G1s who were politically active (not just through our poetry) dealt with these issues repeatedly. >What I don't understand is why this hard-won utopian >intelligence (or say: set of reading practices) is >not brought to bear on the *New Coast.* I disagree that this is what's goin' on. Here the claim in Apex about "iconoclasts and not innovators" rings much truer to my ear. What I want to know is what the social content of that might be. If you can >read Rae Armantrout as "positioned critique" can't >you do the same for Robert Kocik? Yes, absolutely. I'm interested in examining the nature of each position. I'm not especially making the argument for my g-g-g-generation. > >I suppose that at some point, Ron, names will have >to be mentioned to go along with generalizations Oh, I still do believe in Lenin's idea that the move toward "abstraction" is toward the truer layer of the concrete. I'm honestly not sure what's at >stake for you in such remarks. I thought (still do) that if I prod a little, I'd get some interesting feedback from poet(s) in G2 (maybe even G3) who would further articulate the landscape, so that the "prospective" (i.e. inchoate) nature posed by O-b 12 might give greater rise to a new shared vision of a broader terrain. Frankly, I'd like to see less reactive criticism and more manifestos a la Apex (and from a broad range of positions). I find it interesting (very ambiguous word here, and deliberately so) that the most detailed response has come from somebody who positions himself as a critic and not as a poet, as such. >On the question of "average ages" of *NC* and *NAP,* it >seems clear to me that biological age doesn't equal "age" >in terms of the poetic field. Huh? Actually, the question of age is a complex one all on its own. One of the real values of The Art of Practice is its inclusion of a number of poets generationally part of G1 who did not begin publishing until later than most of those in Tree. (I'm reminded, say, how late both Jackson Mac Low and Hannah Weiner were to publish regularly. When Jackson was my age, 48, he had exactly 6 books in print.) But I do think that there's a generational dynamic (different for each G) that focuses when poets are under still well under 35, and that to wait longer as a generation to begin to stake out a space is itself a notable step, so that the hesitancy implicit there must itself be looked at as part of the process (Think of Olson's age in comparison to Creeley, Blackburn et al, or of Burroughs to Ginsberg & Kerouac, or of Williams to the Objectivists.) > >To clarify one general point in closing: I am not under >the impression that a collective re-definition of what >poetry is and does has as yet been articulated by G2 Yep, except for Pam, Lew, Kristin & Alan have at least made one stab. Given the >way literary fields work in capitalist social formations, >the failure to achieve such a collective redefinition >will lead to a lot of interesting poetry disappearing Absolutely! Several G1ers have noted in recent years how much the O-b 12 formation of G2 reminds them of the younger writers who found themselves active around certain modes of the NAP in the mid- to late-60s. David Schaff, Bill Deemer, Harold Dull, d alexander, Lowell Levant, Ed Van Aelstyn, John Gorham, Gail Dusenbery, Stan Persky, Seymour Faust, George Stanley, William Anderson, Wilbur Wood, etc etc etc. But failing to distinguish their terms from NAP1, NAP2 proved unable, unwilling to set up the institutions that might have insured their own communities' perpetuation into the future. I am amazed and appalled that neither the Messerli nor the Hoover anthologies include the work of Lew Welch. In the 1960s, he would have come into almost any listing of the 24 or so most influential NAPpers. Such is history. You have to write it yourself. "Bang. Snap. Crack. They never knew what hit them..." ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 10:01:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Re: G-ology In-Reply-To: <199411010036.TAA18462@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> Some items to consider in the current "generation" debate (and let me say that the remarks I'm about to make are not directed at any one particular respondent. 1) It is a standard hegemonic (not to mention racist and imperialist) move to take one piece of writing by some particular "group" (as it is defined from outside) as the example of what is wrong with that "group" as a whole, and then dismissing that "group" on the basis of that one piece of writing. It is even hegemonic, racist, and imperialist to refer to them as a "group." What does all this have to do with many of the reactions to the introductory essay in Apex of the M? 2) "Make it new" was hardly a dictum put forth by someone interested in social liberation. Indeed, "make it new" is at least as effective as a capitalist slogan as it is as a call to radical change. And whatever the social effectiveness of the proponents of "make it new" in poetry (I think it's unclear, but worth discussing) their success has been undeniable in terms of their marketing of that concept and their promotion of poetry that fits the concept. 3) Indeed, it seems true to me that all writers have a complex relation to past and present, making what is "new" by borrowing, changing, demolishing the past. 4) To see the "lyric" as somehow a force of social conservatism is simply HISTORICALLY UNVERIFIABLE. The lyric form, like the use of parataxis, collage, sonnets, whatever, is a possibility that can be made use of, or discarded, in a variety of historical situations. 5) I don't think it's at all clear whether younger writers are "returning to the lyric." But if writers are using lyric forms, the question to ask is NOT "what's wrong with those writers?" but rather "what is it about the contemporary social environment that makes the lyric seem useful to some writers" or "what is it about the lyric that makes it seem useful to some writers in this social environment." 6) One of the things I'm struck by in my conversations with writers of my own age is their GENEROSITY in responding to the work of previous generations of writers. I'm beginning to wonder whether more established writers can respond with the same level of generosity. What does it mean that it would be taken as a sign of WEAKNESS to actually believe that writers in the past did some interesting things? 7) In fact, my objection to Lew Daly's introduction to Apex of the M is not primarily on the level of poetics (though I find the statement of poetics there fundamentally misguided) but that it repeats the same Oedipal MALE model of thinking your poetry has value only if you can "overthrow the enemy." My problem with his introduction is not that it departs from the avant garde manifestos of writers like Breton, Olson, on down to Silliman, etc., but that IT LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE THOSE MANIFESTOS. 8) But the idea that Lew's work, however interesting or not, is a statement of MY poetics, or that of Steve Evans or Jena Osman or whoever, simply escapes me completely. And that would be true even if I thought everything Lew did was great. 9) To what extent does the discourse of the avant garde remain fundamentally linear, imperialist, etc on the subject of form, the social, etc? Mark Wallace ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 10:21:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Re: G-ology In-Reply-To: <199411011502.KAA29012@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> Some additional comments on my previous missive: 1) What role does GENEROSITY of response to other poets play in who is considered "important", etc. Is attacking the writing of the past the same as a claim to "seriousness"? 2) I WANT TO SEE LESS MANIFESTOS 3) Notice that hegemonic "grouping" practices can be used by everybody against everybody, and they always suck. 4) Charles Borkhus: "You originals/are the biggest dupes" Whether one believes that or not, to what extent is the concept of originality on the level of form a problem rather than a given good? 5) If a revolution were to occur, what makes poets so sure that we would be part of it, rather than what was being fought against? 6) Isn't it possible that everything we know is still wrong? Or at least not more right than previous generations of writers have been? 7) Jefferson Hansen: "I don't know what I think. Hence I am crudely ecletic." Does that make him a WEAK poet? What if it did? 8) Will somebody please say that discussing poetry doesn't have to be the same as a battleground? (excuse me now, I have to go put on my armor) Mark Wallace ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 11:51:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Phillips Subject: "apex of the M" - essay excerpt For those of you who are interested, what follows is the preface and footnotes to an essay I have written on the "apex of the M" preface. I present the essay in its abridged form here in part to spare you too much text and for the simple reason that I have it "out" to an editor in hope of publication. My response the the "M" centers upon a notion of "act" is which I feel undermined by the eschatological. The "footnotes" which folow actually contain their own argument and flesh out more fully what I mean by "act." Toward the end of the body of the essay, which is aphoristic in its construction, I quote a critical line offered by Ron Silliman in the "Chinese Notebook" 20.) Perhaps poetry is an activity and not a form at all..... & 25.) How can I show the intentions of this work and poetry are identical? Here I ain't talkin' 'bout my ge...ge..genuflection. I would be happy to send the body of the paper to anyone who'd like it. Patrick Phillips "Only Be Sure to Spare the Poet's House." Put it all to the torch! And the king named one by one the towers, the gates, the temples this marvel of the world; then brightened, as the thought leaped into words: "Only be sure to spare the Poet's House." Akhmatova: from Alexander at Thebes Leningrad, October 1961 What follows is in part a response to a recent editorial preface published in the first issue of "apex of the M." My initial response upon reading the preface was something of a fever, a visceral anger over the tactics chosen by the editors. Among other things the preface urges a re-figuring of poetry toward a "millennial" poetry; a proffering of the "eschatological" and the acknowledgment of the "sacred" as an orientation in this "iconoclastic" re-figuration. On further reflection, it became clear that the gnostic territory marked out by the editors is an extreme violation of the very things they advocate. I wrote this response to allude to another radicality which turns the editor's contentions inside out, a radicality which alters the grounds toward which such theological terms attempt to surface. The poet's house in the above epigraph is a protectorate it suffers an enjoined sovereignty. By torching Thebes, yet sparing Pindar's house, Alexander makes of the poet's house a protectorate within an eviscerated political and ideological history a situation which speaks poignantly about Akhmatova's condition in Soviet Russia in the early 1960's.1 This protectorate is a historically ramified condominium; condominial in that it becomes the locus of its own negation, an index of a history apart spared only as a remnant. The tyranny of Alexander's rule is not mitigated by his benevolence to the poets (and priests) of Thebes. By being spared the torch, the poet's house is brought into the state, and made a colony of its ideological adventurism. In a similar fashion, the editor's preface to "apex of the M" makes of the poet's house a protectorate through its reference to Dante's benevolent Monarchy.2 The concept of the monarchy arriving at the new Millennium folds this protectorate around our action/writing. The proposal of a millennial poetry guts the act of its own potential; the cultural and historical magnetism of the Millennium is powerful enough to push historical perspective into a future which is beyond its own significance. It is a warped projection which hurls the act into a future of its own making. This warp enables a projection of "consciousness' which for many reasons is an aberration of any sense of the continuity of work. The thought of this projection and its working through is in fact suspended by this hurl into the future; this "thought" is propelled by its own idea and is a self-serving futuring and is not arrived at through historical immanence. In other words this gnostic sparing is an evacuation of history through a constant futuring; an eschatological desire which distances desire and history from the moment of act. This maneuver proves quite similar to Alexander's sparing, but in "M" the house is "spared" instead through the sacred as a sacrifice to the Other. In material history, the poet's house cannot be spared by either monarchy; both monarchies only gaze from a distance at the poet's house; they reach only to the threshold of its potential. As though in the flames engulfing Thebes, the thousand lights flickering off the M into the heavens3 illuminate the poet's house as only an iconographic way-station, postponing history until the fulfillment by an other. This other never being accomplished refutes action.4 History in the case of any imperialist tyranny is absorbed by that tyranny the ash surrounding the poet's house. History in the case of "M" becomes a transfixion, dependent upon the course of postponed desire. The M's subjects stand transfixed by the flicker, the meta-physic of the gnostic fire, a fire as tyrannous in its claim on poets as were Alexander's. We begin to see a relationship of the word to history. The force of work in world is equal to its moment of act as reflected in the word. This is the word's duration and consequence. Through this examination we also begin to notice that the image of the M disrupts history, it creates a film on history which is gesturally opaque a shadow of the world. The "apex of the M," in spite of its attempts to be iconoclastic, reapplies the icon in a most graphic and violent form of usurpation, intended as liberatory, yet functioning as a rhetorical device which perhaps unbeknownst to the editors is bent on debilitating human actuality. We begin to see that far from being iconoclastic the editor's spell cast at the apex of the Millennium makes of history a fetish. The result of the distance of act from word in the eschatological breach is that history and the future is idolized, thematized, made aspect of rhetoric and form. In essence the effect of the preface to the "apex of the M" is an "iconoclastic fetishism."5 Within act as a process of work the poet's house is and can only be continuously engulfed in material history by constantly enacting the overthrow of any agency. This is achieved only at the moment of the letter as it is engulfed in history apart from any agency. Indeed this struggle against agency is the interminable contradiction of language, its constant overthrow of its own mediacy. This continuum is itself history; history apart from rhetoric, from style, from form in activity. This essay is a brief examination of the poetic act as act in history and is prompted by the responsibility of this act a responsibility and a history dodged by any agency, any Monarchy, be it "Alexander's," or "God's." 1 At a recent reading given by Michael Palmer he mentioned to the audience that Akhmatova's house is a national museum, but that it is unmarked and its location is known to but a few it is a "secret house." 2 In Dante's cosmology, the "M" falling out of the heavens in a procession of letters (D-I-L-I-G-I-T-E I-U-S-T-I-T-I-A-M...Q-U-I I-U-T-I-C-A-T-I-S T-E-R-R-A-M ) orients the reader to view the M as if with a partition between one's eyes. In one eye the M is a promotion of the benevolent monarchy - God's justice - to be established on earth; in the other eye, as some critics would have it, the M, in its transformation to a fleur-de-lis, is a critique of the imperialist ventures of the French Monarchy and of Florentine political schisms France had its hand in the ouster of the Ghibbelenes in Florence and both France and Florence used the fleur-de-lis as political symbols. This politically partitioned view of the M points to a secular monarchy and to Dante's critique of a Prince's justice. The partition of the M is instructive.The moment of the M, of letters, for Dante is partitioned secular and sacred the moment of act and potential.. The schism of act and potential points directly to the schism of secular and sacred, but through the transparency of angels: 'The Angelic intellect is always in a state of pure act that is, its powers never lapse into mere potentiality, but are at every moment actualized. At the other extreme of creation, and therefore in the lowest place is pure matter, the prima materia which is pure potentiality the possibility of becoming realized in some individual form. Midway between the two stand man, a union of both. Part of our powers goes forth intermittently in act or actuality; but part lies inactive as mere potentiality, waiting to be called into play. And in man this union of act and potentiality, Beatrice declares, will never be dissolved. This is sometimes understood as the union of body and soul, which even death can dissolve only for a time; but it seems rather to imply that man even in the world to come will never attain to the pure act of the Angelic intellect some part of his being will remain for ever in potentia.' from In Patria, an Exposition of Dante's Paradiso, Rev. John S. Carroll, M.A., D.D. , Kennikat Press Port Washington, NY/London, 1971, first published in 1911. p. 454. When seen through the agency of the Angelic intellect, material act is "for ever in potentia." This in potentia is the measure of our act, from without. This external measure results in a violence an excised history very similar to that suffered at the words of Alexander. In a subtle, yet profound shift, if read dialectically, the future does not bestow grace upon act, act is its own futuring.B With the recognition of the trans-temporality of act, there is a clearer understanding of how the poet's house is perpetually engulfed in history; never does it propose a future, it actualizes history as it's own future. To flesh this out further, this notion of act can be likened to the idea of negotiation put forth by Homi Bhaba in location of culture, (Rutledge, '94). In the first chapter, "The Commitment to Theory," Bhaba refutes the possibility of a transparent agent, or of any third person examination of ideology. He puts forth Mill's "On Liberty" as a clear example of a third person , or transparent agency of political ideology that first marks out difference (polarization) and then reconciles these differences through a careful, (and inherently violent) rationale. (For Bhaba, Mill's transparent agency is a rhetorical/textual manifestation of the political subject through negation.) Opting instead for a textual, or iterate negotiation, Bhaba attempts to position the text in a constant process of emergence from within an ideological translation. "When I talk of 'negotiation' rather than 'negation,' it is to convey a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic, without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History....By negotiation I attempt to draw attention to the structure of 'iteration' which informs political movements that attempt to articulate antagonistic and oppositional elements without the rationality of sublation or transcendence. (pp. 25, 26) What does this have to do with a benevolent monarchy? First, gnosticism is the pre-eminent trans parent agency. For the gnostic, only God is capable of reconciling act and potential. Any acceptance of that agency is a subordination to that agency - a further removal from act's capacity; any acceptance of a transparent agency, any Monarchy, is an acceptance of a negative, transcendental history. Second, the iteration of a gnostic history is the proposition of an Other to which we ascend, of a constant and everlasting potential which is always undoing the act. The extension of this is that through transcendence, history is subordinate to gnostic iteration. B Any attempt to reconcile act with potential must encounter history at its moment and this encounter is impossible through any transparent agency (or angel). In part of the Arcades Project, Benjamin counters very clearly the agency of angels and proposes a material history in constant actualization. The fore- and after-history of historical evidence is made manifest in it by a dialectical presentation. Further: every historical state of affairs presented dialectically polarizes and becomes a force field in which the conflict between fore- and after history plays itself out. It becomes that field as it is penetrated by actuality. And thus historical evidence always polarizes into fore- and after-history in a new way, never in the same way. And it does so go beyond itself, within actuality per se....(N7a,1) and in another place: in allegory the facies hippocratica of history lies before the viewer's eyes like a frozen, primordial landscape...(N2,7) from N: "Re The Theory of Knowledge,Theory of Progress," Act is its own limit and the limit of history. Any agency (any "M") is allegorical and denies this limit and instead presents a mythic history an "antediluvian fossil." As an historical and cultural cross-reference, parts of the argument put forth by the editors of "apex of the M" are in no way new, or specific even to poetries of the west. A Japanese literary critic Yashimoto Takaaki used a similar argument against self conscious, language-centered writing in Japan in the late 1970's. Yashimoto, reacting to the influence of (French) post-modern thinkers on Japanese poetry in the '60's, argued that "to single out [contemporary] poet's individual characteristics from the ground of their sensibility and the solipsism of their thought has become meaningless." [See the introduction to An Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry, Leith Morton Ed (1993) and Trans and Yashimoto Takaaki, Zomho Sengoshiron (Tokyo: Yamata Shobo, 1983) (The above quote is borrowed from Morton's anthology, page xxiii.)]. 3 These thousand lights have been said to be the transcendence of writing itself; the individual letters actually writing the world onto the face of divine justice - the joined matter and spirit, act and potential in the Jovian sphere. See chapter two of Jermey Tambling's Dante and Differance, Cambridge, 1988. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 11:12:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Juliana Spahr Organization: University at Buffalo Subject: Re: G2 As to the Evans-Silliman exchange: I appreciated both posts. But Steve's I found especially useful for clarifying a lot of the problems that I had with Silliman's original post. What I find most frightening about Silliman's arguments is his reduction of everything in Buffalo or even elsewhere in the nation to a sort of spiritualism (it is the only grouping that he acknowledges as really having any seriousness) that finally isn't representative of the larger picture. For starters, as Jena made clear, neither of the editors of Chain are on the board of Apex of the M. Chain in fact is a journal that in many ways pursues an opposite agenda as that of Apex-- it is anti-editorial, anti-grouping. The use of the device of the chain letter in the first volume was explicitly intended to expand community definitions beyond editorial privilege (Jena and I wrote about the success and failure of this project in our "Editors' Notes"). Also neither of the editors of the Technique volume are on the board of Apex of the M. But while this is probably just a confusion on Silliman's part, it also seems in some ways indicative of his blindness to anything going on in what seems to be called G2 poetry beyond spirit. Beginning the Technique volume with the Spirit section was something that went counter to my editorial wishes and knowledge (I wanted to open with the broader "word and world" section), but also I think should not be read as "aggressive." Peter argues that when he sent this volume off to the printers with the spirit section first, it was to try to offer some connection with the Presentation volume-- both begin with Abbot and end Ziolkowsky. I am willing to chalk it up to alphabetical accident. But also I don't think that any more than the twenty-one poets in the spirit section have much to do with spirit (and come on, even of these twenty-one, beyond a statement of an idea of poetics as being transformative, it is hard to see these poets as a unified group-- Miekal And, Lisa Jarnot are hardly spiritualist poets that would meet the rigors of definition proposed in Apex-- this confusion or expansion of the categories in this collection was an editorial intention). Finally, to see the anthology as spiritualist is to do a great and serious disservice to around one hundred other poets. Just as to say that the anthology indulges in "increasingly modest forms" is to do a great disservice to a whole slew of writers (who are these people, Ron? who is "returning to the lyric? what are their numbers in this volume? who is draining the social? what is the social and why is the lyric not social?-- these are all innocent questions on my part, I need more specifics to actually begin to discuss this topic which is one that seems very urgent to me). It is, to just list some names at random, unfair to Lee Ann Brown's and Karen Kelley's attention to sexuality, unfair to Kevin Magee's mix of formalism, class struggle, and history, unfair to Myung Mi Kim's attention to relation, unfair to Susan Gevirtz's complicated feminism and attention to subjectivity, unfair to C.S. Giscombe's attention to identity. It is also I think unfair to the overt political intention in the anthology to include as many women as men (something that other anthologies of alternative poetry don't even come close to attempting and something that never seems to get mentioned in any complaint about this collection). Further, I am no longer sure any more, although I would have been a year ago, that a return to the lyric is a draining of the social. For starters, it is difficult to separate the social from any form. Susan Stewart's recent work on the lyric has done a lot of change the way I think of this form. Also, I don't see the anthology has having a "reluctance to acknowledge or own its own position." It seems rather that there is a complication in the anthology of what it means to have a position (an identity, a school, a gender). Steve Evans's introductory piece is good on this. If there is anything that sits owl-like overlooking a younger generation it isn't language poetry anymore than it is the New York school-- it is rather attempts at categorization, at bunker mentality. Much of the work of what might be called G2 reacts against this and in very interesting and innovative ways (Apex is an obvious exception to this in their editorial return to a concept of poetic discourse as war). Perhaps the reason such a collection seems such a strange beast to Silliman is that it is so different than the rigorous, mathematical model of ITAT. It is a collection of younger poets-- all of whose writing will change dramatically in the next years. I prefer to think of the anthology as more of a phonebook than even an anthology (these complaints about the authority of this anthology that are happening in Joel's post and in the discussion of anthologies at the beginning of the year are very alien to me-- what authority? the whole thing was thrown together and knows it). The numbers will change, people will move, but it is an attempt at a demographic for the year. It claims no completeness. It doesn't tell you not to read the books of the authors included. At best, it is a reference tool. At its worst, it is difficult to read because it includes so many writers. All of this has put me in the uncomfortable position of defending something that I have worked on. But while I acknowledge a lot of omissions and other problems with the anthology, I also believe that a lot of the work in it is important. I stand behind this work by other people because it has meant something to me. I don't find this work a repetition of language poetry nor does it seem to me upsetting that there are "no literary devices in that collection that you cannot already find in The New American Poetry, In the American Tree, or The Art of Practice" anymore than it upsets me that there are no devices in these anthologies that one cannot find in as inclusive a project as America: A Prophecy or maybe even the Norton. It is emphasis and idea and use of device here that is important. Not device itself. I hope this makes sense. I would enjoy complaints and clarifications. Juliana Spahr P.S. Please excuse erratic returns, they are not poetic attempts but rather just attempts to stop the line being cut in two. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 12:43:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Benjamin H. Henry" Subject: Little Magazine Call For Work X-To: nd5754@albnyvms.bitnet, jej84@albnyvms.bitnet, mijoyce@vaxsar.vassar.edu, bernstei@ubvms.bitnet, 3smc22@qucdn.queensu.ca, v231sey9@ubvms.bitnet, v080l3np@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu, keepc@qucdn.queensu.ca, v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu, lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu, au462@roo.INS.CWRU.EDU, ls0796@albnyvms.bitnet, digaman@well.sf.ca.us, varmint@well.sf.ca.us, caroway@aol.com, st000910@brownvm.brown.edu, cab7599@is.nyu.edu, db0965@albnyvms.bitnet, bsmjj@cunyvm.bitnet, belile@delphi.com, pac2j@virginia.edu, edene@alpha.hanover.edu, gquasha@aol.com, v369t4kj@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu, benoit_sta@lsi.supelec.fr, Chris Funkhouser , greg@rasna.com, kelly@levy.bard.edu, jtm19@albnyvms.bitnet, manowak@alex.stkate.edu, wand@nyu.com, gsaedit@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu, ejournal@albnyvms.bitnet, kroker@vax2.concordia.ca, garber@albnyvms.bitnet, magnetic@netcom.com, rasulaj@qucdn.queensu.ca, hrl@well.com, hoffmap@snyplava.BITNET, saturn@hearn.bitnet, tnc@gitvm1.bitnet November 1994 Issue 21 of _The Little Magazine_ will be distributed as a cd-rom, and we are looking for work which maximizes the potential of this medium. We encourage contributors to conceive of their submissions as multi-media "texts" which can incorporate graphics, audio and hypertext (as a partial listing of the possibilities). "Straight" texts will also be considered, especially those concerned with issues relating to electronic medium (the attitude need not be positive). We will produce the journal using a Microsoft Windows system and Asymetrix Multimedia Toolbook, and accept submissions on disk (MacIntosh format possible but not preferred), or via e-mail, ftp, or DAT. Paper as a last resort! Graphics work is preferred in a digitized format, though, if required, we can digitize work for you. Our conceptual / diagrammatic deadline is January 31, and technical / final deadline is April 1. Please contact us as soon as possible if you have work to contribute. _The Little Magazine_ Department of English SUNY-Albany Albany, NY 12222 518-442-4398 bh4781@csc.albany.edu Look forward to hearing from you, Thanks! The Editors ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 13:21:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Howard Shoemaker Subject: calling G1G2...this is mission control In-Reply-To: <199411010808.DAA81531@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> from "Ron Silliman" at Nov 1, 94 00:02:10 am > At the point that David wrote Pcoet, he was either about to (or just > had) abandoned his idea of ever finishing his dissertation (the one > chapter he wrote appeared in the Maps special issue on Zukofsky), and > came out of the closet to his students at Berkeley with a vengence, > platform shoes and glitter in his beard. There was absolutely no way > that any one confronting either him or that text in those days could not > see the text's relation not just to the history of modernism but also to > what was then known as "gender fuck" politics. As someone struggling with my own dissertation on the Objectivists, i found this image of a newly freed Melnick in platform shoes, an image apparently hovering just behind the text, delightful. Problem is, i'd read the poem before & never been visited by this apparition. And maybe i'm only advertising my own lack of in/sight but i defy anyone to conjure it from those pages in INTAT alone. The point is that in its absence, i'm not sure how clear the whole "gender fuck" issue is (wasn't clear at all to me). The larger point, as i see it, is that many of these sorts of discussions, of poetry and "the social," posit a larger (reading) context for the poetry that is simply an illusion (despite the fierce energy and intrinsic interestingness of some of the discussion). Where i live i am defined against almost everyone i know by the fact that the latest ish of Talisman or Sulfur might be found lying around my apt. That puts me in a pretty small group--yet i'm pretty far out of the loop when it comes to the current G1/G2 debate--much of which, it strikes me from the outside, will turn on precisely those Melnickean personal filigrees to which Ron alludes--and these are supposed to verify the political dimension of the work? And on this point, i have to say, despite my longstanding sympathy w/ the LangPo effort, that if people have insisted on objecting to what they see as that group's exclusionary emphasis on the centrality of language (which is key to the claim for social efficacy of poetry), it is only because the original writings are full of such assertions of linguistic centrality. It may be true, as Silliman indicates, that no one actually believed it, but the extremism of assertion was itself part of the way the "group" worked and undoubtedly a crucial factor in its "success" (w/in an extremely limited field). The question remains: what is the larger social efficacy of the sorts of "resistances" LangPos have advocated? How exactly does the social enter the poem and the poem the social? How do discussion like these keep from remaining hopelessly INTERNECINE?? steve shoemaker ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 12:31:38 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Timmons Subject: Re: Failed Experiments In-Reply-To: <01HIXW0LU0QA8YEVHW@asu.edu> On Mon, 31 Oct 1994, George Bowering wrote: > That piece by Timmons was pretty bad, eh? I'd say that it failed at > something, and shouldnt have been published here. > Which, within the context of the "discussion," is another way of saying that it was a successful experiment--though the criteria for success must be garnered through an ironic reading. Jeffrey Timmons ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 14:52:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Phillips Subject: Re: "apex of the M" - essay excerpt I must apologize for the hastily strung preface to my excerpt. The garbled sentence should read: Just how does one act when the church is on fire? I should also add that I find myself, by vice or virtue - not by age, outside G2, though most of my friends are card carrying. My poetry is god damned lyrical though, so according to prophecy, I should be getting my card in the mail any day now. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1994 13:07:48 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Timmons Subject: Re: calling G1G2...this is mission control In-Reply-To: <01HIYP465EDU8YF26H@asu.edu> Steven Shoemaker's question is an important one: How does the social enter the poem; how does the poem enter the social? Such questions seem highly valuable in ascertaining not only relationships between aesthetics and the larger social world, but the place of the arts (and artists) in that world. I'm very interested in hearing what other people's ideas are about such notions of influence between the social and the personal, particularly as they relate to aesthetic production and their place/influence/relationship to history and context. I've been exploring Marxist, particularly Gramscian, views of how the social and the aesthetic interact but I have the sense that they, while useful, remain vague and ill-defined. The notion of "use" that was raised seems pertinent, but I'll have to reread (always) those entries to see if they can be inserted into Steven's question. I am always reminded of Emerson in "Art" where he finds the distinction between the useful and the fine arts limiting and stifling--perhaps the answer (were there ever any one) would lie in that direction. Jeffrey Timmons ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 16:28:28 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: calling G1G2...this is mission control Isn't "the poem", lock schlock and barrel, constituted by a writer who has continuing relations with the body politic, like it or not -- thrown-ness as in Jim Morrison (rr or r] & Charles Bernstein have liked to say -- following Heideggr, I guess. Oh yes aesthetics happens somewhere else then where, old bean, huh? Aesthetics is a blind for social and money interests mainly. Confucius never found anyone who was disinterested -- & that makes questions for a whole tradition of separations and purifications in the name of art (i.e. Milord's fetishized pictures and objets d'art, later property of boards of trustees of museums, or MS of Vergil, as sandwiched in plastic sheeting in Vatican to be literary. Poet's letters, Palgrave and subsequent anthologies in the college market]. Jean Calais's translations of Villon are all in vain....Everyone wants to be a big artist these days. There must be more in poetry than anyone has thought. Could it be that there is a real power in it/always ideologists want to bring it under their control, as instrument. Like music, it keeps on escaping ideological control clutches, saying more than it means to, or less. Let's hope there is a real poet among the new writers, or even two. Surely "G1" or any G at all including G-6 (dead poets of circa Mallarme's time will welcome them, by opening new readings to us, readings we had missed, but which may be what we have always really longed for. Belonging to no G in the U.S. (wrong age) but listening as a reader/user to several U.S. G's with pleasure, excitement, appropriative glee, there is no reason to choose among generations, only to pick out the plums. This you learn in "art history", who says there's progress between generations, so that noone can consider themselves righteous who can make use of "early" artworks? Does the saying of a poem work like a charm as entry to a space of thoughts and language issues and issues of living and the politics of living or not? Noone can quite tell what will prove to be useful and sometimes it happens that a misprint retained does the trick. L= was marvellous because it accepted that conscious control of the way words got into the poem could be consonant with disorders that seemed to be the preserve of chance procedures or of lyrical speaking with tongues. It did not only "displace" "personal poetries" (Downtown poetries various, variously remaining in some degree acceptable or with affinities) but also the hopes for the upsurge of deep image to recreate the body and the body's politics. I look to see with interest which models from the recent G's various will reappear as the mashed potatoes for the younger poets. I could see aspects of beat poetry being valuable as well as the "spiritual" poetries of say Robt Kelly or George Quasha.... If I see the arts as a zone for freedoms, someone will now surely tell me my responsibilities. __ That sounds like a job for Ron Silliman. __ I'm impressed with Tom Mandel's comments on "use" and I hope this will be seen as pushing in something of that direction as well as a rejoinder to the Shoemaker questions. This medium is great for filling in times like sitting in office waiting for next lot of exam papers to come in. Hello. American poets, it's half-past four on an early summer afternoon, --- here is your wake up call. "The difference is spreading." Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz post: Dept of Art History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Fax: 64 9-373 7014 Telephone: 64 9 373 7599 ext. 8981 or 7276 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 16:32:02 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: experiwhat? Not Mandel only, but Patrick Phillips on use, and impoverished uses of this facility, ending "Form is rampant". There's politics! Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz post: Dept of Art History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Fax: 64 9-373 7014 Telephone: 64 9 373 7599 ext. 8981 or 7276 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 00:37:28 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Phillips Subject: Re: "apex of the M" - essay excerpt Although I've been presumptuous enough already, I left off two important notes in the excerpt: 4 My progression to a notion of poethics can't help but take up, through parallel, Levinas' notion of Heideggers' Ontology. In Otherwise Than Being (pg. 103) Levinas charges Heidegger with doing to Being what the M'sters have done with any notion of making, or of poetry. Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues the State and in the nonviolence of totality, without securing itself against the violence from which is nonviolence lives and which appears in the tyranny of the state. Truth, which should reconcile persons, here exists anonymously. Universality presents itself as impersonal; and this is another inhumanity....A philosophy of power, ontology is, as philosophy which does not call into question the same, a philosophy of injustice. Even though it opposes the technological passion issued forth from the forgetting of Being hidden by existents, Heideggerian ontology which subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relation of Being in general, remains under the obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny. Tyranny is not the pure and simple extension of technology to reified men. Its origin lies back in the pagan "mood," in the enrootedness in the earth, in the adoration that enslaved men can devote to their masters. 5 In Iconology (Chicago, '86) W.J.T. Mitchell plots out some of the rhetorical image-making used by Marx and his contemporaries in an effort to get to an understanding of "The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm." From the chapter so titled he examines empiricist and idealist models of history to illuminate Marx's critique of fetishism and "its dialectical counterpart, the phenomenon of iconoclasm." Although his argument in no way resembles my own, I feel there is an pertinent quote from the passage called "the Dialectics of Iconoclasm:" Iconoclasm has a history at least as old as idolatry. Although it always tends to appear as a relatively recent, revolutionary breakthrough, overturning some previous established cult of image-worship (the Protestant Reformation breaking with Roman Catholicism, the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire opposing the patriarch, the Israelites escaping Egypt), it regularly presents itself as the most ancient form of religion a return to primitive Christianity, or to the religion of the first human creatures, before a "fall" which is always understood as a fall into idolatry. Indeed, one might argue that iconoclasm is simply the obverse of idolatry turned outward toward the image of a rival, threatening tribe. The iconoclast prefers to think that he worships no image of any sort, but when pressed, he is generally content with the rather different claim that his images are purer or truer than those of mere idolaters. (page 198) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 08:16:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: experiwhat? This is a bit of a long post, which is, I know, against the rules, and, worse, rude. I apologize in advance, but having initiated this discussion, there's a lot I need to say at this point. The multitude of repsonses have been extremely interesting in their diversity and inventiveness, but none has yet convinced me that the phrase "experimental poetry" is either meaningful (apart from idiosyncratic imaginations of it : private languages) or particularly useful. On the contrary, after everyone has said their piece, it seems more confused and confusing than ever. For me, the most attractive defense so far has been Robert Kelly's, which he achieves by returning experiment and its science to their mysterious alchemical sources, and the notion of proceeding not knowing what the outcome will be. Even then, though, the idea that only some poetry is initiated not knowing its outcome seems based on the very same violent taxonomy I was trying to shed some light on in the first place. If we take this secondary definition of experiment as the operative one in relation to poetry, the unspoken implication is that there is something we can call non-experimental poetry. What exactly would that poetry be? Poetry that knows what its outcome will be before it starts? What does "outcome" mean here? What the poem ultimately "says"? How the poem ultimately "works"? Frankly I don't think I know of any poetry like that, even the poetry I am least interested in. Even the most predictably conventional, it seems to me, can, and frequently does, contain surprises, the unexpected. To know the outcome before you write is to produce manuals, not poems. Even someone like Timothy Steele, I'd argue, doesn't know what results his rhymes will produce before he writes them. Perhaps the key is the word "conventional". Or, dare I say it, "predictable", thus returning us to the world of experimentalism. (But if a poem is predictable, can't this be part of an experiment? Experimenting to see if certain conventions will produce consistently predictable results?) Let's say there is a complex structure of conventions the poet has at her disposal, conventions that extend from phonetics to syntax to semantics to form (something like the grammetrical model Donald Wesling works out in *The Chances of Rhyme* and *The New Poetries*). In one sense, a poem embodies a structure of choices (conscious or unconscious, controlled or random) that array language in complex relation to those conventions. Certain patterns of convention dominate at any given moment the cultural sense of what constitutes a contemporary poem. We recognize Shakespeare's sonnets as poems, even great poems, at the same time we know they are not contemporary poems. Compare them with Bernadette Mayers' or Jack Clarke's sonnets. Their sonnets are absolutely contemporary in every way, even though, or maybe especially because, they work with a 600 year old form. I don't know how Bernadette would refer to her work, but I think Jack would blanche at the word experimental. You could say Los doesn't experiment, Los creates. Is this a meaningful distinction? My sense is that every phoneme, every stress, every rhyme, every reference in Jack's sonnets work within and against the array of conventions to mark out a moment of awareness of the particularity of the astonishing complexity of relation between language, thought, myth, history, sound, silence, rhythm, self, other, social, personal, elsewhere, here, time, and eternity. What Girogio Agamben calls "whatever being" in *The Coming Community*. This is not something I would think of as experimental. Let me go back to the question of the relation to convention as a way of distinguishing between poetries. Let's assume that at certain times certain conventions dominate writing to the point that they no longer even seem to be conventions, they are simply seen as constituting (good) writing. And as a result, meaning itself becomes predictable and conventional. Moreover, the conventions can be seen as upholding certain conventional and oppresive forms of life. One alternative for a poet in those circumstances is to try to subvert the forms of life by subverting the dominant conventions in her work. Is this something people mean by "experimental"? And if so, is it more important under these conditions to not know what you're doing (what your desired outcome is) or to know? Or is it possible in some sense to both know and not know at the same time? Say, to know generally, but not to know specifically. What does it mean to not know in this context? Let me return for a moment to the idea of a situation in which a specific form of literay convention has become authoritarian and can be seen as upholding certain oppressive forms of life. In this situation, is it possible to address, even subvert, those oppressive forms of life from within a writing based on those dominant conventions? I think this is the kind of writing Keith Tuma referred to a few months ago during the great anthology debate, i.e. the writing of someone like Thom Gunn, or, say, Louis Zukofsky when he's writing sestinas. If we acknowledge that it is possible, that means that the link bewteen the forms of literary conventions and the forms of life is metaphorical, not actual, and that some other issue is at stake here in the writing. Let's call it "meaning", where we understand that in a broad sense of the overall signifying power of the poem, the numinous "cloud" of significance generated by the totality of the poem's phonic, visual, semantic, and temporal structures. In this model, the relation to convention, while meangingful, does not determine meaning. If we understand "experimental" poetry to be poetry which resists in some way(s) the dominant conventions by "not knowing" what it's doing, what its outcome is, it could in any case still be upholding the very oppressive forms of life it seems to be subverting, or trying to subvert. That is, it could banal, predictable, pretentious, self-indulgent, tedious--even authoritarian (and, as Joel Kuszai pointed out, sometimes is). What, then, is the use of this distinction? Rather than clarifying the issues facing writers today, it obscures those issues by creating a dualistc taxonomy which implicitly attaches value to sheer formal exuberance or lack of control or even ignorance. I know there's a whole other dimension to this question that has to do with practical considerations of identity, recognition, publication, government money, etc. A number of people made interesting observations about these issues and the question of lables. These are important questions, but they're not questions of principle. They should not be confused with principles, nor allowed to confuse them. Adios, Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca PS Peter Quartermain tells me Gertrude Stein denied she ever wrote an experiemntal work. How should we understand that? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 08:50:17 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: experiwhat? In-Reply-To: <199411021320.IAA03923@eerie.acsu.buffalo.edu> from "Michael Boughn" at Nov 2, 94 08:16:45 am Mike, In the airport recently I observed a man wearing a tee shirt upon which was written, in huge block letters: WHY? BECAUSE I SAY SO. This to me sums up this question re: the issue of "experimental" (allowing that we are not talking any more, which would yield no results, postulating a hypothesis and then trying to prove it.) What I mean to say is that if you take Timothy Steele or people secure in the academy more importantly, where these people come from, that they are invested with some authority and the line really falls where they have the confidence (vs permission, in Duncan's sense) of being able to "say so." I mean when I saw the t shirt I thought who is his audience, his children, his significant other, airport personnel. But in the end it didn't matter to whom it was addressed (maybe it was only to me!) there was no doubt from the look in his eyes, whether he was going to be "experimental" or "conventional" that his audience would have to yield. That's the point I'm thinking as I do my own scribbling somewhere out of his way. Loss Loss Glazier lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 05:57:05 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Flaming X-cc: rsillima@vanstar.com I've found virtually every response to my last post really valuable and useful. Especially Juliana's. But I don't want this to be reduced to a "generational debate" since I don't see "winners" or "losers" but rather think I (personally) have a lot to gain from getting the sorts of insights that seem right now to be just popping out the various posts. Roadmaps to the writing are especially valuable. Besides, if this is going to be Oedipal, I know which role that puts me in, thank you... Some thoughts here on a few of Mark Wallace's comments. > >1) It is a standard hegemonic (not to mention racist and imperialist) >move to take one piece of writing by some particular "group" (as it is >defined from outside) as the example of what is wrong with that "group" >as a whole, and then dismissing that "group" on the basis of that one >piece of writing. Yo, Mark. I'm not saying there's anything "wrong" with the Apex cluster and am trying to read them, not dismiss them. One of many valuable lessons I learned from Jerry Rothenberg about 25 years ago was that it's very hard for any writer to read the work of people 20 years or more younger than him or herself. Writers of the NAP generation tended to cluster w/ regards to my own G1 into the following patterns: 1) Couldn't read it, didn't try 2) Wasn't what they expected, so dismissed it outright, sometimes w/ great hostility 3) Tried to be generous, but didn't really get it (this was/is almost a majoritarian reaction) 4) Read it with interest, insight and made valuable responses to it W/ regards to G2, G3...Gn, I'd like personally to aim for #4. And would appreciate any help I can get. It is even hegemonic, racist, and imperialist to refer >to them as a "group." What is the point of writing a collective "state of the art" if people don't take it seriously as collective action? I'm not the one grouping them together. I will admit that use a governmental/institutional frame such as a "state of the art" address does put one into some heavy metaphoric territory. They're the ones who announced that they were the government, no? Let's avoid flame wars of hyperbole and character assassination if possible. It makes it harder to read the work. >2) "Make it new" was hardly a dictum put forth by someone interested >in social liberation. Indeed, "make it new" is at least as effective as a >capitalist slogan as it is as a call to radical change. And whatever the >social effectiveness of the proponents of "make it new" in poetry (I >think it's unclear, but worth discussing) their success has been >undeniable in terms of their marketing of that concept and their >promotion of poetry that fits the concept. > Actually, Pound was interested in social liberation. But he had a profoundly fucked up idea of what that might mean. The other point about making it new and the promotion of a poetry that fits the concept is one that the New Formalists have already made. Interesting to see it here. >4) To see the "lyric" as somehow a force of social conservatism is >simply HISTORICALLY UNVERIFIABLE. The lyric form, like the use of >parataxis, collage, sonnets, whatever, is a possibility that can be made use of, or discarded, in a variety of historical situations. I think that a social examination of the lyric is a great project to think about working on. I've even contemplated the idea of a booklength study. Especially since the definition of lyric changes I think (part. in the late 19th century) as its differentiation from dramatic & narrative modes dissolves in poetry due to the arrival of other more powerful dramatic/narrative media, the novel, cinema, etc. Pound's tripartate logopoeia, phanopoeia, melopoeia are an attempt I think to rescue that earlier distinction, essentially dividing lyric into all three houses of the poem. But the underlying question becomes, what is the social meaning of the lyric? In O-blek 12, as I read it, it seems a return to the personal and local, which in turn can mean a lot of things. I'd like to figure out just what those are. In general, I think that all forms are amoral and can be used from any poltical/social position depending on the context. >5) I don't think it's at all clear whether younger writers are >"returning to the lyric." But if writers are using lyric forms, the >question to ask is NOT "what's wrong with those writers?" but rather >"what is it about the contemporary social environment that makes the >lyric seem useful to some writers" or "what is it about the lyric that >makes it seem useful to some writers in this social environment." > EXACTLY!! >7) In fact, my objection to Lew Daly's introduction to Apex of the M is... that it repeats the same Oedipal MALE model of thinking your poetry has value only if you can "overthrow the enemy." My problem with his introduction is ... that IT LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE THOSE MANIFESTOS. > It wasn't Lew who signed it. According to Alan & Kristin, they all worked on it together, to the point that even some sentences were collaboratively written. >8) But the idea that Lew's work, however interesting or not, is a >statement of MY poetics, or that of Steve Evans or Jena Osman or whoever, Nobody ever said it was. Or Jena's or Juliana's or Joel's or most anybody else in O-blek 12 except for the very particular few who actively commit themselves to some version of its argument. So people like Will Alexander and Elizabeth Robinson stand in an interesting relation to it, not a part of that declaration but obviously very sympathetic to its conception of a spiritual poetics. Not clear at all how they would stand w/ regards to State of the Arts rather bellicose stance toward the past. I have found people in O 12 who themselves felt that putting the spirit section first in Technique "yolked" them into its general thrust and felt very much ripped off by that, precisely because they did not buy into the underlying argument and felt that putting it first created a sense of that. I've heard that from at least 5 contributors. The value of State of the Art is that it makes explicit what O 12's editing structure seems to imply. Very hard to read it as an accident of the alphabet. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 05:59:28 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: "apex of the M" - essay excerpt That Mitchell quote is illuminating. Though I'm amazed that in 1986 he still uses "he" as a gender neutral third person!! > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 10:32:42 -0500 Reply-To: Robert Drake Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Drake Subject: Re: Little Magazine Call For Work folks-- good ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 11:19:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Re: Flaming In-Reply-To: <199411021358.IAA10207@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> I thought it was clear from my opening comment that my remarks were not directed at "attacking" the comments made by any one particular post. It's interesting that my attempt to avoid doing so can be taken that way. Some further responses, this time in particular to what Ron has said. 1) I think I was suggesting, at least partly, that the reductive grouping of various poets BEGINS in the introduction to the Apex of the M. By turning "Language Poetry" into some one particular thing, they unfortunately invite the kind of attacks that turn THEM into one particular thing (altho I find it unfortunate that that is what had to happen) 2) I think it may be a stretch to say that Pound was ever interested in liberation, altho he may have been interested in revolution. I really do wish that history bore out the conclusion that revolution and liberation were the same thing, but I'm afraid it doesn't. And to say such a thing is not to say that revolution is bankrupt, by any means. But reductive thinking about what revolution entails (and again, this is not to say that anyone has done this recently) is NOT going to help revolution be successful. 3) The idea that poets respond to the past as much as remake the present does not imply a return to radical formalism any more than noting that the avant garde has traditionally been racist and sexist is a conservative insight. 4) The idea I want to put forward is that we need to rethink the relation of the avant garde to the history of social liberation. And I think it's not at all clear that avant gardists have always been as socially revolutionary as they would like to claim. I think it's not at all clear that new forms equal greater freedom, altho I do think that poets can make use of form to respond to changing cultural dynamics. The unexamined conviction that the avant garde is by definition involved with social liberation has to be examined, and to say so is not conservative. 5) It may be that there was some group editorial input on the Apex of the M introductory essay. But the tone and style is undoubtedly Lew Daly's, as will be clear if one reads his essay in A Poetics of Criticism. 6) In fact, it is quite possible that a "poetic revolution" among younger poets may find certain ideas in so-called "Language Poetry" to be reactionary, heavily male-oriented, and wedded to a concept of "make it new" that itself is conditioned by a certain blindness to the historical/social/cultural of its own discourse. But I myself would reject such a revolution, since I think the poetics of writers like Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten and others is more complex than that. But the argument I'm suggesting here is going to be made, and the people who make it will not necessarily be conservative. 7) I don't see how any of these comments can be considered a "flaming" attack on anyone's personality, altho I'm tempted to resent the aspersions that what I've said is "flaming"--and I wonder about the heterosexist implications of a word like "flaming" anyway. 8) I'm tempted to think that at this point in time, the lyric may be a socially revolutionary form than the manifesto. But I have no certainty on this subject. In fact, I guess I think it must be true that the manifesto is still useful, altho it feels awful tired at the moment. mark wallace ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 14:05:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Re: Flaming In-Reply-To: <199411021358.IAA10207@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> Some last updates, etc., and then, since I may have helped confuse rather than clarify matters, I'll shut up (tho I don't really mind confusing things) In #3 of my previous message I don't mean "radical formalism" but "traditional formalism" What Tony Green says about "internicene" warfare really hits home--it's a shame that my comments potentially sparked more misunderstanding (as if we don't already have enough of that). That was not my intention for them. Perhaps my own frustrated sense that a lot of people were not reading each other with sufficient complexity led me into precisely the same error that I was suggesting they were making. On the other hand, I'm never sufficiently comfortable with my own assumptions about the "significance" of experimental poetry, and so I'm perhaps equally determined to question the assumptions of others regarding the value of that work. It's quite possible that when I do that, it can too easily be read as another call to warfare. mark wallace ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Nov 1994 00:33:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joel Kuszai Organization: University at Buffalo Subject: Re: "apex of the M" - essay excerpt >From: TRIXY >To: "kuszai@ascu.buffalo.edu" >CC: >Subj: please don't forward this > >Dear Cookie, I thought I'd send you this, as otherwise you >might not see it, receiving only a few of the missives fired at >Fort Sumter since the Dresden incident. I think I'm done with >the poetics list. Stop sending me stuff. I can't bear it any >longer. Can you believe that shit? that endless chatter? the >only thing worse would be having to get drunk with those >people. but Ron, he's so funny--does he mean to be that way, >and what does he look like anyway? he is cute? I don't >understand what's up with the Apex of the M--you showed me >that essay but I didn't understand it. Trixy dont care. Trixy >have better things to do. HEY TRIXY! thanks for your response. I've been working on some other stuff so it took me a while to respond. Hope that's cool. Yeah, I promise not to send what you write to anyone else. And if you are really serious I'll stop forwarding you stuff from the poetics list. I am eager to do other things too. I think - despite the waves of chatter - that something could still be accomplished on the e-mail thing, although I have no idea as to what it would be. I mean it's not like we are going to get down to any level of praxis or meeting downtown some night to break windows or somthing...which is what I think the political leads to anyhow... Yeah, I too thought Ron was quite generous with the M'ers. I mean it is true - he's quite right - they are really trying to do something, which isn't very normal these days. I don't get the point of it. And don't worry about the editorial, you should read Lew's book--talk about incomprehensible! it is great writing, if you don't mind things being muddled by the psycho-sexual--but the editorial - the "declaration of war" as Ron seems to think it is -- the self-appointment to the "government"! -- I love that. I think Ron's pretty funny too. The problem, for my two-dollars and eighty cents, with the Apex thing is that they are trying to be political but are insisting on the spiritual -- which for me is only political when grouped into assembly for power reasons (i.e. a church) otherwise the spiritual is like, well, you know, kind of acquiescent by defualt--I mean sure, Koresh was able to bring the ATF to his front door--if that's political then let me out now--the real politics worth examining there is the refusal of the social--the manipulation of people in the name of "faith" which always slams the door on the social--here the spirital gets for me kind of sticky and icky -- like the fear of identity within the new coasteries -- hatcheries -- the fear of identity there is on identitarian grounds--the anti editorial mode is still an editorial - one of acquiescence and consent, however tacit. At least the M has some fire under their caps...and don't worry trixie, the next issue is due out soon, and word is that Prevallet wrote this one-- anybody who knows them knows that she has a mind of her own and that -- even with all the group editing in the world, I think, she is really into something different than Lew or Alan, or Pam for that matter--perhaps not hostile to them, but different enough to make the "group editorial" thing an unfortunate effacement. They will have to put their cards on the table soon enough. Poetry as Chillen of the Corn, or Jack-in-the Box will be gone of roadside ephemera soon enough. I mean the true "analysis" of our/any generation is to look at where the money comes from and how it is spent -- anyone can buy a spot on the literary register, the who's who of who cares been reading the situationists for Bernstein's class, wondering how people are going to react to it. I am afraid we'll get into a chapter & verse argument about Debord--maybe people will like him. Kind of hard to be in school and reading that stuff. Reminds me of when what's his face in Portland ore. changed all the street-signs in downtown to "Malcolm X" - it had a pretty wild effect at the time even if it was simply consumed, just as that group's efforts during the gulf war were completely co- opted by the spectacular; I mean going into restuaurants with gas-masks on trying to scare the eaters into some kind of political resistance, I mean come on, despite the disruption, I doubt anyone lost their appetite, and I'm sure there was hefty applause at the end. How yuppie (fake concerned) of them. The protest thing pretty much ended with them all "marching" around downtown portland with a police escort, I mean, led by the police escort. I remember sitting in my living room with John the night we started bombing there...we didn't have any lightbulbs that worked and no TV, just a clock radio, but that was enough. I felt competely incapacitated by the whole thing. All we could do was play music. There was only a bit of hope, word from seattle that some nut had opened fire on I-5 with some kinda automatic weapon. But that's not what the world heard. I don't know what the world heard. But the situationists. Shit. I read ten pages of that stuff then start pacing in my cage. I love it in the anthology where its written that the goal of the movement was to "complete and displace poetry." --an aspiration not too difficult to like, although I wonder what the hell it means. Situationism, as debord points out in that first part of the "Veritable Split of the S.I. public circular" book that situationism becomes as much the understanding of the enemy, who need to know it in order to fight it (through using it??) and then Trix, who then, may I ask? are we? >>The results of the poetics poll: >> >>What was it that Mean Joe Greene threw to that kid by the >>tunnel? Was it a jersey, a coca-cola T-Shirt, a flag of >>surrender? And if it was a flag of surrender, was Mean Joe >>Greene (and _all_ he represents) surrenderring to that kid, or >>what he suggesting that the kid surrender to him. Is he here a >>"warrior" or a "servant"? Is there any thing at all different >>about that ad (give or take a few years very much G1) and the >>one featuring Shaquille O'Neal intimidating all the kids on >>the court except one little one who refuses to give his drink to >>Shaq. >look, joey, trixy dont get it. Trixy say "make your point" and get >off the stage. Trixy wanna find you all alone in an >advertisement and push you up against one of those new cars >and violate you. >>"I wanted to write a poem >>that would teach you to read." >I like that! did you write that or is it from a real writer? it's a joke >Did Ron Silliman really stand on a street corner reading his >poetry to anybody who was passing by? that's what I heard/read--perhaps one of us should write to him and find out. Kind of an embarrassing thing to ask, no? >>Brathwaite reports that Mikey Smith was stoned to death in >>Kingston, Jamaica, presumably for his political activities. >>Smith was a "dub-poet" -- quite "popular" I guess, died about >>ten years ago ?? although I'm not sure. I got to Smith via >>Brathwaite but I don't know much. When the semester is >>over, and I can do what I want, I'm going to find out more >>about this. >>Before her death in 1977, Danielle Collobert had been >>involved with the "Algerian situation". >why do Trixy feel such despair! oh Trixy, my friend, please don't feel such despair.... love in all evenings, yo mama p.s. Ron is cute, but the one you really wanna meet is Steve Evans and about your age... ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Nov 1994 12:40:51 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Timmons Subject: Re: Protest of Gulf War in Portland, Or X-To: Joel Kuszai In-Reply-To: <01HJ0QQYB7B69D4V9V@asu.edu> A marginal concern of mine, not meant to inflammatory: While they were bombing baghdad at least those of us who were "marching" expressed our rage--no matter how contained it was--against what was going on. I can't help but think no matter how "consumed" such actions were (are) that sitting at home with no light bulbs is even more determined. Sorry if this is less than relevant; it seemed important to me. Jeffrey Timmons ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Nov 1994 17:28:25 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: w.curnow@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Experiwhat? It would be nice to trace a history of the phrase--"experimental poetry"--I think it was Tom Mandel writing. That history I feel sure belongs with that of modernism--and not just modernist literature--and more partic- ularly of its scientisms. "The arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science" Pound in l9l3. There's a book, CRITIC AS SCIENT- IST, The modernist poetics of E.P, by one IanBell. Someone was saying Stein denied writing experimentally. although her lab. work with Prof. Wm. James clearly had a direct bearing on her ideas about and practice of fiction. The first definition offered by Zukofsky for OBJECTIVE (ism) is from Optics. Mod- ernist scientism seems to have 2 purposes (at least), the first having to do with re-positioning the artist socially, as more serious (Pound's essay, "The Serious Artist"), artistic knowledge as hardcore, etc. and the second to do with establishing the "autonomy of the modernist art object" as we would today put it. Precise description of the object, impersonality--here we have Eliot's n otorious catalyst analogy--of the writer and so on. And so the short answer to the q uestion as to why people on this list are un- comfortable with, can't see the sense of, want no more to do with, the phrase is that the context which prompted its appearance and the purposes its served have both long gone. So another way into, or out of this discussion, would be to take that discomfort as a sign of our uneasy relation with modernism . ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Nov 1994 13:14:21 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeffrey Timmons Subject: Re: Hardcore X-To: w.curnow@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ In-Reply-To: <01HJ22P23EUQ8YGE0P@asu.edu> Probably repetitious by now: The part the new critics played in creating a "hardcore" object of study, with its own scientific processes and procedures should not be forgotten. I.A. Richards's "Science and Poetry" (or was it Poetry and Science? no, it must have been Science and Poetry) would be interesting to place in the context of a such a study of the relationship of "exp" poetry to the development of "hardcore" knowledge/poetry. Of course, mind you, it has been done . . . but the history of "exp" in this context still would be unique, I think . . . . Jeffrey Timmons ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Nov 1994 17:05:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Shoptaw Subject: experiment As unlikely as it seemed when I first climbed under the Buffalo blanket, I find myself sending a message on Wordsworth. His 1802 Preface to the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads begins with perhaps the most influential use of poetic "experiment" in the English canon. WW says that LB was "published, as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart." If we think of the "quantity of pleasure" as something measurable, like "energy" we're not far from OlsonUsOlson's formulation of poetry as an electronic mail in which, if the lines are good, the reader gets the poet's charge. Wordsworth (and Coleridge, collaboration demonstrating the "objective" worth of the project; if two could work on communicating "real language," then the project might establish "a class of Poetry" which others might join) experiments not only with language but with readers; if nothing happens to readers, the experiment fails. The preface, written after LB went into circulation, reveals his unscientifically gathered results, that he "pleased a greater number" than he hoped and presumably displeased about the same number as he had expected. Wordsworth adopts, and modifies, the scientific model of experiment. Later in the Preface, he distinguishes the poet's from the scientist's nature; the poet studies "general nature" (not Platonic or Johnsonian, but familiar nature, ordinary life) and the scientist studies the "particular parts of nature" of her/his field. Wordsworth prophesies that if "Men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in impressions which we habitually receive," these effects would become "proper objects of the Poet's art." Is WW's idea of experiment independent, with its emphasis on the truth of pleasure, of its origins in Burke and association theory (Locke, Hartley, Mill)? I don't know. To experiment now, with readers (and other writers), in poetry might mean, for example, representing the indirect "material revolution" of the internet experience to readers as part of their new nature--(un)natural , pleasurable, strange, manageable, manipulative, inevitable, and so on. In any case, Wordsworth's use of "experiment" is rhetorical, drawing on the status of the scientific discourse of knowledge, in order to distinguish his practice from what he saw as conventional poetic discourse. I'm not sure the current use of "experimental" (or "innovative" or "alternatives" for that matter) is any less rhetorical, or any less inexactly effective. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Nov 1994 19:13:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Shoptaw Subject: Listings I'd like to announce my forthcoming critical work: _On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry_ (Harvard UP, Dec.94). 386pp., $25pb, $50hb!! Too expensive, but there's some ms. facsimiles. John Shoptaw ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 09:29:44 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Experiwhat? Further towards the bibliography of art&science , Naum Gabo in CIRCLE, ed.J.L.Martin, B.Nicholson & N.Gabo. 1937 (U.S.Ed.Praeger,1971) "The Constructive Idea in Art" pp.1-10. Analogies between Science and Art as knowledge of the world are continuously at work there. "In Art more thn anywhere else in the creative discipline, daring expeditions are allowed. The most dizzying experiments are permissible, but even in Art the logic of life arrests the experiments as soon as they have reached the point when the death of the experimental objects becomes imminent. there were moments in the history of Cubism when the artists were pushed to these bursting points...." (p.5) Also Christina Lodder. "Russian Constructivism" Yale, 1983. pp.78- 82 on the work of INKhUK. IZO declaration of 1919, where "the concept of artisitic culture is defined as the "culture of artisitic invention"..... Further, students of Malevich will know that he conducted "experimental" workshops in which the concerns were the effects of different "forms" -- on people, one supposes. Could one suspect that "control" is at issue, by the artist/writer, over "effect" on the "reader/viewer"; that mistrust of artworks as "spurious" (uncontrolled messing around] is also connected with ideas about "control" over communicatory messages and meanings, including the message that "this is a serious work".... However, quantities of boring artworks in galleries and in print should be a warning that "experiment" covers a multitude of ineptitudes, worst of all a desire to pose as artist, limiting what is required as qualification to a low-level of market expectation. (There is a market-niche for experimental junk, it seems]. There is also a need to take chances in the making of anything to offset a rigidity in preliminary planning: that's experimental in the sense of not quite knowing where the .... or how the .... work will end. "Experimental" is good or bad depending on where and when you're aiming, I'd conclude. Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz post: Dept of Art History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Fax: 64 9-373 7014 Telephone: 64 9 373 7599 ext. 8981 or 7276 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Nov 1994 23:25:51 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: C&C "I hope this makes sense. I would enjoy complaints and clarifications." >Juliana Spahr I noted the other day (before I went to San Diego for a reading & a class at UCSD) that I appreciated Juliana's post a lot. In particular, she approaches the project of sketching out this new terrain more completely than I've seen done heretofore. And that's precisely what (I think) we need. Or I need, anyway. The following thoughts fall almost entirely into the "clarification" column. > >What I find most frightening about Silliman's arguments is >his reduction of everything in Buffalo >or even elsewhere in the nation to a sort of spiritualism >(it is the only grouping that he acknowledges as really >having any seriousness) >that finally isn't representative of the larger picture. Two thoughts: I've tried to be specific about the fact that: (1) I know that the "new mysticism" (or whatever one calls this tendency) is not all that is the case, in Buffalo or elsewhere. In fact, I've noted at least twice that several O 12 contributors make that point repeatedly in conversation. I have said that they are the one group that to date has attempted to articulate theoretically a transformed ground for poetics, not simply an extension of what they inherited from G1, NAP or the rest of the acronyms. (2) I've steered as clear as possible away from characterizing the Apex groups sense of spiritualism. While my own sense of the world may approach something akin to an atheist variant of zen buddhism, I'm fully aware of the pitfalls of approaching that discussion from a post-Enlightment vocabulary and expecting to get much use value out of the ensuing debate. >Chain in fact is a journal that in many ways pursues an opposite >agenda as that of Apex-- >it is anti-editorial, anti-grouping. >The use of the device of the chain letter >in the first volume was explicitly intended to expand community >definitions beyond editorial privilege >(Jena and I wrote about the success and failure of this project in our >"Editors' Notes"). This is an interesting essay, well worth reading in its own right & a perfect example of a text that would not be fun to try and fit into the various constraints of email. The concept of anti-editorial editing is problematic and the Chain editors understand it. From my perspective, I'm intrigued at the desire inscribed in the project. It definitely rings the "hatred of identity" bell from Steve Evans intro to the Technique section of O12. And it differs dramatically from the judgmental "state of the art" (SotA) manifesto in Apex. >Also neither of the editors of the Technique volume are on the board of >Apex of the M. But while this is probably just a confusion on Silliman's part, >it also seems in some ways indicative of his blindness to anything >going on in what seems to be called G2 poetry beyond spirit. Maybe. I wouldn't bet against it. But you neglect to note that two of the editors of Poetics of Criticism are also editors of Apex, while you are an editor of Poetics, O 12 AND Chain. Oliver Stone would have a field day with this kind of stuff. >Beginning the Technique volume with the Spirit section >was something that went counter >to my editorial wishes and knowledge And KNOWLEDGE?? >(I wanted to open with the broader "word and world" section), >but also I think should not be read as "aggressive." Aggressive is not a negative word in my vocabulary (coming as I do from the Watten/Andrews charm school tradition) But I find it hard to read otherwise >Peter argues that when he sent this volume off to the printers >with the spirit section first, it was to try to offer some >connection with the Presentation volume-- >both begin with Abbot and end Ziolkowsky. >I am willing to chalk it up to alphabetical accident. Ganick says that, with one exception, the order of The Art of Practice was exactly that of the receipt of manuscripts from the authors (one more reason to be prompt when solicited!), but I generally don't believe in accidents. Each approach (any approach) is a demonstration of method. >But also I don't think that >any more than the twenty-one poets in the spirit section >have much to do with spirit (and come on, even of these twenty-one, >beyond a statement of an idea of poetics >as being transformative, it is hard to see these poets as a unified group-- I agree completely. >Miekal And, Lisa Jarnot are hardly spiritualist poets True enough if we are speaking in the narrow terms that seem implicit in Apex's "SotA", but Miekal is very much a utopian in spirit. I'm much more struck by the distance in approach given by Steve Farmer (one of my favorite pieces in the entire book--totally sensible and on target) and Alan Gilbert's in that same section. Gilbert's piece seeks to rework the possibility of poetry, philosophy & history in a space of maybe 600 words. I find Gilbert's piece entirely problematic--the privilege he gives to the "other" (which he places transcendentally outside "the dialectic," a phrase he uses way too nominally) and the solid object he seems to envision as the self. But I'm impressed that he wants to accomplish this or even thinks it possible. I want a poetics in which both Farmer and Gilbert seem possible, even in the same paragraph. >Finally, to see the anthology as spiritualist is to >do a great and serious disservice to around one hundred other poets. 111, to be exact. The two volumes have 132 writers by my count. The volume called Presentation -- I forget who first pointed out that this distinction between presentation and technique almost perfectly mimes that of competitive ice skating -- has 114 poets in 334 pages, which comes to 2.9298245 pages per contributor. Obviously there are limitations that any editor will confront trying to include so many. But it's worth noting that 33 (more than a quarter) have more than one poem in the collection. Many others have complete works that gather together distinct shorter pieces (e.g. Clint Burnham, Susan Wheeler, Lori Baker). Just 34 are represented by works larger than their meager page allotments and only a very few have work present from anything that hints, however roughly, at a genuinely longer form (Lew Daly, Dan Davidson, Brian Schorn). Given that the overall age of contributors here is not significantly younger than that of the poets of Tree (or the NAP), that turn away from the longer form seems noteworthy, not accidental. So that when I think of the vast number of G1 poets involved in longer forms (not just from the Tree--where Coolidge, Greenwald, both Howes, Watten, Hejinian, Rodefer, Melnick, Palmer, Benson, Harryman, Weiner, Andrews, Inman, Darragh, Mayer, Sherry, DiPalma, and even Grenier have written booklength works) but Scalapino, Dahlen, DuPlessis, Byrd, Mackey, McCaffery, nichol, Brossard, Raworth, Fisher...the list just goes on and on. While this doesn't and shouldn't negate the work of those who work almost exclusively in shorter forms (Armantrout, Robinson, Bernstein, for example), the difference in the overall conception of the poem strikes me as profound. I'm interested in exploring that distinction, the causes for it, and the implications of it. Historically, history has not been kind to the authors of shorter poems since WW2 (Creeley being the rather obvious exception), and my comments re Lew Welch previously--to which nobody responded--still hold. A second differentiation (and a whole other discussion) has been the adoption of the unpunctuated fragment as a unit w/in the poem, which is much more prevalent in G2 than G1 (tho it certainly has origins in Howe, Coolidge, Grenier et al). >Just as to say that the anthology indulges in >"increasingly modest forms" >is to do a great disservice to a whole slew >of writers (who are these people, Ron? See above. >who is "returning to the lyric? Here, the need for a good definition of the lyric really stands up. I continue to insist on it as one of the 3 classic divisions of poetry, the others being narrative & dramatic, the latter two having been largely diverted via the evolution of other media, so that lyric (any poem in which, contra narrative & drama, turns attention to the language and not to constructs of plot or person) becomes diffuse, relatively vague, which in turn leads to EP trying to reinstitute a trivium (melo, phano, logo) w/in the confines of the lyric. There has been virtually no good work BY POETS on this topic since then, but my gut feeling here is that the evolution of the longpoem dramatically alters what "the lyric" means, esp. when it is not of the "poem containing history" frame set by Pound. So the absence of the longpoem represents a major statement. >what are their numbers in this volume? Roughly 98%. >who is draining the social? >what is the social and why is the lyric not social?-- Here the question of what is the motivation for the new lyric needs to be articulated. Evans has made one attempt ("hatred of identity') and SotA could be read as another, as could some of Chain's chain. But I think this question is still totally on the table and unanswered. (So I'm probably just being argumentative in characterizing it as a draining, but I'd like to hear somebody specifically articulate the function of the social w/in the form.) >these are all innocent questions on my part, I'll admit that I'm not "innocent" in this if you will >I need more specifics to actually begin to discuss this topic >which is one that seems very urgent to me). Me too. >It is, to just list some names at random, >unfair to Lee Ann Brown's and Karen Kelley's attention to sexuality, >unfair to Kevin Magee's mix of formalism, class struggle, and history, >unfair to Myung Mi Kim's attention to relation, >unfair to Susan Gevirtz's complicated feminism and attention to subjectivity, >unfair to C.S. Giscombe's attention to identity. >It is also I think unfair to the overt >political intention in the anthology to include as many women as men >(something that other anthologies of alternative poetry >don't even come close to attempting and something that >never seems to get mentioned in any complaint about this collection). >Further, I am no longer sure any more, although I would have been a year ago, >that a return to the lyric is a draining of the social. >For starters, it is difficult to separate the social from any form. >Susan Stewart's recent work on the lyric has done a lot of change >the way I think of this form. I don't know this reference. Please give a citation. >Also, I don't see the anthology has having a >"reluctance to acknowledge or own its own position." Yo, Juliana, the order went to press w/o your knowledge and represents an "alphabetical accident"--how many stances can you take? >If there is anything that sits owl-like overlooking a younger generation >it isn't language poetry >anymore than it is the New York school-- >it is rather attempts at categorization, at bunker mentality. Oh posh. Categorization begins w/ trying to tell wolves from dogs, edible plants from poisonous ones. "Bunker?" >Perhaps the reason such a collection seems such a strange beast >to Silliman is that it is... a collection of >younger poets-- Not especially compared to the Tree or NAP. >all of whose writing will change dramatically in the next years. As will we all. >I prefer to think of the anthology >as more of a phonebook than even an anthology -- I actually think this stance shortchanges the reader. It denies them any possible insights you as an editor have. If it's going to be a phone book, let it least be the yellow pages. >(these complaints about the authority of this >anthology that are happening in Joel's post and in the discussion of anthologies >at the beginning of the year are very alien to me-- >what authority? the whole thing >was thrown together and knows it). Where/who is the agent of that last sentence? >The numbers will change, people will move, >but it is an attempt at a demographic for the year. It claims no completeness. Another issue to discuss would be those poets who were at the conference who were not included in the book, vs. those who were not physically present who were -- and the nature of the upper age limit. There is some evidence to suggest that many women start to publish later than do men (often for reasons of parenting responsibilities) and a simple across-the-board age limit seems to carry in it a hidden gender bias (thus Weinberger's restriction of his anthology to writers born before the end of WW2 who were publishing after 1950 seems doubly set up to limit the # of women. The difference in gender ratios between Tree and the Art of Practice seems very much to reflect the latter book's ability to bring in poets who had not begun to publish widely when I was working on Tree in '81-2.) >All of this has put me in the uncomfortable position of defending >something that I have worked on. You really aren't coming across as defensive. That's what makes your comments here so valuable. I hate to use the charged word "authority" but you wield it w/ confidence. Okay. It's near midnight & I'm to bed. I'd love to see clarifications on these clarifications. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 07:37:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: experiwhat? So, Loss, I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to respond to your response to my response to the many responses to the experiwhat thread. If your post was a simple observation that few people are persuaded by arguments about issues as close to home as how they conceive of their poetry, I don't think there could be much argument about that. For better or for worse, Because I Say So is probably a place most of us have wound up at in conversations. Still, I guess my response is So What? I can't say what the purpose of this space in fact is, but I would never propose it as a place where people should be persuaded of things. I certainly don't want to start one of those long, self-reflexive debates about what exactly we're doing here. I rarely know, frankly. Every once in while though, it seems something provokes people to write of their own experiences with and in poetry. Some kind of excitement gets generated, and to a certain extent that seems adequate to me. If it's not something I'm interested in, I tune it out, delete the messages dead on the spot. Sometimes I just follow them and think about what people are saying. Sometimes I foolishly leap in, knowing that it will make no profound difference, but game for a conversation, as far as it goes. At its best, it helps me work out certain thoughts and feelings of my own, stuff I might not otherwise get to, like my feelings about "experimental poetry". That really came up because of a conversation with some students in one of my classes. I thought I'd see what others with an intimate involvement with poetry thought of it. And I ended up working out certain unresolved problems in my own thinking about issues of prosody, poetic form, and their relation to forms of life (including the so-called "social"). I certainly had no interest in trying to force others into agreement with me. In the meantime, I got to read Robert Kelly's interesting take on experiment and alchemy, Don Byrd's proposal about the mainstream, George Bowering's witty interjections, Alan Sondheim's interesting non-linear notions of tradition, Ron Silliman's provocative analysis, Joel Kuszai's very funny critique, and numerous other interesting takes on the question of experiment and related threads. So I guess I remain unclear on how Because I Say So relates to this process, other than as an instigator of silence. But maybe your experience of it is altogether different again. Best, Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 06:00:45 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: this space I can't say what the purpose of >this space in fact is, but I would never propose it as a place where >people should be persuaded of things. I certainly don't want to start >one of those long, self-reflexive debates about what exactly we're doing >here. I rarely know, frankly. Every once in while though, it seems >something provokes people to write of their own experiences with and in >poetry. Some kind of excitement gets generated, and to a certain extent >that seems adequate to me. > It's a form, Mike, and a reasonably interesting one in its own terms, not dissimilar from Chain's chain (EXCEPT for the gender ratios!!), it's a "book" unedited & in progress (& indeed could eventually be collected as one tho whether anyone would ever have the energy/dedication/$$ to do same is an entirely different question) &, as you note, its relation to "topic" is contingent at best, Best, Ron ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Nov 1994 09:50:35 GMT+1200 Reply-To: jdolan@gandalf.otago.ac.nz Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Dolan Organization: University of Otago Subject: Groups: A Fable Suppose we come down out of the pious talk about "groups" and talk about the world we have seen--the seminar world--and the way groups gain power there. Odd how no one seems to want to talk about things like this, things they've actually witnessed. As my contribution, let me tell you a completely fictional, utterly untrue story about something which happened to a totally imaginary friend of mine. Let's say, just for fun, that this totally imaginary fictional untrue story took place in a fantastical, imaginary place called San Francisco. An imaginary friend of mine was attached to a literary faction which defined itself by its noble refusal to become involved in the academic-poetry world. They published their own and each others' poems, and then wrote the commentaries, creating a very efficient version of a poetic perpetual-motion machine. They were very fond of the more bloodsoaked jargons of the earlier twentieth century, and did everything they could to make the balmy prosperity of California play a Berlin-like, Petersburg-like backdrop for their display of proud defiance--which was great, because you got the defiance without having to deal with the cold weather and the secret police. My wholly imaginary friend, who was growing older and lacked the absolute, Berlin-like literary ego possessed by his friends in this faction, enrolled in graduate school in the hope of finding a job. He was instantly ostracized by his equally imaginary friends in the faction. He didn't exist any longer, as far as they were concerned. Now comes the equally formulaic, wholly invented punch-line. My imaginary friend found that he couldn't handle the slow pace and lack of conviction of the academic world. After a few years, he dropped out of graduate school, and lived unhappily ever after in, let's say, Berkeley. And six years after being frozen out by this faction, he was walking through Berkeley when he met a high-ranking figure in the faction, whose initials were--let's just choose some initials at random--RP. And this RP, whose noble defiance had been among the noblest and most defiant of noble defiances, greeted my friend cheerfully. My friend found this surprising, but as they chatted, he learned the reason for this cheery and forgiving tone. The imaginary faction member, the nobly defiant RP, was leaving to take a job with a very prestiguous university press. Moral of the story: If you do it right, noble defiance pays like anything. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Nov 1994 12:15:01 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: experiwhat? I guess Michael Boughn could claim that as instigator of the loop the e-posts took he was the experimenter and this list of "missing" persons at their keyboards the experimented-upon, who rose to the occasion and started singing their different toons. It's a lot of fun, but I had thought I might find in this conversation a conspiracy of poets, as for instance, 1) to seize all key intellectual positions 2) talk dirty politics about dirty politicians, 3) insert chasms typos and spoonerisms into key documents, --- "unless they meet our terms".... Ads for such hot articles as the revolutionary text "Writing's Revenge! Poems of denunciation": Three parts: I."I abominate!" 2. "I loathe!" 3. " I despise!" Surely with the charm school boys as the front row forwards -- & William Burroughs redivivus selling tennis shoes. It must be time to Blast. -- again? Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz post: Dept of Art History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Fax: 64 9-373 7014 Telephone: 64 9 373 7599 ext. 8981 or 7276 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Nov 1994 13:26:31 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: whatever Well, Tony, I guess we could step behind the shit house and bombard each other with poems. It might be fun, although whether it--or any other fight you want to pick--will hold off whatever alien intelligence seems to be secretly devouring (kind of like those slimy things in the recent *Puppet Masters* movie) those dear old landmarks of cultural resistance now sadly spiffed up in their Gap khakis and Nikes seems problematic. Actually, thinking of my experience at its best on this thing, I am reminded of Giorgio Agamben's *The Coming Community* where he writes of a community of "whatever singularities" who "do not possess any indentity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition." Interestingly in terms of your point, he goes on: For the State, therefore, what is important is never the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some identity, whatever identity (but the possibility of the *whatever* itself being taken up without an identity is a threat the State cannot come to terms with). (85) The best way to resist the aliens then is not to battle for some new identity (shades of Ron's comments on Alan Gilbert's piece in the NC anthology) like King of the Beats, counter-culture Wild Man, a Really Bad Guy, etc. which will only be integrated into the Spectacle and sold (think also of the end of Bruce Sterling's *Islands in the Net* where imitations of the Outlaw Revolutionarys' dune buggies become a really hot item during the Christmas shopping season). On the contrary, if resistance is of interest to you, perhaps the only path left is to be *whatever*, as Agamben has it, and thus to become absolutely irrelevant to the State. Of course this won't help anybody get any governemnt money. If that's what they want. Alas. Best, Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Nov 1994 22:27:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: A M Allcott Organization: University at Buffalo Subject: KIOSK Call for Work Send your work to another buffalo magazine! KIOSK: A Magazine of New Writing Spring 1995 Issue: "Rust Belt: Industry in the Ruins of Industry" Editorially eclectic, but grounded in Buffalo-- the city, community, and poetic university, we're looking for pieces that have a strong sense of place and engage peoples' relations to "rust belt" as a geography, a political concept, or cultural/historical transition. In past issues we've published Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, John Bennett, Susan Smith Nash, Frank Green, Sheila E. Murphy, Jena Osman, Benjamin Friedlander, John Byrum, Mark Wallace, and many more. We'd like to include you. Send submissions to: KIOSK Poetry Editors Department of English 306 Clemens Hall SUNY at Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260 or submit electronically to: V529Q56B@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu Deadline: Dec 6, 1994 Many thanks, A. M. Allcott and Charlotte Pressler, Poetry Editors. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Nov 1994 09:48:31 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Bernstein Organization: University at Buffalo Subject: from TONY GREEN /repost of bounced msg X-To: poetics@UBVMS.BITNET --Boundary (ID rcYJQ3zHL7Qldt8MVj3Z9Q) Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII [Message was bounced because the extracted portion included the to/from header of the extracted message. Evidently this confuses the machine. --C.B.] >Actually, thinking of my experience at its best on this thing, I am > reminded of Giorgio Agamben's *The Coming Community* where he writes > of a community of "whatever singularities" who "do not possess any > indentity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek > recognition." Interestingly in terms of your point, he goes on: > > For the State, therefore, what is important is never > the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some > identity, whatever identity (but the possibility of the > *whatever* itself being taken up without an identity > is a threat the State cannot come to terms with). (85) > On the contrary, if resistance is of interest to you, perhaps the > only path left is to be *whatever*, as Agamben has it, and thus to > become absolutely irrelevant to the State. > > Of course this won't help anybody get any governemnt money. If that's > what they want. Alas. > > Best, > Mike > mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca > There is a certain difficulty for anyone who works in academia for the "whatever" position, advocated as most resistant (depends on government money usually] . Silence? no publication? is that what "whatever" would really entail, a kind of invisibility-inaudibility as the philosophically best way to live one's life. Gentle prods, subtle instigations, carefully guarded interventions? No action at all? Let the "aliens" (?] do as they please.... Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz post: Dept of Art History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Fax: 64 9-373 7014 Telephone: 64 9 373 7599 ext. 8981 or 7276 --Boundary (ID rcYJQ3zHL7Qldt8MVj3Z9Q)-- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 14:01:54 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: from TONY GREEN / "whatever" Date: Wed, 09 Nov 1994 09:48:31 -0500 Subject: from TONY GREEN / "whatever" >Actually, thinking of my experience at its best on this thing, I am > reminded of Giorgio Agamben's *The Coming Community* where he writes > of a community of "whatever singularities" who "do not possess any > indentity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek > recognition." Interestingly in terms of your point, he goes on: > > For the State, therefore, what is important is never > the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some > identity, whatever identity (but the possibility of the > *whatever* itself being taken up without an identity > is a threat the State cannot come to terms with). (85) > On the contrary, if resistance is of interest to you, perhaps the > only path left is to be *whatever*, as Agamben has it, and thus to > become absolutely irrelevant to the State. > > Of course this won't help anybody get any governemnt money. If that's > what they want. Alas. > > Best, > Mike > mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca > There is a certain difficulty for anyone who works in academia for the "whatever" position, advocated as most resistant (depends on government money usually] . Silence? no publication? is that what "whatever" would really entail, a kind of invisibility-inaudibility as the philosophically best way to live one's life. Gentle prods, subtle instigations, carefully guarded interventions? No action at all? Let the "aliens" (?] do as they please.... (This reply bounced on 9 Nov. It's now 15 Nov, but ....] Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz post: Dept of Art History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Fax: 64 9-373 7014 Telephone: 64 9 373 7599 ext. 8981 or 7276 --Boundary (ID rcYJQ3zHL7Qldt8MVj3Z9Q)-- Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz post: Dept of Art History, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand Fax: 64 9-373 7014 Telephone: 64 9 373 7599 ext. 8981 or 7276 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 00:42:39 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "J. Moxley" Subject: THE IMP-FILES *THE IMP IS OUT THERE * TRUST NO ONE* GOVERNMENT DENIES KNOWLEDGE * ------------------------------------------------------------------- ODDLY SHAPED CRAFT ARRIVES 4TH-CLASS INTERGALACTIC ALIENS IDENTIFIED AS G2-TYPE SPECIMENS, GOV'T AGENCIES WORRIED ABOUT OUTBREAKS OF LYRICISM AT REPORTED LANDING SITES RELEASE STATEMENT CLAIMING NEA LEFT THEM NO EARTHLY ALTERNATIVE WARN THAT THEY WILL COMMENCE DRAINING THE SOCIAL IF DEMANDS NOT MET EARLY REPORTS OF FORCED SCROLL INGESTION DISPROVEN CLAIM MISREAD TRANSMISSION LED MARTIANS TO HIRE AGENT SPICER TO MOVE *THEIR* FURNITURE: VOCAB DIDN'T DO IT TO HIM! ABDUCT YOUR COPY OF IMPERCIPIENT 6 BY WRITING J. Moxley, 61 E. Manning St, Providence RI 02906 or sending e-message to ST001515@Brownvm.brown.edu N0.6 Tanya Erzan, Brian Kim Stefans, Jennifer Blackledge, NOV. 1994 Sally Silvers, Beth Anderson, Juliana Spahr, Mark $5 DuCharme, Gale Nelson, and Helena Bennett BACK-ISSUES AVAILABLE SUBSCRIPTIONS: 3 ISSUES/$12 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Nov 1994 01:37:39 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Experiwhat? In-Reply-To: <199411050511.VAA10735@whistler.sfu.ca> from "w.curnow@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ" at Nov 4, 94 05:28:25 pm You reminded me that in "Hugh Selwyb Mauberley" toward the end somewhere, HSM is called a drifting precipitatre, which suggests (without the unfortunate r I stuck in that word) a chemistry lab. And T.S.Eliot liked the word "transmute" regarding poetry and the poet's mind, which at least suggests alchemy. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Nov 1994 20:35:23 -0500 Reply-To: Robert Drake Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Drake Subject: reqest for reviewer: new Russian poetries TapRoot Reviews is looking for someone w/ some related back ground to review some or all of the following material: Arkadii Dragomoschenko: "Description" --Sun & Moon "Zenia" --Sun & Moon Alexei Parshchikov "Blue Vitrol" --Avec Books K Johnson & S. Ashby, eds. "Third Wave" --Michigan U Gerald Smith, ed. "Contemp. Russian Poetry" --Indiana additional/possible mention of John High's "Polycontexts" piece in WITZ/fall '92; Russian work appearing in FIVE FINGERS REVIEW 8/9; or "Leningrad" by Hejinian, Silliman et.al. might also be useful; other suggestions would be welcome. if you have interest &/or familiarity with this body of work, and would be willing to do a Very Brief survey/introduction for a future issue of TapRoot Reviews, please contact me. luigi-bob drake Burning Press/TRR au462@cleveland.freenet.edu ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 23:45:52 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: Hologographic .... and not experimental? I certainly remember making hypotheses and waiting for results. 'actual possession ...' (enclosed below) is the most recent result. ----------- John Cayley ~{?-U\02~} Wellsweep Press ~{=[i@3v0fIg~} Tel & Fax: 0171-267 3525 Email: cayley@shadoof.demon.co.uk INDRAS NET Hologographic Texts on Disk Two metaphors Indras Net and hologography have guided the inception and development of the pro Indras Net a concept originating in Hinduism is a network of jewels that not only reflect[s] t Hologogram. A pattern of language produced when the words or the order of words of a given text INDRAS NET I.2. A revision of the original Indra Net experiments with the first version of Under COLLOCATIONS. Indras Net II. The first demonstration of a collocation hologogram applied to a pr There is a paper version of Collocations published by the Many Press, London in an edition of 22 MOODS & CONJUNCTIONS. Indras Net III. Collocational procedures applied to three related texts, g An Essay on THE GOLDEN LION: Han-Shan in Indras Net. Indras Net IV. A mesotic demonstration of i LEAVING THE CITY. Indras Net V. Collocational blends of three prose works: a translation and ada The above works are available on 1.4Mb disks suitable for Apple Macintosh computers (with System ALL DISKS ARE 5.95 (us$11.95) POST-FREE (incl. VAT) ... by snail mail with pre-payment (make out ACTUAL POSSESSION OF THE WORLD * John Cayley actual possession of the world left Gu Cheng exposed maimed and handicapped this shining road back to the city into his own shattered emptiness finally I listened to the sounds like leaves or any other violence of the picture there is something in their lives that keeps them following this sound on the other side I could go anywhere recall a life that is distant from our own but this doesnt trouble me because I didnt use words he constantly tried to return following this phrase became the picture once I thought I felt that a new young light had awoken in the woman all softly speaking in a particular kind of way one of the worlds unceasing infinity of transformations the violation of corporal integrity is in the wind they were flooded with both their lives they were flooded with the body and my ears went deaf became fraught and fell ill and she asked me what colour a truly extraordinary sound the speech of the cascading rays I didnt write poetry I didnt use words he claimed taken from the world he had left long ago into his own shattered emptiness living into this world both created and enforced to imagine such hatred I awoke I answered we keep on living I began to think of endless transformation and in gesture like a secret afterwards I began to think of these phrases they really were flying closer and they turned into words dawn was the summit and night was speaking for reasons that were flying closer suddenly the sounds poured endlessly into my life because I didnt use words taken from the world both created and enforced I began to think of whiteness this shining road back to the surface of the final sound [* Lines gleaned at average collocational strictness 386/500 from Gu Chengs The sounds I hear / ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 19 Nov 1994 23:27:01 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: Listings The WellSweep Press Catalogue follows: ----------- John Cayley ~{?-U\02~} Wellsweep Press ~{=[i@3v0fIg~} Tel & Fax: 0171-267 3525 Email: cayley@shadoof.demon.co.uk ----------- ----------------------------------------------------WellSweep The WellSweep Press information/catalogues info@shadoof.demon.co.uk inquiries/correspondence ws@shadoof.demon.co.uk HOW TO ORDER -- SEE END OF FILE. CHINA - LITERATURE - TRANSLATION - POETRY - INNOVATION HUMAN RIGHTS - DIPLOMACY - RITUAL - FICTION - AVANT-GARDE FANTASY - TODAY ---------------------------------------------------------NEW NON-PERSON SINGULAR Selected Poems by Yang Lian wellsweep Chinese Poets 6 translated by Brian Holton Yang Lian is one of the best-known of the so-called misty poets who came to prominence in China Brian Holton teaches Chinese at the Universities of Newcastle and Durham. Amongst other projects 128 pp, 21 x 13 cm, parallel text Paperback price: 7.95 isbn 0 948454 15 6 Library hardback: 14.95 isbn 0 948454 85 7 PLEASE NOTE: This book will not be available from our US distributor (Cheng & Tsui) until early -----------------------------------------------JUST PUBLISHED RUAN JIS ISLAND & (TU FU) IN THE CITIES Graham Hartill Graham Hartills fine long poems are based on his reading of two Chinese masters, Ruan Ji himself 4.95 / us$9.95 pbk isbn 0 948454 14 8 64 pp, 21x13 mm, 10 ills. ------------------------------------------------------RITUAL RITUAL & DIPLOMACY The Macartney Mission to China (17921794) Edited by Robert A Bickers Lord Macartneys mission to China 17921794 was the first British attempt to establish formal dipl The embassy failed to achieve its official aims, but its participants returned with a rich cargo These new essays assess the reasons for Macartneys failure and explore the misunderstandings and Contributions by leading historians of the mission and of Qing diplomacy offer new readings of t 7.95 / us$14.95 pbk isbn 0 948454 19 9 96 pp, 20x13, frontispiece -------------------------------------------------AVANT-GARDE THE LOST BOAT Avant-garde Fiction from China edited by Henry Y H Zhao Five short and three long short stories by some of Chinas neglected contemporaries Yang Zhenggu Forget everything you know about contemporary Chinese fiction. These stories will shock and comp Henry Y H Zhao lectures on modern and contemporary Chinese literature at the School of Oriental 7.95 / us$14.95 pbk isbn 0 948454 13 X 14.95 / us$23.95 hbk isbn 0 948454 83 0 256 pp, 20x13 -------------------------------------------------------TODAY UNDER-SKY UNDERGROUND Chinese Writing * Today * Number 1 selected & edited by Henry Y H Zhao & John Cayley foreword by Jonathan D Spence Conceived in 1978 and suppressed in 1980, Today became the best-known unofficial literary magazi Under-Sky Underground is the first in a series of book-length biennial anthologies which will se 7.95 / us$14.95 pbk isbn 0 948454 16 4 247 pp, 20x13 issn 0968-4670 (Subscription rates on application.) ------------------------------------------------HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER THE EVENT Human Rights and their Future in China edited by Susan Whitfield Human Rights are now firmly on the agenda in China. This collection brings together some of the Contributors include Dr Liu Binyan, a leading Chinese dissident in exile; Professor Bonnie McDou The collection covers three areas: the question of rights philosophical and practical; censorsh 7.95 / us$14.95 pbk isbn 0948454180 128 pp, 20x13, tables -----------------------------------------------------FANTASY BLADES FROM THE WILLOWS by Huanzhulouzhu translated by Robert Chard Novels of magic, fantasy and martial arts adventure have captivated the imaginations of Chinese As bizarre as fiction can be, I had the odd feeling that the story was all possible. At least in The first volume of three. 7.95 / us$14.95 pbk isbn 0 948454 05 9 256 pp, 20x13, 8 full-colour illustrations readers paperback available* ------------------------------------------------------POETRY THE FROZEN TORCH Selected Prose Poems by Shang Chin (1930) WellSweep Chinese Poets 4 translated by N G D Malmqvist A selection of captivating and moving prose meditations by one of Taiwans leading Modernists, an Shang Chin has published two collections of poetry and prose pieces in the Chinese speaking worl N G D Malmqvist is Professor Emeritus of the University of Stockholm and a member of the Swedish The book is illustrated with Shang Chins own accomplished line drawings. 5.95 / us$12.95 pbk isbn 0 948454 10 5 96 pp, 21x13 13 b/w illustrations, parallel text readers paperback available* ----------------------------------------------AVAILABLE SOON WHISTLING FREE The Complete Non-Dramatic Lyrics of Ma Zhiyuan (12601325) WellSweep Chinese Poets 5 translated by William Dolby Ma Zhiyuan was the finest exponent of the poetry which developed from the songs and verse passag 6.95 / us$13.95 pbk isbn 0 948454 11 3 14.95 /us$23.95 hbk isbn 0 948454 81 4 128 pp, 21x13, parallel text (readers paperback*) FROM THE FIRST EMPEROR TO KHUBLAI KHAN an Introduction to Studying Chinese History T H Barrett This short reading guide to Chinese history is the first of its kind, a readable, annotated intr 3.95 / us$7.95 pbk isbn 0 948454 17 2 64 pp, 20x13, 7 b/w ills., index, chronological chart -------------------------------------------------TRANSLATION MIRROR AND POOL Translations and Adaptations from Chinese Poetry David Burnett and John Cayley illustrated by Bronwyn Borrow Twenty-eight Chinese poems translated and adapted by one writer; used as a point of departure by ..deserves to find lots of readers. 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System requirements: Any Apple Macintosh with 2MB RAM, hard disk, System 6.0.7, HyperCard 2.1 (o BOOKS ON DISK Only available as an electronic Expanded Book: STAIRWAY selected poems by Wang Jiaxin translated by John Cayley This selection of poems by the contemporary poet and critic also includes three instances of the 5.95 / us$11.95 disk 1.4mb isbn 0 94845 91 1 Books described elsewhere in this catalogue and to be published as Expanded Books, Spring 1994: BLADES FROM THE WILLOWS 6.95 / us$13.95 1.4 mb disk isbn 0 948454 92 X RITUAL & DIPLOMACY 6.95 / us$13.95 1.4 mb disk isbn 0 948454 89 X AFTER THE EVENT 6.95 / us$13.95 1.4 mb disk isbn 0 948454 88 1 ----------------------------------------KINETIC TRANSLATIONS The following books are kinetic presentations of translations from Chinese poetry which also wor wine flying wine flying explores some of the poetic structures underlying a single, classical Chinese quatra 5.95 / us$11.95 disk 800kb isbn 0 948454 82 2 bird song stream Four classical Chinese quatrains, translated and displayed in animated readings. 5.95 / us$11.95 disk 1.4mb isbn 0 948454 90 3 --------------------------------FORTHCOMING AND FUTURE PLANS Please write/email to have your name added to the WellSweep mailing list. 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PAYMENT: Please make cheques etc. payable to Wellsweep and remit by (gb) sterling cheque drawn o TRADE ENQUIRIES: United Kingdom: Password (Books) Ltd 23 New Mount Street, Manchester M4 4DE Tel (061) 953 4009, fax 953 4001 USA: Cheng & Tsui Co 25 West Street, Boston, MA 02111 Tel (617) 426 6074, fax (617) 426 3669 Canada: Marginal Distribution Unit 103, 277 George Street N. Peterborough, Ont K9J 3G9 Tel / fax (705) 745 2326 Catalogue prices are subject to change without notice. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 11:37:58 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: krickjh@MCGRAW-HILL.COM Subject: Return of the Son of Anthologies Dear Poetics List, Was following the anthology wars to some degree around the end of the summer. I'm wondering if anyone knows anything about the Rothenberg and Quasha "America, A Prophecy" collection. It's out of print as far as I know, and I wish it weren't. John Krick ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 15:34:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: Return of the Son of Anthologies In-Reply-To: <199411211656.LAA04045@sarah.albany.edu> from "krickjh@MCGRAW-HILL.COM" at Nov 21, 94 11:37:58 am Yes, indeed, John, AMERICA A PROPHECY has been out of print for a long time now, & many of us wish it weren't so. There is however little chance for this to change, as getting a book of that order back into print is extremely time consuming & expensive (find publisher, renegotiate all the rights, etc.) Then again, maybe some University press will pick the project up, as UC & UNM have done with other Rothenberg anthos... Pierre Joris > > Dear Poetics List, > > Was following the anthology wars to some degree around the > end of the summer. I'm wondering if anyone knows anything > about the Rothenberg and Quasha "America, A Prophecy" > collection. It's out of print as far as I know, and I wish > it weren't. > > John Krick > ======================================================================= Pierre Joris | Dept. of English | "La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose." SUNY Albany | Paul Celan Albany NY 12222 | tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | email: | "He who leaves a trace, leaves an abcess." joris@cnsunix.albany.edu| Henri Michaux ======================================================================= ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 21:28:05 -0500 Reply-To: Robert Drake Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Drake Subject: Re: Return of the Son of Anthologies >Was following the anthology wars to some degree around the >end of the summer. I'm wondering if anyone knows anything >about the Rothenberg and Quasha "America, A Prophecy" >collection. It's out of print as far as I know, and I wish >it weren't. > >John Krick john-- don't know that one, but you reminded me of Quasha & Gross's "Open Poetry", also, i suspect oop... any other additions to a list of valued anthologies apres Allen? luigi ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 22:37:03 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Paul Hoover x350 Subject: anthology wars I just signed onto this list a couple of weeks ago and have been enjoying the generation wars between G1 and G2, as if history started there! Ron's metaphor of the owl on the horizon is compelling symbolism; it makes G2 into the mice to be preyed upon. But mice can eat owls if there are enough of them. I am not a member of G1 because not a language poet but I have a strong sense of being a member of the most in-the-shadow generation, following the New Americans (sounds like a wholesome Up With People type group). Our generation is almost 50 years old and we're still in that shadow (though langpo has cleared some space). The best policy is to honor the elders as long as they're friendly, and many of them are. The owl is also ego, kills the competition. But this is not a knock on you, Ron, as I know you are considerate of younger writers and many others. Did a big owl like Olson smother his young or feed them? If I were of G2 age, I would never use the term as too junior-varsity. Yes, "experimental" is a problem. Creeley told me that it was too self-marginalizing to use for title of Norton antho. But we've put ourselves in a corner by dismissing the term "avant-garde," which is still accurate although perhaps too Eurocentric and precious. This leaves us with "outsider" (Waldman) and "postmodern" which still holds but how long? Millenialist is as bad as experimental: Eliot's hooded hordes. The adjective "innovative" is nice but thinking you have to innovate each poem out is irritating. Re: alchemy, Octavio Paz used the term "alchemy of the word." Probably we are much too term-conscious because so eager to identify ourselves. I thought for a while of adopting the Chicago Imagist label but it seemed too self- promoting. Jackson Mac Low says that "avant-garde" is too militaristic in its history. So what? The first into battle are the most jeopardized, also get the largest honors. We admire WCW and Pound for it and try to do the same. I thought that the discussion, however brief, on whether current practice (avant-garde) has any social agency was of great value. Does it, except to pound on white men, meaning a good number of those present? Or is experimental practice aestheticism? I hear rumor of anthology wars from last summer. I'd be interested in having a copy of that discussion if anyone is willing to provide it. Paul Hoover e-mail: paulhoover@mail.colum.edu ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 15:56:25 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Flaming In-Reply-To: <199411030817.AAA24133@whistler.sfu.ca> from "Ron Silliman" at Nov 2, 94 05:57:05 am Ron, I liked that long letter of yrs called "Flaming" of a little while ago; that is, if anyone can call the lyric reactionary, he/she hasnt read Shelley with any intelligence. Some dolt might have something to say about SAhelley's personal-social habits and position being out of it today, but my guess is that same person might have worn mind shackles in 1816. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 15:58:40 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: experiwhat? In-Reply-To: <199411021828.KAA27460@whistler.sfu.ca> from "Loss Glazier" at Nov 2, 94 08:50:17 am Well, I saw a guy in the airport yesterfday, wearing a tee shirt that read "Chicago Bulls," and I thought "What if it does?" ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 16:01:48 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: experiwhat? In-Reply-To: <199411021321.FAA02751@whistler.sfu.ca> from "Michael Boughn" at Nov 2, 94 08:16:45 am Well, Mike, we know that Stein was trained in experimental psychology, so it would be a good idea to believe her when she says that she never wrote an experimental work (I presume that she was not including her lab exercise in automatic writing.) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 16:07:38 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: G-ology In-Reply-To: <199411010827.AAA24041@whistler.sfu.ca> from "Ron Silliman" at Nov 1, 94 00:02:10 am Yeah, I have had the Siegel book for about 10 years but have never read it. It's just a WCW iutem as far as I am concerned. s ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Nov 1994 05:53:23 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Shelley Nobody ever suggested that Shelley was unclear about his motivations. I do recall writing that all form(s) is amoral. It can and does mean different things at different points in time and in different hands. A sonnet by Bernadette Mayer (now convalescing after a major stroke, by the way) is not the same one by a Timothy Steele or Dana Gioia. The world has changed since Shelley's time. Hell, it's changed dramatically since 1980. Can you imagine Olson on the net? Ron ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Nov 1994 10:56:48 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: eric pape Subject: Re: Shelley In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 23 Nov 1994 05:53:23 -0800 from I feel like I'm stepping into an already established dialogue, but felt compelled to respond to the issue of the political (in the widest possible sense) implications of form. You know it was Adorno, arguably the most profound thinker in the 20th Cent. who originated that impossibility of lyric poetry after Auschwitz thing, which he later backed away from actually, but he also said some other things about form. If I understand the gist of his statement on form, as articulated in Aesthetic Theory, then any form may be reactionary if it fails to reognize its own implication in domination. Not in any kind of vulger form, ie, those bastard capitalists, but in a much more sophisticated sense of accepting the form as a given. Without recognizing the problems of that form, its darkness. So any form can be troublesome if its assumptions are not criticized at the same time they are utilized. Which is why Beckett was his favorite 20th cent. writer. And this is why I agree with you re: Shelley. I don't think Shelley accepted anything as given, just see Prometheus Unbound. Which is why this formal question is so difficult today, because there are so many forms; new ones everyday. Langpo (to borrow Paul's phrase) is its form, in a certain sense, and has its own problems and assumptions. And of course its own strengths. I think we are making the problem of form far too easy if we define form as simply being about the choice between sonnet or blank verse. The problem is for us, ie G2 or whatever, is that we are given so many new forms and somehow we have to determine how to use them. I don't know if this generation will sole that problem. I don't know if solve is the right word even. The main problem might be that the new forms become as fixed as the old. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Nov 1994 18:13:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Donald J. Byrd" Subject: Olson on the Net In-Reply-To: <199411231356.IAA22537@sarah.albany.edu> from "Ron Silliman" at Nov 23, 94 05:53:23 am Ron Silliman asks, > Can you imagine Olson on the net? It's hard to know where you are on the net. I am in Albany (it's been snowing off and on all day, nasty winds, and temperature dropping toward 20)? That's Ron Silliman? In California? Other people in the conversation who are unlocated in my mind. I look at the UserIDs trying to find a place... Sometimes I can (mebbe), but you are never sure. The net is ultimate suburb, the perfection of New Jersey. But it is hard to be any where, any time and especially now. If you are in Gloucester, are you in Gloucester? They are closing down the fishing on George's Bank. It is certainly not the Gloucester that Olson saw out the window at 28 Fort Square. The _polis_ as FORM is lost to life? There is no way to understand the form of _Maximus_ by examining its language.Perhaps there is no way to understand it at all. I remember when it was possible. He would have said (I think) that form is a matter of not of linguistic arrangement but a judgement of action: that that which has been found out by work may, by work, be passed on (without due loss of force) for use USE ("The Praises").... Form is not a container but a transmission. The gains on a non-referential art that were made in the 50's and 60's have been mostly lost. The world that made them possible has been perhaps lost. CO proposed not to write sonnets or limericks but A Republic!!! The net offers a powerful referential medium with no reference. It was a condition that Ron Silliman and others proposed by elegant artifice fifteen or more years ago. Now it appears to be universal. The net must have a wonderous topology. I have been exploring it for nearly ten years. At first it was just me and the computer nerds. And I understand it less--in some really deep sense--than if I'd been plopped down on the moon. Don Byrd ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Nov 1994 05:58:55 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mn Center For Book Arts Subject: Re: Olson on the Net In-Reply-To: <01HJTRJ5SENMA75SKR@VX.CIS.UMN.EDU> I think Don has, in his moving comments about Olson, form, place, polis, & net, brought us back to a discussion which was never resolved (& can't be, but must be undertaken) many months ago on this list, that of the possibility for community on the net. I too don't often know the place I inhabit any more. Can it be known? I find some important element of community on a forum like this one. Yet, in spending time her, I spend less time outside, walking in the neighborhood, or down to the banks of the Mississippi. A choice I make in which something is lost. Living in a medium with lots of meaning but little reference. Form which indeed exists to be utilized & needs to be critized. charles ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Nov 1994 18:48:04 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: FILELIST Subject: Re: Olson on the Net In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 24 Nov 1994 05:58:55 -0600 from Charles Alexander -- I, too, was moved by Byrd's comments about Olson on the net .... Sated and looking forward. Will be in the Twin Cities around Dec. 10- 13, wondered if it would be OK if I stopped by for a chat .... Sandra Braman ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 08:17:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Olson on net Dear Don: I guess I think in some way it's really no harder to know where you are on the net than to know where you are in "Gloucester". In fact, maybe in some ways it's easier in that in so far as both the net and "Gloucester" are utopias, or tend at one edge toward utopia, at least here there's no danger of confusing it with fishermen. I've known a few fishermen (in the olden days when I was involved in street politics in Vancouver) and while some have been OK guys, many of them were jerks. Just like everybody else. The thing about Gloucester is that it was so pretty it was a great place to think about "Gloucester", but Gloucester was never "Gloucester", and the "Gloucester" that Charles Olson saw out of the window at 28 Fort Square wasn't Gloucester, either. I think the polis as FORM was lost to us about 2,000 years ago. Our nostalgia for it is certainly real, and can be, as in Olson's work or Emerson's, productive of a perfectionist (to use Stanley Cavell's word) vision or imagination, Socrates' city of words. Socrates says that it makes no difference whether "Gloucester" exists anywhere or will exist, that by reading "Maximus" we are already always participating in it, and that "Maximus" itself is thus a further proposal of our selves, unattained but attainable. "Here", in some sense, at least it's impossible to confuse the city of words with any other. That may offer us possibilities, as well as losses. As Bob Creeley says, onward . . . Best, Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 08:25:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: experiwhat? In-Reply-To: <9411230719.AA19644@jazz.epas.utoronto.ca> from "George Bowering" at Nov 22, 94 04:01:48 pm > Well, Mike, we know that Stein was trained in experimental > psychology, so it would be a good idea to believe her when she says > that she never wrote an experimental work (I presume that she was not > including her lab exercise in automatic writing.) I don't know about the automatic writing, George. It was actually Peter Quartermain who told me she said that. (Peter, are you listening? reading? whatever? Where is that quote from?) But you're right. Given her training as scientist and her vocation as writer, her insights here are particularly interesting, and, at least in terms of her own stuff, she must have known what she was talking about. (PS, say hi to Angela) Best, Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 16:30:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Mandel Subject: Re: Shelley X-cc: tmandel@cais.com re: "all form(s) is amoral," I think it might be better to say that all form is moral rather than amoral. It is not possible to give value to a form that is not moral or political at base. Partly this is a matter of intention, and a sonnet by Dana Gioia as one by Bernadette, may certainly be a moral or political act at that level. Partly, it is an understanding of means, or rather of the meaning of means, and the morals or politics of poets surely differ here. This is not intention but interpretation, where one can argue what is correct, what is true, what is useful, what is specific, to the point. The problem is that so often this argument -- an essential one -- occurs on grounds so general as to be useless in itself, viz. dubbing one or another poetry "experimental" or one or another poet "conventional" (as the apexers do in setting the other pole of straw men [to mix metaphors] and set up their place in the juste milieu between 'em). Fernando Pessoa wrote an enormous range of poetries under a number of different names, including a long sequence of (what appear to my groping Portugese-less romance language intuitive reach-without-grasp to be) fantastic quatrains in popular form. To take an example from what's on my desk. One does not, for example, right a sonnet w/o encountering a political and social history, write? Shelley, it is said, used to hum out the metric/rhymic patterns of his poems and then rite them. I recommend to each of you to undertake this procedure in preparing your posts. First sound them out without sense, only then sense them, and only then riot them here. Tom Mandel ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 14:47:57 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tenney Nathanson Subject: Re: Shelley In-Reply-To: <01HJWEF3MBG2HXJQND@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU> What about WCW, "all sonnets say the same thing--to me of no interest" (or more or less to that effect). There may be a not insignificant way in which this assertion is right, the first half of it I mean; as to the chaser one just concurs or doesn't (Creeley: liking is as liking does--for you / for me). Some years ago some friends recommended a possible way to proceed on an interesting poetic career: write only (commissioned? or feigned commissioned) occasional poems. But it's probably less intresting, or less easy anyway, to think through the politics of occasion ("I write bc I want to write"?). Though all form is also occasional (though I guess different sonnets may have different occasions). Recently teaching Dickinson: I wonder if one could make a point about all off-rhyme always being whatever. Tenney (hello to Book Arts btw! up there in the snow [?] like the snow in Maximus, and the alleged arabesque) ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 16:52:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Mandel Subject: Re: Shelley re: Eric Pape on "Adorno, arguably the most profound thinker in the 20th Cent...." I guess we all have our dead horses; Adorno is one of mine. Would *anybody* like to have the references to this "profound" man's attempts to get along with and prosper under the Nazi regime? His position that as only half Jewish he might be allowed to work profitably in a new order Germany, his reviews of rather pro-Nazi German younger poets, the meaning -- in germany at the time -- of his using the name Adorno (non-jew mom's moniker, I believe) rather than Wiesengrund (jew-pop dad's identity)? Not to mention does anybody have a hold on or interest in his treatment of Walter Benjamin, his caviling criticisms of Benjamin's proposals and submissions to the then in NY Adorno/Horkheimer crew, a more generous response to which might have led to WB's escaping Europe rather than dying there, Benjamin's (and Scholem's, and Arendt's) opinion of Adorno at the time (and in Arendt's case, thruout her life: she detested him. I was her student for many years, and learned my antiTeddyism from her directly)? Tom Mandel ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 15:13:44 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tenney Nathanson Subject: Re: Shelley In-Reply-To: <01HJWF7ZZT2AHXJQUH@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU> Tom-- I'll bite at the rhtorical question and say yes, /I/ want to know. Beyond what's in the two Susan Buck-Morss books, say. That is, I know something about Adorno's treatment of Benjamin (and while the early B-M book kind of flaggellates Benjamin w Adorno's suposedly greater perspicacity, the more recent book does the reverse). But what about Adorno and the Third Reich. Or what about Arendt off the cuff? This will pass for news in Tucson (or my part of it anyway) Tenney ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 22:01:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Donald J. Byrd" Subject: _Olson_on_the_Net What is it that has happened since, say, 1970 (Olson's death)? or even earlier. In 1966 Jacques Derrida declared, "Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an 'event.'" An event that is not an event. At the very moment the technologists began to take seriously the possibility of producing cognition of a human order, knowledge in the so-called human sciences also collapsed. It was also in 1966, Michel Foucault wrote: "The only thing we know at the moment, in all certainty, is that in Western culture the being of man and the being of language have never, at any time, been able to coexist and to articulate themselves upon one another." So, what has happened in practical terms. We have been blitzed by the right from Reagan to Newt Gingrich (who speak confidently of the being of man, without questioning the status of their discourse). Even the most media-genic experiwhat/avant/new artists have disappeared from all popular media--e.g. Ginsberg and Sanders at the Chicago convention in 68. The biosphere is a quarter-century nearer irreparable damage. Most viable political organization among the thoroughly excluded classes has collapsed. Sex has become potentially deadly. AIDS Research is in utterly disarray and the entire establishment that controls it (probably in collusion with the drug companies) is thoroughly corrupt. Organized opposition to the military has disappeared. The Cold War has ended. The industrial dislocations in the military industries are at least in some measure being compensated for by building prisons. Over a million people, most of them men of color, are in prison in the United States. There has been a general loss of enthusiasm for and support of education. The youth culture has been fragmented into various youth subculture, so the youth market is expanded while the political power of the young is defused. The dominance of both electoral and cultural politics by the popular media is now unchallenged even by a symbolically significant opposition. Phony science (_The Bell Curve_, etc.) is having a powerful effect on U.S. social policy, and legitimate science (if there is any left) seems powerless to oppose it. Leftist politics has been consigned almost exclusively to English departments. Any thing in the arts and liberal disciplines that smells of metaphysics has been declared illusory. The metaphysicians are now physicists and computer scientists: Stephen Hawking, Herbert Simon, et. al. The life of the President has been threatened by the senior Senator from North Carolina and presumably the next Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We are all on the Internet. The appearance of the Internet is one of the few perhaps positive public developments in the last quarter century. When I first connected in 86 or 87, there was the Humanist List, as one of the few attractions for anyone who wasn't involved in scientific or technological research. And it has been fascinating to watch it grow, the interest groups beginning to have narrower definitions, until literally the relevant, if not entirely useful, information seems endless. But, it may be that the Internet is just talk radio for the fringe. For all of its promise, it has yet to produce much. The task of production seems to me fundamentally unchanged. I have been reading Wesley Trimpi's _Muses of One Mind_ (Princeton UP, 1983) the last few days. It is an old- fashioned book, literary theory heavily informed by classical philology. Although Trimpi seems to be fully cognizant of contemporary theoretical debate, he makes no reference to any of the major philosophers or theoreticians of this century and precious few references to any secondary sources: he ranges from Hesiod to Plotinus and Proclus: "As the daughters of Zeus and Memory, together [the muses] recollect,Jpreserve, and celebrate the integrated activities and the cumulative wisdom of the gods. They offer to us as human beings, furthermore, the possibility of sharing in the contents of this wisdom to the extent that we realize our capacity to understand and describe our experience. In this sense, the Muses, together, provide the psyche with the sources of its coherence and express this coherence as mutually dependent principles in order. These principles, in turn, later give direction to the various disciplines which define and exercise the speculative, the prudential, and the productive activities of the consciousness." These "disciplines" are, of course, philosophy, which rules over the cognitive capacity; rhetoric which rules over the judicative capacity; and mathematics which rules over the formal capacity. As such they are the constituents of the what Plato called "the Good"--that is, the true, the justly measured, and the beautiful. If these are united metaphysically in Platonic thought, Trimpi argues--and here seems to me offer in coherent fashion a position close to Olson's--in disciplines themselves forms are actually constructed, not underwritten by the infinite ideal norm of the logos, and that in poetry these disciplines are enacted as secular and inhabitable forms of the Good, called polis, Gloucester, Tyre, and potentially, I think, the Internet. Trimpi goes on to show with formidle scholarhship (again confirming speculations of Olson's speculations of thirty years earlier) that literary and aesthetic theory by the time of the Neoplatonists, had been mathematicized; the concrete unity of the muses was lost; and literature was already prepared for the kind of deconstruction that its fully articulated Neoplatonic form would reveal as necessary. Of course, Trimpi's "cumulative wisdom of the gods" will make some nervous; no doubt some will find in it code for the transcendental signifier. I suppose the unity of psyche will also be read out as the modern subject and the promise of coherence as a threat of fascism. Trimpi, however, makes a plausible case that _poiesis_ before the Platonic revival of the renaissance (that fundamental moment in Pound's _Cantos_) was innocent of metaphysical and transcendental reference (that is, of infinite images of normative ideality). I would suggest in the spirit of Olson's project, as I understand it, that the construction of net can only proceed as a pursuit of the muses in Trimpi's cogent sense. Speculation, action, and formalization are singularly futile, but as mutually correcting modes of coherence, they produce something more concrete than a utopian vision; that is to say, a living company on inquirers.JIn the etymology of "muse," Trimpi finds-- striving, loving, and inquiry-- notions associated with philosophy, but in Hesiod and in the early theories of literature they are balanced with action and concrete construction, not abstract or metaphysical meditation. The power of Olson's constructivism has not been much investigated. I would point to the work of John Clarke, Charles Stein, Nate Mackey, and Madelaine Gins' recent and utterly remarkable _Helen Keller, or Arakawa_ To be sure, transcendence may look fairly thin when it is not backed up by the authority of some one like Stephen Hawking, but it does not mean we must suffocate in the merely social. The world is to be actually constructed, not infered from an idealized norm. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 19:48:02 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Re: Shelley In-Reply-To: <199411252154.NAA23778@leland.Stanford.EDU> For Tom Mandel: Doing some work on Adorno and Benjamin right now and would like very much to know the Hannah Arendt etc. story about Adorno. I agree with what you say about the demise of "Wiesengrund." Tell all, please! Marjorie Perloff ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Nov 1994 12:46:30 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Sandra Braman Subject: Re: Shelley In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 25 Nov 1994 16:52:30 -0500 from re Benjamin, and the question of experimentation, and the question of commodification of culture: Lutz Niethammer, in his superb analysis of the many, many theories of the end of history across cultures and time, tells the story of Benjamin's death, with which I had previously not been familiar: Benjamin walked out of Germany, in I believe 1945, and as soon as he crossed the border handed the first peasant he saw the manuscript he was carrying, and then committed suicide. That ms. was his book on the end of history .... Sandra Braman ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Nov 1994 14:21:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: Shelley In-Reply-To: <199411261850.NAA20744@sarah.albany.edu> from "Sandra Braman" at Nov 26, 94 12:46:30 pm That seems a bit of a romantizised version of Benjamin's death, with geographic confusion. He was in the process of crossing the Pyrenees (from France into Spain, in order to reach Portugal, from whence ships to the US or GB) when he committed suicide -- as far as I am aware, in a state of depression & despair, as the last stage of that harrowing crossing proposed unforeseen dangers that, it would seem, Benjamin was not able or willing to cope with. I never heard of the handing over of a ms. to the first peasant met -- that seems too pat a narration & would make sense only in relation to the geographical confusion, i.e. if he had in fact crossed the German French border. ======================================================================= Pierre Joris | Dept. of English | "La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose." SUNY Albany | Paul Celan Albany NY 12222 | tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | email: | "He who leaves a trace, leaves an abcess." joris@cnsunix.albany.edu| Henri Michaux ======================================================================= ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Nov 1994 14:46:34 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tenney Nathanson Subject: Re: Shelley In-Reply-To: <01HJXO9DX3MQHXJFLJ@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU> There's a full account of Benjamin's crossing and the iffy question of the manuscript in Susan Buck-Morss' /The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project/. As I recall it seems possible he did turn the ms. (which may have been a chunk of the Arcades Project I think) over to a mother and son, not literati, w whom he was crossing, or I guess he MAY have done so, no one has been able to determine definitely): but it wasn't perhaps a passing of the torch kind of gesture exactly. Anyway Buck-Morss is a good place to go for clarification. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 12:28:37 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: eric pape Subject: Re: Shelley In-Reply-To: Message of Sat, 26 Nov 1994 14:46:34 -0700 from To clarify: I did not refer to Adorno because I believed he was the most honorable man in the world. In fact, I believe his treatment of the student protest movement alone proves he was confused at best in many of his personal relationships, including that with Benjamin. He seemed to always let his intellectual judgments cloud his personal ones. The years before Benjamin's saw a weakening of their friendship due primarily to the Arcades project, and other projects Adorno saw as non-dialectical. Personally, I think he misunderstood completely Benjamin's final work. But I think mostly that's beside the point. The great Olson himself, as Tom Clark's bio demonstrates, was not always the most honorable man. Does that mean we stop reading him? Does that mean his thinking is less profound? Why? All I was tryingto indicate was that I believed Adorno's conception of the dialectical relationship of form and content might be extremely useful to anyone writing in late capitalism. At one time, perhaps we could extricate artistic form, popular culture, critical thinking and our lives from commodification but monopoly capitalism certainly has squashed that possibility Adorno's notion that we can resist commodification in our work by resisting the form of our work, by having our work work against itself, seems to me useful. Finally, to rescue the allegorical reading of Benjamin's death in the most immediate effect of his death: When the Spanish border guards discovered Benjamin's body, they grew so disturbed and frightened about the implications of what they had donethat they let all of the people who had traveled with Benjamin from Paris cross the border and disappear into Spain. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 17:29:11 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Bee Organization: University at Buffalo Subject: M/E/A/N/I/N/G # 16 X-To: poetics@UBVMS.BITNET In its eighth year, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, remains an important meeting ground between critical and theoretical ideas and language, and the actual practice of visual art by working artists. It is an inclusive, lively, contentious, provocative, and unprogrammatic forum for new ideas in the arts. Library Journal writes about M/E/A/N/I/N/G: "This attractive, large-format critical journal contains controversial and provocative comments and reviews related to the contemporary art scene. This eminently readable journal, which seems to display a particular interest in women~s issues, gives voice to new views and is an excellent choice for medium and larger academic collections." M/E/A/N/I/N/G is published twice a year in the fall and spring. Editors: Susan Bee and Mira Schor. M/E/A/N/I/N/G #16 features: Working Conditions: A Forum on Art and Everyday Life by Younger Artists with statements by forum guest editors Julia Jacquette and Lawrence Lipkin, and by Douglas Anderson, Jimbo Blachly, Serena Bocchino, Richard Brown, Kathe Burkhart, Kevin deForest, Jason Fox, Ava Gerber, Hilary Helfant, Lisa Hoke, Jenifer Kobylarz, Robert Kuszek, Mery Lynn McCorkle, Michael Mikulay, Holly Miller, Gregory Montreuil, David Moreno, Portia Munson, Kathryn Myers, Paul Pagk, Alix Pearlstein, Enoc Perez, Rebecca Quaytman, Trudie Reiss, Christian Schumann, Kate Shepherd, Amy Sillman, Hugh Steers, Laura Stein, Danny Tisdale, Nicola Tyson, Anthony Viti, Derek Weiler, Michael Windle, Karen Yasinsky, and Alexander Zane. Also in this issue: Essays on art in the technological era by Charles Bernstein and Johanna Drucker; an interview with Thomas McEvilley by Dominique Nahas; and a book review by Misko Suvakovic. From issue #16, Fall 1994: I see no contradiction in being an artist in a media-based culture. TV, movies, and advertising are potentially just as interesting as works in the traditional fine arts. Conversely, paintings can be potentially more boring than a string of commercials. -- Kathe Burkhart If Sex, Race, and Homophobia, are the major headlines of art at the close of the 20th century then how do I, as a formal, geometric, abstract painter fit in? -- Michael Windle Painting has become purespectacle losing its power to do harm. It has become like the oppressed feminine: domestic,shallow, empty, ineffectual, fickle, decorative. -- Rebecca Quaytman When I first found I could make artwork about the frustration, anguish, and stupidity of my own life, I wept with relief. -- Julia Jacquette In many ways I think my work is about terror management, the control of phobia through humor. -- Amy Sillman Subscriptions for 2 ISSUES (1 YEAR): 4 ISSUES (2 yEARS): $12 for individuals: $24 for individuals; $20 for institutions $40 for institutions * Foreign subscribers add $10 per year for shipping abroad and to Canada: $5 * Foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in U.S. dollars. All checks should be made payable to Mira Schor. Send all subscriptions to: Mira Schor 60 Lispenard Street New York, NY 10013 Back issues available at $6 each. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 21:54:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: Shelley In-Reply-To: <199411271850.NAA04885@sarah.albany.edu> from "eric pape" at Nov 27, 94 12:28:37 pm Tom Clark's biography of Olson doesn't "demonstrate a thing." Except bad faith. ======================================================================= Pierre Joris | Dept. of English | "La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose." SUNY Albany | Paul Celan Albany NY 12222 | tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | email: | "He who leaves a trace, leaves an abcess." joris@cnsunix.albany.edu| Henri Michaux ======================================================================= ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 23:51:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Phillips Subject: Segue Foundation Newsletter ************Announcement of Segue Foundation Newsletter************ Segue is well-known to many of you as a distributor of small press titles and as a publisher. Though we recently lost our distribution grant, it may surprise you how much Segue does beyond its former role as a distributor. For those of you who aren't so familiar with Segue, this newsletter fleshes out Segue as an important part of a much larger arts community. In addition, in this issue there's a list of current titles offered by Segue/Roof Books; a review of P. Inman's new Roof book _criss cross_; as well as press-time comments on Ron Silliman's new Roof book _N/O_. Segue has also published this newsletter in a HyperText version which is accessible through the writing.upenn.edu Gopher server and may be viewed with any hypertext browser (Mosaic, or similar browsers) at: gopher://writing.upenn.edu/hh /internet/library/e-journals/ub/rift /journals/list/Segue/Segue_Newsletter. In the near future, all Segue/Roof titles will be made available via the internet by filling out an on-line form. Segue as a distributor will resurface! Thank you for your patience with this long post. I hope that the information and reviews are worth your while. We also encourage any responses or queries and would be glad to consider reviews of forthcoming books for publication here and in the HyperText version. For more information about a specific facet of Segue you may write to Segue to order Roof and Segue books at a 20% discount. Contact Segue at: Segue Foundation 303 E. 8th St. NY, NY 10009 phone#: 212-674-0199. Or, email Segue Foundation Newsletter editor/developer: Patrick_Phillips@brown.edu Segue Foundation Newsletter - November 1994 The Segue Foundation is mainly a literary organization. It is the publisher of Roof and Segue Books (edited by James Sherry). Segue also acts as a fiscal conduit for projects grants for several arts organizations such as M/E/A/N/I/N/G magazine (a journal of art and criticism edited by Mira Schor & Susan Bee); Sally Silvers & Dancers ( an aesthetically and politically radical dance troupe in NYC); Big Allis (a journal of new poetry edited by Melanie Nielson & Jessica Grim); the Ear Inn Reading Series (conducted every Saturday at the Ear Inn in SoHo), and the INCISIONS Prison Arts Project, (weekly poetry workshops conducted in various NY state correctional facilities by Janine Vega). From 1977 - 1993 the Segue distribution project promoted and sold over 500 small press poetry titles annually. This distribution service has been converted into the Segue Information Archive. The archive, located in the Segue offices, will include every book that Segue distribution has ever carried and it will be complimented by new titles from authors and new presses as well as materials such as manuscripts and correspondence from private author's collections. The Segue Information Archive will represent a substantial free- access collection devoted to new writing. The offices of the Segue Foundation are located at the heart of East Village, the most thriving artistic communitie in New York City. The building in which the office is located is an artist owned cooperative, it includes 12 artist live/work coops, a 1200 square foot performance space, and Film editing facilities. The performance space managed by Segue is used as a low cost dance rehearsal space during the day and in the evenings we sponsor various ongoing film, dance and music series. Segue Foundation, Roof Books Roof Books, edited by James Sherry, is pleased to announce the publication of two new titles; criss cross, by P. Inman (see review of criss cross by Hank Lazer) and N/O by Ron Silliman. Though different in their formal approach to the page and text, both Inman and Silliman present a textual artifact which challenges our assumptions of locution and language. Both present texts which unknot normal attempts at consumption while aiding our understanding of languages as both necessary and critical. Each of these new titles can be ordered through Segue; receive a 20% discount when you order from Segue and mention this newsletter. (click here for Segue Address) (For other books by Inman, Silliman and many other writers, see the list of Other Roof Books in this newsletter.) Here's a glimpse of some press-time reviews: criss cross, by P. Inman 64pp., paper, ISBN 0-937804-57-6, $7.95 P. Inman has a first name that is not a letter. It is a work. His work also raises such questions for the reader. If a reader is sure of what she is saying, she does not need P. Inman's work. If she has doubts, reading P. Inman is a good idea. Roof Books is publishing P. Inman against the grain of ordinary poetics, but right in the face of digital reality. Before one thinks of bytes, Inman's bits represent a primary block of languages, all languages, foreign, domestic, binary, all have to pass through Inman's thoroughfares. Criss cross is a tour of the process of navigating the realms of experimentation, witness, and critique, an invitation to participatory poetic locution. You, as reader, are given the gift of transience. Diane Ward By fully semanticizing the so-called nonsemantic features of language, Inman creates a dialectic of the recuperable & the unreclaimable, where what cannot be claimed is nonetheless most manifest resistant to habitual comprehension as the ambiguous figure and similarly raises questions about the nature of perception. Like Beckett, Inman challenges his reader/audience. . .to consider what is fundamental, presence or absence. Joan Retallack Inman's poetry lies in how this language becomes known in the contemplative strategies it proposes and in what it becomes known as. Inman's poetry an emblem of poetry, of how it sets on a page, the page in a book, how a book opens, before one's eyes and in the mind, and how the mind in relation to its knowns becomes material. Ben Friedlander P. Inman was born on Long Island and educated at Georgetown. He is a member of the AFSCME Local 2910s Executive Board. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including: In the American Tree and From the Other Side of the Century. His books include: Ocker, Red Shift, Think of One, and Uneven Development. Review of criss cross by Hank Lazer words for windows. movement of phrases, words, syllables. bump up against margins, boxes, forms, periods. rarely if ever "personally expressive." as if transmitted. scrolling up & down. a sense of recurrence & reshuffling. orders: taking orders, manifesting orders. the criss-crossing and intersecting of shuffled and deployed lines. rarely if ever traditionally descriptive. a coolness. mondrian- like stripes of words. a beckett-like world of seemingly disembodied articulation. rarely if ever to be confused with speech. the page as a canvas or body upon which the lines inch about. simple whole numbers of their re- combinings. stubbornly resistant to readings which might resituate or paraphrase or thematize Inman's writing. eleven different assemblies. "prose arrived to fragments./ pulch. work stoppage balled up// as content. moeb grammar." readings within the loop; on the beltway. 1, 6, 6; 2, 6, 6; 3, 6, 6; 4, 6, 6: 5, 6, 6: 6, 6, 6. and other workings out, equations, formulas, floor plans, blue prints. from narrow strips to paragraph-wide blocks. "otherwise is that forever." a fill of/ sentences the ditch of what i mean."" and ""every of doubt words into distance."" in this book we see the units assemble and advance or disappear. that process is what we see as much as anything. we see the words in their placement moreso than in their service to other allegedly communicative purposes. "such a thin of the book the beginning of an offspring beside/ one line. how did distance become as dim as nosed. the brook/ of edges in a dictionary." if a stanza is also a room, Inman's book a floor plan, designs with designs upon us, lines assigned to available spaces. "sensation than/ signification" -- odd intersections of words on the page. i highly recommend you see & sense these. an engaging not uninviting terrain. "small wavelets out to something." "how they think the distance left." and across it, left & right, up & down, footprints. impressions. impressive. Hank Lazer Ron Silliman - N/O 112pp / paper / ISBN 0-937804-56-8 / $10.95 He lives the most passionate life of the mind in America. He is a poet I read to break through into new halls and colonnades of verbal richness that, before, I simply didn't know were sealed up behind these walls and dead ends in the palace of art. His work must be studied, lived with. Its pleasures cannot be simply lapped up off its surfaces. But they are the subtler, sharper, and more resonant for the time they take to taste.Samuel R. Delany Silliman has developed a shorthand method of getting it all down. There is something incredibly moving about his cap city and capability, his will and willfulness his hunger to know and absorb as he rants, records, juxtaposes, declares, riffs, puns, pans. . .Tom Beckett Ron Silliman was born in the state of Washington in 1946. He has been a prison and tenant organizer, a lobbyist, a teacher, a college administrator, editor of Socialist Review, and a marketeer in the computer industry. Long a national leader of the Language-centered writing movement, Ron Silliman's poetry and criticism have influenced an entire generation of poets. His concept of the New Sentence spawned literally dozens of efforts based on his idea of prose writing. N/O is two letters of his ongoing alphabet series. Long a national leader of the Language-centered writing movement, Ron Silliman's criticism has influenced an entire generation of poets. His concept of the New Sentence spawned literally dozens of efforts based on his idea of prose writing. His commentaries on the writing of his peers act as the most comprehensive introduction to this fascinating new writing style and at the same time are the perfect example of that writing. Each essay is filled with vital information and is itself a formal innovation. N/O is two letters of his ongoing poem, The Alphabet. Other Roof Books Bruce Andrews, Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened. 116p. $7.50. Bruce Andrews, R & B. 32p. $2.50. Susan Bee (Laufer), The Occurence of Tune text by Charles Bernstein. 9 plates, 24p. $6. Steve Benson, Blue Book. Copub with The Figures. 250p. $12.50. Charles Bernstein, Controlling Interests. 88p. $6. Charles Bernstein, Islets/Irritations. 112p. $9.95. Charles Bernstein, The Politics of Poetic Form. 246p. $12.95; cloth $21.95. Nicole Brossard, Picture Theory. 188p. $11.95. Abigail Child, From Solids, 30p. $3. Alan Davies, Active 24 Hours. 100p. $5. Alan Davies, Signage. 184p. $11. Alan Davies, Rave. 64p. $7.95. Jean Day, A Young Recruit. 58p. $6. George-Therese Dickenson, Transducing. 175p. $7.50. Ray DiPalma, Raik. 100p. $9.95. Lynne Dreyer, The White Museum. 80p. $9.95. Ken Edwards, Good Science. 80p. $9.95. Larry Eigner, Areas Lights Heights. 182p. $12, cloth $22. Jerry Estrin, Rome, A Mobile Home. Copub with The Figures, O Books, and Potes and Poets. 88p. $9.95. Michael Gizzi, Continental Harmonies. 92p. $8.95. Michael Gottlieb, Ninety-Six Tears. 88p. $5. Robert Grenier. A Day at the Beach. 80p. $6. Henry Hills, Making Money. 72p. $7.50. VHS videotape $24.95. Erica Hunt, Local History. 80p. $9.95. P. Inman, Red Shift. 64p. $6. Hank Lazer, Doublespace. 192p. $12. Legend. Collaboration by Andrews, Bernstein, DiPalma, McCaffery, and Silliman. Copub with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. 250p. $12. Jackson Mac Low, Representative Works: 1938-1985. 360p. $12.95, cloth $18.95. Jackson Mac Low, Twenties. 112p. $8.95 Steve McCaffery, North of Intention. 240p. $12.95. Laura Moriarty, Rondeaux. 107p. $8. Melanie Nielson, Civil Noir. 96p. $8.95. Ted Pearson, Planetary Gear. 72p. $8.95. Bob Perelman, Face Value. 72p. $6. Bob Perelman, Virtual Reality. 80p. $9.95. Nick Piombino, The Boundary of Blur. 128p. $13.95. Kit Robinson, Blance Sheet. 112p. $9.95. Kit Robinson, Ice Cubes. 96p. $6. Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense Longing from Taking Place. 88p. $9.95. Peter Seaton, The Son Master. 64p. $4. James Sherry, Popular Fiction. 84p. $6. Ron Silliman, The New Sentence. 200p. $10. Fiona Templeton, YOU-The City. 150p. $11.95. Diane Ward, Relation. 64p. $7.50. Barrett Watten, Progress. 122p. $7.50 Hannah Weiner, Little Books/Indians. 92p. $4. Segue Distribution Archive by Ricardo Tarrega-Shayegan In November 1993, Segue received a general support grand of $3,500 from the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore foundation. The Foundation supports organizations that "provide critical behind the scenes suppport to the artistic community at low cost, or no charge." Segue has been providing such services - a space for reading and rehearsals and for research collections - for seventeen years. Thanks to this grant we have been able to begin setting up an archive of the materials that Segue has distributed. The project is being headed by Heather Ramsdell who is identifying and locating the core of the collection; writing to authors, publishers and editors, as well as organizing materials already in Segue's possession. Right now, Segue has approximately 30% of the materials it would like to have in the core collection, which would include all the poetry and prose books distributed by Segue throughout the years, its collection of poetics titiles and the anthologies and magazines it has distributed. Ideally the collection would be augmented by audio and video tape collections as well as selections from author's collections and correspondence. Once complete, the collection will be housed at Segue or loaned in collaboration with other poetry venues in New York. We look forward to continuing our committment to the project and the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation's generous grants helps make this possible. M/E/A/N/I/N/G Magazine (see Susan's 11/27 post on M/E/A/N/I/N/G) by Susan Bee M/E/A/N/I/N/G is a biannual, artist-run publication edited by two painters, Susan Bee and Mira Schor. M/E/A/N/I/N/G is committed to providing an inclusive forum for the discussion of a broad range of issues of concern to professional visual artists through the publication of writing by artists, art historians and critics. Among the writers we have published are Johanna Drucker, Amelia Jones, Robert C. Morgan, Whitney Chadwick, Charles Bernstein and Rob Storr. M/E/A/N/I/N/G provides a crucial alternative to the commodification of art discourse in the established art magazines. We are not concerned with career promotion, or the "best selling" movements. By publishing writing by and for artists, we provide a needed bridge between critical and theoretical ideas and language, and the actual practice of visual art by working artists. M/E/A/N/I/N/G regularly publishes forums on current issues, encouraging responses from a wide range of visual artist. Past forums have explored motherhood and artmaking, racism in the art world, making art over a lifelong career, issues of community. Some of the artist published in these forums are Leon Golub, David Reed, David Humphrey, Nancy Spero, Miriam Schapiro, Ann Messner and Richard Tuttle. The Segue Foundation acts as our umbrella organization and helps us with grant applications and acts as a conduit for grant funding, but it does not add monetarily to our budget. Segue also assists us in distribution, bulk mailing and other postal services. M/E/A/N/I/N/G's relationship the Segue Foundation has been extremely useful to us; as working artists with active professional lives, The Segue Foundation has helped us produce M/E/A/N/I/N/G with a minimum of bureaucracy or red tape. Sally Silvers and Dancers by Sally Silvers My history as a Segue-connected artist goes back almost 14 years. The foundation has been the non-profit conduit home for Sally Silvers and Dancers since our first bulk mailing in 1981. (We're both housed at the Segue sponsored artist live-work coop/performance space in the Segue offices building on East 8th St. in New York.) I also currently serve on the Segue Performance Space board. In the early 80's Segue was the perfect locus for my "non-obedient" stance to the existing dance world: low-riding minimalism and pushing narrative/persona based theatrical dance with a vengeance (initially as message oriented statement in an early response to Reagonism, but also consensual transparency as a commercially linked career op). I found aesthetic inspiration from many of the writers associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine and Roof books. I wanted to politicize the body, show movement as a social circuitry inherent in the way the body moved (utilizing predicaments, presenting movement analytically, disjunctively, maximally -- to have the "message," grounded in the social) . The writers I admired most (some published by Roof/Segue) linked this kind of formal and political radicalism. My early self-produced evening-length concerts (some 15 from 1980-88) were all performed under the auspices of the Segue Foundation and took place at spaces like The Cunningham Studio and Ethnic Folk Arts Center. For the last 6 years Segue has been my fiscal conduit for project grants like a Meet the Composer collaboration with composer John Zorn, performed at the Joyce Theater; a dance/theater presentation with poet Bruce Andrews on gender, Nicaragua, control/discipline, etc., and a 6 minute film collaboration with filmmaker Henry Hills, "The Little Lieutenant." The film has toured internationally, has won festival prizes and now has a European distributor. 1995 will be a full year for SS&D. Upcoming are 5 weeks of teaching in Holland; an improvisation festival in December in NYC; an evening at Symphony Space in Feb., 1995. The '95 New York City season with all new works starts in April at P.S. 122. We also will be doing a film project with Henry Hills which begins production in the spring. INCISIONS/ARTS - Prison Arts Program by Janine Vega INCISIONS/ARTS has been organizing writing workshops and performances at New York State Correctional Facilities for men and women, and Division for Youth Residences and Secure Centers since 1978. Our writing programs have ranged from six week residencies, to long-running residencies at Sing-Sing and Bedford Hills which have continued for years. Resident writers usually come in to the facility once a week, meeting with inmate writers who have been selected or have chosen to take part. The workshop is conducted through discussion of technique and of individual inmates work. The aim of the workshop process is to generate new methods of discovery and new ways of writing. Recently we have been emphasizing a final event or project: a poetry reading, shared with the rest of the population, administration and staff; a short play or screenplay from a drama workshop; or an anthology of poetry, fiction or nonfiction. If an anthology is chosen as the final project, one is presented to each participating writer. We have found that aside from being a source of delight and pride, the anthology is an immensely effective reminder of the capacity for self-expression and as a continuing encouragement to keep writing. Some of our anthologies have received critical acclaim in American Book Review, Contact 11 Longhouse, Poetry Project Newsletter, Poetry Flash and the Woodstock Times. INCISIONS/ARTS has received grants from the New York State Council on the arts, Sing Sing Educational Department, Poets and Writers, The Vinmont Foundation, Longtermers Committee at Bedford Hills. Witter Bynner Foundation, Riverside Prison Foundation and private sponsors. We have had successful residencies at Sing Sing C. F., Hopper House, Creedmoor Psychiatric Center's Forensic Unit, Bellevue Prison Ward, Green Haven C. F., Rikers Island for Women, Bayview C. F. for Women, Bedford Hills C.F., Green Haven C. F., Highland R. C. for Boys, Sojourner Truth R. C. for Girls, and Harlem Valley Secure Center for Boys. INCISIONS/ARTS has been written about in the New York Times. Our Sing Sing workshop was covered by Bill Moyers on PBS with poet Quincy Troupe; One of our writers read her work for Channel 31 in New York City, and WBAI has broadcast portions of our Sing Sing Christmas Poetry Reading. The only lasting changes in a person happen from the inside out. The INCISIONS/ARTS writing program works by encouraging the participants to clarify their opinions, to articulate and accept their feelings and to examine and express themselves and their world with depth and vision. For the inmate, the writing process thus becomes a considerable and material process for change. Patrick Phillips ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 02:22:47 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Flaming In-Reply-To: <199411030300.TAA07658@whistler.sfu.ca> from "Mark Wallace" at Nov 2, 94 11:19:36 am I have been pondering for a long time (between trips) Wallace's suggestion that "flaming" is a heterosexist word. Dont quite get it. When The Human Torch said "flame on!" was there an implication I wasnt getting? And what about the Calgary Flames? Were they chased out of Atlanta by a conservative Southern city hall? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 07:39:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: Benjamin In-Reply-To: <9411261939.AA29408@jazz.epas.utoronto.ca> from "Pierre Joris" at Nov 26, 94 02:21:29 pm Well, I heard that he got to the Spanish border with his party and they were refused entrance because of some bureaucratic screw-up. (this, incidently, after the party had stayed with Bryher and H.D. in Switzerland--Bryher was apparently deeply involved in getting Jewish refugees out of Germany) That night, in despair, he gave what he had of his manuscript, as someone already said, the Arcades project, to someone else in the party, and then went off alone and killed himself believing that they were stuck in Vichy France. The next day the bureaucratic glitch unravelled spontaneously and they were all allowed to cross the border. It seems no matter which way you get it, it resonates uncannily with meaning. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 12:09:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Patrick Phillips Subject: reformatted (easy-reading) Seque Newsletter Seeing as I submitted a long post, I spoze the least I can do is provide it with the standard line breaks for easy reading. I must have mistakenly saved it and sent it with line breaks straight outta MS Word. Luigi Bob Drake has been so kind and helpful as to do the reformatting for me, so with my gratitude and thanks to him, here it is again. *********Announcement of Segue Foundation Newsletter************ Segue is well-known to many of you as a distributor of small press titles and as a publisher. Though we recently lost our distribution grant, it may surprise you how much Segue does beyond its former role as a distributor. For those of you who aren't so familiar with Segue, this newsletter fleshes out Segue as an important part of a much larger arts community. In addition, in this issue there's a list of current titles offered by Segue/Roof Books; a review of P. Inman's new Roof book _criss cross_; as well as press-time comments on Ron Silliman's new Roof book _N/O_. Segue has also published this newsletter in a HyperText version which is accessible through the writing.upenn.edu Gopher server and may be viewed with any hypertext browser (Mosaic, or similar browsers) at: gopher://writing.upenn.edu/hh /internet/library/e-journals/ub/rift /journals/list/Segue/Segue_Newsletter. In the near future, all Segue/Roof titles will be made available via the internet by filling out an on-line form. Segue as a distributor will resurface! Thank you for your patience with this long post. I hope that the information and reviews are worth your while. We also encourage any responses or queries and would be glad to consider reviews of forthcoming books for publication here and in the HyperText version. For more information about a specific facet of Segue you may write to Segue to order Roof and Segue books at a 20% discount. Contact Segue at: Segue Foundation 303 E. 8th St. NY, NY 10009 phone#: 212-674-0199. Or, email Segue Foundation Newsletter editor/developer: Patrick_Phillips@brown.edu Segue Foundation Newsletter - November 1994 The Segue Foundation is mainly a literary organization. It is the publisher of Roof and Segue Books (edited by James Sherry). Segue also acts as a fiscal conduit for projects grants for several arts organizations such as M/E/A/N/I/N/G magazine (a journal of art and criticism edited by Mira Schor & Susan Bee); Sally Silvers & Dancers ( an aesthetically and politically radical dance troupe in NYC); Big Allis (a journal of new poetry edited by Melanie Nielson & Jessica Grim); the Ear Inn Reading Series (conducted every Saturday at the Ear Inn in SoHo), and the INCISIONS Prison Arts Project, (weekly poetry workshops conducted in various NY state correctional facilities by Janine Vega). >From 1977 - 1993 the Segue distribution project promoted and sold over 500 small press poetry titles annually. This distribution service has been converted into the Segue Information Archive. The archive, located in the Segue offices, will include every book that Segue distribution has ever carried and it will be complimented by new titles from authors and new presses as well as materials such as manuscripts and correspondence from private author's collections. The Segue Information Archive will represent a substantial free- access collection devoted to new writing. The offices of the Segue Foundation are located at the heart of East Village, the most thriving artistic communitie in New York City. The building in which the office is located is an artist owned cooperative, it includes 12 artist live/work coops, a 1200 square foot performance space, and Film editing facilities. The performance space managed by Segue is used as a low cost dance rehearsal space during the day and in the evenings we sponsor various ongoing film, dance and music series. Segue Foundation, Roof Books Roof Books, edited by James Sherry, is pleased to announce the publication of two new titles; criss cross, by P. Inman (see review of criss cross by Hank Lazer) and N/O by Ron Silliman. Though different in their formal approach to the page and text, both Inman and Silliman present a textual artifact which challenges our assumptions of locution and language. Both present texts which unknot normal attempts at consumption while aiding our understanding of languages as both necessary and critical. Each of these new titles can be ordered through Segue; receive a 20% discount when you order from Segue and mention this newsletter. (click here for Segue Address) (For other books by Inman, Silliman and many other writers, see the list of Other Roof Books in this newsletter.) Here's a glimpse of some press-time reviews: _criss cross_, by P. Inman 64pp., paper, ISBN 0-937804-57-6, $7.95 P. Inman has a first name that is not a letter. It is a work. His work also raises such questions for the reader. If a reader is sure of what she is saying, she does not need P. Inman's work. If she has doubts, reading P. Inman is a good idea. Roof Books is publishing P. Inman against the grain of ordinary poetics, but right in the face of digital reality. Before one thinks of bytes, Inman's bits represent a primary block of languages, all languages, foreign, domestic, binary, all have to pass through Inman's thoroughfares. _Criss cross_ is a tour of the process of navigating the realms of experimentation, witness, and critique, an invitation to participatory poetic locution. You, as reader, are given the gift of transience.--Diane Ward By fully semanticizing the so-called nonsemantic features of language, Inman creates a dialectic of the recuperable & the unreclaimable, where what cannot be claimed is nonetheless most manifest resistant to habitual comprehension as the ambiguous figure and similarly raises questions about the nature of perception. Like Beckett, Inman challenges his reader/audience... to consider what is fundamental, presence or absence.--Joan Retallack Inman's poetry lies in how this language becomes known in the contemplative strategies it proposes and in what it becomes known as. Inman's poetry an emblem of poetry, of how it sets on a page, the page in a book, how a book opens, before one's eyes and in the mind, and how the mind in relation to its knowns becomes material.--Ben Friedlander P. Inman was born on Long Island and educated at Georgetown. He is a member of the AFSCME Local 2910s Executive Board. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including: _In the American Tree_ and _From the Other Side of the Century_. His books include: _Ocker_, _Red Shift_, _Think of One_, and _Uneven Development_. Review of _criss cross_, by Hank Lazer words for windows. movement of phrases, words, syllables. bump up against margins, boxes, forms, periods. rarely if ever "personally expressive." as if transmitted. scrolling up & down. a sense of recurrence & reshuffling. orders: taking orders, manifesting orders. the criss-crossing and intersecting of shuffled and deployed lines. rarely if ever traditionally descriptive. a coolness. mondrian- like stripes of words. a beckett-like world of seemingly disembodied articulation. rarely if ever to be confused with speech. the page as a canvas or body upon which the lines inch about. simple whole numbers of their re- combinings. stubbornly resistant to readings which might resituate or paraphrase or thematize Inman's writing. eleven different assemblies. "prose arrived to fragments./ pulch. work stoppage balled up// as content. moeb grammar." readings within the loop; on the beltway. 1, 6, 6; 2, 6, 6; 3, 6, 6; 4, 6, 6: 5, 6, 6: 6, 6, 6. and other workings out, equations, formulas, floor plans, blue prints. from narrow strips to paragraph-wide blocks. "otherwise is that forever." a fill of/ sentences the ditch of what i mean."" and ""every of doubt words into distance."" in this book we see the units assemble and advance or disappear. that process is what we see as much as anything. we see the words in their placement moreso than in their service to other allegedly communicative purposes. "such a thin of the book the beginning of an offspring beside/ one line. how did distance become as dim as nosed. the brook/ of edges in a dictionary." if a stanza is also a room, Inman's book a floor plan, designs with designs upon us, lines assigned to available spaces. "sensation than/ signification" -- odd intersections of words on the page. i highly recommend you see & sense these. an engaging not uninviting terrain. "small wavelets out to something." "how they think the distance left." and across it, left & right, up & down, footprints. impressions. impressive. --Hank Lazer _N/O_, by Ron Silliman 112pp / paper / ISBN 0-937804-56-8 / $10.95 He lives the most passionate life of the mind in America. He is a poet I read to break through into new halls and colonnades of verbal richness that, before, I simply didn't know were sealed up behind these walls and dead ends in the palace of art. His work must be studied, lived with. Its pleasures cannot be simply lapped up off its surfaces. But they are the subtler, sharper, and more resonant for the time they take to taste.--Samuel R. Delany Silliman has developed a shorthand method of getting it all down. There is something incredibly moving about his cap city and capability, his will and willfulness his hunger to know and absorb as he rants, records, juxtaposes, declares, riffs, puns, pans... --Tom Beckett Ron Silliman was born in the state of Washington in 1946. He has been a prison and tenant organizer, a lobbyist, a teacher, a college administrator, editor of Socialist Review, and a marketeer in the computer industry. Long a national leader of the Language- centered writing movement, Ron Silliman's criticism has influenced an entire generation of poets. His concept of the New Sentence spawned literally dozens of efforts based on his idea of prose writing. His commentaries on the writing of his peers act as the most comprehensive introduction to this fascinating new writing style and at the same time are the perfect example of that writing. Each essay is filled with vital information and is itself a formal innovation. _N/O_ is two letters of his ongoing poem, The Alphabet. Other Roof Books Bruce Andrews, Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened. 116p. $7.50. Bruce Andrews, R & B. 32p. $2.50. Susan Bee (Laufer), The Occurence of Tune text by Charles Bernstein. 9 plates, 24p. $6. Steve Benson, Blue Book. Copub with The Figures. 250p. $12.50. Charles Bernstein, Controlling Interests. 88p. $6. Charles Bernstein, Islets/Irritations. 112p. $9.95. Charles Bernstein, The Politics of Poetic Form. 246p. $12.95; cloth $21.95. Nicole Brossard, Picture Theory. 188p. $11.95. Abigail Child, From Solids, 30p. $3. Alan Davies, Active 24 Hours. 100p. $5. Alan Davies, Signage. 184p. $11. Alan Davies, Rave. 64p. $7.95. Jean Day, A Young Recruit. 58p. $6. George-Therese Dickenson, Transducing. 175p. $7.50. Ray DiPalma, Raik. 100p. $9.95. Lynne Dreyer, The White Museum. 80p. $9.95. Ken Edwards, Good Science. 80p. $9.95. Larry Eigner, Areas Lights Heights. 182p. $12, cloth $22. Jerry Estrin, Rome, A Mobile Home. Copub with The Figures, O Books,and Potes and Poets. 88p. $9.95. Michael Gizzi, Continental Harmonies. 92p. $8.95. Michael Gottlieb, Ninety-Six Tears. 88p. $5. Robert Grenier. A Day at the Beach. 80p. $6. Henry Hills, Making Money. 72p. $7.50. VHS videotape $24.95. Erica Hunt, Local History. 80p. $9.95. P. Inman, Red Shift. 64p. $6. Hank Lazer, Doublespace. 192p. $12. Legend. Collaboration by Andrews, Bernstein, DiPalma, McCaffery, and Silliman. Copub with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. 250p. $12. Jackson Mac Low, Representative Works: 1938-1985. 360p. $12.95, cloth$18.95. Jackson Mac Low, Twenties. 112p. $8.95 Steve McCaffery, North of Intention. 240p. $12.95. Laura Moriarty, Rondeaux. 107p. $8. Melanie Nielson, Civil Noir. 96p. $8.95. Ted Pearson, Planetary Gear. 72p. $8.95. Bob Perelman, Face Value. 72p. $6. Bob Perelman, Virtual Reality. 80p. $9.95. Nick Piombino, The Boundary of Blur. 128p. $13.95. Kit Robinson, Blance Sheet. 112p. $9.95. Kit Robinson, Ice Cubes. 96p. $6. Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense Longing from Taking Place. 88p. $9.95. Peter Seaton, The Son Master. 64p. $4. James Sherry, Popular Fiction. 84p. $6. Ron Silliman, The New Sentence. 200p. $10. Fiona Templeton, YOU-The City. 150p. $11.95. Diane Ward, Relation. 64p. $7.50. Barrett Watten, Progress. 122p. $7.50 Hannah Weiner, Little Books/Indians. 92p. $4. Segue Distribution Archive by Ricardo Tarrega-Shayegan In November 1993, Segue received a general support grand of $3,500 from the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore foundation. The Foundation supports organizations that "provide critical behind the scenes suppport to the artistic community at low cost, or no charge." Segue has been providing such services - a space for reading and rehearsals and for research collections - for seventeen years. Thanks to this grant we have been able to begin setting up an archive of the materials that Segue has distributed. The project is being headed by Heather Ramsdell who is identifying and locating the core of the collection; writing to authors, publishers and editors, as well as organizing materials already in Segue's possession. Right now, Segue has approximately 30% of the materials it would like to have in the core collection, which would include all the poetry and prose books distributed by Segue throughout the years, its collection of poetics titiles and the anthologies and magazines it has distributed. Ideally the collection would be augmented by audio and video tape collections as well as selections from author's collections and correspondence. Once complete, the collection will be housed at Segue or loaned in collaboration with other poetry venues in New York. We look forward to continuing our committment to the project and the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation's generous grants helps make this possible. M/E/A/N/I/N/G Magazine (see Susan's 11/27 post on M/E/A/N/I/N/G) by Susan Bee M/E/A/N/I/N/G is a biannual, artist-run publication edited by two painters, Susan Bee and Mira Schor. M/E/A/N/I/N/G is committed to providing an inclusive forum for the discussion of a broad range of issues of concern to professional visual artists through the publication of writing by artists, art historians and critics. Among the writers we have published are Johanna Drucker, Amelia Jones, Robert C. Morgan, Whitney Chadwick, Charles Bernstein and Rob Storr. M/E/A/N/I/N/G provides a crucial alternative to the commodification of art discourse in the established art magazines. We are not concerned with career promotion, or the "best selling" movements. By publishing writing by and for artists, we provide a needed bridge between critical and theoretical ideas and language, and the actual practice of visual art by working artists. M/E/A/N/I/N/G regularly publishes forums on current issues, encouraging responses from a wide range of visual artist. Past forums have explored motherhood and artmaking, racism in the art world, making art over a lifelong career, issues of community. Some of the artist published in these forums are Leon Golub, David Reed, David Humphrey, Nancy Spero, Miriam Schapiro, Ann Messner and Richard Tuttle. The Segue Foundation acts as our umbrella organization and helps us with grant applications and acts as a conduit for grant funding, but it does not add monetarily to our budget. Segue also assists us in distribution, bulk mailing and other postal services. M/E/A/N/I/N/G's relationship the Segue Foundation has been extremely useful to us; as working artists with active professional lives, The Segue Foundation has helped us produce M/E/A/N/I/N/G with a minimum of bureaucracy or red tape. Sally Silvers and Dancers by Sally Silvers My history as a Segue-connected artist goes back almost 14 years. The foundation has been the non-profit conduit home for Sally Silvers and Dancers since our first bulk mailing in 1981. (We're both housed at the Segue sponsored artist live-work coop/performance space in the Segue offices building on East 8th St. in New York.) I also currently serve on the Segue Performance Space board. In the early 80's Segue was the perfect locus for my "non-obedient" stance to the existing dance world: low-riding minimalism and pushing narrative/persona based theatrical dance with a vengeance (initially as message oriented statement in an early response to Reagonism, but also consensual transparency as a commercially linked career op). I found aesthetic inspiration from many of the writers associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine and Roof books. I wanted to politicize the body, show movement as a social circuitry inherent in the way the body moved (utilizing predicaments, presenting movement analytically, disjunctively, maximally -- to have the "message," grounded in the social) . The writers I admired most (some published by Roof/Segue) linked this kind of formal and political radicalism. My early self-produced evening-length concerts (some 15 from 1980-88) were all performed under the auspices of the Segue Foundation and took place at spaces like The Cunningham Studio and Ethnic Folk Arts Center. For the last 6 years Segue has been my fiscal conduit for project grants like a Meet the Composer collaboration with composer John Zorn, performed at the Joyce Theater; a dance/theater presentation with poet Bruce Andrews on gender, Nicaragua, control/discipline, etc., and a 6 minute film collaboration with filmmaker Henry Hills, "The Little Lieutenant." The film has toured internationally, has won festival prizes and now has a European distributor. 1995 will be a full year for SS&D. Upcoming are 5 weeks of teaching in Holland; an improvisation festival in December in NYC; an evening at Symphony Space in Feb., 1995. The '95 New York City season with all new works starts in April at P.S. 122. We also will be doing a film project with Henry Hills which begins production in the spring. INCISIONS/ARTS - Prison Arts Program by Janine Vega INCISIONS/ARTS has been organizing writing workshops and performances at New York State Correctional Facilities for men and women, and Division for Youth Residences and Secure Centers since 1978. Our writing programs have ranged from six week residencies, to long-running residencies at Sing-Sing and Bedford Hills which have continued for years. Resident writers usually come in to the facility once a week, meeting with inmate writers who have been selected or have chosen to take part. The workshop is conducted through discussion of technique and of individual inmates work. The aim of the workshop process is to generate new methods of discovery and new ways of writing. Recently we have been emphasizing a final event or project: a poetry reading, shared with the rest of the population, administration and staff; a short play or screenplay from a drama workshop; or an anthology of poetry, fiction or nonfiction. If an anthology is chosen as the final project, one is presented to each participating writer. We have found that aside from being a source of delight and pride, the anthology is an immensely effective reminder of the capacity for self-expression and as a continuing encouragement to keep writing. Some of our anthologies have received critical acclaim in American Book Review, Contact, Longhouse, Poetry Project Newsletter, Poetry Flash and the Woodstock Times. INCISIONS/ARTS has received grants from the New York State Council on the arts, Sing Sing Educational Department, Poets and Writers, The Vinmont Foundation, Longtermers Committee at Bedford Hills. Witter Bynner Foundation, Riverside Prison Foundation and private sponsors. We have had successful residencies at Sing Sing C. F., Hopper House, Creedmoor Psychiatric Center's Forensic Unit, Bellevue Prison Ward, Green Haven C. F., Rikers Island for Women, Bayview C. F. for Women, Bedford Hills C.F., Green Haven C. F., Highland R. C. for Boys, Sojourner Truth R. C. for Girls, and Harlem Valley Secure Center for Boys. INCISIONS/ARTS has been written about in the New York Times. Our Sing Sing workshop was covered by Bill Moyers on PBS with poet Quincy Troupe; One of our writers read her work for Channel 31 in New York City, and WBAI has broadcast portions of our Sing Sing Christmas Poetry Reading. The only lasting changes in a person happen from the inside out. The INCISIONS/ARTS writing program works by encouraging the participants to clarify their opinions, to articulate and accept their feelings and to examine and express themselves and their world with depth and vision. For the inmate, the writing process thus becomes a considerable and material process for change. Patrick Phillips ------------------------------- Patrick Phillips ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 12:43:44 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: reformatted (easy-reading) Seque Newsletter In-Reply-To: <199411281712.MAA06515@terminus-est.acsu.buffalo.edu> from "Patrick Phillips" at Nov 28, 94 12:09:30 pm A note to mention that the Segue Newsletter is available at the Electronic Poetry Center where it can be retrieved through gopher, the world-wide web, or Mosaic, according to your preference. If you normally enter the Poetry Center through the main menu, you would first choose electronic journals and then selected journals. Since the Segue Newsletter is archived at the EPC, if you misplace your copy or wish to refer to it some time in the future, it will be there for your use. Loss Glazier ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 21:09:19 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: James Sherry Subject: Re: reformatted (easy-reading) Seque Newsletter In-Reply-To: <199411281739.AA22412@panix2.panix.com> I hope some of you will read and comment on the Segue Newsletter speaking either to its content or the fact of such a text in this place. James ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 21:18:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Mandel Subject: Benjamin/Bryher I'm trying to figure out how Benjamin would have gotten into Switzerland from France on his way to the Pyrenees. Moreover, allow me to assure you heartily, had he gotten into Switzerland he would n e v e r have left! Amazing the degree to which it is possible to imagine that world as like ours, in which one enters any country one wishes, etc. But it was not at all like that in the late 30's. Again, it was the entry visa which was critical, the right to enter another country was very very hard to come by. tom mandel ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 15:50:03 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: w.curnow@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Olson on the Net X-To: djb85@CSC.ALBANY.EDU IT'S HARD TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE ON THE NET Yes and no. The net 's value is different (greater?) for those who are the most widely separated. From one another, from the CENTERS of discussion. News of conferences, books, etc., travels further faster on the net. Space offers much less resistance it is true, but the net is still a map which retains its scale, its distributions and projection regardless of the subject under discussion. And it's a familiar one, to those of us out here on its periphery. In that respect I remain clear about where I am. But the subjects do, of course, reinforce this geography. A long while back ANTHOLOGIES were discussed. They were all anthologies of AMERICAN poetry as I recall. More recently, we discussed NAMES. G-1, the NEW AMERICANS--after those Abstract Expressionist shows O'Hara was putting together and taking EUROPE by storm. I'm not complaining and have no desire to pose as the net's postcolonial pet or anything. But this seemed like a good moment to make a point about the geography of the net, and how the issues are always a bit (at least) different according to where you are writing from. These differences will show up when the Auckland is on the line. I have an outsider's interest in this G-1, G-2 talk--not only because G-formation itself is a map-making process, and scale here makes it much more difficult to engage in, but also because I am BETWEEN your Gs, along with Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, Robert Grenier. So, as a for instance then, The Generation Game could've done with more ZOOM all round. Wystan Curnow. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 07:36:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: Benjamin/Bryher In-Reply-To: <9411290257.AA02030@jazz.epas.utoronto.ca> from "Tom Mandel" at Nov 28, 94 09:18:09 pm Dear Tom: I've been racking my brain trying to remember where I read that about Bryher. It was when I was compiling the H.D. bibliography and a lot got lost in the sheer volume of information passing through my hands. I may have encountered it going through the H.D. archives at Yale. Or it may be in the Guest H.D. bio, but, wouldn't you know, I lent my copy to my sister-in-law when she was passing through town a couple of weeks ago. I do know that Bryher was involved in smuggling Jews out of Germany by illegaly harboring them in Switzerland. I stress this was an illegal operation and involved some risk on her part. Perhaps that's why B and others couldn't stay in Switzerland, they had no papers. Anyway, my memory, though hazy, I admit, is that she (though not H.D.--but she must have known) was involved in such a pipeline/underground railroad deal getting people into Spain and Portugal from where they could get to England or the States. H.D. left Switzerland for England fairly early. Bryher stayed for some time, continuing her work and almost got trapped in Switzerland for the duration of the war. I know it sounds a bit like *Casablanca* or something. I was amazed when I first read it. Best, Mike mboughn@epas.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 05:56:46 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Re: Benjamin/Bryher What Tom Mandel doesn't bother to mention in his eMail is that he still has his parents passport out of Germany. A big red "J" (for Jewish) stamped right across the cover. The point being: these details are not simply intellectual. The "where in the world is Carmen San Diego" quality of the Benjamin on the border w/ the holy grail sage has had me wondering.... ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 09:37:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: reformatted (easy-reading) Seque Newsletter In-Reply-To: <199411281822.NAA09726@terminus-est.acsu.buffalo.edu> from "Loss Glazier" at Nov 28, 94 12:43:44 pm For those that may need instructions to the Electronic Poetry Center, I neglected to include them in this earlier post. They are appended to this message. Loss > > A note to mention that the Segue Newsletter is available at the > Electronic Poetry Center where it can be retrieved through gopher, the > world-wide web, or Mosaic, according to your preference. > If you normally enter the Poetry Center through the main menu, you > would first choose electronic journals and then selected journals. > Since the Segue Newsletter is archived at the EPC, if you misplace > your copy or wish to refer to it some time in the future, it will > be there for your use. > Loss Glazier > ____________________________________________________________ The Electronic Poetry Center (Buffalo) 11-29-94 ____________________________________________________________ THE ELECTRONIC POETRY CENTER (BUFFALO). The mission of this World-Wide Web based electronic poetry center is to serve as a hypertextual gateway to the extraordinary range of activity in formally innovative writing in the United States and the world. The Center provides access to numerous electronic resources in the new poetries including RIF/T and other electronic poetry journals, the Poetics List archives, a library of poetic texts, the Segue Newsletter, news of related print sources, and direct connections to numerous related poetic projects. The Center is located at gopher://writing.upenn.edu/11/internet/ library/e-journals/ub/rift (Presently, the prototype is under construction but operational.) Gopher Access: For those who have access to gopher, type gopher writing.upenn.edu at your system prompt. First choose Libraries & Library Resources, then Electronic Journals, then E- Journals/Resources Produced Here At UB, then The Electronic Poetry Center. (Note: Connections to some Poetry Center resources require Web access, though most are presently available through gopher). World-Wide Web and Mosaic Access: For those with World-Wide Web (lynx) or Mosaic access, from your interface, choose the go to URL option then go to (type as one continuous string) gopher://writing.upenn.edu/11/internet/ library/e-journals/ub/rift _____________________________________________________________ The Electronic Poetry Center is administered in Buffalo by E-Poetry and RIF/T in coordination with the Poetics List. Loss Pequen~o Glazier for Kenneth Sherwood and Loss Glazier in collaboration with Charles Bernstein ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 09:37:25 -0500 Reply-To: Robert Drake Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Drake Subject: forwarded "call for peer reviewers" Sorry to clutter up mailboxes of those already subscribed, but at least one of the pieces up for review might be of interest to this group... luigi ---------------------------start of message----------------------------- Date: Tue Nov 29 03:21:53 1994 From: pmc@unity.ncsu.edu Subject: PMC call for peer reviews Reply-To: pmc-list@listserv.ncsu.edu Call for Self-Nominated Peer-Reviewers: Self-nominated peer-reviewers regularly participate in the editorial process of _Postmodern Culture_. All submissions distributed for review have been screened by the editors and will receive two other readings from members of the journal's permanent editorial board; _Postmodern Culture_ preserves the anonymity of both authors and reviewers in this process, but the comments of reviewers will be forwarded to the author. If you would like to review one of the submissions described below, please send a note to the editors at PMC@UNITY.NCSU.EDU detailing your qualifications as a reviewer of the work in question (experience in the subject area, publications, interest). We will select one self-nominated reviewer for each of the works listed below, and we will notify that person within a week. We ask those who are selected as reviewers to return their comments within two weeks of the time they receive the submissions. If you cannot help with these manuscripts within two weeks of receipt, please do not volunteer at this time. Please note: members of the journal's permanent editorial board should not nominate themselves in response to this call. Manuscripts for review: MS#1: "Ugly Beauty: John Zorn and the Politics of POMO Music." Reference to avant guarde music, the work of John Zorn, politics and pop. culture. MS#2: "Evocations of Empire in a Transnational Corporate Age: Tracking the Sign of Saturn." Reference to global culture, Bakhtin, science and public policy, Foucault, government studies, business. MS#3: "Madness and Automation: On Institutionalization." Reference to psychological institutionalization, Blanchot, Deleuze, Goffman. MS#4: "The Mired Sublime of Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou." Reference to Mackey, Said, transcendence in poetics. MS#5: "Dambudzo Marechera's Politic Body: The Menippeanism of a Lost Generation in Africa." Reference to African literature, genre studies, postcolonial theory. -----------------------------end of message----------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 15:40:56 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Olson on net From: Self To: POETICS@UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: Re: Olson on net Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 14:04:31 Reading the e-mail after a few days grading papers. 1.Boughn: From: peter quartermain Subject: Re: experiwhat? In message Fri, 25 Nov 1994 08:25:37 -0500, Michael Boughn wrote: >> Well, Mike, we know that Stein was trained in experimental >> psychology, so it would be a good idea to believe her when she says >> that she never wrote an experimental work (I presume that she was not >> including her lab exercise in automatic writing.) > > I don't know about the automatic writing, George. It was actually > Peter Quartermain who told me she said that. (Peter, are you listening? > reading? whatever? YES, I'M HERE, A BIT SLOW AND BETWEEN TERM-PAPERS, BUT HERE. Where is that quote from?) DAMN IF I KNOW (SHAME, SHAME) BUT THIS IS WHAT SHE SAID (I'LL LEAVE UPPER CASE NOW AS IT'S EASIER TO READ): "Artists do not experiment. Experiment is what scientists do; they initiate an operation of unknown factors in order to be instructed by its results. An artist puts down what he knows and at every moment it what he knows at that moment." But I don't have a note of whence I got it! It's in some notes I wrote on "Emp Lace" (in _Bee_Time_Vine_) but I have no idea why or where it comes from. Does anybody out there recognize it? I'm not sure I'd take Stein's word for it anyway, so far as "experiment" goes. In any case it's quite clear that in the terms of the definition just quoted, she experimented. In 1928 she called _Tender_Buttons_ "my first conscious struggle with the problem of correlating sight, sound and sense, and eliminating rhythm; now I am [in pieces collected in _How_to_write_] trying grammar and eliminating sound." That quote is from _Transition_ #14. Of course she experiemnted in the sense of trying something out to see what happened. Not, perhaps, in the sense of trying to disprove a hypothesis. If you want an example of a deliberate and conscious experiment, try "An Instant Answer or A Hundred Prominent Men" (Transition # 13 Summer 1928: 118-130) in which she deliberately sets out, describing a hundred photographs one after another in numbered sequence, to see if at any point she (or presumably any reader) could thereby get a *sense* of one hundred. After all, earlier (?) she had said "there is only one way to count: one and one and one and [you guessed it] one." But I guess she said that later. Now BACK TO THOSE TERM-PAPERS. Peter ! __________________________________________________________________________ Peter Quartermain 128 East 23rd Avenue voice and fax (604) 876 8061 Vancouver B.C. e-mail: quarterm@unixg.ubc.ca Canada V5V 1X2 __________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 10:46:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Poetics List Archive Files This is a note to let you know that the Poetics List back files have been updated. To view back files of the Poetics list, enter the Electronic Poetry Center. (Instructions for this, though recently posted, are repeated below.) Select Poetics, then "Poetics List Archive" where you will find files corresponding to monthly activity on the list. Many thanks to Kenneth Sherwood who noticed that the machine that was supposed to do this was less than effective and spent his time rebuilding the files! Loss ____________________________________________________________ The Electronic Poetry Center (Buffalo) 11-29-94 ____________________________________________________________ THE ELECTRONIC POETRY CENTER (BUFFALO). The mission of this World-Wide Web based electronic poetry center is to serve as a hypertextual gateway to the extraordinary range of activity in formally innovative writing in the United States and the world. The Center provides access to numerous electronic resources in the new poetries including RIF/T and other electronic poetry journals, the Poetics List archives, a library of poetic texts, the Segue Newsletter, news of related print sources, and direct connections to numerous related poetic projects. The Center is located at gopher://writing.upenn.edu/11/internet/ library/e-journals/ub/rift Gopher Access: For those who have access to gopher, type gopher writing.upenn.edu at your system prompt. First choose Libraries & Library Resources, then Electronic Journals, then E- Journals/Resources Produced Here At UB, then The Electronic Poetry Center. (Note: Connections to some Poetry Center resources require Web access, though most are presently available through gopher). World-Wide Web and Mosaic Access: For those with World-Wide Web (lynx) or Mosaic access, from your interface, choose the go to URL option then go to (type as one continuous string) gopher://writing.upenn.edu/11/internet/ library/e-journals/ub/rift _____________________________________________________________ The Electronic Poetry Center is administered in Buffalo by E-Poetry and RIF/T in coordination with the Poetics List. Loss Pequen~o Glazier for Kenneth Sherwood and Loss Glazier in collaboration with Charles Bernstein ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 18:04:45 U Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kit Robinson Subject: Re: Benjamin/Bryher Reply to: RE>>Benjamin/Bryher It may be worth noting that Benjamin's lost ms, the Passage Work, represents an attempt to construct philosophy with wholely concrete elements -- the documented remnants of an outdated commercial culture -- the Paris Arcades. The Arcades were a proto-Net -- connected areas of public access & commerce. Benjamin argues that the Arcades represent the dreamy, unconscious longings of industrial capitalism in concrete form, and that they suggest, in the moment of our latter-day estrangement and fascination, the possibility of awakening. The Net is currently being promoted both in terms of revolution (democratic horizontality) and commerce (electronic malls). I wonder what'll happen. Kit Robinson ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 20:51:36 MST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: visit In-Reply-To: <199410131721.NAA19995@freenet.carleton.ca>; from "Charles Watts" at Oct 12, 94 5:53 pm Hi Charles, Nice to have though ever so briefly met you once again. Hope we didn't leave too great a mess in the archive. Thanks for yours and Jean's assistance. Louis ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 22:35:31 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: eric pape Subject: Re: Benjamin/Bryher In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 30 Nov 1994 18:04:45 U from Defending dead men is a bad business. You can't help but engage in half- sincere apologetics about issues you have no knowledge. For examples of which see my last posting. But/but... The main point of contention between the two thinkers, the bastard and Baldur/Adonis, ie, the lost son, the lost possibility, is in fact the possibility. Do you in fact think there is the possibility of truly oppositional thinking/art/popular culture. Benjamin was able to theorize such a thing in film in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction or something. Adorno was never able to see it. Always felt a profound pessimism about the possibility that experiment could work against the dominant culture. I don't know. What do you think. This is what I think: there isn't a day that goes by, not a single one, that when I sit at my computer to write a poem I don' t imagine I can write something that will, in some profound way, make things better for people. Yet... On PBS, I watched a Shaker auction in Vermont or some such place, and Oprah fucking Winfrey bought a Shaker box, a box painted blue, for 10,000 dollars. In the early 80s, as an undergraduate (okay, yeah so I'm G2 or whatever), I watched as punk became a fashion statement for professors. I don't know what experiment is. I don't know what opposition is. Because everything I've ever believed in is now a commercial for someone. And if there is anything that all, I mean all, previous generations have to deal with now, it is that you, too, will become a commercial. And this is the fundemental question facing all art forms and where Adorno's pessimism, which seemed so Mandarin in the 60s or so, now is appropriate. A question vital to everyone who pretends they write: How do I not become a commercial? Eric (enpape@lsuvm.sncc.lsu.edu).